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...
Michiel Horn is professor emeritus of history at York University. He translated David Koker’s At the Edge of the Abyss: A Concentration Camp Diary, 1943–1944 (Northwestern University Press, 2012); he is also the author of Becoming Canadian: Memoirs of an Invisible Immigrant (University of Toronto Press, 1997).
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