Mackenzie King and the Prairie West

David E. Smith is a professor of political Studies at the University of
Saskatchewan. He is the author of Building a Province: A History of
Saskatchewan in Documents, The Invisible Crown, and Republican Option in
Canada, Past and Present.

Those familiar with Western Canadian history in the first half of the
20th century will find nothing new in this book. All the usual suspects
are here. The Progressives, the Crow, the tariff, Aberhart, Bennett,
Dunning. Hudson (A.B. as well as the railway to the port of Churchill),
wheat, depression, and drought—each makes its obligatory appearance.
Alone, the story is not worth yet another telling. The justification for
the enterprise resides in the history they constitute as seen through
Mackenzie King’s eyes. While more books have been written about
King’s tenure than that of any other prime minister, none has as its
theme the relation of the leader to a region.

The outcome is a revelation for what it reveals. Not about the events
or problems that plagued King’s leadership—there is nothing new in
that—but in King’s own reassessment of the politics of the Prairie
West and his government’s policies toward them. According to
Wardhaugh, King’s imagined West was part pastoral idyll and part
social gospel, and he saw himself temperamentally a fellow spirit. The
travails of the 1920s and, even more, the disaster of the 1930s
disabused him of that illusion. Simple plainsmen turned out to be as
quarrelsome and demanding as people in the rest of Canada’s regions.
And their political leaders, even when loyal to the Liberal cause
(witness James G. Gardiner), proved just as difficult.

During this period, the West (against King’s own judgment) pushed the
federal government into accepting an interventionist role in the form of
prairie farm-income stabilization. It has taken nearly 50 years for the
Liberals to abandon that legacy. They have been able to do this because
no region, certainly not the Prairie West, has the electoral influence
it did when Mackenzie King first dreamt that he and it were destined to
have a special relation.