King Was a Steady Influence for Canada

By Allen R. Wells

More than a dozen biographies of Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, have appeared since his death in 1950. Likely in an attempt to be balanced, the volumes come across as rather strangely ambivalent. Given credit as a political strategist, King is referred to as a person “with a style noted for its compromises.” He is said to have been “insecure, craving flattery.”

He is given little credit for the intricate social safety net that his government built, measure by measure, over more than a quarter century in power right here at home.

To the public’s shock and dismay, as revealed in the thousands of pages of his diary made public after his death, Mackenzie King talked to ghosts. Spiritualism was a common belief in Western society during the last half of the 1800s. Its beliefs were regularly adopted by members of the Puritan Church. It prompted a striving for temperance, freedom from slavery, equality of women and many other social improvements because of the ultimate equality of departed spirits. This helped establish Utopian communities within Canada and around the world.

King was no doubt attracted to communion with spirits to overcome the tremendous loneliness following deaths in his family, most especially the death of his mother whom he adored. Very few people were aware of his interest in the spirit world and the revelation of the publication of his diaries is in such contrast to his rather reserved personality. This overwhelmed many biographers.

Of much greater importance to Canadian society was his careful maneuvering through the complex and divisive issue of wartime conscription which crippled other governments before him. King also established supports to help the middle class – such as old age pensions and family allowances.

Under his direction, his government established the transfer of mineral rights to the provinces which became the economic means for the prairies to reach their present level of wealth. His work made the life of individuals more secure and ultimately more hopeful.

Above all, King’s Quebec Lieutenant, Ernest Lapointe, kept Quebec a stronghold of Liberalism. Other strong ministers – C. D. Howe, J. G. Gardiner and Paul Martin Sr. – seemed to act independently for decades at a time, influenced by King’s steady attention to national unity and individual welfare.

Many aspects of King’s life – his international influence in the formative field of industrial relations, his astonishing platonic friendships with married women that survived decades of public scrutiny without scandal and his scholarship — are well known to specialists but often unknown or overlooked by the general population.

King, like Canada itself, is a complex entity. His role in the creation of the Canada that we recognize today is substantial, and not the mark of just a passive observer, content with the status quo. King is Canada, warts and all.

 – Allen R. Wells is the author of The First Canadian, Xlibris Publishing, 2014.