King without a Crown

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 at present than a decade ago). Still, why is it that Churchill is honoured in Canada but not King, who served longer than any other prime minister in the Commonwealth? Comparatively, King had far greater electoral success and a far greater impact on this country. Surely the answer lies in Churchill’s record of stirring rhetoric amid great peril; King is remembered, if at all, for his equivocating declaration “Not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary.” Indeed, when the poet F. R. Scott memorialized King in verse, it was not a flattering portrait: “Do nothing by halves / Which can be done by quarters.” That’s hardly the stuff of rousing legend.

If the average Canadian does know something about King, it’s likely that he was an oddity interested in table rapping and driven by compulsive behaviours. Yet this characterization of King as “Weird Willie” is at odds with his successes at the polls; his stewardship of the country through perilous social, economic, and geopolitical times; and his implementation — sometimes reluctantly — of transformative policies, from pressing for autonomy from Great Britain to launching the welfare state. These aspects of King’s record explain why he ranked as Canada’s top prime minister in surveys of historians conducted in 1997 and 2016. Clearly his legacy is a complicated one. Sorting through such complications is at the heart of The Enduring Riddle of Mackenzie King, a collection of essays ably edited by Patrice Dutil.

A political science professor at Toronto Metropolitan University (and the founder of this magazine), Dutil is familiar for his prodigious output. With this volume, Dutil has gathered an impressive group of scholars (though one wonders if even a lone woman might have been found to contribute) who cast a reflective eye on King. Together they probe his life, his policies, and his impact on Canada. The chapters range widely, as befits a volume about a figure with such a long career. Sensibly enough, Dutil opted not to include contributions exclusively focused on the well-trodden ground of foreign affairs and the Second World War, though these topics are touched upon throughout.

The collection opens with essays on King’s life and politics. Dutil begins with a biographical portrait rich with detail, which is followed by Allan Levine’s exploration of King’s famous diary. As the author of the most recent full biography of King, Levine is well positioned to comment on this unique document, which the journalist Robert Fulford once predicted would stand as the lasting Canadian literary work of the twentieth century. Begun in 1893, when King was a university student, and ending near his death in 1950, the diary clocks in at roughly 7.5 million words or 30,000 pages, with near-daily entries, many focused on public affairs. Much has been made of its private side, which reveals that King led a double life — at least that’s the view popularized by C. P. Stacey. Levine pushes back against this Jekyll and Hyde characterization, while also showing that King often did use the diary to confess deep, unguarded thoughts about people and politics, as well as his own soul.

Next are two chapters on King and the press. The first, by the former Kingston Whig-Standard court beat reporter Arthur Milnes, recounts King’s brief stint as a journalist in Toronto, while still in university. Somewhat skilled at political reporting, he even engaged in some of the muckraking then in vogue. In the second, the popular historian Mark Bourrie traces King the politician’s relationship with the press, showing that he was a skilled manipulator even as he feigned obsequiousness with the era’s newspaper barons. Rounding out the section, Dutil looks at King as a political animal, from his electoral record (and that of the party he led from 1919 to 1948) to his own brand of Liberalism and his management of government. While King famously governed through much of the Great Depression and the Second World War, his time as prime minister in the 1920s was no picnic, considering nativist populist movements and the emergence of new parties. As for the 1930s, King reflected in his diary, “Fascism vs. Communism, Capital vs. Labour — class warfare in all the European countries, & who will say not also in America. The world is in a terrible state.” That he proved deft at guiding the Liberals and Liberalism through these choppy seas is remarkable.

Essays in the next section deal with what are far and away the most controversial elements of King’s legacy and the issues that have laid low his public reputation: his handling of racial and ethnic minorities. A historian with the Department of National Defence, John MacFarlane opens with King’s dealings with French Canada, where he scored best in the polls of historians who touted his pursuit of national unity. Mindful of unity — and Liberal electoral fortunes — King paid deference to Québécois views, particularly on foreign affairs. (It seems no coincidence that his Quebec lieutenants Raoul Dandurand, Ernest Lapointe, and Louis St‑Laurent also left indelible impacts on foreign policy.) However, King’s tolerance had limits when it came to Asians and Jews, the subject of chapters by Kirk Niergarth and Pierre Anctil respectively. A historian at Mount Royal University, Niergarth traces King’s anti-Asian attitudes and policies throughout his career, as indeed there is a through line here from his activities in the Department of Labour following the 1907 Vancouver race riot to the internment of Japanese Canadians in 1942. 

Similarly, Anctil, a University of Ottawa emeritus professor, looks at King’s view of Jewish people, which bore the prejudices one might expect from someone of that era (though the world of 2026 seems little better). Societal intolerance led to King’s fateful decisions to spurn refugees searching for sanctuary from Nazism. The late historian J. R. Miller recounts King’s relatively more enlightened dealings with First Nations. What’s clear from these chapters is that King held racist views and enacted racist policies even as he himself never campaigned as a racist nor sought to stir up racial resentments, a stark contrast with other politicians of his age, not only in Europe or the American South but across Canada. “King was a racist if necessary,” Dutil quips in his introduction, “but not necessarily a racist.” Niergarth offers a more stinging judgment: “If Canada underwent a ‘rights revolution’ in the postwar era, it was largely in spite of King, not because of him.” Perhaps the most interesting contribution in this section comes from John English, of the University of Waterloo. He charts King’s long relationship with German Canadians, starting in his youth in Berlin, Ontario (as Kitchener was then known), home to a large community of German immigrants. English points out how what King saw as his “greater understanding of Germans and Germany” played a role in his encounter with Adolf Hitler in the Reich Chancellery in 1937.

Just two years after King’s infamous Berlin meeting, Canada was again at war. This conflict is not the focus of any single chapter, though it is the hinge around which several essays turn. Colin Campbell of Western University examines King’s impact on government finance and his dealings with various finance ministers, most notably J. L. Ilsley, who controlled the purse strings and whose imposition of a general income tax in 1942 paved the way for the transition from warfare state to welfare state. The speed of that transition and of other reforms wrought by King is a point of debate between Raymond B. Blake of the University of Regina, who presents King as a radical, and Stephen Azzi and Norman Hillmer, both of Carleton University, who stress his caution and belief in incremental progress. Readers may decide for themselves which King they see.

In a look at King’s handling of Canada-U.S. relations, Robert Bothwell sees a leader who dealt carefully with Washington. This view contrasts with many among King’s critics, who often accused him of selling out. W. L. Morton, for one, wrote that he left Canada “so irradiated by the American presence that it sickens and threatens to dissolve in cancerous slime.” Bothwell, doyen of historians of Canadian foreign policy, offers a more balanced judgment, to say the least. So does David MacKenzie of Toronto Metropolitan University, who considers the growth of international society from the 1920s onwards, as well as King’s cautious dealings with the panoply of organizations that emerged in the era, including the Pan American Union, the League of Nations, the International Labour Organization, the Commonwealth, and the United Nations. This section also includes two chapters that break much new ground: the drama scholar Anton Wagner’s analysis of the prime minister’s involvement in cultural programming and the urban planning professor David L. A. Gordon’s showcase of King’s interest in architecture.

Two final essays speak to the enduring legacy of Canada’s longest-serving prime minister. Trent University’s Christopher Dummitt charts the ups and downs of King’s posthumous reputation. Much as Sir John A. Macdonald’s place in the public mind has seen a recent overhaul, King’s record and its significance have shifted to reflect the issues that are foremost in the minds of Canada’s bien pensants, be it relations with the United States, national unity, or racial discrimination. Rounding out the volume, the prolific J. L. Granatstein reflects on his own relationship with King, the figure at the centre of so much of his scholarship.

What is one to make of the collection as a whole? Simply put, it offers a welcome and much needed overview of a Canadian of true significance. What is wanted now is a new thorough biography that befits King’s outsize impact. Perhaps a statue or two would follow.