An Unpopular PM Revisited

Was Conservative prime minister Richard Bedford Bennett (1870–1947) a leftist? The question has been around for years. During the 1969 meetings of the Canadian Historical Association I listened with some skepticism to a paper with the title “R.B. Bennett as a Reformer.” In addition to discussing the 1934 Farmers’ Creditors Arrangement Act and the 1935 New Deal, author J.R.H. Wilbur pointed out that the Bank of Canada and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation both owed their existence to Bennett’s government. Closer study, he said, “might reveal that of all the administrations governing Canada in this century, the most conservative have beenledbyMackenzieKingandthemostreformingby R.B. Bennett.”

I can’t remember whether anyone observed that the government led by Lester B. Pearson was more reformist than Bennett’s. It was Wilbur’s locating of Bennett to the left of King that stuck in my mind. This reforming Bennett is at the centre of John Boyko’s new book, Bennett: The Rebel Who Challenged and Changed a Nation, the first full-scale biography of Canada’s eleventh prime minister.

A historian and administrator at Lakefield College School, Boyko paints a sympathetic portrait of a leader who has not enjoyed a good press. Bennett was and is too easily depicted as pompous, plutocratic and reactionary, incapable of dealing with the problems thrown up by the Depression and motivated by expediency more than any real commitment to reform when he finally did act. “The premise of this book,” Boyko states, “is that the consensus about Bennett is fundamentally flawed.” Asserting that “most historians” have been unkind to Bennett and his legacy, he adds that “Bennett’s wealth, personality, and even his style of dress made him too tempting a target.” There is, too, the iconic Bennett buggy, a car with its engine removed and pulled by a horse, a symbol of futility that seems to capture the essence of the Dirty Thirties.

But “there is more to Bennett than the Bennett buggy.” He was a “rebel” whose views were frequently unconventional and bold. Like Wilbur, Boyko believes that Bennett was no reactionary. Bennett recognized that ordinary people needed protection from the market. His accomplishments were substantial, and he deserves to be better known. “Bennett is among Canada’s most intriguing citizens and influential prime ministers, with a great deal of value to teach us all … He is whispering to us through time. We owe it to ourselves to listen.”

Boyko’s main source is the collection of papers that Bennett left to the Harriet Irving Library and Archives at the University of New Brunswick. However, he borrows from earlier accounts of Bennett’s life, those written by Andrew MacLean and Bennett’s lifelong friend Max Aitken, first Baron Beaverbrook, as well as more substantial studies by Ernest Watkins, James Gray and P.B. Waite. Boyko also makes good use of Larry Glassford’s study of the Conservative Party under Bennett’s leadership.

Boyko traces Bennett’s life from his birth at Hopewell Hill, New Brunswick, through a penurious childhood in which his devoutly Methodist mother was the key influence, to professional, business and political success and, finally, to his retirement in England and death. Intelligent, industrious, frugal (but personally generous), well spoken and ambitious, he was practising law in Calgary by 1897. A year later he entered the territorial legislature. Although he had a thriving career in corporate law, with the Canadian Pacific Railway among his clients, he showed a marked concern for the rights and interests of working class people. He saw no contradiction here. In addressing a meeting of strikers in 1902, Boyko writes that he said “that he supported capitalism and the right of business people to make a fair profit, but also that all workers deserved the right to organize themselves into unions, set reasonable prices for their labour, and earn a decent living through which they could raise their families.” Bennett was not a Social Gospeller, but as a Methodist he could hardly fail to be influenced by its ideas.

In Boyko’s view, Bennett’s concern for working class people influenced him throughout his political career. He had other convictions as well, of course. Proudly Canadian, he believed that Canada’s international interests were linked to its membership in the British Empire. When he ran for Parliament in 1911, he attacked Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s Reciprocity Treaty with the United States, seeing it as a threat to Canadian business and labour but also to the British connection. During the 1930s he sought preferential tariffs and closer trade relations within the Empire as a partial solution to the problems of the Canadian economy. During the 1930s, too, he became more centralist, convinced that Ottawa should have the power to set national standards in companies’ law, the marketing of natural products and labour relations.

Boyko’s style is lively, and his book generally makes for easy reading. He paints a convincing picture of Bennett’s personality and his strengths and weaknesses, and makes sense of the way he acted in often trying circumstances. His genuine though exaggerated fear of communism, for example, was at the bottom of his negative attitude to the relief camp strikers and the On-to-Ottawa Trek in the spring and early summer of 1935, and prompted a reaction that seemed excessive to many observers at the time.

Has Boyko given Bennett the definitive biography he deserves? Unhappily, no. This book contains too many omissions, mistakes and unfounded claims. First of all, Boyko is far too cavalier about citing his sources. Second, his selection of primary sources is puzzling. He has ignored what until 1936 was perhaps the most important Conservative newspaper in Canada, Toronto’s Mail and Empire. He has consulted no newspapers in the Atlantic provinces or Quebec, and none in French. Third, key secondary works are absent, the most startling omission being Marc La Terreur’s Les tribulations des conservateurs au Québec: de Bennett à Diefenbaker.

The gaps in his research may explain why Boyko ignores some subjects while dealing inadequately with others. Bennett was a prohibitionist, but Boyko is silent on Bennett’s reaction to the 1923 Alberta plebiscite on prohibition. We read that, in the 1930 election, “Bennett paid attention to all regions of the country but afforded special consideration to Quebec.” But Boyko says nothing about the nature of his campaign in that province, so that we are left to guess how the Tories went from 4 to 24 of its seats. We read about the 1930 Unemployment Relief Act and about increases in tariffs, but draconian cuts in immigration go unmentioned. During the early 1930s, thousands of more or less recent immigrants were deported after applying for unemployment relief, but Boyko fails to mention this. He informs us that Bennett had little interest in a common defence plan for the British Commonwealth, but he says nothing about defence policy or about the deep cuts made in Canada’s defence budget. Bennett was a member of Dalhousie University’s board of governors for many years, but there is nothing here about his attempt to force the dismissal of a political scientist in 1931–32 or his effort to save President Carleton Stanley from dismissal in 1945.

Boyko gets several dates wrong, but that is small potatoes alongside the hash he makes of the international financial crisis in the summer and fall of 1931 and its effects on Canada. Michael Bliss’s Northern Enterprise: Five Centuries of Canadian Business, one of many relevant titles absent from Boyko’s bibliography, could have helped, for Bliss considers the government’s successful campaign to borrow $150 million in the domestic capital market in the late fall of 1931, at a time when foreign capital markets were effectively closed, to be “R.B. Bennett’s finest hour.” There is not a word about the campaign in Boyko’s book.

Dominion-provincial relations are another subject he has difficulties with. As part of the 1931–32 budget, Boyko writes, Bennett’s government proposed to reduce transfers to the provinces for relief purposes. “The premiers saw Bennett’s action for what it was: the old trick of the federal government attempting to bring its books into balance by downloading fiscal responsibilities to the provinces.” This is balderdash. Unemployment relief was a provincial responsibility. In the Unemployment Relief Act, Bennett offered the aid to the provinces that King had refused earlier in 1930. The prospect of a reduction in this aid displeased provincial governments, but fiscal responsibilities were not being downloaded to them.

Where Boyko goes farthest astray is in locating Bennett in the Canadian political tradition. He sees the early Bennett as a “red Tory,” who in his paternalistic concern for the working class was in the left wing of the Conservative Party. Fair enough. But Boyko turns the Bennett of the early 1930s into a Keynesian avant la lettre, and then argues that, by virtue of the New Deal, he “situated the Conservative Party on the crowded ideological left.”

Was Bennett “a pioneer in moving Canada into the brave new Keynesian world”? Hardly. He believed that budgets should be balanced, and so his government raised taxes and tried to reduce spending. Neither is a Keynesian device in depressed times. Budget deficits persisted chiefly because of the burdensome obligations the government faced with respect to the deficits incurred by the Canadian National Railway system. Bennett accepted deficit financing in much the same spirit that I accept getting old: I don’t like it but see no way around it.

Did Bennett, with an assist from his brother-in-law W.D. Herridge, turn the Tories into a party of the left? Here an affirmative answer may be more tempting. When the prime minister began his New Deal broadcasts in January 1935, Arch Dale, editorial cartoonist for the staunchly Liberal Winnipeg Free Press, showed Bennett, dressed to the nines, getting into bed with CCF leader J.S. Woodsworth and saying: “Move over!!” In fact, the CCF caucus gave only qualified support to Bennett’s bills, voting for them but criticizing their inadequacy and lack of cohesion. Moreover, most CCFers believed that Bennett’s legislation was unconstitutional. According to Kenneth McNaught, “Woodsworth concluded that the government’s whole programme was an artful dodge to deprive the Liberals of electoral victory in 1935 and to undercut the growing political strength of socialism.”

Aside from overestimating the CCF’s strength, this failed to do justice to Bennett’s sincerity. It also took no account of the damage that the defection of H.H. Stevens, Bennett’s minister of trade and commerce until his resignation in October 1934, was doing to the Tories. During the early summer of 1935 Stevens launched the Reconstruction Party, which attracted support especially from small business and farmers, groups angry about the market power exercised by large retailers and processors, and the business practices this power fostered, as revealed in testimony before the Royal Commission on Price Spreads.

Boyko rightly pays a lot of attention to Stevens, whose brand of populism was a significant part of Canadian conservatism. The Tories were never simply a party of big business, although a good many businessmen supported it and its policies, especially the high tariffs that provided tax revenue for Ottawa while offering protection to manufacturers. Well into the 20th century, Conservatives generally stood for higher taxes than the Liberals, as well as greater government intervention in economic life, and not just on behalf of business. The government of John A. Macdonald, “gratifying the working-men and … discomfiting the Reformers,” sanctioned labour’s right to organize at a time (1872) when the law, and Liberals such as George Brown, still saw unions as conspiracies in restraint of trade. Workers’ compensation and Ontario Hydro were the off-spring of a Conservative provincial government.

By the 1920s some Liberals were coming to grips with changes in the economy that gave enormous market power to a relatively small number of increasingly multinational corporations. But other Liberals wanted to keep taxes low and government to a minimum, thereby giving the private sector the freedom that, they believed, best served the public good. The Depression led some to change their views, but others opposed the Bennett New Deal because they feared the degree of intervention in the economy it entailed. When Paul Martin Sr. entered the House of Commons in 1935, he found few like-minded souls in the Liberal caucus and just one in the Cabinet: “Norman Rogers, who was assigned the labour portfolio, was the only one who generally shared my reformist beliefs.”

To depict King as having become more conservative than Bennett, or the Conservatives in the 1935 election as having turned into a newly hatched party of the left, is to transpose the present back into the past. The differences between Liberals and Conservatives were not great: leftist critics such as Frank Underhill saw them as almost identical. Some Conservatives would not have been out of place in the Liberal party and vice versa. But even if modest, the differences were real. It was no aberration that Bennett, not King, created such Canadian icons as the Bank of Canada and the forerunner of the CBC, and that Bennett, not King, introduced major legislation, in the areas of marketing, companies’ law and labour relations, that sanctioned an expanded role for government. Public sector intervention restricts free markets, and many Liberals opposed significant government restrictions on market freedom. And with reason: classical liberalism was committed to economic as well as political freedom. Conservatism was less committed to them.

Liberals embraced reform when the political need seemed pressing or the financial cost acceptable. King’s support for provincial old age pension schemes in 1926 and his government’s introduction of family allowances in 1944 were timely responses to pressure. The unemployment insurance plan that King introduced in 1940, after provincial agreement to the necessary constitutional change had been obtained, resembled the one Bennett had introduced in 1935—the courts later held it to be ultra vires—not least in that the plan was expected to be self-financing.

Before the formation (in 1963) of a government in which men such as Lester Pearson, Walter Gordon and Paul Martin Sr. were dominant, federal Liberal support for reformist measures remained sporadic. Since 1960, however, that support has become more consistent although never total. Meanwhile the federal Conservatives moved toward a less interventionist position. The rise of the Reform Party represented the resurgence of time-worn liberal beliefs and policies. Reform, in this case, means a commitment to reforms aimed at reducing taxes, freeing markets and limiting the role of government. Many years ago these were objectives of the Liberal party. It is ironic that policies once thought of as liberal are now described as conservative or neoconservative (or, as European writers more accurately say, neoliberal), and that initiatives embraced by adherents of the Conservative party in 1934–35 are now regarded as the heritage of the political left. The irony seems lost on Boyko and is, I suspect, lost on many Canadians. It would not, I think, be lost on Bennett.