TA Crerar: A Political Life

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University, the
author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable Kingdom,
and the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste. Marie.

Thomas Crerar’s moment of greatest prominence had to be the election
of 1921. He led Canada’s first successful third party, the
Progressives, which won 64 seats. Yet Crerar declined the opportunity
for his party to become official opposition. What were his reasons?

In None Is Too Many (1983), Irving Abella and Harold Troper dismissed
Crerar as “well past his prime as a power on the Liberal party
benches” even before World War II. At that time a member of Mackenzie
King’s cabinet, he was legally responsible for immigration. In
reality, say Abella and Troper, Crerar “knew little of the working of
the Immigration Branch and cared even less.” Crerar’s inaction
allowed the anti-Semitic Frederick Blair, a civil servant, to determine
policy. Blair was determined to exclude all Jews, many of whom would
have stimulated the Canadian economy had Blair allowed them to escape
the Holocaust. Yet Crerar remained a cabinet minister until 1945 and a
senator until 1966. Did he do anything constructive in that time?

Crerar was a resident of Manitoba since the age of 5, a voice for
prairie agricultural interests, an MP for a Manitoba constituency, and a
senator from Manitoba. Yet he deposited his papers at Queen’s
University archives. Why?

In this book, J.E. Rea offers answers to two of these questions. He
rejects as simplistic the suggestion that the 1921 Progressives were too
inexperienced to form the official opposition. Rather, claims Rea,
Crerar thought he might have greater influence on the Liberal government
if it was not his duty to oppose. In Rea’s view, Abella and Troper
were unfair to Crerar. Crerar personally favored the admission of Jewish
refugees on compassionate grounds. On four separate occasions, he tried
(but failed) to bring his cabinet colleagues around; opposition from
Quebec on this issue was too strong. Rea depicts Crerar as a vital
member of the cabinet and a vigorous proponent of Western Canadian
interests. But why his papers sit in Kingston remains unclear.