There has been no full biography of R.B. Bennett, a major Canadian political figure and Canada’s prime minister during the first years of the Depression. This absence is explained partly by Bennett’s decision to destroy many of his public papers and partly, I would suggest, by Bennett’s apparently contradictory views. Although Richard Wilbur long ago argued that Bennett’s New Deal was more than a deathbed conversion at a time when his political death seemed inevitable, there has been no full study of Bennett’s remarkable business and political career. The distinguished historian Peter Waite has written an excellent short study of Bennett, but Ernest Watkins’s dated biography has remained the major source for Bennett’s full career. Lord Beaverbrook’s personal memoir of his friendship with Bennett is fascinating but, like its author, often unreliable.

John Boyko’s biography of Bennett is, therefore, a most welcome addition to prime ministerial biographies. Using Bennett’s papers, contemporary documents, and secondary works, Boyko has written a lively and highly readable account of a largely unknown prime minister. Boyko’s major contribution is his analysis of Bennett’s conservatism or, more accurately, Bennett’s peculiar, Canadian definition of conservatism. At its core was the British connection, and Bennett’s perception of the British imperial idea. Bennett, like many British conservative imperialists, believed that the empire possessed a moral force, a responsibility to improve not only the “lesser breeds” beyond the law but also the worker, the farmer, and the hardy yeoman who were the empire’s strengths. They fought its wars and, in peacetime, bore its message of duty and commitment.

And yet, the British imperialist Bennett was North American, and his British-Canadian perspective was complicated by his immersion in the laissez-faire world of North American capitalism. That world opposed the tradition of working class conservatism espoused by Benjamin Disraeli in Britain and John A. Macdonald in Canada. While highly successful in business, Bennett’s strong religious beliefs, his youthful penury, his experience of the frontier with its sense of common purpose, and, not least, his highly romantic view of the British monarchy combined to create a political outlook that was distinct and fascinating. In tracing Bennett’s intellectual and emotional development, Boyko has convincingly demonstrated that Bennett’s New Deal was not a whimsical or desperate response to the Depression but rather a reflection of a profound and enduring commitment to an enhanced role for the state in the emerging industrial economy.

Like the British Empire, Bennett’s conservatism has passed as if in a dream. Boyko’s book illuminates corners of Canada’s and the Conservative Party’s past that have been shaded for too long. If we are to understand Canada’s past, we must probe the darkened parts more deeply. John Boyko has ably guided us toward a better understanding of a past and a person we barely know today. R.B. Bennett was not a great prime minister, but he was a remarkable Canadian. Because of John Boyko, we now know him much better.