by Conrad Black
Most sentiment in the country sided with King, favouring support for Britain if it needed it and it was justified, but by Canada’s decision, not Britain’s summons. But Meighen flung himself into the trap laid by events and told a Toronto audience, “Canada should have said: ‘Ready, aye, ready; we stand by you.’ ”16 (This was originally a Great War phrase of Laurier’s.) This was a divergence even from Borden’s view that Canada had “nearly” become autonomous and was not subject to unconditional demands for combat forces in this cavalier way. King was on firm and precedented ground and could invoke statements made by Macdonald, Laurier’s stance on South Africa, and both Laurier and Borden’s positions on the Great War. The Chanak crisis settled down quickly, and thus both Churchill and Meighen were shown to have shot from the hip with thoughtless and misguided reflexes, and Meighen’s lack of political judgment was again on display. What some of King’s supporters called the “kindergarten school diplomacy” had to end. The next step in this process was King’s direct negotiation with the United States of the Halibut Treaty. It was absurd that the British would, as they did, strenuously object to a first Canadian treaty on straight sovereign terms over such an improbable and apparently pedestrian issue. In fact, Pacific halibut fishing was a considerable commerce, and Canadian nationalists could jubilate that the country was finally negotiating its own treaties and was not hobbled by British appeasers trying to buy American goodwill at Canada’s expense, as Macdonald had endured at Washington in 1871 and Laurier over the Alaska boundary in 1903. Mackenzie King had swum to national independence holding the tail of a halibut, and not even Meighen could get too jingoistically exercised on behalf of an affronted Empire about that.
In the autumn of 1923, Mackenzie King carried his muted crusade for greater Canadian autonomy to the Imperial Conference. It was outrageous that there should be any ambiguity at this late date about Canada’s standing as an independent country; and it was doubly outrageous that the British government could imagine, given that country’s impecunious postwar condition and the wealth of Canada – now a nation of nearly ten million under no possible threat from the United States and certainly not anyone else – that it had any automatic authority over anything Canada did. Canada had repaid the paternity and avuncular sponsorship of both founding countries in the First World War, and only the phenomenon of public psychology responding slowly to geopolitical realities explains why Canadian leaders had to put up with any of this, though perhaps the reticence of the leaders themselves may have prolonged this artificial state of subordinacy somewhat.
The Canadian Conservatives had regressed from their founder, Macdonald, who was a realist about the workings of Whitehall and only indulged the Imperial government as much as necessary to be sure of being plausibly under its protection while the American bull intermittently rampaged in the polemical blathering and bloviation of its public men. Borden ascribed French-Canadian lack of enthusiasm for the Imperial framework to Quebec’s isolation, superstition, and unworldliness, and even he made a fairly vigorous stance for recognition of Canada as a consultative partner in a more collegial Empire. He seems never to have taken on board that the Imperial War Cabinet was a sham and a talking shop manipulated by the Welsh trickster Lloyd George while he milked the Empire of men and resources in Britain’s hour of need. Meighen, a Manitoban and twenty years younger than the Atlanticist Nova Scotian Borden, was at this point an unsubtle, heel-clicking servant of the overseas Imperial king-protector. He hadn’t thought it through. King had, but his natural caution and desire always to find the radical and cozy centre, to find the route to his goal that offered the least resistance, no matter how circuitous, like a heat-seeking missile, forfeited the admiration of those who liked firm and crisp leadership. That is a quality that is almost always in short supply in the federal government of Canada, because Canada is a country that spans sharply different cultures that have never been homogenized. The French segregationists, the nostalgic unitary Imperialists, the American-oriented continentalists, and the outright Canadian nationalists, are always hard, but not impossible, to coordinate, so King pursued his own mysterious course with mind-numbing tortuosity, making placatory gestures to almost all electorally identifiable groups as he made his noiseless way. It was deft, and even artistic at times, but so singular, so imperceptible, that the gallery that cheered him was confined to a few sycophants and spiritualist cranks through whom he communicated with those who had gone ahead to the “Great Beyond,” in particular his mother and Sir Wilfrid Laurier, as well as some people he had never known, such as William Ewart Gladstone. It was bizarre, but it was oddly successful, and it is not for others to mock the achievements of one who accomplished so much, for so long, no matter his frequent humbug and obscurantism.
King departed for London accompanied by Professor Oscar (O.D.) Skelton of Queen’s University, who had favourably reviewed King’s Industry and Humanity and had publicly commended him on his handling of the Chanak incident. The prime minister also took with him John Dafoe, the acidulous but perceptive editor of Sifton’s Manitoba Free Press, who had been critical of King’s diffident and indecipherable leadership techniques but had warmed somewhat to him in office, though he had reservations about accompanying him and only did so at Sifton’s request. Skelton would join King’s government as deputy minister of external affairs, found the Canadian foreign service, and exercise greater influence on the personnel and formulation of Canadian foreign policy than anyone in the country’s history. He was an authentic Canadian nationalist, a respecter of both the British Empire and the United States, but an advocate and, in so far as he could be, a propagator of an independent course for Canada. He suffered the disadvantage of most Canadians who would seek to be pathfinders, or at least of most between Laurier and Pierre Trudeau: he had no flamboyance or panache, a necessary ingredient in raising the heavy dough of Canadian excitement, overlaid as it always is by caution and doubt, often including a generous portion of self-doubt.
At the conference, and as King had anticipated, there was a renaissance of enthusiasm for a unified Imperial foreign policy. Stanley Bruce, the Australian leader succeeding the unfeasible Hughes, favoured it, as Australia feared Japanese expansion; Smuts of South Africa also favoured it, because he had so mesmerized the British political leadership, Liberal and Conservative, that he expected to be the most eminent figure in an Imperial council or ministry. King, in a vintage formulation, said, “Our attitude is not one of unconditional isolation; nor is it one of unconditional intervention.”17 Smuts, not altogether in jest, called him “a very terrible person.” The Australian Richard Casey (a future governor general of that country) compared him and his nationalism to “a vandal who pulls down a castle in order to build a cottage.”18 Lord Curzon (1859–1925), the foreign secretary – who had been sent as the brightest of the Souls (an elite British group of talented and stylish aristocrats that included Tennants, Wyndhams, Lyttletons, Asquiths, Coopers, and Balfour) to be, at forty, the youngest viceroy of India ever – had just been passed over by King George V as prime minister (to succeed the terminally ill Andrew Bonar Law) for Stanley Baldwin, whom Curzon described, with some reason, but typically, as of “the most profound insignificance.” He was more acerbic even than usual when he described Mackenzie King as “obstinate, tiresome, and stupid, and nervously afraid of being turned out of his own Parliament when he gets back.”19 The description was fair, except that King was anything but stupid; his passes d’armes with the legendarily exalted (“I am George Nathaniel Curzon, / A very superior person” began a popular current sendup) yet tragic Curzon left them with no reciprocal regard or understanding. Curzon’s brilliant career faded and he died in 1925. Winston Churchill later said that Curzon’s “morning had been golden, the noontide was bronze, and the evening lead.”20 Mackenzie King was like a shadow, who remained for a very long time, was unprepossessing or even irritating when animated, but who left his mark, when he finally departed, with a greater imprint than many apparently
weightier people.
King stood his ground well in London, and he gave and intended no offence to Canadian Imperialists, but gratified Canadian nationalists and isolationists, French and English. He did what he had come to do, and as a bonus he had impressed Dafoe, the most influential opinion leader in the Western provinces. In November 1922, King had pounced on Gouin and others for trying to reopen discussion of what had been agreed about tariffs and control of natural resources and stormed uncharacteristically that he would not be humiliated nor have his position usurped. There were further disagreements over King’s plan to resurrect the subsidized railway rate instituted with the 1897 Crow’s Nest Pass Agreement, which would reduce shipping costs for the Western farmer. With infinite and almost sadistic patience, King held to his position and appeared endlessly indulgent, and even Job-like, in his toleration of recalcitrant and dissentient members of the team. Finally, William Fielding’s health deteriorated, and in 1923 he handed over most of his duties as finance minister to an associate minister, James A. Robb, and in 1925 retired altogether, aged seventy-five. By then, and a few months later, partly for health reasons and partly because he had been hemmed in by King and Lapointe and couldn’t do anything, feeling himself like Gulliver in Lilliput, Gouin too resigned, in January 1924. King wrote in his diary that Gouin had “served only interests.”21 This shortchanges Gouin for his vital role in isolating Bourassa politically and strangling his effort at political success, but it is true that Gouin regarded Quebec’s interest, the interest of the Montreal financial community, and his own political and pecuniary interest as being almost identical. He had been succeeded as premier of Quebec by the patrician and capable Louis-Alexandre Taschereau, nephew of the cardinal and son, cousin, and father of justices of the Supreme Court of Canada (chief justices in two cases), and as federal justice minister by Ernest Lapointe, who, as King’s Quebec lieutenant, was virtual co-leader of the government and de facto co-leader of the federal Liberal Party.
King’s patient, devious, systematic removal of rivals and dissidents was a bloodless and ultra-moralistic replication of some of the methods of his almost exact contemporary and analogue in shadowy communist manoeuvring, Stalin. They were both party leaders for twenty-nine years, though King started five years earlier. Both claimed the legitimate succession to illustrious predecessors (in Stalin’s case, Lenin) and were enigmatic and uncharismatic, but endlessly calculating and possessed the genius of survival. Of course, the parallels are superficial; Stalin was a bloodstained monster while King was a fidgeting turbopious Christian mystic and a mark for spiritualist quacks and charlatans. But to a degree they followed similar methods of leaving the flamboyance and the spectacle to others while endlessly negotiating around and manipulating the susceptibilities and frailties of small numbers of insider party functionaries.
With Fielding and Gouin gone, King did reduce the tariff on items of greatest concern to the Western farmers. As he had expected, Crerar had departed public life not having been able to square joining King’s government with his duty to his supporters, and as the Progressives had never seriously put down the roots of a party, they were burning out like prairie wildfire in the rain and King expected to reap the political benefit. The area where the government had a vulnerability greater than King had appreciated was in financial irregularities in the Customs Department, presided over for many years by Jacques Bureau, six-term MP and now senator, from Trois-Rivières. The department, especially in Quebec, had been heavily undermined by the vast bootlegging and smuggling interests that took over the alcoholic beverage business in the United States when the Americans officially imposed Prohibition in 1919. It was one of the most insane legislative initiatives in American history, as it simply handed one of the country’s greatest industries over to what quickly became organized crime, including some individuals whose folkloric renown (such as Chicago’s Al Capone) would surpass the fame of many of the current politicians. The smugglers of liquor into the United States, past bribed border officials of both nationalities, brought cheap American manufactures back with them. It was estimated that this traffic was costing the federal government about fifty million dollars a year in lost customs revenue, and an appreciable amount of this was going into the pockets of Bureau and his officials. The chief customs enforcement officer of Montreal, Joseph Bisaillon, was sending stocks of whisky to Bureau, and the minister’s own chauffeur was moonlighting as a driver of a car used for smuggling, a car which had itself been smuggled into Canada. At a meeting with Lapointe and Arthur Cardin, an influential Quebec MP and Lapointe’s successor as minister of marine and fisheries, at Laurier House on September 1, 1925, Bureau turned up drunk. This did not endear him to his leader (who rarely drank, and never to excess), and Bureau was sacked as minister and replaced by Georges Boivin, who removed Bisaillon but did not seriously address the problem.
King dissolved Parliament for an election at the end of October and believed that his tariff for revenue would be a workable cover for the distinctly different views on tariff matters he was propounding in the East and West, and that he would reap credit for his constructive but somewhat nationalistic stance in the Empire and as the only candidate who could keep English and French Canadians happily together. The crowds on the campaign trail were thin but not hostile, and King seemed to do well on the radio, the first election where this medium figured, as about one hundred thousand Canadian homes had radio receivers. King’s radio voice was reedy and his syntax was always complicated, and he never departed from a very flat monotone. His spiritual media assured him the omens and auguries were good. On October 28, election eve, King had another stirring seance and was convinced that his own father (whom he took at first for Sir Wilfrid) assured him that he would win the election.
The spirits were mistaken, or were misunderstood. The Conservatives made the greatest gains of any party in one election in Canadian history up to that time, picking up 36 of the constituencies that had been held by the Progressive Party in 1921, as well as 30 others, including 18 from the Liberals. The Conservatives would have 115 MPs, up from 49, on 46.1 per cent of the popular vote, up from just under 30 per cent. Liberal members of Parliament were reduced to 100 from 118, representing 39.7 per cent of the vote, down from 41 per cent in 1921. The Progressives won 22 seats on 8.5 per cent of the vote, compared to 21.2 per cent in 1921 and 58 MPs. The Conservatives had 68 of 82 Ontario MPs, and where they had been whitewashed in six of the nine provinces in 1921, in 1925 Meighen had 10 of 14 British Columbia MPs, 10 of 11 from New Brunswick, and 11 of 14 from Nova Scotia. Two Labour candidates were elected, including the eminent socialist James Shaver Woodsworth, and two independents, including Henri Bourassa, returning to Ottawa, inexplicably, after an absence of nearly twenty years. There were two United Farmers of Alberta MPs, an independent farmer and official Socialist. The Conservatives elected four Quebec MPs, all from predominantly English districts. Mackenzie King was defeated in his own riding of York North, as he had been in 1911, and seven of his ministers also lost. Though full of moral reproaches at Conservative dishonesty and vote-buying with oceanic contributions allegedly provided by Montreal and Toronto business interests, King was philosophical and not panicked or deprived of his inextinguishable sense of self-preservation.
The unexpected result seems to have been attributable in part to skepticism about King’s tariff evasions, in part to anger at corruption in the Customs Department – though Canadians, who did not adopt countrywide Prohibition, had no moral problem with selling liquor to the Americans, though they were less enthused by gangsters like Capone – and in part to a backlash against the claim that the Conservatives would divide the country, and except in Quebec no credence at all was attached to the suggestion that Meighen would blunder into war, a charge based on the Chanak episode. In Quebec, the Liberals pulled out all the stops, as Taschereau declared, “Meighen … has sent our boys to Flanders Fields. It is he, who, with his conscription law, has filled the cemeteries of Flanders with 60,000 Cana
dians.”22 Taschereau was finally reduced to claiming he had been misquoted, but it was a very shabby campaign of smear and fear, and in Quebec it worked; but not elsewhere. Grim shock though the result was for the government, there was no reason to doubt that the Progressives would continue to vote with the Liberal Party, and that would give King 122 MPs in a house of 245, even if he was not among them himself. He was almost certain to be sustained in the House of Commons, if he chose to meet it, although Meighen was clearly at the head of the largest party. King determined to convene Parliament.