W.A.C.: Bennett and the Rise of British Columbia

William T. Perks was Professor of Urbanism and Planning, Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary.

W.A.C. “Cec” Bennett was in politics all of his life. Premier for twenty years (1952-72), he was never in the mainstream of Canadian political affairs of the period (he favoured boycotting first ministers’ conferences). But he was rightfully the giant of British Columbia politics: road builder, resources dealer, railway man, dam builder, and interventionist capitalist who took over electric companies and a ferry line and damned the socialists.

A teetotalling Presbyterian and believer in predestination, Bennett was seldom magnanimous, frequently self-righteous, and never wrong. In defeat, he would say that God sometimes answered “No” to his prayers. In victory, he centered power in himself and gave his enduring loyalties to incompetent associates.

Because Bennett was so secretive about his person and rule, and so manifestly paranoid about his public adversaries, it is immensely difficult to write in fully explanatory terms about him. David Mitchell acknowledges this. Nonetheless, he has performed the most thorough possible research on his subject, including long hours of taped interviews with Bennett. In the outcome, Mitchell has written one of the more instructive and engaging political biographies in the Canadian repertoire. Mitchell relates everything he can about Bennett’s boyhood, his familial relationships, his beginnings in the hardware business and rise to successful merchant, first in northern Alberta, then in Kelowna. Bennett was clearly a genius — but a genius of lamentable intellectual accomplishments and a very restricted world view. Unread in political or social history though he was, Bennett could read people, and he practised the intuitive art of politics like no one in British Columbia before him, or after him. The formula in politics was his formula for business: boosterism and shrewd risk taking. “He exuded confidence and wore a perpetual smile on his face.” Bennett governed himself and others according to thoroughly conservative thought and habits. As for moral and life precepts, Mitchell relates that no great books or biographies figured in Bennett’s make-up, only such pioneer life manuals as Heroes of the Faith.

In the British Columbia 1952 elections, the people were fed up with the “bickering and cynical brand of politics” of the coalition Liberal-Conservative government. Bennett had bolted the Conservative Party. He spearheaded the Social Credit League’s assault on coalition and socialists alike, bringing to electoral victory (narrowly) a collection of the unknown and the inexperienced. Then he proceeded to win the British Columbia Socred leadership convention against the outsider efforts of Alberta organizers and aspirants who fancied themselves the true Socred apostles. Bennett’s was “the first government even to be sworn in on Ovaltine.” In the telling of this rise to power, and in his account of how Bennett finessed the Lieutenant Governor into acknowledging his right to govern, Mitchell has rendered (in Chapters 4 and 5) a highly entertaining, informative political portraiture.

Chapters 10 and 11 are equally evocative; the themes are “power means control over other people’s lives” and “the undisputed boss.” In the end, Bennett has abandoned the laissez-faire economic populist principles of his early life; no one may be allowed to grow in stature alongside him; the socialist hordes have been stalled, but now the environment is damned. He tells Herb Capossi, “A government is not as strong as its weakest link, it’s only as strong as its most brilliant mind.” Brilliance inspires Bennett to delight in Trudeau’s betrayal by Bourassa at the Victoria Constitutional Conference. He denies bargaining rights to government employees and bunkers himself, with all power, in the Premier’s suite. As Mitchell states it, “[Bennett’s] brand of state capitalism in British Columbia may have actually encouraged a greater public reliance on government than he had once approved....”

After the defeat of his government in 1972, Bennett’s “invisible hand” guided his son, Bill, to the leadership and, subsequently, to the Socreds’ return to power in 1975. Upon his death in 1979, the “ordinary people” he had so long championed flocked to honour W.A.C. Bennett at simultaneous ceremonies in Victoria, Vancouver, and Kelowna. His legacy to the province was a blend of reactionary modernism and the style of one-man rule.

Mitchell’s fine biography makes this clear. What remains to be gauged is Bennett’s impact on the Canada he seldom visited and never counted.