Case Study: Canada’s Greatest Prime Minister
Who was Canada’s greatest prime minister? Pierre Trudeau, the great proponent of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? Or perhaps Sir John A. Macdonald, the leader of the Fathers of Confederation and our first prime minister? Or Sir Wilfrid Laurier, our first French Canadian prime minister and the proponent of pan-Canadian nationalism?
What about William Lyon Mackenzie King? It is Mackenzie King, Liberal prime minister from 1921 to 1930 and then again from 1935 to 1948, who gets the nod from Michael Bliss, Canada’s foremost historian of our prime ministers in his must-read book for students of Canadian history and politics, Right Honourable Men: The Descent of Canadian Politics from Macdonald to Chrétien.
Most Canadians now know next to nothing about this extraordinary man, who holds the Canadian prime ministerial longevity record. Mackenzie King served as prime minister for a total of 22 years. Only John A. Macdonald comes close to this, at 19 years of service. And Mackenzie King was the only prime minister to have earned a PhD.
But today, if Canadians know anything about Mackenzie King it is that he seemed to be a bit odd. He was interested in séances, and in his diaries he wrote about talking to his long dead and most beloved mother, and his deceased dog, Pat. As Bliss argues, if this is all that most Canadians know about Mackenzie King, they do themselves a disservice by failing to know more about the greatest prime minister this country ever had.
We live in the Canadian political and governmental world that Mackenzie King built.
The key to understanding Mackenzie King is to know that he was a reform-minded liberal who believed that Canadians were a pragmatic but fair-minded people who wanted a centrist, socially progressive but fiscally conservative government. Mackenzie King also believed in the virtue of compromise. The federal government had the duty to find the proper balance between the interests of English Canadians and French Canadians, between the interests of Eastern Canada and Western Canada, between the interests of big business and organized labour, and, on the international stage, between the interests of the British Empire and the United States.
It was Mackenzie King who first perceived the power of the centre, and who understood that the path to electoral success was through gaining and holding the centre ground of Canadian politics. Mackenzie King believed that Canadian national unity required a careful balance between the needs of French and English Canada. During World War II, Mackenzie King carefully maintained this balance, promising “conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription” as a means of placating isolationist sentiment in Quebec while promoting a vigorous Canadian war effort.
Mackenzie King also promoted a greater and more independent role for Canada within the British empire. He was instrumental in pushing for Canada to have a separate foreign policy from that of the United Kingdom and in the early 1920s his government established the first Canadian department of External Affairs. It was in this new organization that a young Lester Pearson began his career as a diplomat.
And Mackenzie King was the father of the modern Liberal Party of Canada. He held the role of party leader for 29 years, and during the 1920s and 30s he promoted the values and policies of modern reform liberalism. It was during the Mackenzie King years that we saw the birth of the modern social welfare system.
The list of social policy achievements for the Mackenzie King government is memorable and enduring:
- promotion of Keynesian economics to address the ravages of the Great Depression and reconstruct the Canadian economy following World War II;
- establishment of a national unemployment insurance system in 1940;
- legalization of collective bargaining in 1944;
- inauguration of a national social welfare system through a family allowance, the “baby bonus,” in 1944;
- new federal departments with portfolios dealing with veterans affairs, housing, health, and welfare;
- development of federal–provincial fiscal relations;
- federal regulatory policy to promote health and welfare, industrial safety standards, product standards, and consumer welfare; and
- federal policy studies on the feasibility of national social programs to deal with old age security and pensions, and health care.
It would be the Liberal governments of Louis St. Laurent, Lester Pearson, and Pierre Trudeau that saw those social programs through to fruition.
In his years in power Mackenzie King fostered greater independence from the United Kingdom in foreign policy and closer economic connections with the United States. The federal government became a leader in federal–provincial relations, and it assumed a major role in establishing and managing socio-economic policy. The idea and practice of national social welfare programs were promoted by the Mackenzie King government.
And through all of this Mackenzie King forged the federal Liberal Party into a political force that would dominate Canadian politics and public policy for three- quarters of the twentieth century. We still live with the legacy of Mackenzie King. As Canadian prime ministers from Trudeau and Mulroney to Chrétien and Harper seek the coveted middle ground of Canadian politics, they attempt something first delineated by Mackenzie King.
