Franklin D. Roosevelt, right, was elected U.S. president in 1932, while William Lyon Mackenzie King, left, was re-elected as Canada's prime minister in 1935.The Canadian Press
During the Second World War, U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt wrote to prime minister Mackenzie King: “Sometimes I indulge in the thoroughly sanctimonious and pharisaical thought, which I hope you are occasionally guilty of, that it is a grand and glorious thing for Canada and the United States to have the team of Mackenzie and Roosevelt at the helm in days like these.”
“Grand and glorious,” Roosevelt called it. He wasn’t exaggerating.
Today, with a White House occupant who has bullied and sought to harm Canada like no other, it’s worth pausing to remember a president who was the opposite, who did more for Canada than any other.
Roosevelt was elected in 1932, succeeding Herbert Hoover, whose administration had brought in the brutal Smoot-Hawley tariff that worsened the Great Depression in the U.S. and Canada.
King became prime minister again in October, 1935. Just one day later he asked for an audience with Roosevelt, whom he didn’t know. He wanted something that had eluded all prime ministers since Confederation: an agreement for liberalized trade.
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Roosevelt agreed to see him, and within the month King was in Washington. The prime minister had a vision of being seated on a field with Roosevelt, as the president tossed his straw hat over to him. Thinking it would be too big, King put it on and found it fit perfectly. He was so excited by this that when he awoke from his reverie, he wrote it down.
How fitting it turned out to be. FDR had a special kinship with Canada, having spent many summers on Campobello Island, N.B., where his wealthy family owned a home. With the Tory prime minister R.B. Bennett there was little chemistry, but with King he established a cozy rapport. Many, including Eleanor Roosevelt, found this surprising, because they saw the tea-drinking Canadian as quite the bore.
Within just a couple of days of meeting the prime minister, FDR had worked out a liberalized trade agreement with him. King was over the moon. In his diary he wrote it was “the greatest achievement of my life.”
The trade agreement was hardly as grand as King made it out to be. But there can be no underestimating the importance of that meeting between the president and the prime minister 90 years ago.
It marked a turning point in the bilateral relationship in that it set the stage for a series of agreements that transitioned the Canadian economy from its integration with the fading power that was Britain, to a bonding with the American colossus. Without their close personal relationship and the enormous goodwill toward Canada of Roosevelt, the best president we ever had, it wouldn’t have happened.
Following that 1935 meeting, there came a broader bilateral trade agreement in 1938 and then the Ogdensburg Agreement (creating the Permanent Joint Board on Defence in 1940) and then the Hyde Park Agreement of 1941, which averted a Canadian currency crisis and integrated war-production capacities.
There followed the vitally important co-operation between the two leaders in the management of the war. It is so well told in the book The Good Allies by our exceptional war historian Tim Cook, who passed away last month.
FDR, the first president to come to Ottawa, met with King 18 times. They became political advisers to one another. FDR accorded Canada practically major-power treatment. He made sure Canadian troops got credit for their great war contributions.
Lester Pearson, who was our Washington ambassador in the war years, said of Roosevelt that he was “closer to us in a sense than any other president ever was. He spent his summers on our shores. He fished our Northern streams. His fireside chats were heard in our homes. His ringing declarations lighted our hearts.”
Initially, King was concerned that FDR had ulterior motives. “The secret aim of every American leader including Franklin Roosevelt,” he wrote in his diary, “is to dominate Canada and ultimately possess the country.”
The concern in Ottawa was that the U.S., fearing that Canada was not strong enough to protect itself, would move its forces across the border to protect the continent – and keep them there. The war gave them the perfect cover.
Roosevelt, writes Prof. Cook, could have “turned the screws on Canada.” But he “did not,” because his alliance with King made him realize that fears of Canadian weakness were unfounded.
Sadly, added Prof. Cook, the story of the great alliance of those critical years is largely unknown by Americans today, especially it seems by those currently residing in the White House.
Would that they had one fraction of the respect for this country that FDR had.