Politics, Not as Usual

The end of the Great War brought substantial changes to Canadian political life. Both the Unionist and Liberal parties faced the necessity of regrouping and reorganizing their forces. Early in 1919, Sir Wilfrid Laurier died. He left a party fractured by wartime controversies and without an obvious successor. To find one, the Liberals called the first leadership convention in the country’s history. The delegates gathered in Ottawa in August and chose young Mackenzie King over the veteran W. S. Fielding. King had remained loyal to Laurier on conscription; Fielding had not. The

Quebec delegates remembered. King appeared to be a man of tbe new age: a Ph. D. in political economy with a successful career as a civil servant, an expert in industrial relations. His political experience was limited to less than three years in Laurier’s last Cabinet and a few years of organizational work. But his political sense was keen, his ambition unbounded, and his sense of mission powerful. He believed he had a divine calling to political leadership and he never forgot that he was the grandson of William Lyon Mackenzie, the rebel leader of 1837. Always cautious and moderate in outlook, King had learned from his Christian upbringing and from Sir Wilfrid that conciliation and compromise were the keys to success in Canadian politics. This labour expert would need all his talents for conciliation in the chaotic politics of the 1920s, when farmers, rather than workers, necessarily became his main concern.

The Unionists, too, acquired a new leader in the first years of peace. Once Borden, after a period of uncertainty, finally decided to retire, the Unionist caucus selected Arthur Meighen. He was a sharp contrast to the Liberal Mackenzie King. A Manitoba lawyer, he had served as Borden’s most effective lieutenant, preparing and defending some of the Union government’s most controversial policies. Meighen was a superb debater, a master of ridicule who hardly knew the meaning of conciliation. He too was ambitious, and no less self-righteous than King, though much less voluble about it. He despised the new leader of the Liberal party, whom he had known since student days at the University of Toronto. The feeling was mutual.

King and Meighen faced the same challenge: the growing militancy of the farmers’ movement. Already in 1919, after the Union government had refused to implement certain tariff reductions, some western Unionists had broken with the government. This group was led by Thomas A. Crerar, a Manitoban who came from the Grain Growers’ Grain Company to join the Union government in 1917. Crerar was not a radical, but he was convinced that the protective tariff weighed unjustly on the farmer, and that party politics had to be realigned along pro - and anti-tariff lines. The “New National Policy,” which the Canadian Council of Agriculture had laid down in 1918, became the policy statement around which farmers were called to rally. It was an almost spontaneous revolt of farmers against both old parties that swept Crerar into the leadership of a new movement, the Progressive party. In 1919, with the aid of a number of members of tbe Independent Labour Party, the United Farmers of Ontario took office in their province. Alberta soon followed suit, while farmers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba effectively controlled their provincial governments. The balance of power in Ottawa was the next objective.

While not noted as an orator, William Lyon Mackenzie King was an effective campaigner; during the 1926 election he took advantage of this pause in the motorcade to denounce his “millionaire” opponent, Arthur Meighen. (King seems not to have noticed the misspelling of his own name.)

When the election of 1921 was called, three parties, rather than two, offered themselves to the voters. Prime Minister Meighen and Thomas Crerar hoped to fight the campaign on the tariff question. Mackenzie King, his Liberal party divided on the issue, chose to attack the government on its overall record, while at the same time wooing the farmers with ambiguous promises to look after their interests. King also told maritimers that the Liberals would deal with their growing economic problems if returned to office.

The outcome of the election was astonishing. That the Unionist government was defeated was clear. Not much else was. While the Liberals gained the largest number of seats, 116, the Progressives gained the most ground in electing 64 members, and the Unionists were reduced to a mere 50. The Progressive contingent included Agnes Macphail, the first woman to be elected to the federal Parliament. Two Labour members were also returned. For the next four years Mackenzie King’s Liberals governed precariously, supported by most of the Progressives. A few concessions were made to the farmers’ low-tariff views, and the preferential freight rates contained in the Crow’s Nest Pass Agreement of 1897, which had been suspended during the war, were restored. But King’s greatest advantage was Arthur Meighen’s tactlessness, and the divisions that were emerging within the Progressive ranks. The Conservative leader was nearly as unrelenting in his attacks on the farmer politicians as he was on the Liberals, and that further weakened his party’s standing in agricultural areas. At the same time, the Progressives revealed their own disunity and confusion about their role in politics. One wing, led by Crerar and centred in Manitoba, were “Liberals in a hurry,” anxious to force their low-tariff views on the Liberals in Ottawa so that they could return to that party. A second wing, which looked to Henry Wise Wood of the United Farmers of Alberta, condemned Liberals and Conservatives equally and insisted that members of Parliament were only responsible to their constituents. These so-called Alberta Progressives rejected Crerar’s leadership. These divisions made it possible for King to navigate the turbulent waters of parliamentary politics even without a clear majority.

But King’s success in Parliament did not impress the electorate. Voters in the Maritimes had quickly grown disenchanted with King’s Liberal government’s failure to respond to their needs. The “Maritime Rights Movement,” a bipartisan coalition of businessmen, politicians, and even some labour leaders, decided to throw its weight behind the Conservatives. Conservative fortunes were also improving in Ontario, where the Farmer-Labour government proved too inexperienced and too divided to govern effectively. Even in the West, where Progressive divisions and the revival of prosperity weakened the farmers’ protest movement, Meighen’s party benefited. Only in Quebec, where the Liberals constantly reminded French Canadians of Meighen’s conscriptionist past, did King’s party hold firm. Thus, in the 1925 election, the voters gave Meighen the largest number of seats—though not a majority.

At this point a deadly contest of political wills and strategies commenced. There could be only one victor. Though defeated at the polls. King, quite legitimately, chose to meet Parliament rather than to resign. He believed that with the support of the greatly reduced Progressive contingent he could continue to govern. Then convincing evidence of scandal and mismanagement in the Customs Department (Quebec Liberals had been receiving kick-backs from rum runners smuggling alcohol into the dry United States) was brought to light. The Progressives, who had long preached the need for political purity, could hardly support this corrupt government.

But before a motion of non-confidence was voted. King requested a dissolution and a new election. Lord Byng, the Governor General, declined the advice, insisting that Meighen, with the largest party, should be given a chance to form a government. King inaccurately declared that the Governor General’s action was “unconstitutional.” Meighen jumped at the opportunity to regain office. He acted correctly, but perhaps foolishly. Events soon proved that the Liberal King was a skilful strategist And that the Progressives could not be relied upon even to see the Conservative minority government through the session. But, in the end, it was bad luck as much as anything that destroyed the Meighen government: a sleepy Progressive cast a deciding vote against the government when he was paired with an absent Conservative and should not have voted, since pairing was an arrangement whereby both members agreed not to vote. In the inevitable election that now followed King made much of a trumped-up claim that a “constitutional crisis” had been caused by Byng and Meighen, and that the real issue was Canadian self-government. Meighen tried to ignore King’s claims, and only too late did he realize that the almost complete collapse of the Progressives meant a Liberal victory. In the 1926 election King won his first majority; it was based on a solid Quebec, a sweeping triumph on the prairies, and important gains in Ontario and the Maritimes.

The Progressive revolt began with a bang and ended in a whimper. Few changes had been made in national economic policies, but the return of agricultural prosperity after 1925 dampened the anger of the farmers. Moreover, farmers continued to control their provincial governments and, through the co-operative movement, began to develop some of their own economic institutions. For a few years times were good on the prairies and the Liberals were given the credit. But westerners had tasted political insurgency, and some, at least, enjoyed the experience. Not everyone was reintegrated into the “old-line parties”; a “Ginger Group” of radicals remained after 1926, and they would form the nucleus of a new revolt once the illusory prosperity of the late twenties passed away.

The revolt of the Maritimes, never so spectacular as that of the farmers, was quelled with almost equal ease and at a minimal price. Rather than insurgency, mar-itimers had chosen to work through the existing parties, hoping to force a good bargain. Liberals and Conservatives both offered aid at election time, but once they were in office action rarely followed words. What the Maritimes wanted—protection for their steel industry and the restoration of preferential freight rates—ran counter to the interests of central and western Canada. Finally, in 1927, King’s new Liberal government appointed a royal commission to examine maritime problems. Its report proposed some modest increases in federal subsidies to the Maritimes and some freight-rate reductions. It ducked the tariff issue. King acted on some of the recommendations, including minor freight-rate changes, increased subsidies, and federal aid to port development. It was not much and could hardly be expected to solve the fundamental structural problems of the maritime economy. But it was apparently sufficient to becalm the maritime revolt. “Anaesthetic has been administered in the form of the Report of the Royal Commission,” a Nova Scotia newspaper commented acidly and accurately.

By the late 1920s Mackenzie King had completed his political apprenticeship successfully. He had combined ambition and skill with luck and a loyal Quebec to vanquish all comers. In 1927, Arthur Meighen stepped down. The tiny Independent Labour party, led by J. S. Woodsworth, with its roots in post-war labour unrest, had been contained. Even the women’s movement, so full of hope at the war’s end, had come to much less than its leaders hoped. The occasional woman elected to public office was hardly more than a token. Some of the old activists battled on, especially against the constitutional provision that barred the way to appointment to the Senate. When the courts finally decided in 1929 that women too were “persons,” and therefore eligible for membership in the Senate, King moved to make sure his party reaped the rewards. It was not Nellie McClung or Emily Murphy, seasoned warriors of the suffragist battle, who went to the comfort of the Red Chamber. (Murphy, King thought, was “rather too masculine and possibly a bit too sensational.”) He chose a loyal and worthy Liberal woman, Cairine Wilson.