Rise to Greatness by Conrad Black

Author:Conrad Black [Black, Conrad]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-7710-1355-3
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2014-11-11T05:00:00+00:00

The depression put great pressure on the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National and other railways. Bennett and the railways and canals minister, Robert Manion, set up the Committee on Railways and Shipping, with Robert Hanson as chairman (both subsequent leaders of the Conservative Party), and the committee took evidence, satisfied itself that Sir Henry Thornton, the chairman of the CNR, was extravagant, self-indulgent, and inefficient, and forced him out. (He died, of cancer, penniless, in New York eleven months later.) Bennett established the Royal Commission to Inquire into Railways and Transportation, chaired by the chief justice of Canada, Sir Lyman P. Duff. This commission reported in September 1932 that the two railways should remain separate and maintain competitive pricing but cooperate in all respects to reduce operating costs. Duff, like Bennett, feared a monopoly and its abuses. King attacked all this as a putsch against Thornton and a partisan move to pack the management of Canadian National with Conservative hacks and placate the Montreal financial community. Liberal opposition caused Bennett to introduce his railways legislation establishing a joint supervisory committee for both railways in the Senate, and Meighen put it through and sent it on to the House of Commons, where it passed after a lively debate. It was a creative measure, with representatives of both railways and of the railway workers on the committee.

In response to growing interest in radio broadcasting, Mackenzie King had set up the Aird Commission (John Aird was a retired bank chairman) to make recommendations about this new industry, prompted in part by complaints from the Roman Catholic Church in Quebec about Jehovah’s Witnesses taking to the airwaves to denounce Quebec’s principal religious denomination. This commission urged that seven publicly owned stations be set up in different major cities to compliment the sixty-two private broadcasters already operating. King ignored the report, but Bennett, a more decisive and often more innovative personality than King, was interested in the concept and took it up, encouraged by the Canadian Radio League, a vast umbrella organization of governments and interest groups whose national council included future prime minister Louis St. Laurent and commander of the Canadian army in the First World War General Sir Arthur Currie, now principal of McGill University. There was hostile lobbying from the newspaper industry, which apparently helped motivate Mackenzie King to continue to counsel caution, but Bennett drove on, until interrupted for a whole year by a challenge from the government of Quebec that claimed that granting radio licences was a provincial matter. Bennett had the better of the argument, and he and the minister of marine and fisheries, Alfred Duranleau, who was inexplicably in charge of radio matters, won at the Supreme Court of Canada and successfully resisted Quebec’s appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Bennett appointed a parliamentary committee chaired by Raymond Morand to advise on how to implement the ambition to enter public broadcasting, and that committee’s report was tabled in the House of Commons on May 9,

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