Robert Borden

Many Canadians began to question not just what the war had been fought for, but the whole system by which Canadian leaders were chosen.

It was a sign that the political landscape had been fundamentally altered that disillusionment with the government of Conservative Prime Minister Robert Borden did not discernibly benefit the Liberal opposition.

It seemed as though Canadians didn't trust either of the parties that had dominated the political world since Confederation.

In a sense, Borden had himself contributed to that outcome.

I just referred to him as the Conservative Prime Minister, but that's not strictly accurate.

In 1917, Borden formed a new Union government, which consisted of Conservatives and dissident Liberals who disagreed with Wilfrid Laurier's stance on conscription.

Although the so-called Laurier Liberals contested the federal election of December 1917, the Union government effectively blurred the lines of the long-standing two-party system in Canada.

But if Borden's Union experiment opened the door to a new kind of politics, the Prime Minister quickly lost control over what lay on the other side of that threshold.

And last but not least, we are coming up on an important anniversary.

Many of you will know from history November 15th, 1926 was the day that the dominions of the British Empire voted in favor of a measure that was actually proposed by Sir Robert Borden to acknowledge the sovereignty of the dominions of the British Empire being the equal of the sovereignty of Great Britain.

That decision on November 15th, 1926 was unanimous among all the dominions, and I know this is the Empire Club, so I can throw a little dominion stuff in there.

But it led in 1927, well, it led first to an exchange of letters, and in 1927 to the first exchange of ambassadors between the U.S. and Canada, coming up on the 100th anniversary of bilateral relations.

S- so, uh, technically because some of these events started earlier, uh, like several months earlier, we had two prime ministers during these.

So Robert Borden, who I mentioned last time.

Oh.

He was the wartime PM.

[laughs]

When, when you hear about the second one, we almost had three.

Um, but, uh, uh, yeah, I mean, Robert Borden basically, uh, it, uh, the guy he was, uh, succeeded by, Arthur Meighen, um, it, it, uh, not a name I even knew, and then you realize there's a reason why.

He served for just over a year, later come back, and I'll talk about more his second term when he came back for about three months, uh, almost a decade later.

Anticipated shortages and panic buying all but broke the Winnipeg Exchange, the center of wheat trading in Canada and one of the largest such markets in the world.

In hopes of preventing astronomical prices and runaway inflation, Robert Borden's federal government stepped in and suspended trading in Winnipeg.

For the rest of the war, wheat prices were set by a government board, which acted as the sole buyer and distributor of Canadian wheat.

The Board of Grain Supervisors, which would later morph into the Canadian Wheat Board, has operated in the background of our explorations of farm politics in recent episodes.

The maritime refineries were especially dependent on the favorable freight rates they had negotiated with the intercolonial, the main route taken from the Atlantic provinces to the major market in Montreal.

By one estimate, the cost of transporting a carload of sugar from St. John to Montreal doubled overnight, from $61.50 to $126.00.

When the new policy was met with howls of protest, as it would be the death knell of a major maritime industry, Prime Minister Robert Borden relented.

Borden, of course, was himself a Nova Scotian, well attuned to the old accusation that the Maritimes were destined to be economically marginalized within a Canadian confederation dominated by Ontario and Quebec.

Last week on History Matters, we had part one of my conversation with Barbara Messamore about the 1921 election that brought Mackenzie King and his Liberal Party to power after a decade of conservative government, first under Robert Borden, who was prime minister through the war years, and then after 1920 under Arthur Meehan.

Today's episode is part two of our conversation, focusing on the 1925 election, a rematch between Meehan and King, and the dramatic events in the months after the election that led to the incident we know today as the King-Bing affair.

Barbara Messamore is Emeritus Professor of Canadian History at the University of the Fraser Valley, and is also President of the Institute for the Study of the Crown in Canada.

The Peace Conference of 1919 was foundational for Canada's future trajectory in many ways, not just in its relationship to Britain.

That being said, for Prime Minister Robert Borden, the priority in any post-war settlement was holding the British government to the promises it had made in its greatest hour of need during the war.

In particular, Borden had in mind the declaration issued at a meeting of imperial leaders in the spring of 1917.

As you may recall, the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, called representatives from the Dominions, as well as India, to London to invite them to take on a larger role in managing the war.

Among the Dominion leaders, Borden took a leading role in pledging greater manpower commitments.

In return, Borden expected tangible constitutional reform in how the empire was run.

The Canadian Prime Minister's terms were encapsulated in Resolution 9, produced by the Imperial Conference.

the resolution laid out in clear language Borden's expectations for the new empire that would emerge from the current crisis.

And Canadians always liked to identify themselves more with Europe.

And, you know, that go back to to Robert Borden or John Diefenbaker trying to identify more with the British Empire and Commonwealth.

That's always been a romantic notion for a lot of Canadians.

And while Canadians say they want no trucker trade with the Yankee, we've now...

Yeah, a feeling that they could purify things.

Well, so talking about those, the two main parties, the four previous elections had all featured Wilfrid Laurier versus Robert Borden.

And so one of the most significant changes was between 1917 and 1921 is a complete change of the people leading the political scene on both fronts.

So let's talk for a minute about Arthur Meehan, who was the conservative leader after 1920.

When the Mian government arrested me, he claimed, it nominated me for Ottawa.

Now, that's getting a bit ahead of ourselves, and might be somewhat confusing, as Robert Borden, not Meehan, was the Prime Minister at the time of Woodsworth's arrest.

But we'll be filling in those gaps eventually.

For now, it might be best to turn to a different remark Woodsworth made in the immediate aftermath of the strike in the summer of 1919.

To many in Ottawa, the strike demonstrated the need to devote greater energies to domestic security.

In fact, as we've seen, that was a debate that had been going on in Ottawa since the previous year.

You may recall Charles Kahn, the Montreal lawyer Robert Borden had tasked with investigating the threat of radicalism and foreign interference in Canadian affairs.

Kahn had used his investigation as a springboard to propose a federal organization modeled on the FBI in the United States.