Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  When he met the governor general, Lord Byng, on October 30, Byng’s opening gambit was, “Well I can’t tell you, my dear friend, how sorry I feel for you,” as he cranked up to receive the prime minister’s resignation. Byng said that King had the option of asking for dissolution – which the governor general said he could not grant in good conscience – of resigning, or of remaining. Byng would accept whichever was King’s choice, but told him, “As a friend of yours, may I say that I hope you will consider very carefully the wisdom of” resigning.23 He prattled on a bit about how undesirable it would be to rely on the Progressives and J.S. Woodsworth. King said he was inclined to remain but would think about it. Lapointe urged him to continue, as did most of his entourage, but Vincent Massey, the urbane but unsuccessful Liberal candidate in Durham, Ontario, and scion of a family that was roughly the English-Canadian equivalent of the Taschereaus, though commercially more experienced, urged him to hand over to Meighen. Naturally, King took his cue from the spirits, who had moved quickly, via his principal current medium, Mrs. Rachel Bleaney, to interpret the election in a way entirely consistent with their pre-electoral predictions of victory. “I cannot do other than regard all Mrs. Bleaney tells me as revelation.”24 Doubtless, King was sincere in this, but it was an interpretation that certainly suited his convenience. On November 2, King returned to Government House and told Byng he intended to remain. The governor general told him he thought Meighen had earned the right to try to govern and asked him to continue to think about it overnight. King took a few hours, conferred with his cabinet again, and confirmed his decision to Byng.

  Byng would later claim that it was at least agreed between them that if King lost a confidence vote he would not dispute that Meighen could have a chance at forming a government. By this time, Meighen was becoming impatient for a call from Byng to do just that. He continued in that angry condition through to the opening of the new Parliament on January 26, 1926. In the meantime, on November 16, in a speech in Hamilton, Meighen did an apparent U-turn on Chanak and implied that Canada should not go to war without a general election. He assured the numerous outraged commentators after this bomb burst that allowance would of course be made for matters of urgency, but no one now imagined that it would be possible to hold up a war decision for two months while the people were consulted, nor that it would be appropriate not to have Parliament sitting for two months prior to such a decision. King largely ignored Meighen to allow him to stew in his own juice with his angry partisans, who were almost ready (aye, ready) to muzzle their leader as they hovered on the brink of office. There was a faction among Liberals that thought of trying to depose King in favour of Saskatchewan premier Charles Dunning, who was about to join the federal government and dreamt of little else but thought better of trying to make such a move. Lapointe and most of the senior party leadership and organization had been well massaged by King and were solid, and King was now leading them in an intricate sequence of steps to retain power; this was no time to challenge a leader who was beleaguered but on top of his game and manoeuvring with cool-headed shrewdness to defeat an accident-prone opponent he had bested before.

  There were a number of social encounters between King and Byng and his wife. The governor general had stopped the repetitive assurances that King was his “friend” (always a suspect practice, but especially from a British viscount and field marshal), but he was quite civil. Lady Byng (although she donated a trophy to the National Hockey League for sportsmanlike conduct) was vituperative and barely able to bring herself to speak with King. More piquant is the claim from Lady Byng’s lady-in-waiting, Eva Sandford, that the prime minister, seated next to her at dinner at Government House, had twice pinched her thigh. This made the rounds, to some titillation, even from those Rockliffe doyennes who thought King unlikely to be so bold or even motivated. (As his secret history posthumously revealed, King was not lacking in sex drive, but his very restrained manner and status as a bachelor incited the much laboured inference that he was asexual.) In the Throne Speech of January 1926, Byng read King’s very tactical political program: farm loans; completion of the Hudson Bay Railway from The Pas, Manitoba, all the way to Churchill; a neutral Tariff Advisory Board; and a concession of control of Alberta’s natural resources to the provincial government. King shortly discovered the virtues of a national pension scheme also. The pension was only twenty dollars a month, was means-tested, and was dependent on agreement with the individual provinces, but it bought the government the support of Woodsworth and his Labour colleague Abraham Heaps. The pension bill passed the House in March, but then the Conservative senators killed it, in another act of political suicide in the highest traditions of Meighen’s promise of a general election to determine if the country could go to war.

  In mid-February, King had returned to the House of Commons representing Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Lapointe was the House leader and deftly floor-managed the government’s rather opportunistic program until, in June, a special parliamentary committee unearthed the fact that Jacques Bureau’s replacement as customs minister (after Bureau removed nine full cabinets of ministerial files), Georges Boivin, while he was minister, had employed bootleggers and smugglers, and had sprung one of them from prison to assist a local Liberal candidate. Lapointe and Cardin refused to hear of Boivin resigning and locked arms with their colleague. King, who by now knew something about the mind of French-Canadian politicians, wrote in his diary that this sense of chivalry was commendable but that he felt such loyalty was “open to question” in moral terms, or, more to the point, in considering the practicalities of holding on to one’s – that is, his – position. On June 22, 1926, Henry Herbert Stevens (1878–1973), the hyperactively aggressive Conservative Vancouver MP from 1911 to 1940, moved a motion of censure against Boivin and of no confidence in the government. Woodsworth tried to derail it with an amendment deferring everything to a Royal Commission, but it failed. King concluded that he would not wait for such a dispute to be resolved but would seek dissolution for new elections, which he did on June 26. He sought to avoid the vote of censure proposed by Stevens that was now likely to pass. This led to one of the great political controversies in Canadian history.

  Byng felt King had no right to expect dissolution without losing a confidence vote or equivalent; he thought it the “negation of Parliament’s authority.”25 The counter-theory, that King had every right to request dissolution and that, as King had been sustained by Parliament many times in six months, the governor general had to grant it, also has many adherents. In general, a prime minister who has retained the confidence of the house, and especially who still ostensibly retains it, has the right to dissolution when he requests it. It cannot be within the governor general’s prerogatives to impute and judge the motive of the prime minister in requesting dissolution and to determine, if a confidence motion is before the House that is apt to be lost, that the prime minister must suffer the ignominy of defeat before requesting dissolution. King momentarily took leave of his political senses and asked Byng to seek advice from the British government. This, Byng naturally refused to do; King should never have asked, and Byng was right to refuse. King resigned himself to his fate, which he still expected to be a benign one, and on June 28, 1926, tendered his resignation and that of the government to the governor general. Lady Byng wrote Lord Tweedsmuir, the famous novelist John Buchan (and future governor general), that King was “a scurvy cad” wallowing in “his own despicable depths of moral degradation,”26 a hilariously severe censure for such a self-righteous man as King.

  Byng called upon Meighen to form a government, and John Dafoe and many others professed to believe King’s career was about to end ignominiously. To deal with the requirement to resign and seek personal re-election of an incoming minister, Meighan himself resigned and named his other ministers as ministers without portfolio and provisional heads of other ministries, thus avoiding a sure minority position in Parliament and a fiasco that would replicate Macdonald’s famous “double s
huffle” defeat of George Brown in 1858 (Chapter 3). King raised an immense outcry at this mockery of Parliament and the public will. The Progressives joined him in this, and even Byng, who had brought this farce down upon the country, when he saw Meighen’s cabinet, called them “the worst looking lot he had ever seen assembled around Parliament.”27 Meighen was defeated in the House and called on Byng, who had to grant dissolution, for a new election on September 14, 1926.

  Incredibly, the other players had fumbled directly into King’s hands. Meighen, who had effectively defeated King in all but the arts of survival in the 1925 election, had been completely outmanoeuvred for six months, starting with his insane call for electoral approval before the country could engage in foreign combat. Byng had opened with King on a note of patronizing treacle about “my dear friend” and with poor advice he had no business pressing, and then in some funk composed of egoistic pique and profound stupidity declined King’s request for dissolution, pushed government on Meighen, who should have declined it so that at least the ensuing electoral gambit of King’s would just be an attack on a foolish governor general, of which Canada had had plenty, though none recently. Instead, Meighen tried to form a government, which he should have known to be impossible, attempted a silly ruse, an activity to which he was morally as well as intellectually unsuited, and it all came down and hung around their necks like toilet seats, as if Byng and Meighen were puppets in a children’s farce, controlled by the Liberal leader. And King now buried the customs scandal which brought him down in Parliament and could have killed him electorally, and distracted the country with a bogus campaign for popular sovereignty over an arrogant, meddlesome British governor who had been colluding, if not conspiring, with a shifty, saturnine, and medieval Tory – unfair caricatures of Byng and Meighen of course, but somewhat plausible on these events. For good measure, Meighen campaigned for a high tariff again, and against old-age pensions.

  Again and again in his long career at the summit of Canadian public life, King would snatch a dazzling deliverance from apparently hopeless circumstances. The night of dissolution, July 4, King strolled in his garden at Kingsmere, in the Gatineau Hills – where he had more than two hundred acres of rolling hills and a comfortable country house, and installed ruins that he acquired from various sites in Europe – and sang one of his mother’s favourite hymns, “O God of Bethel,” to himself. As he thought of his mother’s “beautiful flight to heaven,” a “beautiful bird” with “a scarlet head” descended on one of his bird baths, which confirmed him in the predestined and benign trajectory of events.28 It was all so fantastic that the utility of King’s much-mocked practice of communing with those in the Great Beyond should not be ruled out entirely in an attempted explanation of this sequence of events and subsequent similarly astounding ones.

  On September 14, the Liberals gained 16 MPs to win a total of 116 seats, on 42.9 per cent of the vote, an increase of 3.1 per cent. The Conservatives elected 91 candidates, 24 fewer than before, though it was on 45.4 per cent of the vote, a drop of only 1 per cent and still 2.5 per cent more than the Liberals and a substantial lead in English-speaking Canada. The Progressives lost half of their 22 MPs, retaining 11, and lost a majority of their votes, dropping from 8.4 per cent to 3.9 per cent. And the United Farmers of Alberta, who had only had one-third of 1 per cent of the overall vote in the 1925 election, gained by almost 500 per cent to win 1.9 per cent of the countrywide vote, but jumped from 2 MPs to 11. The Progressives were not opposed by the Liberals, and their leader, succeeding Crerar, Robert Forke, joined King’s government, making the combined Liberal-Progressive total of MPs a comfortable 127. The United Farmers of Alberta were also a good deal closer to the Liberals in policy terms than they were to the Conservatives.

  King was elected with a margin of more than four thousand in his adoptive district of Prince Albert, over a determined thirty-one-year-old candidate whom King referred to in his voluminous diary with the words “We have seen the last of this young man Diefenbaker.” This would be the only occasion in Canadian history when two candidates who would be prime ministers ran against each other. (It was far from being the last of John Diefenbaker. He would ultimately hold the all-time Canadian record for general election victories as MP, thirteen terms.) Meighen again lost his own constituency of Portage la Prairie, and soon announced his retirement from politics. King and Meighen were both fifty-two in 1926. Meighen was a powerful and talented politician but needed the guidance of a senior figure to direct his fire; he was a brilliant second-in-command, an Anthony Eden, or in military terms a Stonewall Jackson, but not a successful commander. He would be heard from again, as Diefenbaker would, and Meighen’s subsequent career would have its rewards, not least in amassing a substantial fortune and seeing the success of his sons in the law and finance and a much-respected (and bilingual) grandson who would become a successful Quebec and Ontario lawyer, political candidate, and eminent senator.

  King encountered the Byngs a few more times before they left in October 1926, and after. When Their Excellencies departed Ottawa, Byng was cordial, but Lady Byng “looked at me like someone from the Chamber of Horrors.” They were back on a private visit in 1932, when King was in opposition. Byng was again cordial, but his consort was an ice queen and said nothing. The men reminisced and agreed to disagree on their recollections. King wept with mellow satisfaction at this civilized end of it, and even Lady Byng was a little more forthcoming, but she remained, wrote King to himself, “a viper.” Lord Byng died in June 1935, aged seventy-two, and King had a seance with intimates in which Byng appeared and allegedly asked for forgiveness, which King was happy to grant. A few weeks later, Lady Byng wrote to King’s opponent and the incumbent prime minister, R.B. Bennett, and referred to “that fat horror King … little beast. How I hate him for the way he treated Julian [her husband, known to friends as Bungo]. He is the one person in the whole world to whom I would do whatever harm I could.… I loathe liars and traitors. He is both.”29 He was more of a fabulist, responding to wishes that took the shape of revelations and visitations, than he was a liar. And he was certainly not a traitor; Byng was the chief author of the shambles of 1925 and 1926. But in all his apparent diffidence, King moved with preternatural, if amoral, and sometimes even ignoble, cunning, and while his virtuosity was little appreciated, the fallout of his agile manoeuvring left many incoherent with rage.

  3. Mackenzie King II: Toward the Great Depression, 1926–1930

  King embarked on another trip to an Imperial Conference on October 6, 1926, accompanied by Lapointe, Massey (whom King was naming as minister to Washington, finally filling the post created in 1920, as Canadian sovereignty creaked forward at less than a snail’s pace), O.D. Skelton, and lesser officials. Though he was better established and more confident than in 1923 on the same mission, King was perceived by at least one participant as having “gone fat and American and self-complacent.”30 There was the usual schism among the participants on the issue of unity of foreign policy. The Australians and New Zealanders, not wanting to be left alone in the far Pacific between the isolationist and America-centric United States and the aggressive Japanese, wanted a tight relationship with the British, whose navy could still provide some deterrence against Japan. The South Africans and the Irish, both of whom had conducted prolonged rebellions against the British, were opposed with a ferocity that few other nationalities could approach. Sitting in the centre was the ultimate man in the middle, the increasingly familiar and endlessly enigmatic figure of Mackenzie King. He imagined Imperial conspiracies everywhere, but there were not many. The rather pedestrian and crisis-averse Stanley Baldwin was the British prime minister; Lloyd George had gone, with the old Liberal Party, into the unofficial opposition, where he would remain for another twenty years. Curzon was dead; Balfour was lord president of the council and near the end of his very long career. Churchill was busy in the exchequer and the foreign secretary was Austen Chamberlain, and neither was much in evidence at this meeting. Leo Amer
y was secretary for war and colonies and was present, but not with any fervently held agenda to push forward. It was a great deal less lively than in the days of Joseph Chamberlain’s crusades and Lloyd George’s devious orchestrations.

  Europe was drowsy, as Germany and Russia were still pariahs; the trauma of the Great War was receding, prosperity was reviving, and there did not seem to be much need to do anything. The British were happy now with Canada opening its legation in Washington as long as the minister kept their ambassador informed, which only highlighted the absurdity of having delayed this step for seven years. King’s main objective at the conference was to alter the role of Canada’s governor general after the disagreement he had had with Byng. He proposed that the British government open high commissions in the dominion capitals and that governors general represent only the Crown. There was easy and general agreement on this point, and it was a useful step. It fell to King to be the leading conciliator with General Barry Hertzog, since 1924 the South African leader, and from all the debate about the organization of the Empire it was agreed that the dominions and the United Kingdom had equal powers and that the autonomous countries, including the United Kingdom, would together form the British Commonwealth of Nations. Everyone was happy with this formula except the king, who lamented that “poor old Balfour has given away my Empire.”31