Ottawa in 1911 exuded the feel of the rough lumber town that it still very much was. Before and around Parliament Hill were more wooden structures than brick or stone, linked by a good many dirt roads that were choked with dust in the summer and sodden mud every spring. Two blocks from the Hill was the wicked ByWard Market where for sale or rent was every temptation the lonely or lecherous could conjure. Log booms plied the river below the towering cliffs. The smell of pulp mills fouled the air and filled the nostrils of rookie members of Parliament who arrived in the capital with their new suits and callow dreams. Most found that in Ottawa, politics was a business like any other and that, like in any other, only the smart and strong survived. But sometimes even brains and brawn were not enough.

When Bennett arrived that fall to take his place as the Conservative member of Parliament from West Calgary, the country had celebrated but forty-four Dominion days. Laurier was the Opposition leader and Macdonald had been dead only twenty years. Bennett took his seat in the old House of Commons, which had only a few sessions left before a careless smoker would accidentally burn all but the library to the ground.

Like all rookie MPs, Bennett initially had trouble with the pace and procedures of the Hill. But he quickly adjusted. A popular political axiom claims that in your first year as a new member of Parliament you marvel how you got there; in the second you begin to get some work done; and in the third you look around and wonder how all the others ever got there. Bennett seemed to skip the first steps, for he immediately showed not only the confidence of a veteran but also the emotional intelligence to remain quiet while adjusting to his new environment. He had learned to watch others and pick his battles.

An MP’s maiden address to the House is always nerve-racking and carefully scrutinized. It is an indicator as to whether a new member will be simply a puff of smoke to be ignored for the wisp of time he will take to fade or perhaps a force with which to be reckoned. Bennett’s maiden speech was rendered even more stressful for him as he had been afforded the honour of speaking to the government’s Speech from the Throne. Bennett wrote to Max Aitken expressing pride in having been chosen and admitted to being quite nervous.1 He spent a great deal of time writing his remarks and practising his delivery.

Bennett stood before the House on November 20, 1911, and spoke with the booming voice upon which he had partly built his reputation. The ideas that he expressed were fascinating for they situated him as a red Tory; that is, on the left of the Conservative Party, a supporter of Borden’s Halifax platform and far from the mainstream thought that dominated the Canadian civil society of the day. His rebellious ideas and core, guiding principles were important, for not only were they true to the conventions upon which Bennett was constructing his nascent public career but they also foreshadowed those upon which he would rely in steering the country when, nineteen years later, he placed his hands on the ship of state’s tiller. Bennett’s was a lonely voice among Conservatives in challenging many party members, and through them all Canadians, to consider government power as a force for good and a judicious use of that power as an essential element in the forging of a progressive society.

The speech also demonstrated that Bennett understood the challenges and pitfalls not only of the moment but of issues that are with us still. For instance, accurately predicting the dilemma faced by twenty-first-century western leaders contemplating increased trade with China, he observed, “In my judgement, in this complex civilization of ours, the greatest struggle of the future will be between human rights and property interests; and it is the duty and the function of government to provide that there shall be no undue regard for the latter that limits or lessens the other.”²

Given that the election that had brought him to Ottawa had focused on the issue of a new trade arrangement with the United States, it was perhaps to be expected that Bennett would devote a good deal of time to trade and tariffs. Again, the point he made was prescient, for it addressed issues with which he would deal as prime minister and with which the country still wrestles. Bennett said, “. . . what is the great weapon with which nations must fight the battles of commerce? . . . and these battles will be just as fierce [as wars] and even though there is no bloodshed, just as deadly in some respects, as the battles of the past. The only weapon we have is the weapon of the tariff.”3 He implored the House to turn from the folly of reduced or eliminated tariffs with the United States and see a bright and prosperous future in preferential trade arrangements with Britain and the Dominions of the Empire. He advocated the creation of a government tariff commission to oversee and regulate trade in a rational way, or, as he called it, scientifically.

Finally, with a nod to problems that awaited the country in 1929 and again in 2009, he returned to his belief in positive government intervention in the marketplace. He argued that Canada needed to modernize its financial and securities regulations. Perhaps, he said, fluctuations in the market could be reduced, investors could be protected from fraudulent practices, and companies could be protected from themselves through the establishment of an investment protection agency.⁴ By the end of his speech, anyone who believed that the rich corporate lawyer would be a staunch advocate of laissez-faire and a mouthpiece for big business should have been disabused.

He took his seat to applause from the Conservative benches but there was no follow-up. His words were quickly lost in the sparring between Borden and Laurier. He received scant mention in newspapers the next day. It was a stark welcome to the life of a backbencher, where the work is often tedious and the spotlight’s glare is nearly always absent or, at best, fleeting.

Used to a workaholic pace, Bennett dove into his duties as an MP. Letters were answered quickly and with attention to the details of each correspondent’s inquiry. He read reports and dutifully did his time in the House. He found his ability to speak without notes and to pivot like a skilled linebacker in debate an advantage that few other rookies seemed to enjoy. However, he sometimes still fell into the old habit of losing himself in wordy diatribes that were impressive as oratorical displays but failed to persuade. He sometimes talked himself out on a limb. One afternoon in the House, for instance, after lambasting the Liberals with torrents of words, he paused and uttered, “And now I will tell you the truth.”5 The response from across the aisle was as raucous and merciless as one might expect.

He knew he needed to improve and worked hard to do so. A friend from Calgary named George Robinson helped by coaching Bennett. He taught him to reduce his volume and speed and the number of points made in a single speech. He even used a stopwatch to try to lasso his verbose friend. Robinson, a real estate and insurance broker, was one of the few friends who went to great lengths to shake Bennett from his shell of self-control. For instance, he hated bowler hats but always wore one to Bennett’s office just to tease his friend about the overly formal way in which R.B. dressed. Bennett was always amused but maintained parsimonious priggishness.

Bennett involved himself in a number of political and policy issues. His support for activist, interventionist economic policies was seen in his enthusiastic endorsement of the government’s attempts to reform the two-decades-old Bank Act. The reforms were designed to, among other things but of special interest to Bennett, allow farmers easier access to credit. He spoke of the need for the amendments and criticized the Liberal-dominated Senate for blocking them. He went as far as arguing that its tactics proved that the upper house needed to be significantly reformed or perhaps even abolished.

His speeches advocating Bank Act changes again demonstrated his belief that the immoderate power of business interests should stop at the foot of Parliament Hill. The country’s elected representatives should base their decisions not only on what was best for big business but also for the country as a whole. Decrying what he saw as the corporate, financial, and business elite having too much power in the halls of Parliament was a theme to which he returned many times. Two years later, in 1913, for instance, he said in the House, “The vital question is whether or not a few capitalists shall control the action of this Parliament. . . . the Bank Act of 1913 is the Bank Act of twenty years ago without any change, without any single step forward or one motion towards progress and reform . . . and I say [this] is not in accordance with the spirit of our institutions.”⁶

Later in the same speech Bennett detailed his support for the progressive and populist idea that not only should the government have more regulatory power over banks and banking, but also that monetary policy should be the purview of the government and not that of Canada’s chartered banks. Years later, this belief would lead to his creation of the Bank of Canada. Consider these words, spoken twenty years before he designed that now-respected and indispensable institution and nearly one hundred years before banks and financial investment houses would be primarily responsible for the devastating economic crash of 2008:

Shall or shall not Parliament impose a restriction on the rate of interest the banks may charge? . . . I think there should be a restriction. . . . Parliament has a right to hold a bank to the strictest account, and in the exercise of those powers this Parliament must stipulate that they shall be exercised for the public interest and not for the benefit purely of private individuals.7

PRINCIPLES AND COURAGE

Bennett knew that if he were to ever fulfill his dream to become prime minister, his first step must be to get himself appointed to cabinet. Upon arriving in Ottawa he surveyed the competition and saw as his main rival a man four years younger than himself but already with three years’ experience as the member of Parliament for Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. Arthur Meighen was a tall, fit, handsome man with thin lips and cold eyes. He had been born in Ontario but like Bennett had been drawn to the West. Also like Bennett, Meighen was a lawyer, had been successful in business, possessed a keen mind, and was an exceptionally talented speaker. Meighen’s memory was such that as a parlour trick he would accurately recite long poems and Shakespearean sonnets. Those who tested him found hardly ever a word misspoken. In 1913, Meighen was appointed Solicitor General.

Bennett already felt that he was being left behind. Rather than surrendering, however, he took a step that both led to his being noticed and risked his needing to leave the race altogether. It began with a speech that articulated his core political beliefs and demonstrated his political courage.

The occasion was precipitated by the transcontinental Canadian Northern Railway project that had been initiated by the Laurier government. The skilled financier William Mackenzie and adroit lobbyist Donald Mann had been joined by the legally masterful, and magnificently named, Zebulon Lash. They had put together the money and politicians that would see a new line built from ocean to ocean. But after nearly seven years, the complex international and government-backed conglomerate had constructed less than one hundred miles of track in rural Manitoba running from nowhere to nowhere. In 1911, the CNR had asked the government for $30 million in loan guarantees. The next year it asked for another $15 million and a year after that for yet another $44 million. Despite a near absence of assets, the watering of shares to laughable levels, and a colossal inability to match achievement to promise, first the Laurier and then the Borden government continued to grant land, subsidies, and loan guarantees to the Northern Railway.

In the spring of 1914, company officials were back in the prime minister’s office with caps in hand. Borden had little faith in Mackenzie and Mann, but had become convinced that to allow the CNR to fail would negatively affect the economy and hurt the federal and many provincial governments that would be left to pay the interest on guaranteed bonds. Consequently, a complex arrangement was designed to consolidate the company’s lines into one and streamline its financial and corporate structure, thereby rendering it more stable. It proposed the creation of more stringent regulations and the federal government’s ownership of 40 per cent of company stock.

When the complicated deal was explained to the Conservative caucus, it was accepted with few questions, but then Bennett stood and expressed outrage that Mackenzie and Mann were being handed a lifeline. Borden later met privately with Bennett and found him quite agitated. He believed that Bennett was upset about the deal mostly because his expertise had not been called up to create it, and that he was jealous of the role Meighen was playing in the issue.8 Borden confided in his diary that, with respect to the railways issue, he believed Bennett’s mind was becoming affected.⁹

On May 13, Prime Minister Borden moved the long and complicated railway motion in the House. Meighen made a detailed speech seconding and supporting it. Perfunctory comments followed, and it appeared that the bill was headed for easy passage. The next day, however, William Nickle, Conservative member for Kingston, stood and made a short speech opposing the extension of yet more loan guarantees for the CNR and noted that Bennett would soon rise to express his objection. Everyone knew of Bennett’s speaking ability, ties to big business and the CPR, and news had leaked about his firm opposition to the bill. Everyone was waiting for the main show. The galleries filled over the lunch break. Many were left waiting in line. He did not disappoint.

Bennett stood to speak in the early afternoon and was still on his feet when the House rose for dinner at six. He carried on at eight and did not wrap up until he had spent nearly four-and-a-half hours dissecting the intricacies of the Northern Railway operations. Bennett’s experience with the CPR, and with the corporate mergers undertaken by him and Aitken, allowed him to understand and deconstruct the complex web that Mackenzie and Mann had woven. His courtroom experience and dexterity with words allowed him to lay it out in a way that all could understand. He explained how the conglomerate had been set up so that its properties and other assets were hidden in a tangle of separate corporate names, with each protecting their true owners, while each issued ridiculously overvalued stock based on little or nothing at all. He explained that each of the separate corporate entities held debt in such a way that each asset was used as collateral for a number of different loans. The CNR was exposed as not really a railway company but a financing scam.

With the tawdry corporate structure and manoeuvrings laid bare, Bennett then moved on to condemn members of the House, including those of his own party, and even his own leader, for failing to peek behind the elaborate but obvious facade. He criticized those in the House who were at that moment planning to cast a vote to perpetuate the swindle and spoke of the place at which private misdeed meets public irresponsibility. He accused both parties of supporting the CNR for no other reason than to receive campaign donations. He thundered that the history of the debauched relationship between the syndicate and two governments was

. . . nothing but a long trail of parliamentary corruption, of lobbying, of degradation of parliamentary institutions, of the lowering of the morale of public life and the degrading of those standards by which public life should be truly measured. . . . Just a few days before a General Election, one party proposes and the other acquiesces. They are bound to ask a few questions in order that the contributions to party funds may be large enough. Let us look the business square in the face . . . we must decide whether we will continue to add to the predatory wealth of promoters or whether we shall strike a blow for the people of the country.10

Then, shutting down accusations of hypocrisy before they could be launched, he said,

Last year and the year before we were induced to grant extensive aid . . . to this Canadian Northern system. I voted for it on a statement of facts that, I am bound to say, I did believe. . . . I failed in my duty as a member of this House last year . . . but I am not going to fail again.¹¹

As Bennett’s speech continued and the case against the Canadian Northern and the men and governments that had supported it became increasingly damning, there were more and more interruptions. Interestingly, the Liberals seemed to recognize Napoleon’s dictum about not attacking while an enemy is in the midst of destroying himself. They stayed relatively quiet, enjoying the angry shouts from the government benches. Finally, even Meighen could stay silent no longer. As Solicitor General and as the seconder of the motion that had set Bennett off in the first place, it was obvious to him and to all listening that much of the mud being flung at Mackenzie and Mann was splattering on him.

At first, Bennett ignored the jibes coming from his colleagues. But finally, with the sun long since set and his patience long worn thin, he controlled his mercurial temper but cut into his younger rival. He glared at Meighen and said, “I am glad to see that the Solicitor-General has become the advocate of these two men. Before I finish he will regret that he has become their apologist.”¹² Minutes later Bennett was sarcastically dismissive of Meighen in a response to another of his taunts: “I will not be diverted from my argument by the impertinent interruptions of this young man.”¹³ Bennett then called Meighen “the gramophone of Mackenzie and Mann,” thus handing the Liberals and the press a soundbite they would ruthlessly exploit.¹⁴

He came to the summation of his remarks with a recommendation that the bill be defeated, not another cent be forwarded to or guaranteed for the syndicate, and that a Royal Commission be established to investigate the entire matter. He concluded with a final plea to parliamentarians to act for the good of the country and not merely as pawns in the hands of a group of shady financiers in particular and big business in general.

When finally it was over, Bennett took his seat to silence. When the motion was eventually called, the Canadian Northern Railway Aid Bill passed, with only he and Nickle voting nay. Mackenzie and Mann got their loans and the Northern Railway continued to raise and spend money without laying much track or significantly advancing the progress of the Canadian West.

The speech was noticed and commented upon favourably in newspapers across the country. In his diary, Mackenzie King wrote, “It was fearless, full of information and convincing, a terrific indictment of the Co., [Northern Railway] a powerful plea to the Gov’t. — a statesman’s speech.”15

Less than a year later, as Bennett had predicted, Mackenzie and Mann reappeared at the prime minister’s door and again Borden approved the spending of even more taxpayer cash. Mackenzie and Mann made out like the bandits they were. Within two years, however, the demands of the war plus the stress on the Canadian railway infrastructure were such that the government could no longer avoid taking action. The Royal Commission that Bennett had advocated was finally appointed to investigate the corporate inefficiencies and corruption that had wasted so much time, robbed Canada of so much potential, and squandered so much public money. The tangled financial web that Mackenzie and Mann had constructed, and that Bennett had exposed, was a significant part of the investigation. The 1917 Report of the Royal Commission to Inquire into Railways and Transportation in Canada, King’s parties vindicated all that Bennett had said about both the syndicate and its ties to two governments and both political parties. It demonstrated that the Canadian Northern Railway was, in fact, bankrupt. It was first placed in receivership and then nationalized. The Canadian National Railway thus became a Crown corporation.

Bennett’s role in the creation of the new CNR again helped to propel his career through the demonstration of his intelligence, disdain for the power of money in Parliament and politics, and his belief in the necessity of the state to stand against business interests when those interests stood in contrast to those of the country. The episode was yet another indication of the innate political courage that allowed Bennett to put his career on the line in a determination to do what was right rather than what was simply safe or expedient. As he stated in his speech on that long day in May, “Let us begin right . . . and not be deterred from our duty because the action which that duty lays upon us seems temporarily unpopular.”16

Another issue that demonstrated Bennett’s political principles and courage while also advancing his career involved the plight of western farmers. His interest in the agricultural industry was somewhat natural as an Alberta MP. It was important in his political and personal education as well, for a good deal of the suffering that the 1930s Depression would bring to all Canadians would be visited most destructively upon farmers. In his 1911 maiden speech to the House, he had spoken of the many challenges facing those who worked the land, and called for the government to construct and regulate grain elevators that would assist in the storage and marketing of wheat.

The summer of 1913 brought a drought to much of the prairies. Bennett had spoken in caucus and written letters to the prime minister arguing the need for the federal government to assist those who, due to no fault of their own, were suffering hardship. Bennett requested that the government provide low-interest loans and, in the spring, arrange to send western farmers a supply of cheap and plentiful seed grain to allow crops to be planted.

In February 1914, Bennett said in the House, “It is even true that the children of the farmers in some instances have been suffering from the pangs of hunger, almost starvation, and under these circumstances the Government relief is absolutely needed. . . . Even if the Government should expend several millions more than was anticipated at first, it seems to me that this duty devolves upon them fairly.”¹⁷

Bennett’s advocacy of using the power of the government as a tool to improve the lot of Canadians was consistent with the Social Gospel sentiment that was at that time sweeping parts of Canada and was especially powerful in the West. The Social Gospel came from reformers who sought to bring a Christian sensibility to the myriad ills that for decades the industrial revolution had been visiting upon the urban poor. Its goals and means naturally applied to rural folks as well. Leaders such as Ontario’s John J. Kelso and Manitoba’s J.S. Woodsworth promoted the notion that the work of Jesus should be done to help individuals through addressing broad social problems. You help individuals, it was argued, by improving society as a whole. Bennett never openly espoused the Social Gospel or imposed his Christian beliefs on others. But a good deal of what Bennett did through the policies he supported echoed both the ideas of that movement and the personal religious values that he had learned at his mother’s side in the polished oak pews of the small Hopewell Cape church.

As the drought ended and conditions slowly improved, the need for immediate aid for farmers waned. The issue was also overwhelmed as the drumbeats of war filled the summer of 1914. But as attention shifted, Bennett’s dedication to the needs of farmers, and their respect for him, was not forgotten.

Remembered as well, during interminable sessions and long nights far from home, was the excitement of the business world that Bennett had left for the tedium of life as a backbencher. It was not like today when members of Parliament use free or radically reduced airfare to fly home nearly every weekend. Bennett was stuck in Ottawa throughout the length of the parliamentary session. That the city offered few distractions or entertainments mattered little to a young man of Bennett’s fastidious habits and prim attitudes, but he missed the challenge of difficult work and suffered the malady of many rookie backbenchers who find themselves at the periphery of power. He wrote to Aitken, “I am sick of it here. There is little or nothing to do and what there is to do is that of a party hack or departmental clerk or messenger. I will probably leave here. There must be more doing that counts than is at present apparent.”18

Aitken offered a respite from Bennett’s funk. In 1903, Aitken’s business interests and contacts had taken him to London where he wiggled his way into the newspaper business and then into London’s political and economic circles of influence. In December 1910, he had used business favours and what was becoming his fortune to win election as the member of Parliament for Ashton-under-Lyne. In August 1912, after numerous invitations, Bennett finally visited Aitken at his handsome estate near the quiet village of Mickleham in Surrey and found that his friend had arranged for a grand public meeting. Bennett took to the stage and electrified his audience with calls for a stronger union between Britain and her dominions. Bennett argued that closer ties were becoming increasingly necessary not only for the economic benefits that would accrue to all, but also in light of what all observers recognized as the dark clouds of war on the horizon.

As was nearly always the case, Bennett’s sister Mildred was his supportive travelling companion on his trip to Britain. Mildred was nineteen years younger than her brother, witty, quick with a smile, and as funloving as he was staid. They were as close as siblings could be and all saw how much they loved each other and each other’s company. She offered spirited conversation and encouraged adventurous outings, such as a trip to Stonehenge, where Bennett might have otherwise remained ensconced with a book. They later shopped in London’s most fashionable districts, with Mildred directing his purchases of clothing and him searching out rare books. He later relaxed with Aitken, and then was able to relax again on the long transatlantic journey home. It was an idyllic summer blessed with beautiful weather. But trouble was coming.

No one could have predicted the length or savagery of the First World War, or the collapse of empires that would be its blood-soaked legacy. But few could deny that the nationalistic militarism that was accelerating the arms race between the great European powers was creating pressure that would be relieved one way or the other, and in no way that would be good. It was precisely because of this pressure, Bennett argued, that imperial ties with the dominions needed to be enhanced.

WAR YEARS

In the summer of 1914 the short-sighted insatiable greed of some and the angry pride of others led Europe to sleepwalk into a family squabble that turned into a stupid war, fought in a stupid way, for stupid reasons. When Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914, Canada was automatically in a state of war too. It began as a great adventure. Canadian recruiting centres could not keep up with the thousands who were signing on, most believing it all would be over by Christmas. By the end of 1915, more than 100,000 Canadians were in uniform and in Europe. This number is astounding when one considers that there were only eight million people in all of Canada and only 1.5 million men of military age. Borden and his minister of militia, the fascinating and perhaps unstable Sir Sam Hughes, were insistent that Canadians fight not as British soldiers but as Canadians. And fight they did. They fought the German army. They fought leaders who couldn’t lead and rifles that wouldn’t shoot. They fought disease, rats, lice, dysentery, and they fought the mud. It was hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror linked by days of inhuman misery. Their bravery earned them tremendous respect from allies and foes alike. After the long and dreadful battle of the Somme, British Prime Minister Lloyd George remarked, “The Canadians played a part of such distinction that thence forward they were marked out as storm troopers and for the remainder of the war they were brought along to head the assault in one great battle after another. Whenever the Germans found the Canadian Corps coming into the line they prepared for the worst.”19

In July 1914, before war had even been declared, Bennett had attempted to enlist, but at age forty-four and with only his time in the Chatham militia as experience, he was turned down. He quickly found that his money allowed him to contribute in a more substantive way than carrying a rifle. He wrote to Sam Hughes and received permission to pledge $100,000 from his personal savings to raise a regiment in Calgary. He wrote to Governor General the Duke of Connaught and received permission to name the regiment in honour of his daughter, the Princess Patricia. Alas, Bennett’s grand plan did not work out: Montreal millionaire Andrew Gault had already been granted permission to raise a regiment. Since the government did not need two, Bennett surrendered the name and the honour. Nonetheless, due partly to his efforts, in August, four hundred young Calgarians boarded a train bound for training in Valcartier, Quebec, where they joined the Princess Patricia Light Infantry Division. On that troop train was a young man who had been among the first to enlist: Bennett’s youngest brother, George.

Bennett also sought to contribute to the war effort by accepting an invitation to become a part of the Alberta Red Cross and was soon appointed president. He participated fully in its fundraising efforts and related activities. Over the years he would attend a number of Red Cross conferences across Canada, and in 1919 he would represent Canadians at an international conference in Geneva. He also accepted an invitation to become a member of the board of the Southern Alberta Patriotic Fund, which raised money to support the families of fighting men. This organization took him not only across the province but across the country, where he spoke at fundraising rallies and strong-armed those whom he knew could afford to contribute.

But those activities lay in his future. With the war just under way, Bennett delivered a number of stirring speeches intended to boost morale, inspire giving, and urge recruitment. One such speech was planned for early September 1914 at Calgary’s Victoria Arena, but when organizers found they were swamped by people wanting to attend, they split the event in two, with a second rally taking place at the Sherman Rink. More than five thousand people showed up at the two venues. Speakers were shuttled between the two locations, with Bennett as the keynote at both. He closed the events with inspired speeches that left the crowds roaring approval.

Tragedy struck when, on the first of October 1914, Bennett’s mother died. Henrietta Bennett was seventy years old. She died in the same Hopewell Cape house in which she had raised her family and in which her husband had passed away ten years before. Her forty-one-year-old daughter Evelyn, a schoolteacher, was sharing the house with her at the time of her death, as was twenty-five-year-old Mildred, who had just returned from graduating with a bachelor of arts degree at Mount Allison University.

Bennett returned to Hopewell Cape and again led his family through a difficult period. He handled Henrietta’s modest will and arranged it so that Evelyn could remain in the house. He also took the lead in organizing his mother’s small funeral. As was always the case, Bennett kept his emotions to himself, as his mother had taught him to do. Few saw any outward signs of grieving as he adjusted to the fact that the woman who had meant so much to him was gone.

The special bond between Mildred and him that had always been evident had grown deeper since their father’s death. Bennett had paid for her education and the two were regular and warm correspondents. In 1929, she would move to Calgary and to a room in his elegant suite at the Palliser Hotel. Mildred was often on his elbow at business and political events and his companion on nearly all of his transatlantic trips. She and her husband, Bill Herridge, would play major roles in Bennett’s life.

In the spring of 1915, Evelyn married a Methodist minister from Fredericton named Dr. Horace Coates. Soon afterwards, he accepted a parish in Vancouver. Bennett paid for the couple’s moving expenses and bought them a small bungalow. His visits to New Brunswick became somewhat sporadic after his mother’s death, and Christmas found him at Evelyn’s home. Evelyn had one child and named him Richard Bedford Coates. Years later, Bennett paid his nephew’s tuition and expenses at Dalhousie. When young Richard’s dream of becoming a doctor did not pan out, his uncle wrote letters that allowed him entrance to Montreal’s business community.

Bennett’s brother Ronald entered the military early in his life and proudly served Canada in a distinguished career. He retired a captain. He enjoyed a long and happy marriage and proudly saw two sons follow his footsteps into military service. Tragically, both boys were killed at Normandy in the Second World War. Ronald, or R.V. as he came to be known, was a respected member of the Sackville, New Brunswick, community. His brother Richard made news in the small town when, as prime minister, he once visited Ronald’s unpretentious York Street home. Ronald made frequent and generous donations to a number of charities and served on several community boards. He was especially interested in promoting excellence in education and spent time and donated money to improve the University of New Brunswick and Mount Allison. In 1931, he stood proudly at the opening of the UNB’s Bonar Law–Bennett Library Building named after his brother and Andrew Bonar Law, a fellow New Brunswicker and the only non-British-born person to serve as British prime minister. Although the library was later moved to other facilities, the building still houses the provincial archives. In 1979, Ronald’s Sackville home was bequeathed to Mount Allison University and became the Centre for Canadian Studies. In 1998, the university’s new Centre for Learning Technologies was named in his brother’s and his son’s honour. His was a life well lived.

Brother George was a special case. He had gone to war in 1914 with Calgary’s Princess Pats and had made it to France. Before seeing action, however, he fell ill with enteritis. Bennett pulled strings to expedite his return home, where he spent months in and out of hospitals. It was while recovering that George developed a relationship with the bottle. He eventually found work in Fort McMurray, married a young woman he met there, and together they welcomed a daughter. Bennett purchased a house for the young couple and helped them with their bills. Things were looking up. But George’s drinking turned to alcoholism. He eventually left his family, and his wife left the child. Bennett opened his mail one morning to find a letter from Ronald informing him that their young niece, Joan Bennett, was at Toronto’s St. Joseph’s College Academy with no means of support. Bennett arranged to pay for all the expenses regarding her upbringing and education. The bills were always paid, but the growing girl and Bennett never met nor exchanged as much as a card.

Meanwhile, George’s life continued to spiral down, with Bennett receiving news from time to time that he was in jail after a bender in Calgary or Edmonton. He always paid the legal and travel costs needed to get his brother back to Fort McMurray. Bennett set up a $20,000 endowment from which George could draw interest and also had $125 deposited to his brother’s bank account on the first of every month. He also paid all maintenance expenses for George’s small house. Despite many angry letters in which the elder Bennett threatened to cut his brother adrift, the largess continued despite George’s unrepentant profligate ways. More than once Alice Millar saved George from the law when informed that he had again tried to pass a bad cheque. Without informing Bennett, she arranged for money to be transferred to the bank in question and the trouble, for a time, to fade. The two brothers went years without speaking. George died in Fort McMurray in 1938. His brother Richard did not attend the funeral. He did not even send flowers.

Bennett’s relationship to his family, and especially to his brother George and niece, reveals a good deal about the man. His ability to compartmentalize his mind enabled Bennett to simultaneously juggle myriad personal, business, and political challenges and, with respect to his family, to meet responsibilities without the emotion that familial ties might, in most others, arouse. This facility to divorce himself from emotional commitment impressed many and infuriated more.

He was self-aware. When the lure of war took a number of important young men from his Calgary law firm, Bennett wrote to Aitken, “The loss of these men leaves me absolutely heartbroken in so far as it is possible for a man of my type and temperament (sic) to be heartbroken about anything.”20 It was this chilly intellectual capacity that Pierre Trudeau would later call reason over passion and it left people unable to truly understand him, just as colleagues, friends, and family could never truly comprehend Bennett. Trudeau’s wife, Margaret, once described her husband in terms that perfectly describe Bennett and perhaps explain Bennett’s aloof support for his rogue brother and hapless niece. Margaret Trudeau said, “Behind the silky, charming manner and the absolute confidence that had given him such a reputation for arrogance, was a curiously solitary figure.”²¹ Late in life Trudeau gave himself fulsomely to his three children. Bennett, on the other hand, was an absolutely solitary man who was an engaged citizen and supportive family member but offered himself wholly to no one.

As the fall of 1914 turned to winter and the spring found fresh flowers brightening Canadian gardens, the new warmth brought only stinking mud to the young men in France. The mobile ground war had been short lived and the wretched stalemate of the trenches settled over the front. The Western Front’s trench system had become so elaborate that it was said one could walk from the North Sea to Switzerland without going above ground. But with the trenches came more death.

Bennett read of the thousands of young men dying and was sickened by the waste. He mourned for the men, but also for the country as a generation was needlessly slaughtered. He wrote to Aitken,

And when I think of the multiplication of the loss to the State of the men that are dying, of the blood that is being spilled, of the economic waste that is going on; when I see the best men of the Empire being drained from it; when I see the population of the province in which I live being lessened day after day by the men who are so willingly, so gladly, so nobly, so patriotically giving their services for the cause of freedom, I ask myself; where will it end?²²

In 1915, Prime Minister Borden had put together a team of business leaders and his most respected political colleagues to travel to Europe. They would meet with the British prime minister to discuss strategy, with his generals to discuss tactics, and with the brave men who had to face the horror of carrying out orders whether inspired or, as was more often the case, asinine. Already the courageous soldiers were being called lions led by donkeys.

Bennett was chosen to be part of the Canadian contingent. By this time, Aitken had been afforded that most British of honours and become Lord Beaverbrook. Besides his peerage, Beaverbrook had also talked his way into an appointment by Borden as a special envoy for the Canadian government in London, was given the honorary rank of lieutenant colonel, and led the newly created Canadian War Records Office that kept Canadian contributions to the war before the eyes of the British public and decision makers. It was Beaverbrook, therefore, who welcomed the Canadians to the Empire’s capital and led the group to, and sometimes through, its rounds of discussions. Bennett participated in a number of the high-level, bilateral military and political meetings. Beaverbrook also ensured that Bennett spent time with Britain’s political elite, including Bonar Law, Lloyd George, and Rudyard Kipling, whom Bennett embarrassed at a dinner with an all-too-effusive toast. Kipling had been named godfather to Beaverbrook’s son Peter, and Bennett had made far too much of the honour. Bennett also travelled to France, where he toured rear trenches that were close enough to hear, smell, and sense the horrors of the Western Front.

When Borden and the others returned home, Bennett arranged to stay two weeks longer. He treasured his time in London with Mildred, who loved few things more than shopping in that most cosmopolitan of cities. On the sprees that would be a part of every trip to Britain, beyond a couple of rare books, Bennett bought little or nothing but approved of the purchases Mildred made for him or on his behalf. Bennett also again took the time to repair to Beaverbrook’s estate where the two old friends enjoyed pleasant afternoons of long walks and evenings of quiet conversation.

While neither spoke or wrote about the substance of their conversations, it is a good bet that business was discussed. By 1915, Bennett had become firmly established as one of Canada’s most successful businessmen. His interests were varied and complex. He had a knack for land speculation. Shortly after arriving in Calgary in 1897 he had purchased the mortgage on ninety-four acres on the city’s southwest boundary that the Agricultural Association had owned but allowed to fall into arrears. In 1901, when its financial stability returned, it offered to buy it back, but Bennett held out for $7,000 — much more than market value and far beyond what he had paid. There was a great deal of negotiation, but in the end Bennett got his price. It is this transaction that gave Bennett the financial foothold he needed to build his wealth.23

After his initial success, real estate remained a source of interest and profit. Bennett bought and flipped farms and houses that had fallen into default and purchased land on Calgary’s outskirts that was flipped as the city continued to expand at breakneck speed in the first decades of the new century. Bennett was not above using his insider knowledge with the CPR to purchase land that was to be developed. His buying land in the small town of Wetaskiwin in 1904, for instance, may have seemed odd to observers, but not later when the CPR chose the town as a terminus for a new line and land prices soared.

In 1911, he had resigned his position as vice-president of CPR’s Irrigation Colonization Company and with the acceptance of a $5,000 cheque in lieu of a pension, surrendered his $10,000 annual retainer. He was, however, still president and principal shareholder of the Calgary Power Company. The company had grown so that it not only supplied all Calgary’s electricity but had also created subsidiaries that generated power for Medicine Hat and Edmonton. In 1917, the board of Calgary Power rewarded Bennett’s efforts by presenting him with $50,000 in stock. He was still president and principal shareholder of the Canada Cement Company. He still owned shares in the E.B. Eddy Company and was the solicitor for both Jennie Eddy and E.B.’s grandson, Ezra.

Bennett was still pocketing 40 per cent of the net proceeds from Lougheed Bennett, which was continuing to make more money from insurance, mortgages, and real estate than from law. Bennett always thought in the long term. For instance, when handling the legal affairs of business clients, he sought stock in lieu of fees. Bennett continued to find and invent lucrative business ventures. The amalgamation of six companies that in 1912 had become the Alberta Pacific Grain Company was continuing to grow in wealth and influence. It owned and operated seventy-seven grain elevators in or around Fort Macleod, Vancouver, Red Deer, and Calgary. A single transaction in 1917 netted Bennett $90,000. The Alberta Pacific Grain Company would become the most profitable business in which he was involved.

One spring afternoon in 1912, a rancher in Alberta’s Turner Valley, just south of Calgary, had stood pointing at a hole in one of his fields. He showed an amazed Bennett a small crack that was spewing forth a steady stream of hot gas. He demonstrated its heat by frying an egg on the emission. Bennett quickly formed a partnership with local businessman Archibald Dingman and together they created the Calgary Petroleum Products Company. A financing arrangement was put together and drilling soon began.

On the fourteenth of May 1914, the same day Bennett was on his feet in the House of Commons delivering his blistering attack on the Canadian Northern Railway boondoggle, the Dingman well hit. And it hit big. The oil flowed and the money flowed with it. At that time, the Imperial Oil Company was reaping astronomical profits from a series of wells in Montana, and it was not long before company officials learned of Bennett’s success. Its representatives found their way to the offices of Lougheed Bennett where after intense negotiations they created a subsidiary called the Royalite Oil Company. Bennett was its president and majority shareholder. He was also given a seat on the board of Imperial Oil. The legal transactions were handled through Lougheed Bennett and the sale of shares through Montreal’s Alliance Trust Company, which had been put together by Beaverbrook and where Bennett was a board director and president. Money from fees, commissions, and gas and oil profits from three companies criss-crossed before ending up in Bennett’s bulging pockets.

Despite his growing fortune and notoriety earned both through business and politics, Bennett maintained a frugal lifestyle. He purchased one car and on his first day careened it into a tree. He sold the wreck and never drove again. He spent lavishly only on travel, books, and clothing. When in Ottawa he lived in a suite at the Château Club and in Calgary he maintained even more spartan quarters at the same rooming house at 222 Fourth Street at which he had lived for years. In 1922, he would move to a suite of rooms at the Ranchman’s Club and then the next year to a somewhat larger suite on the seventh floor of the Palliser Hotel. He still worked long hours and enjoyed nothing more than an evening with a good book. He amassed an impressive seven- hundred–volume library that he arranged to keep at his Fourth Street rooming house until 1929 when he finally had the collection moved to the Palliser.

Bennett was also growing physically larger due to his lack of exercise and his seemingly insatiable appetite for three sumptuous meals that he continued to enjoy every day. The broadening of his girth was also helped along by the pound of Moirs Candy Company chocolate creams that he continued to polish off each night.

As Bennett’s fortune and waistline grew, so too did his generosity. Many churches, libraries, and schools opened envelopes to find small and sometimes large unsolicited donations to capital projects or worthwhile programs. When Calgary was working to create a sick children’s hospital, for example, Bennett purchased a large house in which it could be located. When it outgrew that space, he purchased a mansion on Eighteenth Avenue and donated it to the hospital. Every Christmas he gave boxes of chocolates to every member of the Palliser Hotel staff as well as to the staffs of hospitals and children’s homes. He gave about 10 per cent of his annual income to charity, an amount his tithing mother would have recognized as honourable.

Bennett believed that affording a young person a good education was the greatest gift one could bestow. He donated money to a number of schools and universities, with Dalhousie University in Halifax his personal favourite. His donations landed him a position on the Dalhousie board. He persuaded Jennie Eddy to donate $1 million to Dalhousie and saw that the money was used partly to purchase a large house near the campus to become the university’s first student residence for women. His goal was to encourage more young women to seek a university education. He provided the money needed for medals and certificates for deserving secondary school students in Calgary, and when possible, attended commencement ceremonies to bestow the awards himself. He wrote large cheques to many who could not have otherwise afforded university. For some deserving students he provided help with tuition and even clothing allowances. Every year he helped others by composing effusive letters of reference. Sometimes the grateful young recipients were those he knew, such as his four nephews or the children of friends and colleagues. Often he helped young people whom he would learn about one way or another but whom he would never meet. Bennett explained once to a skeptical reporter who cynically wondered about his benevolence, “I still think that hard work is the solvent for most of our troubles. But all the hard work in the world won’t give that vitally important first chance. . . . Getting your feet off the ground and onto the first rung of the ladder.”24

He seldom simply gave money to those wanting to start a business or farm, but he signed many loan guarantees to help hard-working people to get a footing on that first rung. There are many examples of his taking such action, but one is particularly interesting. Reverend William Irving was a socialist who played an important role in the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 and then was elected to the House of Commons as a member of the Labour Party representing the people of Calgary East. When he lost his seat, he decided to turn to farming and approached Bennett for help. Bennett signed a loan guarantee for $8,000. During the Depression, like thousands of others, Irving’s farm failed to provide an income and so Bennett gave permission to the bank to allow Irving to overdraw on the fund. Meanwhile, Irving had returned to politics, this time as a member of the United Farmers of Alberta Party, and sat across the aisle from Bennett and the Conservatives who at that time formed the government. Despite their political differences, neither man publicly spoke of their financial arrangement. By 1935, Irving had lost his farm and defaulted on the loan, leaving Bennett on the hook for $8,579. He paid the bank without private complaint or public comment.

While Bennett’s various business and personal responsibilities took up much of his time, he remained a hard-working member of Parliament — and the primary focus of Parliament remained the war. Borden had said in his 1916 New Year’s message to the country that Canada would raise another 600,000 soldiers. It was soon apparent to all, however, that recruitment was slowing to the point that the prime minister’s goal would be tremendously difficult to meet, while dwindling numbers would soon affect the fighting capability of soldiers already overseas. Further, a growing shortage of labour was affecting war-material production. In October, Borden created the National Service Board to address both problems. Its mandate was to urge more men into uniform while simultaneously keeping essential skilled workers at home and perhaps even moving them to where their skills could best serve the war effort.

The board was created by an order-in-council on October 3, with Sir Thomas Tait in charge. He was to receive no remuneration. Tait wanted G.M. Murray, the secretary of the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association, to be appointed secretary to the new board, but because Murray had publicly savaged the government in its handling of the recruitment issue, Borden felt that he could not appoint him to the post. When Tait was told of the decision, he quit in a huff. Tait’s departure, which Borden later admitted was actually a good thing, allowed him to appoint Bennett as the board’s director general.

Borden had written to Laurier explaining that the board would split the country into twelve National Service districts and that while he would appoint directors for seven of the districts, the Liberal leader was invited to appoint the remaining five. Laurier suspected a political trap, however, and refused to participate.25 Two political foxes were demonstrating their cleverness through calculated caution regarding every aspect of the board’s work. Both knew that most Canadians, and especially Quebecers and farmers, were vigorously opposed to any action that threatened to take their sons from the fields or to fight in what most Quebecers had begun to call Britain’s war. Borden had written to a trusted friend that “Registration means, in the end, conscription and that might mean civil war in Quebec.”²⁶ Bennett, on the other hand, motivated by his visceral ties to empire, rapacious ambition, and either his political courage or egotist’s refusal to see risk, charged into the challenge.

Bennett split Canadians into four categories: nineteen- to twenty-five-year-olds able to enlist, workers, farmers, and bureaucrats. He deemed all necessary to win the war and pondered how to put people into the positions and areas of the country where they could do the most good. In one of the first meetings of the new board, Bennett brought up the notion of conscription. When he took the idea to Borden, however, he found that the prime minister would not consider it. While Borden had mused publicly and in a July cabinet meeting about the option, and he still did not want conscription at the moment, he did concede that if the war lasted longer than expected it might become necessary. To prepare for that possibility, Bennett argued, the government should implement a policy demanding the completion of a compulsory military registration card for all military-age Canadians. Again, recognizing the political costs of the suggestion, Borden said no and even refused Bennett’s request to take it to cabinet.

But politics is chess, not checkers, and Bennett was becoming a shrewd player. A few weeks later he returned to the prime minister’s office and was successful in having Borden and then the cabinet approve a registration drive that would focus more on the need to harness labour than on preparing to conscript soldiers. Ten days before Christmas, 150,000 prominent Canadians received a letter from Bennett. Many others saw newspaper ads and found eight-by-ten inch posters in post offices and other public buildings throughout the country entitled “National Service.” The letters, ads, and posters all stated that under the authority of the War Measures Act, the government would be undertaking an inventory of every male between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five. Canadians could expect National Service cards to arrive by mail and they were to complete them and return them to the post office within ten days. At the bottom of the poster was printed “R.B. Bennett, Director General,” and in bold underlined print — “God Save the King.”27

The small brown cardboard cards that Canadians soon began pulling from their mailboxes posed twenty-four questions. They asked everything from name, health details, and occupation, to the nationality of not only the man filling it out but also his parents. Two interesting questions were, “Would you be willing to change your present work for other necessary work at the same pay during the war?” and “Are you willing, if your railway fare is paid, to leave where you now live and go to some other place in Canada to do such work?”²⁸ Eighty per cent of the cards were filled out and returned.

With cards filling mail bags from and to Ottawa, Borden and Bennett set out on a cross-country tour to try to stir up interest in service and sacrifice. Their biggest challenge was in Quebec where opposition to the war was greatest, and they bravely began their tour there. They met with provincial and municipal leaders as well as with Cardinal Begin and Bishop Williams, who both promised support. At a well-attended meeting at Quebec City’s Garrison Club, Bennett delivered a rousing speech, albeit in English, followed by a somewhat more pedestrian address from the prime minister. It was then off to the West where they addressed meetings in Winnipeg, Brandon, Regina, Edmonton, Calgary, Kamloops, and Vancouver. The three-week tour ended rather anticlimactically with a poorly organized and sparsely attended meeting in Toronto. At every stop, provincial politicians of both parties pledged their support for the cause. Bennett could look at his directorship of the National Service initiative with pride; a great deal had been accomplished in just a few short weeks.

After he took a well-deserved but short Christmas break Bennett was back in Ottawa keeping the indefatigable Alice Millar and himself busy with a mountain of business, political, and personal correspondence. The number of letters he composed on any particular day, coupled with the range of topics addressed, suggest a dexterous mind and ability to accomplish a great deal in limited time.

Boxing Day 1916 found Bennett in the prime minister’s office. He urged Borden to consider a Maritime tour and again raised the question of conscription. Borden agreed to the first but continued to resist all arguments regarding mandatory military service. Bennett expressed concern with what he told Borden were disappointing results with national registration. He was especially peeved with the lack of what he considered an adequate response from Quebec. Bennett demonstrated a rookie’s reaction to his annoyance when he suggested to Borden that they needed to threaten to punish Quebec in order to inspire Quebecers. He suggested that if the number of recruits from the province did not meet the quota he had set then it should be deprived of one of its cabinet ministers. Borden wisely told him that such a move would be neither wise nor generous.29

The Western Front had become a catastrophic quagmire. Young men had their valour wasted in launching countless suicidal frontal assaults against gas, shells landing accurately from miles behind the line, and the deadly incessant spray of machine-gun fire. They fought for generals who employed twentieth-century technology but first-century tactics. And yet, as in all wars, the generals screamed for more troops. A new government took office in London and among its first actions was to call for more men from the dominions.

Canada did its best to answer the call, but despite Bennett’s best efforts and a steadily increasing number of valiant recruits, it was becoming evident to all in the early spring of 1917 that Canada could not meet the demands of the British government or Borden’s pledge, let alone those of Canadian military leaders, with an all-volunteer army. It had become painfully apparent to Borden that the only way to meet the country’s military commitment would be through the imposition of conscription.30 He still understood the political risk and the price that would be paid in national unity, but Borden swallowed hard and announced to the House that if Canada was to meet its commitment to play a significant role in the winning of the war then it must impose conscription. Borden introduced the Military Service Act on May 18. The prime minister, Meighen, and others then took part in the spirited debate, but it was Bennett whom Borden later described as being most effective in defending the government’s policy.³¹ In a powerful speech, Bennett made legal points that essentially differentiated between rights and responsibilities and between citizenship and enfranchisement. He never once gloated that it was he who had seen the need for conscription two years before. As the public debate caught fire, both Laurier and Montreal’s Monseigneur Bruchési sent private notes to Borden warning him that there could be a violent reaction if the conscription bill was passed. It was too late to turn back.

Shortly after what for many had been a surprise announcement came yet another. Borden floated the notion that in order to bring about conscription and present a united domestic front to meet all of the war’s other needs, the Liberals and Liberal-Conservatives should form a coalition government. A number of rogue Liberals, led by Arthur and Clifford Sifton, met in Winnipeg to discuss the idea and found it curiously appealing. Later in the month, the Governor General sat with Borden and the venerable and still widely respected Sir Wilfrid Laurier. The old man listened carefully while the prime minister made his pitch. Borden even offered to postpone conscription and delay the next election if Laurier would join him. But Sir Wilfrid would not bite. He left Government House and walked into the hot Ottawa sunshine with his head bowed.

Since he could not win Laurier, Borden went around him and recruited a number of Liberal MPs to join what he had begun to call a Union government. In June and July, many fell in line after Clifford Sifton and Winnipeg Free Press editor John Dafoe joined the growing chorus of support for the unprecedented new coalition. With their support the deal was all but done. There was consternation among many people, especially Conservatives, who believed they had elected a Conservative government and were suddenly getting a coalition. With adjustments that saw ten Liberals join the cabinet, the Union government was in place. The establishment of the Union government covered Borden’s political flanks and allowed him to move boldly. Parliament passed the Military Voters Act, allowing soldiers and their wives to vote, while disenfranchising those deemed enemy aliens. It passed the War Time Elections Act, which extended the government’s life beyond the constitutionally mandated five years. With this done, Borden was able to postpone the election until the new government was firmly in place. He finally dropped the writ, with Canadians to go to the polls on December 17, 1917.

While pleased with Borden’s decision regarding conscription, Bennett was upset by the idea of bringing Liberals to the cabinet table. He believed that the Liberal Party was rife with men bereft of scruples. He thought that the presence of Liberals in the government would lead to inter-cabinet partisan bickering. He warned about manoeuvring that would derail Canada’s attempts to meet its war obligations with honour and later hamper the task of rebuilding a postwar economy. Bennett saw Borden’s actions as desperate measures that would ultimately destroy the Conservative Party that he had worked diligently and for years to build and one that he sincerely believed represented Canada’s best hope for the future. Bennett believed that conscription and income tax were both needed but that a Union government was not necessary to bring about either.32

Part of the reason for his growing anger with Borden was also the degree to which Clifford Sifton and J.W. Dafoe were playing an increasingly significant role in Borden’s political stage management, while Arthur Sifton became a Union cabinet minster from Alberta. A character flaw that Bennett carried with him to his grave was his difficulty in forgiving and his inability to forget. Bennett was absolutely Olympian in his ability to carry a grudge and the one he toted with regard to the Sifton family was gargantuan. He simply could not abide being in the same government with one of the detested brothers.

Bennett wrote to Aitken commenting on the unusual political situation in Canada and the state of the West, and reserved special venom for Clifford Sifton. He observed, “The degradation of the public life in Western Canada is directly attributable to the influence of one man, and that man is Sifton.”33 He went on to accuse him of theft and corruption in his public dealings — something for which he was indeed being investigated at the time, but was later exonerated. In a concluding jab, Bennett wrote, “He is now a Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George and, if money compensates for lack of honour, I suppose he is one of the most powerful and least influential citizens of this new democracy.”³⁴

Despite his growing political acumen Bennett’s passion and rebellious nature, often disguised as arrogance, kept him from keeping opinions to himself, even when he probably should have done so. He expressed his worries about the Union coalition government to Borden in letters that began with polite expressions of concern. When they went unanswered he turned to accusations of political piracy. Bennett wrote in one letter that was both impolitic and too rude by half, “. . . it was a grave responsibility for any man who had been placed in the position of prime minister by the united efforts of the members of a great party to destroy that party.”³⁵

The Military Service Bill was approved by the House on July 24, 1917. When it was afforded royal assent on August 28, the rage that had been simmering beneath the surface in Quebec exploded in two days of riots, the worst of which were in Montreal’s Victoria Square and in Phillips Square. Windows were smashed, cars were overturned and streetcars destroyed as 150 police struggled to quell the violence. The army was eventually called in and by the time order was restored, hundreds had been injured and four people were dead.

Perhaps if Borden had acceded to Bennett’s argument and considered conscription sooner, the Canadian people might have been consulted and allowed time to digest the necessity for the action. Violence and the widening of the French-English cleavage might have been avoided or at least mitigated. Bennett never publicly raised the idea.

A TIME TO LEAVE

In January 1917, with Borden moving toward a serious consideration of conscription, and the work of the National Service Board all but complete, Bennett had resigned his directorship. It was his first step out of the political door. For months, he had been confiding to friends that he was growing increasingly disenchanted with life as an MP and was considering leaving public life.

Borden had often been frustrated by Bennett and had once confided to his diary that “Bennett has much ability and great facility of speech but…lacks common sense.”36 However, Borden had accepted his resignation from the National Service Board with a handwritten letter that was effusive in praise for the work Bennett had done. The prime minister wrote, in part,

You are already aware of my most grateful appreciation of your splendid labours in the cause of National Service. . . . The tremendous energy that you have executed, the wonderful organization that you have built up, the marvellous effort which you have thus been enabled to fuel, faith in the fine forethought and broad vision which you have displayed throughout, your untiring industry and your unfailing devotion to the cause, all these entitle you to the thanks of the Canadian people.³⁷

Bennett was forty-seven years old; an age when a man is too young to retire but nearly too old to start all over again. In a letter to Beaverbrook, Bennett confessed concern and confusion regarding his options and admitted to casting about for guidance regarding the next stage in his life. The only thing about which he was certain was his desire to serve in the Senate. He wrote,

My present intention is to retire from the House of Commons at the next election and to be appointed to the Senate. I desire, after the war, to visit the Dominions Overseas and other sections of the British Empire. I do not desire to be entirely dissociated with the public life of my own country. I am very anxious to arrive at sound and sane conclusions about many matters affecting our National and Imperial well-being, and perhaps the Canadian Senate may afford me a medium through which to express independent opinions that would be denied me as a Party man in the House of Commons.³⁸

Beaverbrook understood and supported Bennett’s desire to retire his seat in the House but urged him to resist the Senate, seeing no value in a seat in the red chamber. He suggested that his friend consider instead perhaps the lieutenant-governorship of Alberta or New Brunswick, a position which would allow him to move later to Britain.

As it turned out, none of the options would be in Bennett’s immediate future, for it was at that point that he instigated an unfortunate and totally avoidable tiff with Borden. Although the two men later differed in their memory of what exactly was said and promised, both agreed that following an exchange of letters, Bennett had sat with Borden and discussed his future. Bennett recalled asking about an appointment to the Senate. Bennett said that there were two vacancies at that time and that Lougheed was Alberta’s lone senator so he was in a perfect position to fill one of the spots. Bennett was convinced, although Borden was less so, that the prime minister then promised that the appointment was his and would be made before the upcoming election. Bennett left the prime minister’s office and informed the West Calgary riding association president that he would not be placing his name in nomination for the 1917 election. When asked by caucus colleagues about his decision, he explained that he was quitting because Borden wanted him in the Senate.

But then, with Borden’s promise in his pocket and having announced his plans to colleagues and friends and, through them, the press, he could not keep his mouth shut. The Conservative Party’s last caucus meeting before the election should have been a time for reflection, offering thanks to members, and mixing careful plans with a pep talk. And it began that way. But then Bennett stood up. He cleared his throat and began a long and detailed criticism of Borden and the decision to create a coalition government. He argued that Borden had effectively destroyed the old party and for no good reason. Borden grew increasingly peeved with Bennett’s remarks and finally retorted with a rare show of public temper. While Borden was still raging, a caucus colleague whispered to Bennett that he knew of one man who would not be appointed to the Senate and that Bennett was that man.

That very afternoon, coincidentally, Laurier stated in the House that despite the fact that there were Liberals in the new Union government, two Senate seats were vacant and that it was only fair that both should come from Conservative Party ranks. Laurier’s generous offer and Bennett’s resumé meant that Borden’s ability to appoint Bennett would probably have been without opposition or controversy. But it would not happen. The next day Borden announced the Senate appointments of Edward Michener, a Conservative who had served two quite undistinguished terms in the Alberta legislature, and Liberal Party hack Bill Harmer, who had been a backroom adviser to Arthur Sifton. Not getting the appointment would have been bad enough, but to lose it to Michener and especially to Harmer was almost more than Bennett could take.

One can understand Borden’s reasoning: why would he have wanted an angry senator whose negative opinions of both him and his Union government were well known? And one can also understand Bennett feeling anger, confusion, betrayal, and humiliation. But just as emotion has no place in business, it is an orphan in politics. Bennett had his things packed and took the train to Calgary. As he watched Ontario’s rugged shield give way to endless prairie, it was quite far from certain that he would ever see Ottawa again.

In April 1918, Bennett sat down and, over the course of a week, hand wrote an eleven-page letter to Borden that outlined his view of what had happened. The remarkable letter began with a detailed account of his public service. He claimed, in a sentence that foretold his future, that after losing an election in 1905, “I resolved to devote myself to the practice of my profession, accumulate a reasonable competence, and occupy the leisure of my later life in travel and study, possibly settling and to some extent taking an interest in politics in Great Britain.”39 Bennett went on to remind Borden of his having encouraged him to return to politics and that he had left a lucrative practice, financed his own election, and become the only Alberta Conservative elected to office. Regardless, he continued, at no time did he seek a position in the government. He reminded Borden of his reluctantly accepting the appointment as director general of the National Service Board and explained that he had been encouraged by others to resign when Borden refused to consider his advice regarding compulsory service, but that his loyalty and duty kept him at his post. Only when conscription seemed to be inevitable, Bennett explained, and he and his colleagues recognized that they had no further role to play, did he resign. Bennett then came to the nub of the letter and recounted his calling on the prime minister and asking to be appointed to the Senate. Bennett wrote, “Not only did you readily promise to comply with my request but you expressed the opinion that I had claims to consideration which could not be disregarded or overlooked.”40 It was with this promise in hand, Bennett continued, that he had not placed his name in nomination for re-election. Bennett concluded, “As this letter marks the formal termination of such friendship as has heretofore existed between us — a friendship seemingly on your part more apparent than real . . .”⁴¹ The letter was at once a rebuke and a sulk. It was an act of political suicide.

Borden did not reply. In his memoirs he mentioned neither the Senate incident nor the harsh letter. But he did take one action. The British government had created a new award called the Officer of British Empire (OBE) for those in the dominions who were doing exemplary work in the war effort. Bennett was among those whom Borden had put on the list to receive the award. With Bennett’s love of empire the award would have been an exceptional honour. Shortly after Bennett mailed his long missive to the prime minister, however, his name was dropped from the list of OBE recipients.

Bennett turned his attention back to business and the law. But public issues would not leave him alone. In early May he was dealing with paperwork at his desk, when a local farmer was shown into his office. The gentleman asked if there was anything that could be done about the fact that his son, Norman Lewis, had been conscripted. Bennett was moved by the story of the hardships that the loss of the son would bring to the man’s family and he went to work. Farmers across the country had been trying to win exemptions by arguing that taking their sons from them would hurt the war effort by hindering food production. On May 14, five thousand farmers had protested on Parliament Hill. It was an argument to which Bennett was sympathetic, but Borden was not. The prime minister made it clear in response to the farmers’ protests that he had to choose between food production and troop replacement and that he had decided on the troops.

Bennett, on the other hand, looked beyond Borden’s false choice and considered the case strictly on its legal merits. Perhaps, too, he was motivated by his bitterness toward Borden. He presented the Lewis case to Alberta’s Supreme Court. He noted that the Military Service Act as originally passed had exempted farmers from conscription but that an order-in-council passed in April had ended that exemption. Bennett argued that the order-in-council was ultra vires, or beyond the cabinet’s legal authority, since the House had been in session at the time. Further, he contended that taking Lewis into what was, in effect, custody violated the young man’s right of habeas corpus. On June 18, 1918, the court found for Bennett.

The federal government reacted quickly and announced that it would appeal to Canada’s Supreme Court while continuing to conscript young farmers. Meanwhile, a new order-in-council was passed stating that the Alberta court’s decision was to be ignored. Lieutenant Colonel Philip Moore, who was in charge of conscription in Calgary, was thus left in the untenable position of obeying the federal government by ignoring the Alberta courts. He also needed to act in the face of growing and increasingly angry crowds who formed every day outside recruiting offices and at Calgary armouries. Just when tension was reaching a snapping point, a writ for Moore’s arrest was issued and Calgary’s sheriff arrived at Moore’s office at the Victoria Park barracks to serve it. Armed soldiers would not let him in. Guns were cocked and the crowd hushed. The wise sheriff turned and left.

Meanwhile, in province after province, lawyers had hopped on the Bennett bandwagon and brought the constitutional and habeas corpus arguments to their courts. More and more young farmers were refusing to become soldiers. Finally, on July 20, the Supreme Court ruled in an Ontario case that the Alberta court had been wrong; Borden’s order-in-council ending the exemption for farmers was constitutional. Young men, including Norman Lewis, could be legally conscripted.

Bennett had been energized by the legal fight but for months his mood remained dark. In December 1918, he composed a letter to Beaverbrook that revealed the seething anger that was still souring his heart, and asked what his old friend thought of his moving to England to run for office in the upcoming election there. The letter was black and sad and desperate.42 If running for office was not a possibility, he wrote, then perhaps he could just deliver a few speeches in support of the prime minister. The Borden and Beaverbrook letters together reveal a middleaged man who had seen his dreams shattered but was still too close to the shards to be able to reflect on the role that he had himself played in the demolition. The Beaverbrook letter also shows that an escape to England seemed to rise in Bennett’s mind whenever his fortunes fell.

His childhood dream seemed to have been dashed. As Christmas drew near, the first Christmas of peace in so long, Bennett and Mildred made the slow train ride from Calgary to their sister’s home in Vancouver. No one, least of all he himself, would have predicted that within ten years he would be back in Ottawa as the leader of the Conservative Party, and that three years later he would be prime minister.

PRIVATE MAN

It was a rather embittered and despondent Bennett who welcomed the new year, alone in the hotel suite Bennett called home. It was January 1919. Although he had impressed many and done some important work, Ottawa had not been what he had expected. To make matters worse, while in Vancouver for the holidays he had contracted a case of erysipelas, an infection caused by streptococcal bacteria. The condition tortured him with red, itchy blotches on his skin, a fever, and headaches, all of which made sleep impossible; it would incapacitate him for several days, then go away only to return a week later. This was the second bout of ill health he had suffered, for in June 1917 he had checked himself into Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital where he had undergone abdominal surgery. He was back to work in a matter of weeks but then back in hospital in early August with complications. The Montreal surgery and the bout of erysipelas were the first indications that his strong constitution was no longer able to sustain the long hours, massive stress, lack of exercise, and questionable diet. But like others of his day, Bennett did nothing to change the lifestyle that was beginning to affect his health. When the ravages of his latest illness finally left him, he felt utterly fatigued. He laboured under a general feeling of malaise that haunted him for nearly a year. Being forced to address his age and mortality was the last thing he needed as he faced an uncertain future.

While fitfully recovering his health, Bennett caught up with a mountain of correspondence and discovered that all had not been as he had presumed at the firm during his absence. As his strength slowly returned, he dug deeper into the affairs of Lougheed Bennett and grew increasingly irritated as he did. The war had robbed the firm of several important men, including George Robinson who was a trusted friend, gifted attorney, and Bennett’s political organizer. Further, in 1909, long-time partner Senator James Lougheed had formed a separate brokerage firm called Lougheed and Taylor to handle mortgages, loans, and insurance while also providing employment for his son. Bennett had felt robbed, as it was business that could have gone through Lougheed Bennett, but he had said little, secure in the belief that there were plenty of clients to go around. While in Ottawa, Bennett had surrendered Lougheed Bennett’s day-to-day control to four young lawyers named W.H. McLaws, L.M. Roberts, H.A. Allison, and W.T. Taylor. Taylor was doing double duty with Lougheed’s new firm. While preparing for the National Service tour, Bennett had received a rather startling letter from Lougheed asking that the old partnership be dissolved. Bennett was shaken. He suggested, and the two agreed, to postpone decisions regarding the firm’s future until he could return to Calgary.

Now Bennett found that for months, Lougheed and the others had been acting as if the firm were either already dissolved or indeed had no future. A great deal of new business was being diverted to the new firm while many poorly thought-out decisions were being made at the old one. For instance, Lougheed Bennett had made a number of loans that Bennett later deemed to have been far too risky, and had put the firm in a precarious position. One particular loan, for instance, had been to a client who had skipped the country and left the firm responsible for full repayment of a considerable sum. At a stormy meeting, he announced to Allison and Taylor that he was displeased, that their powers were being curtailed, and that he would be taking a much more active role in all decisions. By mid-March he was back at the office every day and back in control. While his various business interests took up much of his time and remained profitable, the firm’s future was uncertain.

On August 9, 1921, Jennie Eddy (née Shirreff) passed away. She had suffered with peritonitis and after, enduring extreme pain for some time, she died peacefully in her sleep. She was only fifty-seven. She and Bennett had met in New Brunswick, but Jennie had left to marry Ezra Butler Eddy. He was a fascinating man who had begun his business career in Vermont, then later found success with a modest match-making venture in the back offices of lumber magnate J.R. Booth. While he served in the Quebec legislature and also as an alderman and mayor of Hull, his genius was business. He slowly built a multi-million-dollar company, housed on over twenty acres of sprawling factories and powergenerating plants on the banks of the Ottawa River, right across from Parliament Hill. The company manufactured matches for the world but also a host of wood products. It turned pulp to newsprint that supplied newspapers across North America. In February 1906, Eddy had died. His will had placed control of the company and its considerable wealth into a ten-year trust with five-eighths held for his wife and the rest for his grandson Ezra and four company officials. The company men plotted while Ezra immediately embarked upon what seemed to be a race to see how quickly he could burn through his inheritance.

Jennie was much wiser than them all. She was an intelligent woman who had learned the business well before her husband’s death. She turned to Bennett for legal advice and he was instrumental in negotiating a deal with the Quebec government regarding the payment of an exorbitant $700,000 in inheritance taxes. Their business dealings led to a renewal of their close friendship and Jennie arranged for Bennett to be given Eddy stock and a place on the board. Their obvious affection for each other was clear to all, but their busy lives invited space and time to trump their hearts. This did not stop the spread of a rumour that Mildred was actually the daughter of Bennett and Jennie. It was as cruel as it was false.43

Bennett was not the only prominent political figure to be smitten by Mrs. Eddy’s charm and grace. In a whimsical diary note dated August 28, 1907, an obviously gobsmacked Mackenzie King related a tumble of misunderstandings between him and Laurier’s wife that occurred in his adolescent-like attempt to secure an invitation to a theatre production in order to spend some time with the recently widowed Jennie Eddy. The note also somewhat sadly betrays his steely determination to control his desire for anything beyond companionship. King wrote, “Mrs. Shirreff is what Sir Wilfrid says is a fine girl, the makings of a fine woman, kind, generous I should think, gentle disposition and all that. Unless she can surpass in my judgement any woman I have yet seen as the one with whose nature my nature could best blend, I will not allow wealth, position, or aught else to tempt me.”⁴⁴ But despite the fact that Jennie rubbed elbows with Canada’s elite, including captains of industry and prime ministers, only Bennett remained her true friend and trusted confidant.

In 1917, Jennie had sensed that something fishy was going on and called on Bennett for help. He soon discovered that the four trustees were untrustworthy. They had voted to increase their dividends beyond what the will had stipulated. Bennett acted on Jennie’s behalf and the four repaid the company what they had stolen. The repayment was made just in time for the tenth anniversary of the trust’s creation, which allowed Jennie to inherit controlling interest in the company. Jennie was a rich and powerful woman and Bennett was her rich and powerful ally.

At the time of Jennie’s death, the E.B. Eddy Company was among the most successful in the country. Bennett naturally handled her will and discovered that she had split her shares of the company and related wealth among her brother, sister, a few other relatives, a number of charities, and to endowments at McGill and Dalhousie universities. She left Bennett 500 of her 1,507 shares. He became the most influential member of the Eddy board and quickly used that power to have the president fired. He then hand picked G.H. Millen as the new company president. Millen did not make a major decision without consulting Bennett.

The Eddy inheritance was a boost to Bennett’s power and bank account, but Jennie’s death left him truly alone. Shortly after her passing he burned all of their letters. Upon his mother’s death he had also burned all of the correspondence between them that he had kept and carefully filed. Pop psychologists might enjoy pondering the fact that, as with the letters to and from Jennie Eddy, he did not just throw them away but rather made a point of carefully consigning them to the flames. Both acts of wilful destruction would have taken time and effort, and would have been emotionally wrenching. In addition, they robbed historians of the chance to pry into Bennett’s personal thoughts and learn a little more about the man. Maybe that is exactly what he had in mind.

Only a month after Jennie’s death in 1921, before the will had been settled and while tending to his overlapping and all-consuming business interests, Bennett received a series of enticing cables from Ottawa. After his departure from the federal scene, the Union government had seen its way through the end of the war. Borden had done well in Versailles in securing a place for Canada at the grown-ups’ table. Canada took part in negotiations, signed the treaty, and took a seat in the League of Nations. Due to the country’s dedication to the war effort and the valour of its women that worked at home and as nurses at the front and its fighting men on the fields of battle, especially in the spectacular victory at Vimy Ridge, Canada was recognized by all. Perhaps most important, their country was recognized by Canadians themselves as a mature and independent state. In a country where census forms still had no box to check one’s self off as Canadian, people began to proudly declare themselves just that. Macdonald might have created the state, but Vimy created the nation.

After his return from the international stage, Borden had announced that it was time for him to step down. He visited the Governor General on July 10, 1920, and his successor, Manitoba’s Arthur Meighen, was asked to become prime minister. Meighen was an intense man who was as dedicated to his family as his career, but who allowed no one to peek behind the austere image that he offered to the world. A brilliant administrator and adept speaker and debater, his nature was such that few warmed to him. A naturally shy man, he hated the interaction with strangers on the campaign trail and was not good at it. Reporters openly spoke of Meighen’s struggling to stay interested in the hand shaking and baby kissing that is a part of running for office, the rarity of a smile, and the death stare that sometimes welcomed crowds.

The forty-six-year-old Meighen carried a number of liabilities with him up the marble stairs to the prime minister’s corner office. First was that while Conservatives in the Union government supported his leadership, the Liberals in the cabinet did not. They had argued for Sir Thomas White, who would have won favour with both parties. Second, and more important, was that Meighen had been a loyal cabinet man. As solicitor general and later justice minister, he had been the government’s face for hugely unpopular acts. The tainted and expensive acquisitions of the Grand Trunk and Northern Railways had pleased few observers. The Military Service Act brought conscription to Canada and riots to the streets of Montreal. The War Time Elections Act had allowed soldiers and their wives to vote, which most saw as good. But it also had soldiers cast ballots only for a party and allowed the government to allocate them to whatever riding needed Conservative-Union votes, which most saw as underhanded.

Meighen possessed an intellectual arrogance that allowed him to sincerely believe that it was the role of the political elite to lead. The people’s task was simply to choose their representatives, then be quiet and subserviently complacent until asked to do so again four or five years later. He never deigned to explain himself or ask for support from the people or the House. Mackenzie King was cynically delighted in Borden’s choice. He confided to his diary, “I could not help exclaiming Good for him when I read of Meighen having won out, and achieved his ambition, immediately I added walking up and down with feelings of satisfaction it is too good to be true.”45

With the end of the war that had justified the Union government’s creation, and with the ascension of Meighen to leadership, the government began to slowly unravel. The coalition had weakened the Liberal and Conservative parties and new parties such as the Progressives had risen to steal support from both. The postwar recession led many workers and recent immigrants to see value in the socialist ideas of Labour parties, while many farmers turned to parties geared specifically to their interests. Conscription had widened the French-English cleavage to a state not seen since Macdonald had allowed French-Catholic hero Louis Riel to hang in 1885. No one knew what would emerge from an age of uncertainty where the old political alliances were being made obsolete and all that had been certain was up for grabs.

Through it all, Meighen appeared unwilling or unable to do what was needed to inspire loyalty. Within months there were resignations by Liberal after Liberal and only one Liberal replaced those jumping ship. Mackenzie King was gaining strength as he moved adroitly to bring disaffected Liberals to his side. He had enjoyed a successful swing through the Maritimes in January, then Ontario and Quebec in the summer and autumn. He had also been skilfully rebuilding the political fences that had once been erected between Liberals and Progressives in the West and, in so doing, outflanking the Conservatives. All four western provinces had Liberal governments and Mackenzie King’s most enthusiastic audiences were in Alberta, in Bennett’s backyard.

It was from within this perilous political environment that Meighen had swallowed hard and in May 1921 sent a cable to Bennett. He asked his old rival to join the cabinet as minister of railways and canals. The two had never been close. The CNR affair had stung Meighen as Bennett had intended it to. But the new prime minister was in a difficult spot and needed friends. Bennett pondered the offer. He was still peeved with having had a promised Senate seat snatched from him, plus his business responsibilities were enormous. Only weeks before he had turned down an offer to be chief justice for the province of Alberta. But this was another matter. Meighen’s offer was a chance to re-enter federal politics and rekindle his childhood dream. Bennett weighed the offer against his business responsibilities. He said no.

Within days, a second cable arrived that promised him the Interior Ministry. That portfolio was even more tempting. Bennett was considering the new offer when a third cable arrived. Meighen stated that if the Interior Ministry did not thrill him then perhaps he would be interested in becoming the minister of justice. Meighen was on his knees. Bennett paced his office for an hour weighing options. At midnight he cabled Meighen and accepted the position. In a follow-up letter that was mailed the next day, Bennett spoke of the many challenges that stood before the Canadian people and of his eagerness to confront them. He wrote, “I should not like to think that I had shrunk from discharging my duties merely because the problems that confront us are difficult, the conditions of life onerous, or the outlook of the future dark and gloomy. . . . I have therefore concluded . . . to place my services loyally and unreservedly, under your Premiership, at the disposal of the country.”46

Bennett was thrilled. He saw the position as one that would make every lawyer in the country salivate with envy. It offered him the opportunity to make, as well as practise, the law.⁴⁷ He wrote to Beaverbrook, explaining his decision to join the Meighen administration as motivated by a desire to put his talents on the side of “law, order, and constituted authority.”⁴⁸ He also confided that he was entering the race with no expectation that the government would survive the next election, believing that the Conservatives would find no support in Quebec or the Maritimes. So it was with an idealist’s desire to serve and a realist’s misgivings about the length of that service, packed along with his ever-present books and always stylish clothes, that Bennett was soon on the train to Ottawa. It appeared that the young country offered even middle-aged men a second act.

While the post was a good one, Bennett soon learned that he had joined a cabinet that resembled a pick-up team. It comprised twelve recent appointees, most of whom were of rather limited capabilities, with not a single French-speaking member. He was among those whose duties were made more difficult to completely fulfill as he held no Commons seat and thus could not participate in committee work, vote, or appear at question period. Still, for six months Bennett put in his typically long days serving as Canada’s minister of justice and then, due to a resignation, he also took on the position of attorney general. But it was a government held together with binder twine and old glue. It could not hold.

The election was finally called for December 6, 1921. It was the first to be fought by the new Liberal leader. William Lyon Mackenzie King would play a central role in the rest of Bennett’s political career. Mackenzie King is Canada’s longest-serving prime minister and among its most fascinating. Even as a young man, Mackenzie King appeared old. Short, mashed-potato soft, with thin, comb-over hair and grey eyes, he was a staunch and determined bachelor.

Mackenzie King was the proud descendant of Upper Canadian rebel William Lyon Mackenzie. Born in Kitchener (then called Berlin), Ontario, Mackenzie King was educated at the universities of Toronto, then Chicago, then earned his master’s and Ph.D. in political economy at Harvard. He specialized in labour law and worked as the Deputy Minister of Labour and then for the Rockefeller Foundation. Mackenzie King first won federal office as the MP for Waterloo North in 1908 and quickly caught the eye of Wilfrid Laurier as an intelligent and hardworking administrator with palpable ambition. In 1919, as an MP for Prince, in Prince Edward Island, Mackenzie King became Laurier’s successor as Liberal leader.

The 1921 campaign saw a number of issues discussed in the West, including immigration, freight rates, and grain marketing. Foremost in most westerners’ minds, though, seemed to be Meighen’s tireless support of high tariffs and Mackenzie King’s hammering of the Conservatives’ blemished record. There was a palpable and growing desire for change. One must respect Meighen for his refusal to parse words or try to rewrite his record. He went to Quebec and stated that he had supported conscription and would do it again. He went to Manitoba and declared that he supported high protective tariffs that might hurt farmers. As a man who admired the beauty and power of oratory, he was infuriated with Mackenzie King’s slippery language and teased him at one point, saying that King had spoken against tariffs but for tariff revenue. Not the first or last to be exasperated by Mackenzie King’s crafty ability to speak without saying a thing, Meighen sputtered, “Those words are just the circular pomposity of a man who won’t say what he means. He might as well say he favours a perambulating tariff, or an atmospheric tariff, or a dynamic tariff.”49 Observers were treated to the sad view of a train wreck in slow motion. Meighen and the Conservatives were headed for a crash.

Meanwhile, Bennett was having just about as much fun as his leader, who was out munching bad chicken dinners in small sweaty church basements, shaking hands with people he did not really want to meet, and scowling at crowds he would rather not address from one end of the cold snow-covered and subzero-degree country to the other. Bennett enjoyed the cut and thrust more than Meighen ever would, but he had been away from politics and Calgary too long. He was rusty. He had sat out the 1917 election and all but ignored the constituency. Its Conservative riding association had been allowed to disintegrate. In the bustling city there were many new people; so many of the old ones upon whom he could rely before were gone.

Bennett had written to Beaverbrook in November stating that he knew the campaign would be a tough one and even predicted his defeat.⁵⁰ Regardless, he campaigned vigorously. But his efforts found little traction. Bennett was in the heart of Liberal Alberta and in a city where, like elsewhere, a growing number of immigrant and urban workers saw credibility in the words and ideas of labour and socialist candidates. At the same time, the United Farmers of Alberta and the Progressive Party were poaching what had been reliable Conservative rural votes.

Bennett ignored the lack of an Alberta Conservative party organization, personally financed his campaign, and ran the show himself. His efforts were not helped by the fact that for much of the campaign he was dealing with cabinet responsibilities in Ottawa and delivering speeches for other promising Conservative candidates in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Further, he was at the same time representing the city of Calgary in hearings dealing with a public utilities board. As if all of that were not enough, the people of Calgary were, like other Canadians, being jolted by the postwar labour upheavals, recession, and the terror of the Spanish flu pandemic. Returning soldiers spread the virus quickly and without antibiotics there was little doctors could do to stop it. The 1918–20 pandemic killed between 50 to 100 million people world-wide and took 30,000 to 50,000 Canadians — nearly as many as the war. In Calgary, whole families succumbed to the disease. At the Beaver Indian Reserve, northeast of Calgary, 85 per cent of the population perished.

Meanwhile, wheat prices, still the foundation of Alberta’s economy, had fallen from $2.80 a bushel in 1919 to only $1.21 a bushel at the time of the election. Even the weather had turned. In 1915, every acre under cultivation had produced thirty bushels of wheat; in 1921, those same acres were producing only ten bushels. All these factors meant that the voters’ mood did not bode well for incumbent candidates. The Labour Party’s Joseph Shaw, a lawyer, built slowly and used a populist appeal to win the working class and farm vote. Liberal candidate Edward Ryan, another lawyer, sank along with Bennett.

The election results were closer than anyone expected. When the votes were finally counted on December 14, it appeared that Bennett had won 7,372 to Shaw’s 7,366. Shaw naturally appealed to the district court of the province for a recount. Judge W.R. Winter discovered that there was a good deal of uncertainty in the voting as twenty-three ballots had been marked in ink and nine in coloured pencil rather than black pencil as prescribed by law. Further, it was found that twenty-nine ballots had been marked with a single stroke rather than an X, and that a Mrs. Laird had somehow voted for Shaw twice. Her votes were thrown out, as were those marked in ink, but the others were allowed. On December 23, Judge Winter announced that Shaw had won by 16 votes. If all the others had been counted or if all the other irregular votes had been thrown out, Bennett would have won. Most estimates had him winning the election by ten. The decision regarding the votes marked in pen had done it. Newspapers called it the fountain pen election.

Bennett was bitter and, as was often his wont, he blamed others. He claimed that the countryside had been against him and the city part of the riding had been strongly in his camp, yet his small group of campaign volunteers had not organized properly to pull the urban vote. He estimated that about six thousand urban voters had not gone to the polls when only a handful would have made the difference.51

As Shaw had before, Bennett refused to accept the decision and demanded that the Supreme Court of Alberta count the ballots yet again. Judge W.W. Stuart sided with Winter and announced that indeed Shaw had won by 16 votes. Bennett was still not satisfied. He took it to the Supreme Court of Canada, which, in June 1922, sided with Winter’s first decision. Shaw was sworn in as the MP for West Calgary. While maintaining a brave public face, Bennett was bitter in the protracted defeat.

Bennett’s West Calgary riding mattered to him and Shaw, of course, but the final result would have no effect on the overall outcome of the national election. Meighen’s Conservative government had been soundly trounced. The Liberals were back in power, one seat short of a majority, with the Progressives winning 69 seats and the Conservatives reduced to 50. Bennett’s brief foray back into federal politics had seen him hold two cabinet posts but his time had been so brief that he’d played only a managerial role. There had been no opportunity for leadership or accomplishment. The people of West Calgary had decided that he should be a private man rather than a public figure, and so he gathered his talents and ambitions and turned them again to the world of business and finance.

BITTER DIVISION

Bennett allowed himself little time to ruminate over the last recount’s final decision. He poured himself into matters at the firm and with the many other companies and investments with which he was involved. Just a few months later, in the late spring of 1923, Bennett found himself on a ship to England where he was to act as lead counsel in an appeal to the Privy Council. The case involved the damages awarded to the widow of a Calgary doctor named W.J. Chambers who had been killed in a train accident while in western Ontario. In the midst of arguing the case, Bennett’s focus was tested when he received an abrupt but disturbing telegram from James Lougheed. The telegram prompted proceedings that are debated to this day among Alberta law students.

He and Lougheed had discussed their partnership and the future of the firm on at least two occasions before Bennett’s latest departure for England. They had agreed that the firm was changing and growing to meet the evolving needs of Calgary’s development. They had finally conceded that the 1897 partnership agreement that had been reviewed and extended each year since needed to be substantially restructured, and that they would begin discussions upon Bennett’s return. It was with this plan in mind that Bennett read the telegram and felt the sting of betrayal. The July 21 Great North Western telegram read, “Acting on Ottawa conversation Sinclair will purchase your interest as mentioned and organize new firm. Unless immediate steps taken dissolution probable. Cable reply.”52

Lougheed and his cohorts had been busy. They visited each of the firm’s clients attempting to persuade them to leave Bennett and move to the new, and what they promised would be, improved firm. Room would be created in the new entity for William McLaws who had articled with Bennett but had been let go in 1918. There would also be a place for Lougheed’s son Edgar.

Bennett was hurt and angry. He carefully planned his response. He made no communication with Lougheed but sent a number of carefully worded telegrams to trustworthy allies. On August 24, Bennett returned to Calgary but ignored his office, instead setting up headquarters in his rooms at the Palliser. Alice Millar and other friends and colleagues spent hours with Bennett, relaying their versions of what had happened, trading gossip, and helping to plan his counterattack. All of Calgary knew what was happening and awaited the battle of the titans.

Lougheed had placed Lougheed Bennett in receivership. Horace Howard of the Calgary Trusts and Guaranty Company had been appointed by the court to oversee it all. Bennett carefully planned his move, then pounced. He called Lougheed’s bluff. Bennett summoned Howard to his room and demanded, in his capacity as one of the firm’s partners, that the court’s decision be carried out immediately and completely. That day, the Clarence Block offices were stripped to the bare walls. Everything was boxed, up then carted away to be stored, locked, and guarded in the attic of the nearby Southam Building. When Howard returned to the Palliser to report on the action, Bennett was unsatisfied. He castigated the poor man and demanded that he return and remove the brass plaque inscribed with the words “Lougheed Bennett” from the door. Bennett’s actions deprived Lougheed and his new partners of their offices, furniture, equipment, and even more important, their files. There was to be no turning back.

Lougheed set up a new legal firm called Lougheed McLaws Sinclair and Redman. He began to build anew. Bennett did the same and with loyal employees Alexander Hannah and Percy Sanford founded Bennett Hannah and Sanford with new offices on the sixth floor of the Lancaster Building, only a block from his old offices. It is interesting that all of the secretaries, support staff, and associate attorneys, E.J. Chambers, O.E. Might, and H.G. Nolan, were given the choice and every one of them went with Bennett. He also discovered that the majority of major clients, excluding the Bank of Montreal, had decided to remain with him.

The legal wrangling that was necessary to dissolve the partnership continued for some time. The next step in the saga involved Bennett’s response to the Statement of Claim that Lougheed had filed on August 1. The document outlined the history of the firm in a way that Bennett found offensive. For instance, its second paragraph stated that William McLaws became a partner in the firm that was subsequently called Lougheed, Bennett, McLaws and Company but that he retired in 1918, which returned the firm to its original partnership of Lougheed and Bennett. It portrayed McLaws as the aggrieved party. Bennett found the paragraph instructive, and assumed, although it was never proven, that it was McLaws who had been manipulating events from behind the scenes and had turned Lougheed against him.

Bennett’s response was a twenty-two-page document filed on December 2, 1922. It was at once both a carefully argued legal brief and the cry of a hurt and bitter associate who had assumed friendship. While the document’s fifth paragraph admitted that the firm changed names and brought McLaws to prominence for a time, its third paragraph attacked Lougheed’s honesty in charging, “This Defendant denies that the Defendant, McLaws, at any time became a member of the said partnership of Lougheed and Bennett.”53

Two other paragraphs were even more scathing in reproving Lougheed’s character and reputation as a lawyer, public servant, and as a man. Bennett claimed that his former partner had used underhanded tricks to rob him of his firm and that such action was beneath the behaviour of a gentleman.

Bennett must have known that the accusations and personal barbs would hurt and he must also have known that they would not be allowed to stand. Indeed, Lougheed filed a Notice of Motion with the court asking that the personally insulting paragraphs be struck as they were, “. . . scandalous, embarrassing and tending to prejudice or delay the fair trial of this action, and as contravening the provisions of the Rule of Practice in regard to pleadings generally . . . .”54 The judge agreed and paragraphs 45 and 46 were removed.

The case dragged on for year after painful year. In November 1925, with the case still pending, Senator James Lougheed died. It was Lougheed’s son Clarence who finally approached Bennett and the final arrangements were made to put it all to a close. As in most cases motivated more by emotion than logic, neither side really won; they just stopped fighting. Lougheed and Bennett had seen each other only once between the London telegram and the senator’s death. They sat and sipped tea in Bennett’s Palliser suite and, according to Alice Millar, who was listening in the next room, they quietly and politely disagreed with each other’s recollection of events. They left each other’s company for the last time with a solemn handshake. It is said that upon his Ottawa deathbed, Lougheed was brought news that Bennett, who by that time had re-entered politics, had won an election and would again represent West Calgary. Lougheed smiled and said, “Isn’t that just fine.”⁵⁵

In the midst of the wrangle with Lougheed, Bennett had stirred intrigue in the city when he took ownership of a fabulous three-storey sandstone house. The Prospect Avenue house boasted a commanding view of Calgary from atop Mount Royal. Rumours quickly spread that Bennett had purchased it in advance of a pending marriage. There were, in fact, a number of women to whom Bennett was romantically linked in those years. The name bandied about at that moment was Edith Cochrane, the daughter of Ontario Conservative Party leader Frank Cochrane. Indeed, the two enjoyed a number of evenings together in Ottawa and Toronto, but nothing came of the relationship. The tongues stopped wagging when Bennett rented the house and remained in his rooms at the Palliser. A less romantic story finally came to light. The house had come to Bennett from L.M. Roberts in lieu of payment for debts owed as part of the dissolving of Lougheed Bennett.

Meanwhile, Bennett Hannah and Sanford thrived quickly and well. Everyone in Calgary called it simply the Bennett firm. It remains a powerful institution today and is called Bennett Jones. Interesting and perhaps ironic is that among the many lawyers who have been associated with the firm was the Honourable Peter Lougheed, from 1971 to 1985 Alberta’s mercurial and respected premier, and James Lougheed’s grandson.

The fight with Lougheed had been tough financially and emotionally. As much or perhaps more than the defeats he had suffered at the hands of the voters, the frustrations he experienced with Sifton and Meighen, and the snub he had been handed by Borden, the struggle with James Lougheed had torn at something deep within him. In 1925, Bennett was fifty-five years old, rich beyond his dreams, and respected in his community. But the Lougheed challenge had re-awakened within him the desire to fight for what was in his mind right and fair.

In June 1925, with the Lougheed struggle entering its final stages, Bennett received a cable from Meighen. As he had before, he asked Bennett to leave private life and run for office. Without mentioning a particular post, he promised a seat at his cabinet table.56 It was a bold offer from a not very popular or powerful leader of a small and ineffectual Opposition who had done little to ingratiate himself with Canadians to a retired Conservative living in a Liberal province in a Labour riding. Bennett thought for two days then cabled back that his responsibilities with his new legal firm, his other businesses and directorships, and his growing responsibilities with the Eddy Company were such that he could not contemplate leaving private life and would not be a candidate. He was gracious and wished Meighen well and promised to help in any way that he could.⁵⁷ One wonders if Bennett allowed himself the anticipatory tingle of pondering whether his answer was final or if his days as a public figure were truly over.