Quick now: Who do you think is the most written about former prime minister of Canada? You might think it is Sir John A. Macdonald, given all the bad publicity he has received over the past decade. Perhaps Pierre Elliott Trudeau? In fact, they have hardly been examined compared with William Lyon Mackenzie King, who was prime minister for most of the 1920s and then from 1935 to 1948. His role in governing the country and in guiding its wartime administration and then the birth of the welfare state has won him far more scrutiny than any other.
Yet we hardly know him. I repeatedly came to this conclusion when reading Anton Wagner’s two-volume study of King as spiritualist. Almost fifty years ago, the historian C. P. Stacey, who had long toiled at writing excellent but obscure books on a variety of military and foreign policy subjects, published A Very Double Life: The Private World of Mackenzie King. It was a mild, very Canadian sort of succès de...
Patrice Dutil is a professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto Metropolitan University. He founded the Literary Review of Canada in 1991 and wrote Sir John A. Macdonald & the Apocalyptic Year 1885.
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