The Great Depression (9 page)

Vulgarity and ostentation disgusted him, especially where the British upper classes were involved. Canada was just beginning to emerge from the long shadow of the mother country, and King was in the forefront of those nationalists who couldn’t abide the pomp, circumstance, and out-and-out grovelling that accompanied royal and vice-regal occasions.

Back in 1927, during the country’s Diamond Jubilee, he had been irritated by the Governor General’s request for five thousand dollars to entertain highly placed visitors from England, including the Prince of Wales and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. “I am beginning to be ‘fed’ up with the English invasion,” he wrote. The fawning over high dignitaries in Ottawa social circles disgusted him. At one lavish dinner, at which both he and the Governor General were guests, he was dismayed to find that a marionette show had been hired for their amusement, complete “with cartoons which were lampoons … and this in the presence of a lot of foolish young people and empty headed old ones.” It was unworthy, King thought, considering the high position of the guests, “a children’s party for grown ups.” He was very conscious of the dignity of his position as the prime minister of an imperial dominion that would soon become an autonomous member of the new Commonwealth. He disliked being patronized and sometimes unconsciously snubbed by those British peers who reigned but did not rule from Rideau Hall. Once on a drive with the vice-regal party from the Quebec Citadel to luncheon thirty miles distant, he found himself relegated to a little side seat in an ADC capacity. “It shews,” King wrote, “what a wrong sense of proportion people come to have.”

That led King to muse that the whole business of having a governor general from the old country was getting out of date. “It is perfectly absurd for two people to be surrounded by flunkies,
A.D.C.s getting ‘Your Excellency’ at every turn & from every breath, salutes, etc.… The life indeed disgusts me. I get fed up with it.” He returned to the subject more than once: “The truth is I find myself very little in sympathy with the whole social side of Govt. House life.… Its patronizing attitude shrivels me completely.…”

These words were written a year before the general election. By this time King had a clear idea of the kind of Canada he wanted – one that was in no way subordinate to Great Britain. When Sir William Clark, the British High Commissioner, tried to tell him how Hugh Keenleyside, his new chargé d’affaires in Japan, should act in Tokyo, King “got thoroughly mad & told him that we in Canada did not need to be told how to behave … by the Br. Frgn Office, or his office.” King went on to declare that this “tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority” on the part of Englishmen was intolerable as far as Canadians were concerned. It was an uncharacteristic outburst from the most circumspect of politicians, and King was surprised himself at the bluntness of his words; but he “could not contain the feeling of indignation at the way the High Comm’rs office has been seeking to ‘keep tabs’ on us.”

How ironic then, in the light of these convictions, that less than a year following the election, the Statute of Westminster would give Canada the autonomy that King craved, but the prime minister who signed it would be Mackenzie King’s bitterest antagonist, the staunchest of imperialists, the man who brought back British titles to Canada, himself a future peer of the realm – Richard Bedford Bennett.

When the campaign began in June, two hundred thousand Canadians were out of work, the price of wheat had plunged by 54 per cent from the previous year, and the prairies were assaulted by the worst drought in Canadian history. Cora Hind, the West’s first woman journalist, described the situation that summer in the
Free Press:
“One of the truly pathetic things is the number of men looking for work and not finding it, tramping in the broiling heat with their packs on their backs. Not the hobo type, but good,
respectable, capable, keen to earn a living and far too many of them looking as if they and a good meal were strangers.”

The seriousness of the situation completely escaped Mackenzie King, who continued to insist that there was no national emergency, but Bennett seized on it, ran with it, and made it
the
issue of the campaign. King was at a disadvantage, though he failed to realize it. Goaded into an early election, he was forced to do battle on his opponent’s ground.

Bennett opened his campaign in Winnipeg on June 9 in the skating rink of the cavernous Winnipeg Amphitheatre, where at the party’s first convention in 1927 he had been elected Conservative leader. Although the meeting was scheduled for 8:15 that night, hundreds were already waiting outside when the doors opened at 7:10. For the next hour a stream of motor cars and a parade of streetcars disgorged their passengers, most of whom were men. As the building filled up – it would hold seven thousand – the band of the Canadian Legion blared forth above the buzz of the crowd. Banners draped along the walls made it clear that the Tory campaign would be tied to the economy:
ELECT A CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT AND RELIEVE UNEMPLOYMENT … TIME TO CHANGE! VOTE CONSERVATIVE FOR BETTER TIMES …
and
VICTORY FOR THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY MEANS PROSPERITY FOR CANADA
.

A gigantic portrait of John A. Macdonald stared down from its gilt frame above the platform at the west side of the auditorium, flanked by enlarged photographs of former Tory stalwarts – John Norquay, one-time premier of Manitoba, and Macdonald’s old crony Charles Tupper.

At 8:30 the band struck up “O Canada,” and as the faithful roared, clapped, and cheered their approval, Bennett and his party came down the aisles and bounded onto the stage with such vigour that they knocked over a vase of red roses.

Now the ebullient leader – “our beloved chief,” as his introducer called him – plunged into a fighting speech that focused on the unemployment issue. Yet Bennett’s solutions, cheered to the roof by the crowd, seemed remarkably old-fashioned. “I will make the tariff fight for you,” he declaimed, promising to maintain and indeed strengthen the traditional Tory policy of high duties to protect Canadian industries against “overseas competition.”

“My concern,” he said, “must always be for the unemployed men of Canada, and not for those of Great Britain or any other countries.” The words had a nice solid ring, comforting reminders of the old National Policy. But what, really, did this panacea have to do with appalling conditions dictated by a different kind of crisis? Bennett spoke for an hour and a half – a brief speech by the standards of the time – and ended with a pledge that any government he headed would introduce any act necessary to end the Depression “or perish in the attempt.” That brought down the house.

This was the first time that radio had been used extensively in an election, and Mackenzie King, listening to his rival on the airwaves, was not impressed. “Such demagoguery, declamation & ranting …,” he wrote. “I cannot see how he can hope to win to his side men of any real intelligence.”

But Bennett’s appeal was undeniable. In Regina, where thousands more heard him, the party made sure that the front seats were occupied by the unemployed, each man identified by a white card on his lapel. King might declare, as he did, that Bennett was exploiting misery for political purposes, that he was exaggerating the problem “out of all proportion,” but the Tory leader’s speeches were corralling votes.

“I will use tariffs to blast a way into the markets that have been closed to you,” he declared in Winnipeg. That bellicose phrase would dog him for the next five years. It was on a par with King’s five-cent-piece blunder or Pierre Trudeau’s later pledge to wrestle inflation to the ground.

Canadians, Bennett said, didn’t want charity; they wanted work. “I will not permit this country with my voice or vote, to ever become committed to the dole system.”

“Ever,” “never,” and “forever” are words that the canny politician learns to avoid. In less than two years, Bennett would be forced to eat his. Both leaders were mired in the past, seeking old-fashioned solutions – a high protective tariff, a balanced budget – for a new set of problems.

But Bennett was more specific than his cautious opponent. Unemployment, he told a Calgary audience, “has now ceased to be a local or Provincial one and … has assumed national importance” – a jab at King’s position. He promised he would call a special session of Parliament immediately to deal with it. He
would inaugurate a system of public works to provide jobs. He would build the St. Lawrence Seaway. He would start construction on the Trans-Canada Highway. He would introduce a national system of old-age pensions. “The bogey of unemployment would be destroyed.” There was no excuse for it in Canada “if a Government does its duty.”

“The Conservative party,” Bennett told a Moncton audience, “is going to find work for all who are willing to work, or perish in the attempt” – another promise that he would live to regret. And then, the clincher: “Mr. King promises consideration of the problem of unemployment. I promise to end unemployment. Which plan do you like best?”

In those days there were no airplanes to speed the candidates from one political rally to the next. The indefatigable Tory leader travelled fourteen thousand miles, all by private rail car. He made seventy speeches, some lasting two hours, and spent sixty thousand dollars of his personal fortune in the seven weeks of the campaign. His solutions may have been old-fashioned, but his style was that of a fervent evangelist, in direct contrast to that of his plodding opponent.

King couldn’t fathom it. He thought Bennett was going too far in making unemployment the big issue of the campaign. “Labour is not likely to be deceived, and the men who are working are not going to worry particularly over some of those who are not,” he wrote, in a monumental misreading of the mood of the electorate. Those remarks, which he confided to his diary just two days before he opened his own campaign in Brantford, show how far the Prime Minister was removed from the realities of the day. It is a measure of the Liberal myopia that their main newspaper advertisements scarcely mentioned unemployment but emphasized instead taxation and trade.

By the time King reached the West in early July, his speeches were being interrupted by boos and catcalls, demonstrations and humiliating taunts of “five cent piece.” He tried to explain what he had really meant during that unfortunate exchange in Parliament, tried sometimes to laugh it off (“A party is in a pretty bad way when it has to adopt a five cent issue”). It didn’t work.

The campaign was, to use his own words, “heavy sledding.” In Quebec he discovered only at the last minute, and to his dismay, that he was expected to speak out of doors on a damp, cold night
to more than five thousand voters. Worse, he realized he was addressing a predominantly French-speaking audience, many members of which couldn’t understand a word he said. Just as he began, a spatter of rain came down. There he stood, wearing the light suit he had chosen in expectation of an indoor affair, shivering in the cold, distracted by the ineptitude of his own people, “too weary to speak, let alone think.” Somehow he managed to get through the ordeal, but the experience – “a sort of nightmare” – left him profoundly depressed.

Halifax was also hard going. Again the arrangements were terrible: for one thing, the audience was too far from the platform. He managed to hold his temper at the taunts in Calgary but was terrified in Vancouver to discover that there were no loud-speakers. In Edmonton, returning east, he was greeted by the unemployed with jeers and banners. By the time he reached Saskatoon, he wrote, “I really felt as tho I would not be able to hold out.”

While the two political leaders criss-crossed the nation, an uglier drama was being enacted on the streets of Toronto. In addition to the various splinter parties that formed the “Ginger Group” in Parliament under J.S. Woodsworth, one other national party had nominated candidates. For the Communist Party of Canada, the Depression was an opportunity for action; it was determined to contest the election.

Its new leader, who had ousted Jack MacDonald, was a diminutive English-born machinist, Tim Buck, who looked more like a shoe salesman than the cartoon stereotype of a bearded, bomb-throwing Bolshevik. Buck was short, wiry, quiet spoken, clean shaven, and well read, though largely self-educated. During his family’s days of deepest poverty in England, Buck would recall, their home was the only one in the neighbourhood that had a complete set of the works of Shakespeare.

Buck’s Conservative father, a former innkeeper whose hero was Disraeli, believed that “there was absolutely nothing wrong with Britain and her Empire that the Tories couldn’t fix.” But young Tim, who went to work as a machinist’s apprentice, was enthralled by the speeches of Keir Hardie, the Scottish Labour M.P. Later, when he opted for socialism, his father wouldn’t speak to him. In 1910 Buck decided to emigrate and chose Canada because the steamship fare was cheaper than it was to Australia.
By then he was a radical and a strong union member. He read Marx, joined the Workers’ Party of Canada, and in June of 1921, in Fred Farley’s barn in Guelph, Ontario, helped form the Communist Party of Canada, which he would lead from 1930 until his death in 1973.

A few days after the election was called, two strapping plainclothesmen walked into Buck’s Toronto office. “Put on your coat, Tim,” one of them said, “the Chief wants to see you.”

Buck knew both men well enough to call them by their first names – Dan Mann and Bill Nursey, members of Chief Draper’s infamous Red Squad, the same group that had precipitated the Queen’s Park riot a year earlier. He asked if they had a warrant. They didn’t. But Buck had enough experience with the Toronto police to know that nothing was to be gained by refusing them. They would simply drag him down to the squad car, warrant or no warrant, and no citizen would bother to protest.

Since 1927, the average Torontonian had come to the conclusion that the Communist party was an illegal organization because the police treated it that way. It wasn’t, of course. It was a legal political entity contesting a democratic election with the same rights and privileges enjoyed by the Liberals and the Conservatives – at least on paper. In practice, the party’s street corner meetings were invariably broken up and its members refused the use of meeting halls that were open to the rest of the public. The police commission, three of the city’s four newspapers (the
Star
was the exception), a majority of the city fathers, and most citizens saw nothing reprehensible about these violations of civil rights.