In June 2024, a statue of Sir Winston Churchill was unveiled in Calgary, joining other monuments to the former British prime minister in Halifax, Toronto, and Edmonton. In Quebec City, meanwhile, a bust of Churchill squares off against Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the American president who met his counterpart for two wartime conferences held at the Château Frontenac and the Citadelle. Not part of the memorial is William Lyon Mackenzie King. Given the honours paid to two foreign leaders and the fact that Canada hosted the Allied meetings in 1943 and 1944, the absence of the Canadian prime minister strikes one as odd. Then again, King himself wanted no part in the management of grand strategy. Rather, he showed up for photo ops. His role, he later confessed, was “similar to that of the General Manager of the Château Frontenac.”
Beyond Parliament Hill, statues of Canadian prime ministers are few and far between (the recent spate of iconoclasm has left considerably fewer...
Asa McKercher is the Steven K. Hudson Research Chair in Canada-US Relations at the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government at St. Francis Xavier University, in New Brunswick.
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