The Great Depression (51 page)

Stevens’s defection embittered Bennett. “One man has crucified the party – Stevens,” he told a friend in Calgary. His own Cabinet was in disarray. One minister had died; eight others had declined to run; Bennett himself, dogged by illness, was operating at half-steam. Nonetheless, as he told a Tory banquet in June, “I’ll die in harness rather than quit now.” That delighted Mackenzie King, who thought him the best possible adversary, considering the times. “He is the man the people rightly wish to defeat,” King wrote. “He has been making enemies for himself, as I thought he would, from the day he assumed office, and if he goes through the campaign he will get one of the worst defeats any political leader ever sustained.”

King had no use for Bennett. His diary is peppered with epithets, some of which – “blatherskite” is one – have slipped out of common usage. Bennett, King wrote, was “unctuous,” “boorish,”
a man of “low cunning and hypocrisy,” “the Great I Am,” “a dog of a man – a brute in his instincts,” “a Pharisee of Pharisees,” and so on. The accommodating Mrs. Wriedt, to King’s obvious satisfaction, told him that Bennett was “like a snake in the grass in his Cabinet – he was not to be trusted.” All the same, King could not help indicating his delight on those rare occasions when Bennett deigned to notice him.

The two were miles apart in personality and political savvy. Where Bennett was bombastic, King was bland. Where Bennett was blunt, King was devious. Where Bennett was loud and rude, King was soft and fawning. Where Bennett was outspoken, King was fuzzy. Where Bennett was direct, King was circuitous. Bennett used a cleaver against his enemies; King used a stiletto. Bennett never understood the art of the possible; King thrived on it. In short, King was a politician; Bennett was not.

King, who always disliked making election promises, was wise enough to realize he need make none this time. The Depression, not the Liberal party, would finish off the Tories. He confined himself to some vague statements about restoring parliamentary democracy, getting rid of government bureaucracy, and saving the nation from dictatorship. He managed to suggest that other parties had something in common with Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini (who at that time was invading Ethiopia). Wasn’t it obvious that Canada was becoming “a second Italy, a second Germany, a second Russia”? he asked. His pledge to get rid of the relief camps and the hated Section 98 formed part of that attack.

The Conservatives responded with another of those meaningless slogans that political parties seem to love:
STAND BY CANADA – A CHANCE FOR YOUTH – VOTE BENNETT
. The Liberals pounced on that, and with reason. The Tories, who had inaugurated the so-called slave camps and brutally stopped the protest of youth in Regina, were now talking about giving youth a
chancel
And how could they believe that the word “Bennett” was better than “Conservative” when it came to attracting votes? The Liberal slogan was more telling. It was
KING OR CHAOS
.

When the results were tabulated on October 14, the Liberal sweep was even greater than expected. King’s party had captured 173 seats; the Conservatives were reduced to 40. Stevens’s party failed to get off the ground; only its leader retained his seat. The big surprises were the good showing of the Social Credit party
with seventeen seats, all but two from Alberta, and the poor showing of the CCF, with only seven of its candidates elected.

Had Stevens stayed in the party and Bennett resigned, perhaps in his favour, the results would have been dramatically different. Stevens’s defection had badly crippled the Tories. In forty-eight ridings, Ernest Watkins has pointed out, the total of Conservative and Reconstruction votes would have been enough to defeat the Liberal candidates. That would have given Mackenzie King a total of 125 seats in the House to a combined Opposition of 123 – an uneasy margin. Almost equally damaging was the impact on the CCF, which would certainly have gained more seats if independent voters had had one fewer option to the old-line parties. Stevens’s party actually got slightly
more
of the total vote than the CCF.

The Liberal victory was no landslide, except in seats. The party barely increased its strength in total votes. Its gains in French Canada were matched by heavy losses in the West. As usual, the voters weren’t voting for either of the old parties; they were voting against the Conservatives, whose strength dropped to three-fifths of what it had been in 1930.

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.

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 girl 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.