The Railway King of Canada: Sir William Mackenzie, 1849-1923

David E. Smith is a political science professor at the University of
Saskatchewan and author of Jimmy Gardiner: Relentless Liberal.

This is a biography that is hard at the edges but rather soft at the
centre. Because Mackenzie “left posterity almost nothing” in the way
of personal papers, his biographer has had to construct the Railway
King’s character through inference and by deduction. The subsidiary
(but strong) players—Laurier and Borden, Beck and Whitney— thus
occasionally upstage the principal of the piece. The problem confronting
Fleming is illustrated in this comment on the launching of the Canadian
Northern Railway (CNoR): “There are few clues to explain why Mackenzie
embarked upon one of the greatest acts of daring and grandeur in
Canadian history.”

Undaunted, Fleming has compensated for the lack of a personal record by
supplying a rounded portrait of Mackenzie’s multiple business
ventures, all associated in one form or another with traction. Thus, the
reader learns a lot about the street railways of Toronto and Winnipeg,
an unsuccessful bid to acquire the tram lines of Birmingham (England),
the acquisition of Brazilian Traction, and the formation of the Electric
Development Company of Ontario (this last enterprise an eventual victim
of Adam Beck’s Ontario Hydro).

But it is the agglomeration of the CNoR out of different parts and
diffuse dealings that commands the greatest attention, if only because
its genesis stands in contrast to the purposeful building of the linear
CPR. The CNoR achievement, and its eventual collapse under debt and in
the face of dislocation caused by World War I, gives substance to an
otherwise evanescent study in personality. In placing the emphasis where
he does, Fleming makes this book as much an exploration in business and
social history as it is a biography.