Penguin History of Canada by Robert Bothwell

Author:Robert Bothwell
Language: ru
Format: mobi
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP (CANADA)
Published: 2012-06-02T18:46:24+00:00

POLITICS AND THE ECONOMY IN THE TWENTIES

Mackenzie King had that most useful political attribute: luck. Canada had suffered a sharp economic downturn in 1920–21. Unemployment and economic misery had contributed to Meighen’s defeat; a slow recovery would assist King’s political prospects.

King was in many respects an American- or British-style Progressive, with all that implied in favouring state responsibility for economic and social policy. Yet one of the controlling factors in King’s politics was a deep aversion to deficits and debt. Canada in 1921 had a debt of $3.018 billion, compared with $750 million in 1914. It was the conservative King, not the reforming King, who gnawed away at its fringes during the 1920s. As a percentage of gross national product, though not in absolute terms, the federal debt fell as King’s early cabinets, composed largely of politicians senior to him in age and experience, approved a policy that rejected new and dangerous opportunities for expenditure and instead paid down the national debt. Naturally they understood that King must lower some taxes—tariffs on farm machinery for example—in order to buy off the Progressives and corral their support. As a result, most of the time, the Progressives backed the Liberals. As time passed, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish some Progressives from Liberals; never strong on party discipline, the Progressives quarrelled among themselves while their party fractured. In the background, King quietly assisted his most senior ministers to retire and recruited prominent provincial Liberals to take their places.32

King was later remembered as a political master, but that wasn’t the impression he created in the 1920s. In 1925 his party came close to defeat at the hands of Arthur Meighen and the resurgent Conservatives, but in a Parliament of minorities, King could scrape by with the support of the Progressives and a few Labour members. He won the early votes of confidence in Parliament, watching from the sidelines because he’d gone down to personal defeat in his own constituency and had to wait for his Saskatchewan allies to open up a safe seat for him. At that precise moment a scandal broke out in the Customs department and the revelations proved too much for the minor parties to bear. They deserted King, who promptly went to the governor general, Lord Byng, and asked for a dissolution of Parliament.

Lord Byng, without entirely understanding what he was doing, refused. King resigned, and Byng sent for Meighen to form a government. The problem, politically, was that while the Progressive and Labour members might have been willing to vote against King, they were unwilling to vote for Meighen.33 Meighen was therefore defeated in the House of Commons, then asked Byng for Parliament to be dissolved, and got his wish.

King did not hesitate to grasp the opportunity of a lifetime. The election issue was simplified to the fact that Byng had given Meighen the dissolution he’d refused to King. It was the People versus the Peer, and it proved a most unequal contest. King, representing the People, won and Meighen, carrying the can for the Peer, lost.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.