Politics and Government
The national Liberal Party, elected in 1935, was approaching the
end of its first mandate in 1939. Cautious, solid, a master of political
timing, Prime Minister Mackenzie King had skilfully led Canadians
into a war he had always known they would have to fight. He had
by then almost fifteen years experience as the country's leader.
King's first wartime political challenge came almost immediately,
from Quebec. Premier Maurice Duplessis called a Quebec election
in September 1939. His Union nationale party claimed that Ottawa's
war policies would take power away from Quebec and turn it into
just another English province. King's ministers from Quebec declared
that they would resign if Duplessis won, leaving the province to
face a federal government dominated by English ministers who would
not have francophone Canada's interests at heart. This ploy worked:
Duplessis was defeated.
Then, soon thereafter, another challenge. Ontario was governed
by Mitchell Hepburn, a Liberal like King but a bitter adversary
of the Prime Minister. A resolution by Hepburn's legislature condemned
the national war effort as too little and too late. King's response
was to call a snap election in March 1940, and he was returned with
an increased majority in the federal House of Commons. King's re-election
freed the Liberals from having to go to the voters through the darkest
days of the war.
By 1943, Hepburn and the Liberals had lost power in Ontario. The
Conservatives took power and the Liberals had fallen to third place. The
Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) had formed the official
opposition there. They also had won several federal by-elections
and were leading both the Liberals and Conservatives in national
opinion polls. Confronted by this turn to the left, the wily King
grabbed some of the CCF's social policies designed to ensure a better
and more secure life for the people. ( see Post-War Planning ). In
the new session of Parliament which began in January 1944, the Liberals
brought in family allowances, a massive housing programme and gave
employees the right to join unions. When the next federal election
was held in June 1945, between the end of the war in Europe and
the end of the Pacific war, the Liberals won again.
The government grew in size and complexity. In March 1940, the
Clerk of the Privy Council took on the additional task of Secretary
to the Cabinet. In that role, he quickly became the country's chief
paper-keeper and a key advisor to the Prime Minister. Mackenzie
King's small wartime team, the Cabinet War Committee, replaced the
full Cabinet as Canada's most important decision-making body.
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