Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  In mid-April 1930, King took a holiday in Bermuda and New York with his supporters long-time Liberal organizer Senator Andrew Haydon and the financier Senator Wilfrid Laurier McDougald. McDougald picked up King’s hotel bill in Bermuda of four hundred dollars, and King enjoyed the lovely island, though he was slightly disconcerted by the “women, and girls, who were bathing in abbreviated suits,” though some were “rather pretty to look at.” King seems never to have had the least idea of why McDougald lavished such attention on him. McDougald had a holding company called Sterling Industrial Corporation which, after Beauharnois Light, Heat and Power Company had invested in it, had recycled that money and extensive borrowings into the stock of Beauharnois. But the Beauharnois acquisition of its interest in Sterling was conditional on federal government approval of Beauharnois’s plan for extensive hydroelectric development of the St. Lawrence River about twenty miles southwest of Montreal. On the announcement of the proposal, the stock of Beauharnois soared, and Haydon’s law partner, John Ebbs, was a business partner of McDougald, and Haydon’s firm did almost all Beauharnois’s legal work and received a fifty-thousand-dollar annual lobbying fee. A close friend of Premier Taschereau’s and of King’s, Senator Donat Raymond, was also a member of the promoting group, and King was careful enough to ensure that consideration of the project was meticulous and disinterested. There is no indication of a financial impropriety by King personally, but he was unusually careless in being quite so intimate with men who were close partisans, and in the case of McDougald had contributed to Peter Larkin’s fund of $225,000 to provide the prime minister financial independence. It appears to have been King’s naïveté about commercial matters rather than a failing generated by his avarice (which was considerable) that created this compromising condition. There were no immediate repercussions, but Beauharnois was a time bomb as King returned to Ottawa in May 1930 and had Parliament dissolved on May 30 for elections on July 28.

  Richard Bedford Bennett (1870–1947), a wealthy and successful Calgary lawyer and investor, originally from New Brunswick, and a Conservative MP from 1911 to 1917 and again from 1925, was elected leader of the Conservative Party and of the official Opposition in October 1927. He was a very confident and forceful man, who always seemed on the knife-edge between being an extremely effective leader and a blowhard and a bully. Bennett was a bachelor, a Wesleyan crusader for good causes, and a humourless, driven man. King expected him to be a difficult opponent, as destructive and aggressive as Meighen, but less intellectual and probably with better political judgment. He had a good deal of business support and injected a substantial amount of his own money into his campaign.

  Bennett embarked in early June on a fourteen-thousand-mile rail campaign tour and at every stop hammered the economic depression and promised to deliver the country from it and from King. He opened his campaign in Winnipeg, where he promised to use tariffs “to blast a way into the markets of the world.” It was nonsense of course, and much of Bennett’s technique was just bluster, but to a frightened country that was suddenly very concerned about rising unemployment and crashing commodity prices and tired of King’s mealy-mouthed equivocations, Bennett had an appeal that caught the moment. He engaged in wholesale fear-mongering with a sighting of a tidal wave of economic disaster if current incompetence and dithering and cynicism were not replaced by Bennett’s can-do, roll up the sleeves, Western vigour. King tried to be more forceful and declarative, but he was a known and not overly exciting quantity, and there were large numbers of hecklers at most of his meetings. Ferguson declared that “King is the issue,” which was not an elevation he meant kindly. Although King was startled by the ad hominem attacks, which seemed to be better directed to the public mood and a lower intelligence than had Meighen’s polysyllabic barbs, he was philosophical, always playing the long game, and still thought on election eve that he would win. With Quebec and most of the Prairies, as he thought, firm, the Liberal formula would enable him to win with just bits and pieces from Ontario, British Columbia, and the Maritime provinces. He was supported in his optimistic opinion by the spirits, which, according to his diary, never seemed to stray far from his desires.

  On July 28, 1930, King suffered the only real defeat he sustained in seven elections as federal Liberal leader. Bennett’s Conservatives won 134 constituencies, a gain of 43; the Liberals won 90, a loss of 26. The Conservative popular vote rose from 44.7 per cent to 47.8 per cent; the Liberals’ share of the total vote also increased, from 44.2 per cent to 45.5. The United Farmers of Alberta lost two of their MPs and retained nine, on a reduction in the popular vote from 2.1 per cent of the countrywide total to 1.5 per cent. The Progressives had now largely folded into the Liberals, vindicating in some measure King’s tactics; they declined from 11 to 3 MPs as their overall percentage of the vote declined from 4.2 per cent to 1.8 per cent. The prime minister had at least hung on to his own constituency, but the shocking development was the election of twenty-five Conservatives in Quebec, a clear response to economic conditions and to a Conservative leader who, though he was opposed even to a Unionist government in 1917 and was a conscriptionist, was not particularly identified with conscription, as Meighen had been. Lapointe may have lost some prestige in the province in minor jurisdictional differences with Taschereau, who remained the master of the province, though two rising opposition figures would bear watching: Camillien Houde, mayor of Montreal, starting in 1928, and Maurice Duplessis, member of the Legislative Assembly for Trois-Rivières, starting in 1927.

  King, though he frequently wallowed in self-pity and fear for his health and endurance, and for conditions that he could not control, such as the antics of antagonistic provincial premiers or world conditions, was rarely overly rattled by reversals. They were always part of the divine plan and were bound to be temporary, because of his virtue, repentance of his shortcomings, and methodical thoroughness. Election night 1930 was such an occasion. “I will be glad to throw onto Bennett’s shoulders … finding a solution for unemployment,” King said. “My guess is that he will go to pieces under the strain.”42 He knew that Bennett was a shoot-from-the-hip Westerner who had no idea what he was getting into, and that conditions were now more likely to deteriorate than improve. Bennett had made such brash claims, and disillusionment would not be long in coming. From 1911 to 1919, King had patiently waited (in the House of Rockefeller) for his hour to come. Now, he would wait again, but with a historic and comfortable home and a country property, a solid fund provided by his partisans, and an interesting task as leader of the Opposition with much to oppose as Bennett lost his swagger fighting heavy economic headwinds. The country, which became bored and impatient with King, could soon rediscover his reassuringly unflamboyant qualities. He had held almost even with the Conservatives in the popular vote, and while his political reasoning about holding Quebec and the Prairies had not entirely been successful, that reasoning would keep him in the party leadership, as those regions were, within the Liberal Party, solidly loyal. After a few months, King summoned Rachel Bleaney, his principal spiritualist, and invited her to explain her mistaken interpretations and prognostications, but he saw the new era as an opportunity to be more rested, enjoy the spectacle of Bennett’s discomfort, and, he certainly emphasized in his diary, “reconstruct my own thought and life.”43 Involutional, generally cynical, and self-obsessed though King was, he did not hesitate to blame himself, never lacked humility before God, and saw any setback as a deserved humiliation resulting from his own errors, but also an opportunity graciously presented by his creator to regroup, pull himself together, and be worthy to come back stronger than ever. One of the many aspects of King’s odd personality that his opponents – who all, except Borden, underestimated him – never understood was that he was more dangerous in his relentless and unshakeable perseverance than in his shameless and sometimes breathtaking unscrupulousness. The new man of government prepared to govern; the old leader of opposition prepared to oppose. In these tumultuous times, both were assure
d of challenging days ahead.

  4. Richard Bedford Bennett: Man of Thunder, 1930–1935

  R.B. Bennett was sworn in as Canada’s eleventh prime minister on August 7, 1930, and also as minister of finance and receiver general, president of the Privy Council, and secretary of state for external affairs. Sir George Perley became deputy prime minister and minister without portfolio. The postmaster general would be the former and long-serving leader of the provincial Conservative Party of Quebec Arthur Sauvé (a gentlemanly doormat for the unstoppable Taschereau regime). The minister of marine, traditionally a French-Canadian position, would be Alfred Duranleau; Charles H. Cahan would be the secretary of state; Robert J. Manion would be minister of railways and canals; and Henry Herbert Stevens would be secretary of trade and commerce. It was a passably purposeful but not an especially memorable group to begin with, and did not become one. Ontario premier Howard Ferguson became high commissioner in London, succeeding Larkin and Perley. In taking so much direct responsibility on himself, Bennett was making himself the lightning rod for any reversals and disappointments that would come, and there were bound to be some. Domineering from the start, Bennett frequently fielded questions that were not directed to him; he set out to provide a new level of personal, comprehensive government. This impression was furthered when Bennett called a special session of Parliament for September 8, 1930, and opened it with a twenty-line Throne Speech, in which he presented a stimulus package to generate jobs and upwardly revised protective tariffs.

  Bennett departed for London on September 22. The Statute of Westminster had been adopted, which provided that no law of any commonwealth country should become law in any other of the countries unless they wished it so, and it was given royal assent in December. This was not a popular measure with the provincial governments, which tended to like Westminster better than Ottawa, as it was less meddlesome and partisan. To achieve favour with the provinces, Bennett prevailed upon the British to accept an amendment for the Canadians that assured that changes to minority rights in the Canadian provinces since 1867 would not be altered. His other chief function was to plump for Commonwealth and Imperial preference in trade, which was the cornerstone of his plan to blast Canada’s way into markets. Bennett, who travelled with his sister, visited battlefields in France and toured around Britain and Ireland before returning to Canada.

  In accord with the Statute of Westminster, the 1865 Colonial Laws Validity Act was abrogated. The doctrine of “repugnancy” to British legislation was stricken. Shortly after this achievement, for which he was generally felt responsible, especially in Canada, Bennett gave a large hint of where his government was going when he advised the provinces that Ottawa would have to cut back its contribution to unemployment benefits, as he announced 10 per cent cuts in the pay of federal employees. But he launched public works programs to try to soak up the unemployed. In March 1931, he had offered price supplements for wheat, whose price had plunged to thirty-nine cents a bushel, subsistence levels and less than a quarter of what it had been in 1929. He improved and made more generous and accessible the pension King had passed for Woodsworth, and as one province after another ran into funding problems, he raised the federal government’s contribution to the pensions from 50 to 75 per cent.

  The controversial aspects of the Beauharnois scandal percolated to the surface in early 1931, after Robert Gardiner, the head of the United Farmers of Alberta, got hold of Beauharnois documents that were, to say the least, suggestive of impropriety. Bennett struck a five-man committee to look into it. The committee, of which Gardiner was a member, quickly unearthed a web of shady transactions and controversial links with senators Haydon, McDougald, and Raymond. All were called to testify before the committee. Raymond, who was a wealthy man to begin with, didn’t know much, and Haydon suffered a coronary attack and was unable to testify. McDougald did appear, and it emerged that Beauharnois had been billed by McDougald $852.32 for the trip to Bermuda and New York, so it appeared that King’s travel had been paid for by the company. King met with Bennett and asked that the reference to the payment of his travel expenses not be made public, as he had known nothing about them. Bennett was offended that King had recently called him a “dictator,” and King alleged that he had only done so in response to some rudeness of Bennett’s; it was a pretty childish and churlish business, and over small sums. There was a reference to this payment in the committee’s report, and King made a statement in the House denying that he had known anything about the bill being paid by Beauharnois or that he had ever discussed any aspect of Beauharnois with McDougald or Haydon. As McDougald’s July 20 date with the committee approached, King filled his diary with recitations of horrible dreams he was having, in which his mother was trying to help him through the crisis.44 His particular concern was that McDougald would mention the Larkin fund of $225,000 amassed for him, to which McDougald had contributed $25,000. But McDougald did not; he responded effectively to all questions and said the paper trail showing that Beauharnois had paid for the then prime minister’s travels was a clerical error. The committee report sharply criticized McDougald and Haydon but did not mention King at all, and King tried to bury the matter with a maudlin speech in the House of Commons of over three hours. He said that the Liberal Party was passing through “the valley of humiliation” but promised to lead his party back to “higher and stronger … ground than it has ever occupied in the past.”45 King was immensely relieved and even considered that his Irish terrier, “little Pat,” who had been unwell, in licking King’s hand when he recovered, had “so reminded me of mother … like her spirit sent to comfort.”

  McDougald was forced to relinquish some of his stock and retire as Beauharnois’s non-executive chairman, but the greatest problem he faced was from Arthur Meighen, now the government leader in the Senate, and as strident as always. Meighen demanded that McDougald, Haydon, and Raymond all be expelled from the Senate. King met McDougald at Laurier House and, instead of showing any gratitude for McDougald’s discretion over the Larkin fund and his fine improvisation over the secretarial error, he firmly pressed McDougald to resign from the Senate. Several weeks later, King visited McDougald at his home in Montreal and gave back fifteen thousand of the twenty-five thousand dollars that the senator had given to the Larkin fund. He had even presumed to draft a letter of resignation for McDougald. The following night, King had further complicated dreams, which he recorded in his diary, and concluded that “it is true that spirits are guiding me. This is as real as anything in my life – it is worth everything.”46 Much has been made of King’s interest in the spirits, but he is probably more the victim of his apparently unsuspecting openness in leaving such candid diaries than of aberrantly exotic religious and spiritual views. No other statesman, apart perhaps from Gladstone, has left quite such detailed and apparently complete summaries of his mood and thoughts. (Surely he wasn’t holding anything back.) And one of his diaries, on physical matters, with excruciating detail on bowel movements and the like, is even more startling. No one knows what other statesmen have thought; it was just that King wrote such things out and left them, deliberately, for his literary executors, with the same naïveté with which he failed to insist on repaying McDougald when he picked up his hotel bill in Bermuda and wrote in his diary that the act was “mighty gracious.”47 As devious and calculating as King was in political matters, including his manipulation of colleagues, he was strangely vulnerable and trusting in unfamiliar situations, such as commerce. McDougald eventually did resign from the Senate to end the investigations, and Meighen only laid off Haydon when he received a doctor’s attestation to Haydon’s infirm condition. Haydon never recovered; he died on November 10, 1932, aged sixty-five. King was a pallbearer, but at the funeral he avoided McDougald. The balance of McDougald’s career was an anticlimax, and when he died on June 19, 1942, aged sixty, King declined to be a pallbearer, having gone to some lengths to keep his distance from McDougald in the intervening years. King wrote in his diary that McDougald
“lacked principle and understanding. It is well that he is at rest.” He had completely air-brushed from memory his own errors, and even ten years after these events self-righteously exonerated himself from any trace of possible misconduct or even simple error.