When King and Bennett met the following day for an “intimate and friendly” discussion, the talk turned to Stevens. Both men were fervent in their condemnation of him. “You have no idea of the kind of man he is,” Bennett said bitterly. He quoted Richard McBride, a former premier of British Columbia, who had once told him: “Do not trust that man Stevens; he will betray you. Stevens has no background whatever, and no principles.” By which, of course, the self-made millionaire and the courtly, polished ex-premier understood that Stevens, the small businessman, didn’t belong to their class and didn’t adhere to their principles.
King was appalled at Bennett’s appearance. “He has taken off much weight, and, particularly from his face – the bones … are quite visible, with just the skin drawn over them. His lower lip and jaw protruded a great deal, and all the time he spoke his mouth, at the corner, was filled with saliva, as though he had been using his jaws to the utmost. It was the look of a man who had become almost an animal in his fight.”
In politics, perception is often more important than accomplishment. Bennett’s unfortunate personality – his bullying, his bluster, his public intransigence, and his handling of radical dissent – obscured his successes. The Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission, the Bank of Canada, the Farmers’ Credit Arrangements Act to help debt-ridden farmers, and the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration to tackle the drought were among the solid achievements of the Conservatives’ term in office. Bennett also paved the way for both unemployment insurance and a national health scheme, although his attempts in this direction were annulled by the decisions of the Privy Council.
Such progressive measures would have been unthinkable in the decade before Bennett took office. In a sense, he was forced into them by the times. Nonetheless, there is irony in the fact that Bennett, the big businessman leading a party dominated by other big businessmen, should preside over the dawn of a new attitude toward the relationship between government and the private sector. Until the Depression, the Bennetts of Canada had believed with absolute faith that the government had no business involving itself with economic or social issues. By the time Bennett left office, that concept was as dead as the passenger pigeon.
He carried on as Opposition leader until 1938, when he was replaced by Manion. That same year, he left Canada forever to spend the remainder of his days in England. Tommy Douglas was one of the little group of three who saw him off at the train station. As Douglas remarked, “the man who had been fawned [on] and flattered by all the politicians for years was completely ignored.” Bennett told Douglas that he left Canada betrayed by his friends and deserted by his party. When he died more than a decade later, the leader who had presided over the five most turbulent years in Canada’s domestic history was close to being Canada’s forgotten man, remembered for the Bennett buggy and not much else. The Canadian Encyclopedia devotes sixty-three lines to Richard Bedford Bennett. Tommy Douglas, deservedly, gets far more.
* The building has since been renamed the Tellier Tower after Lucien Tellier, one of the delegation.
1936
1
State of the nation
2
The weather as enemy
3
Le Chef, the Church, and the Reds
4
Birth control on trial
5
Abdication
1
State of the nation
After more than six years of Depression, Canadians were no longer in a mood to be pushed around. Several incidents in Ontario in 1936 made that clear. In the farming hamlet of St. Charles, east of Sudbury, forty-five starving men attacked a district relief officer who had refused them food vouchers and shut him up in a room without anything to eat. When he brought a charge of assault against one of his tormenters, the magistrate let the accused go, remarking that “his destitution justified his action.” In Blind River, a crowd of angry women threatened to strip two relief officials naked and ship them back to Toronto. “Give us enough to keep our children. That’s all we want,” they told the mayor at a mass meeting. At Stamford, near Niagara Falls, a crowd of more than one hundred, protesting relief cuts, imprisoned eight municipal officials in the town office. In the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke, the reeve received similar treatment; it was hours before he was set free.
The people were angry because of the authorities’ grudging attitude toward relief payments. That was partly Mackenzie King’s doing. Like Bennett he was obsessed with the dogma of the balanced budget – if not in 1936, then in the succeeding year. He raised the sales tax and the corporation tax slightly, but not the income tax; and because he, too, was convinced that Ottawa’s money was being spent recklessly, he reduced grants-in-aid to the provinces by 25 per cent.
As a result, the country grew tense and testy as the lower levels of government responded to the cuts. Quebec decided to scrap the dole and force all relief recipients to work for their meagre allowance. The Ontario government began to fire its married women workers and replace them with spinsters. The mayor of North Bay, forced to remove eighteen hundred men from the relief roles, gave them permission to beg on the streets. This lack of compassion toward the jobless was further demonstrated by the mayor of Fort Erie, who suggested that all male applicants for relief be sterilized.
In the opening moments of the New Year, the new prime minister, as was his habit, had knelt in prayer “for all the loved ones in earth and in heaven, and to be of service to the poor and needy, to my country and to the cause of peace.” Service to the poor and needy did not, however, involve a plunge into the chilly seas of deficit financing. Brave words and fanciful public relations efforts, such as Winnipeg’s “Business Is Better” campaign, did not reduce the number of jobless in Canada. At the beginning of the year there were still 1,300,000 Canadians on relief. That number would increase by at least 8 per cent before the year was out.
King was more interested in saving money than he was in creating jobs. In the United States, the Roosevelt administration was spending eleven billion dollars on the Works Progress Administration, which not only built dams, bridges, parks, and airports but also subsidized writers, artists, ballet dancers, and actors. To King, this was unbridled extravagance, and it horrified him. He was convinced that Canada’s problems were caused by a similar prodigal attitude on the part of the provinces and municipalities. To solve that, he fell back on a traditional Canadian solution: he set up a commission. The National Employment Commission would co-operate with the provinces to secure efficiency in the dispensing of relief and thus save money. Its secondary task would be to recommend new employment programs. But the cautious Prime Minister made certain that its role would be strictly advisory. It would have no real power to create work for the unemployed.
As always, Mackenzie King felt himself to be teetering on the edge of exhaustion, “so weary and fatigued I could give it all up.” But he soldiered on, dragging himself to his bed “disheartened and very lonely” and also bemused by his own situation, so “strange to possess great power (nominally) and in one’s self to be so helpless.”
The country seemed to be at a standstill that spring. It needed an infusion of new blood to help shake it from its lethargy, but that was not forthcoming. In 1930, it had welcomed 163,000 immigrants; now the annual flow had dried up to a trickle of 11,000. Mackenzie King might consider himself a leader capable of solving global problems – he told his friend Joan Patteson that June that he believed he had saved the world from war on more than one occasion – but the evidence suggests that the world paid Canada little heed. A minor player in international politics, it was seen by many as a cultural backwater. John Goss, the noted British singer, came to Canada in February and announced that the country had the worst radio broadcasting system in the world. J.B. Priestley, the noted British novelist, arrived in May and declared that there was no literature in Canada worth speaking about. As usual the country was exporting much of its best talent, including Edna Mae Durbin, a fourteen-year-old gir
l from Winnipeg. As Deanna Durbin, singer and movie star, she would save Hollywood’s Universal Pictures single-handedly from bankruptcy.
In spite of this cultural apathy there were hints that Canadians were gaining a sense of community. The Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission was reorganized as a corporation – the CBC. Based partly on the British model, partly on the American, it would within a decade make Goss’s peevish remarks obsolete. Clarence Decatur Howe, Mackenzie King’s minister in the new Department of Transport, was hard at work on a plan for a national airline that would allow Canadians to travel coast to coast in a mere eighteen hours. The new Bank of Canada was issuing its own paper money, which King insisted carry bilingual wording despite the objections of Bennett, who thought that decision was “fraught with the greatest danger to harmony between races in other parts of Canada.”
Bilingual currency, however, could not be any more divisive than the despised Section 98, which King struck from the Criminal Code that spring, or the relief camps, which he caused to be closed at the end of June. It was by no means a permanent solution to the transient problem. Although half the relief camp workers – some ten thousand – went to work for the railways at better rates of pay, with the government footing the bill, these jobs were only seasonal. And the farm placement scheme, also designed to absorb transients, was a year away.
An Imperial era was ending. In late January the life of George V drew “peacefully to its close,” in the words of the Royal Physician, who was not above giving his dying sovereign a little nudge toward the grave. Now the new king reigned. “His subjects in every country in the British Commonwealth know that he will acquit himself with great distinction,” John Dafoe wrote in the Free Press – brave words that he, in common with other editors, would have preferred to forget before the year was out. Rudyard Kipling, who wasn’t poet laureate but acted as if he were, preceded George V to his tomb by a few days. King made no public comment; Kipling, in his view, was “a Tory imperialist [who] has never shown particular friendship towards myself or meant much to Canada.… It does not seem to me … [that] Canada has any particular tribute to pay.”
King’s aversion to Kipling was in keeping with his own nationalism. In the midst of the worst economic crisis in its history the country was slowly becoming disjoined from the British connection, with its colonial overtones. King’s suspicion of titled governors general, who, he felt, were always trying to upstage him, also applied to the newest occupant of Rideau Hall. One might have expected John Buchan, a popular novelist, to be more accommodating than the blue bloods who had preceded him, but as First Baron Tweedsmuir he was, in the Prime Minister’s view at least, decidedly stand-offish.
At the end of March, King tackled Tweedsmuir about his attitude and an embarrassing conversation took place. King asked if somebody had been telling the Governor General to beware of him. Why, at a recent Canadian Club dinner, with Bennett, of all people, present, had His Excellency made no reference to King as prime minister? And why had he delivered a eulogy of Lord Byng – whose treatment of King’s position in the constitutional wrangle was still a sensitive topic after ten years? Surely, Tweedsmuir must have known that he was reviving an old controversy and striking at King personally! Or so King thought.
The Prime Minister complained that he didn’t feel at home with Tweedsmuir as he had with the others; and that was odd, he felt, because the two had known each other for twenty years. Why, just that evening, at a reception, the Governor General had snubbed him, giving him nothing more than a formal shake of the hand before passing him on to Lady Tweedsmuir “and leaving me to straggle in as a schoolboy.” King wondered why on informal occasions the Governor General and he could not be on first-name terms; yet even in private Buchan addressed him formally as “Prime Minister.” This hypersensitivity was typical of King. He might be irked by the colonial connection; he might be distressed by ostentation; but he loved to bask in the friendship of the great and near-great – a Franklin Roosevelt, a John D. Rockefeller, Jr., a Ramsay MacDonald, or a member of the British nobility.
Buchan tried to make amends, but it didn’t work. At a vice-regal dinner during Roosevelt’s visit to Quebec at the end of July, King found himself seated at His Excellency’s right but with a vacant chair at his right. That meant he had nobody to talk to half the time. The vice-regal staff apparently hadn’t thought to bring someone else in. “It is this treating of one as a secondary consideration – when P.M. of the country that I do not like,” he wrote.
He found it almost impossible either to talk to Tweedsmuir on a man-to-man basis or to write to him “as fully as I would have liked to be able to. I don’t feel free enough to be natural; or that he is enough of a stranger to be formal.” King at last decided to stop using “J.B.” as a salutation and go back to “Governor General,” but he did sign one last letter, wistfully, with “Rex,” the name that only his oldest and most intimate friends used.
As the prime minister of an independent nation in the Commonwealth, in no way subordinate to Great Britain, King was, of course, feeling his position. It was not the first time he had been nettled by what he considered a patronizing attitude on the part of British nobility, and he was in the process of drawing Canada gracefully out from under the long imperial shadow. But Buchan was newly minted as a noble and still a commoner at heart. Why didn’t he bend a little? Was it because, as a new peer, he was too conscious of his position? There is a simpler and more obvious explanation: the sophisticated novelist-viceroy had little in common with his fusty prime minister. He simply couldn’t warm to him.
King was faced with more serious problems than imagined vice-regal snubs. The province of Alberta was technically bankrupt. Aberhart had asked for a two-million-dollar loan the previous December; King cut it to one million. He and the Minister of Finance, Charles Dunning, wanted to establish a loan council that would allow the poorer provinces to borrow money more cheaply because the loans would be guaranteed by the federal government. But there was a string attached: each province must prove that it really needed the money. That was too much for William Aberhart, who balked at this attempt to extend Ottawa’s control over provincial finances. King felt he had no choice but to let the province default on its maturing debentures, as it did on April 1 and again later in the year.
As the new premier of a depressed province, Aberhart was having a bumpy ride. There was as yet no sign that the voters would get their promised twenty-five dollars a month. Indeed, he had at one point referred to that election promise as “a figure of speech.” And he had broken with Major Douglas, who said, quite correctly, that Aberhart’s version of Social Credit was not his version. Douglas, for one thing, had never mentioned twenty-five dollars a month. But what was Aberhart’s version? He had relied on Douglas to come to Alberta to put his Social Credit theory into effect. Now it appeared that neither Douglas, who thought in global terms, nor Aberhart, who thought in provincial terms, had any specific plan.
The new premier was sure the press was out to get him. The Calgary Herald hired its first staff cartoonist, Stewart Cameron (late of the Walt Disney studios), whose job was to caricature Aberhart and his program. The Premier hinted more than once that he would have to control the press. Meanwhile the Alberta Social Credit League bought the other Calgary daily, the Albertan, getting its radio station, CJCJ, into the bargain. Station CFCN, over which Aberhart had broadcast and on which he still held a mortgage, was told to stop reporting news adverse to the government. To its credit, it refused to be muzzled.
About the same time, Aberhart reassured his followers that the Rapture, in which the world would be deserted by Christians, was still a long way off. The second coming of Christ would not occur until after 1943, he told an audience in Edmonton.
On April 23, Aberhart moved to introduce a form of what he considered Social Credit. The government, he said, would issue scrip known as Prosperity Certificates in place of money. To keep the scrip valid, the holder would have to place a one-cent stamp
on the back of each certificate every week. Aberhart hoped that this tax would keep the notes circulating.
It didn’t work. People found they couldn’t use “funny money” to pay fines or taxes or make purchases in government liquor stores. The banks wouldn’t cash scrip. Some Cabinet ministers even balked at being paid with it. The Prosperity Certificates failed to bring prosperity.
To still the clamour for the monthly twenty-five-dollar dividend, Aberhart in August introduced a registration program for Albertans who, he promised, would start receiving the bonus some time in 1937. The regulations laid bare the authoritarian nature of the Social Credit government. To receive Alberta Credit, a citizen would have to register, pledge allegiance to the government, and make a declaration of all assets and liabilities and a statement of other personal information. Nor could anyone be absent from the province for more than a month without permission of the local manager of one of the new State Credit Houses that the government was creating. These houses were designed to process all financial transactions within Alberta; they were, in effect, state banks. People rushed to sign up, either through fear of government retaliation or because they expected to get their twenty-five dollars at once. One man brought his wife all the way back from Detroit to sign. But an Edmonton bookstore owner named Surry refused, even though his MLA told him he’d lose his business. Instead he launched a “League of Freedom” to attack the whole idea.
2
The weather as enemy
The reforms that Aberhart introduced in Alberta in 1936 had little to do with Social Credit philosophy. They were forced on him by the deepening drought. He increased the minimum wage, bolstered crop insurance and unemployment relief, created a moratorium on debt collection and land seizures, and reorganized the school system, including a much-needed consolidation of school districts. But he could not make it rain.
The Great Depression Page 40
