CANADA: Mackenzie King Wins

As everybody had expected, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s Liberal Party won last week’s Dominion election hands down. But nobody had expected such a rout as Mackenzie King’s enemies suffered. Conservative Leader Robert J. Manion lost his seat, was expected soon to lose his leadership. In Ontario, where blustery Premier Mitchell Hepburn had precipitated the election by knifing his leader in the back (TIME, Feb. 5), the Liberals won 55 seats against 25 for the Conservatives, and Mitch was so discredited that his retirement seemed also in order. Quebec returned Minister of Justice Ernest Lapointe in triumph, defeated all the lieutenants of disgruntled ex-Premier Maurice Duplessis who backed Conservative candidates.

In the new House of Commons Liberals will have 176 out of 245 seats. Even the Senate, which has a 51-45 Conservative majority, will soon become Liberal, since Prime Minister Mackenzie King is assured of five more years in power and members are appointed for life. The Senate has been Conservative since the days of the first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, who served for 20 years (1867-74, 1878-91).

If 65-year-old Mackenzie King serves out his term, he will have been Prime Minister for 19 years, not quite so long as Sir John Macdonald but five years longer than the late great Liberal leader, Sir Wilfred Laurier, whose protege he was.

Sir Wilfred Laurier began to watch William Lyon Mackenzie King as early as 1900, when he learned that the young man had entered the civil service (as Deputy Minister of Labor) in preparation for a public career. Up to that time Mackenzie King had been headed for social service. After graduating from the University of Toronto and Harvard he had studied social conditions in Europe, done social work under Jane Addams at Chicago’s Hull House. But his grandfather had led an abortive rebellion against the British in upper Canada, and Sir Wilfred thought the grandson had the stuff of a leader in him. He made him Minister of Labor in 1909. From 1911, when the Conservatives came in, until Sir Wilfred’s death in 1919, Mackenzie King was his faithful lieutenant. Two years later the Liberals were back in the saddle, and Liberal Leader Mackenzie King became Prime Minister. Since then he has been out once, in since 1935.

Poetry-loving Bachelor Mackenzie King spends so much time at his country house, “Kingsmere,” that Mitch Hepburn dubbed him “The Hermit of Kingsmere.” In win—ter he lives at “Laurier House” in Ottawa, which Sir Wilfred left to the Liberal Party. A Gladstonian Liberal, the red-faced Prime Minister once investigated industrial relations for the Rockefeller Institute, worked out a plan of employer-employe representation that was put into practice by Colorado Fuel & Iron Co., Bethlehem Steel Co. and others. He is just the sort of “safe” Liberal that Canadians could trust to see them through the war without grabbing too much power, and last week he was at work on Canada’s first billion-dollar budget to pay for it.