R.B. Bennett was Canada’s eleventh prime minister and served the country during the Great Depression. A fascinating Canadian worthy of study, no academic biography has previously been written about him. Therefore many greeted the arrival of John Boyko’s Bennett: The Rebel Who Challenged and Changed a Nation with enthusiasm.
Bennett was born in 1870 in New Brunswick, where he was raised, educated, and began his career. He practised law briefly before heading west to Calgary in 1897.
He was extraordinarily successful in both business and law, and no other prime minister amassed as large a fortune before taking the office. Yet Bennett had the great misfortune of being elected prime minister in 1930 as Canada entered the second year of the Great Depression, which struck Canada harder than any other industrialized nation.
He was defeated badly in the 1935 election, not so much by Mackenzie King and the Liberal party, but by H.H. Stevens, a senior Conservative cabinet minister who resigned and led his own party, the Reconstruction Party, into the election. While Reconstruction won only one seat, it took 8.6 per cent of the popular vote — as much as the CCF and twice as much as Social Credit. The Liberal seat count skyrocketed from 88 to 171 with only a 0.5 per cent increase in popular vote.
The Conservative Party, being the Conservative Party, made it difficult for Bennett, so he not only resigned as leader but left Canada for the United Kingdom in late 1939. In Britain he was admitted to the House of Lords for his wartime service, becoming the 1st Viscount Bennett of Mickleham, Calgary and Hopewell. He died in 1947 and is buried in England, the only former Canadian prime minister not buried in Canada.
Unfortunately, Boyko’s Bennett is not a particularly good biography, although it is a good read.
This is not to say there are not some good points about the book. Boyko emphasizes the problems created for Canada’s trade balance by the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 and also deals well with the problems caused by H.H. Stevens and the fractious nature of the Conservative Party. However, the book’s good points are obscured by numerous errors ranging from minor, to puzzling, to significant.
Boyko is particularly weak in his knowledge of Western Canada. He writes of the old saw of “foreign” immigrants settling the Canadian prairies. But other errors are less understandable. He has Mackenzie King beating John Diefenbaker (on the wrong month) in an early 1926 by-election, but Diefenbaker and King did not clash until the general election later that year. Boyko refers to Jimmy Gardiner first as the premier of Manitoba and then, thirteen pages later — but this time correctly — as the premier of Saskatchewan.
The author clearly has a bias against Bennett’s Conservative predecessor Arthur Meighen. The description of the World War I railway crisis doesn’t mention Bennett’s close association with the CPR.
Then there are puzzling errors, such as mention of Italian prisoners of war during World War I, when Italy was an Allied nation; the reference to 1933–34 as Bennett’s last full fiscal year; and discussing the low share prices of the CNR, which was then a government-owned railway.
The minor errors are too numerous to mention but include misspelling Lord Chancellor Haldane’s name, stating that the CPR built the Chateau Laurier, and claiming that Sir Joseph Flavelle was president of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Of greater concern are strong assertions not based in fact. For example, Boyko writes, “the banks helped move the country from recession to depression.” His evidence for this is the fact that the Royal Bank’s loans declined dramatically from 1929 to 1933, but he ignores the fact that there have to be deposits before there can be loans.
While there is no doubt a need for an insightful biography of the man who led Canada through the Great Depression, this book does not fill that need.
— Joe Martin (Read bio)
Joe Martin is the Albany Club historian and author of Relentless Change: A Casebook for the Study of Canadian Business History.