Dec. 17, 2024, marks the 150th anniversary of William Lyon Mackenzie King's birth. But you would be forgiven for not being aware. There has been no postage stamp to mark the occasion. There is no television documentary to re-evaluate the legacy of a prime minister who led the country during the crucial years of the Second World War and served longer as prime minister than anyone in Canadian history.John Boyd/The Globe and Mail
J.D.M. Stewart is a writer and historian and author of the forthcoming book, The Prime Ministers.
On Dec. 17, 1949, former prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King celebrated his 75th birthday.
“Flowers have come in quantities,” the man who led Canada for 21 years between 1921 and 1948 noted in his diary that morning. They came from C.D. Howe, who had been one of his most important cabinet ministers; they came from governor-general Viscount Alexander and his wife. There were telephone calls from prime minister Louis St. Laurent and Jack Pickersgill, King’s long-time cabinet secretary. It was a lot to handle for a man who was in the last year of his life.
“I had very little time to myself all day,” he wrote. “Flowers kept coming in, in pots and boxes, no end of telegrams & letters, cards, etc.”
Observing it all was his dog Pat, the third of his three Irish terriers who all answered to the same name.
Dec. 17, 2024, marks the 150th anniversary of King’s birth. But you would be forgiven for not being aware. There has been no postage stamp to mark the occasion. There is no television documentary to re-evaluate the legacy of a prime minister who led the country during the crucial years of the Second World War and served longer as prime minister than anyone in Canadian history.
But we should be acknowledging the milestone. By looking at King’s legacy, we not only learn something about Canada, but also, implicitly, pay tribute to the country’s past.
Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and his dog, Pat, in Kingsmere, Que., in the 1940s. King had three dogs, all named Pat.Library and Archives Canada
When King held his final cabinet meeting as prime minister in 1948, his soon-to-be successor Louis St. Laurent told the group that there were now three eras in Canadian history. The first two had belonged to Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Now there was a third era: King’s.
It is not hard to see why. King’s prime ministership represented a turning point in Canadian history. Much of what we see and value in Canada today was largely a result of his leadership. The ever-widening social safety net in this country began when his government introduced modest old age pensions in 1927. They were only available to those over the age of 70, but it was a beginning.
During the 1940s, his government expanded the social welfare system by improving pensions and adding both a family allowance and unemployment insurance.
There were, however, other preoccupations than social welfare for King. His two guiding principles were developing Canadian autonomy and maintaining national unity. These were not unusual goals for a prime minister, and King was successful in both areas. What is more, he did so during one of the most difficult times in the 20th century: the Second World War.
Canada declared war independent of Britain in 1939. “Parliament will decide,” was King’s mantra. He led a government that mobilized a million people to fight Nazi Germany.
The British Commonwealth Air Training Plan he negotiated was another key contribution to the war. More than 130,000 air recruits from allied nations trained to become everything from pilots to bomb aimers. U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt called Canada “the aerodrome of democracy.”
Under King, Canada uncoupled its wagon from Britain and hitched it to the rising star of the United States. The key pivot came during a 1940 steak dinner in Roosevelt’s railcar in Ogdensburg, N.Y., just on the other side of the St. Lawrence River from Prescott, Ont.
There the two leaders created a Permanent Joint Board on Defence, which allowed for the planning and co-ordination of defence of the continent. With Britain’s influence waning, King put Canada’s eggs in the American basket. The accord was front-page news in The Globe and Mail, whose editorial called the agreement “the most momentous chapter in the history of Canadian-American relations.”
King’s turn toward continentalism was not finished. The following year in 1941 he and Roosevelt declared the Hyde Park agreement, which greatly facilitated trade between the two countries and showed the way for future economic integration.
On the national unity file, King was deft in his handling of Quebec. He avoided the deep wounds caused by conscription during the First World War through clever strategies of delay and consultation. King left managing most affairs in the province to his Quebec lieutenant Ernest Lapointe. When he died in 1941, King recruited another highly regarded francophone in Louis St. Laurent. The prime minister did not possess a deep knowledge of the aspirations of Quebeckers, but he was smart enough to lean on the intelligence and insights of others.
King’s leadership style was very different from what we see in most leaders today. He did not seek to divide or roil. While he certainly enjoyed attention and validation, he was not dependent on it. His belief was to keep the country moving forward in a steady fashion.
Years later, former prime minister Lester B. Pearson would write that King was “aware that his posture was often neither heroic nor dramatic. Nailing your colours to both sides of the fence seldom is; but it may be better than nailing your colours to one side if in so doing, you bring down the fence.”
The success of King has often flummoxed observers. In 1981, historian C.P. Stacey, who had studied him closely, still did not know what to make of him. “No one has yet achieved an adequate estimate of Mackenzie King,” he wrote.
We seem to know more now. A 2016 Maclean’s magazine poll of historians ranked him as our best prime minister. Historian Margaret MacMillan argued in her Massey Lectures History’s People that, for Canada, King “is as important as Bismarck is for Germany. Where the latter built a country, the former preserved it – through part of the turbulent 1920s, the aftermath of the Great Depression, and on into the first years of peace.”
There are dissenters, however. King is criticized for incrementalism and for antisemitism. It was his government that refused entry to the 907 Jewish refugees aboard the St. Louis in 1939. Many of those passengers returned to Europe where 254 souls died in the Holocaust.
Patrice Dutil, a politics professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, is among the dissenters. Next year UBC Press will publish a collection of essays under the title The Enduring Riddle of Mackenzie King. Edited by Prof. Dutil, the writers will challenge the conventional thesis that King is the country’s greatest PM.
“[He] certainly wins the prize for survival, but his leadership only really shined during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath,” Prof. Dutil wrote in an e-mail. “He simply does not compare to John A. Macdonald whose exploits include forging a consensus on Confederation, building the country from coast to coast and then defending his record by winning six majorities.”
King was not the visionary Macdonald was, nor did he have the ability to inspire with words as was the case with Laurier. But his leadership marked an “era” as St. Laurent put it. He prepared Canada for the post-1945 world by giving it confidence and a sense of itself. He laid the foundation for the country’s social safety net. He did not frown on Canada. He believed in its promise. His legacy is as understated as it is essential.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to Roosevelt's declaration of the High Park agreement. It is the Hyde Park agreement. This version has been updated.