How long was bennett prime minister

However, Bennett was dissatisfied with his role as a backbencher and did not run for re-election in But Bennett failed to win a seat in the subsequent election by only 16 votes. In , he became the federal member for Calgary West. In , he served as minister of finance ; acting minister of the interior; acting minister of mines ; and acting superintendent general of Indian affairs. Bennett worked hard to unify the party, expand its base and shore up its finances.

The election saw Canadians voting while in the early months of the economically and socially devastating Great Depression. Liberal prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King said he would let markets fix the worsening catastrophe. In July , the Conservatives won a commanding majority and Bennett became prime minister. It was later augmented by the Unemployment and Farm Relief Act, , which provided for more infrastructure construction and direct relief for farmers and the unemployed.

Western farmers had been devastated by a collapse in prices, a drought , and a grasshopper plague. In , the Bennett government created the Canadian Wheat Board , which stabilized prices and helped farmers sell their wheat abroad.

See Colonial and Imperial Conferences. It resulted in 60 per cent more Canadian goods being sold in Britain and bilateral trade agreements with other nations. At that time, chartered banks controlled interest rates , the value of the Canadian dollar in world markets and the amount of money in circulation. They even printed their own currency.

Bennett established a Royal Commission as a step toward creating the Bank of Canada. It would ultimately assume all those powers from the chartered banks. The chartered banks fought the idea, but Bennett persevered. The Bank of Canada Act was passed in and the Bank opened in It also established a publicly owned, national radio network dedicated to telling Canadian stories to Canadians. See also Founding of the CBC. In , Bennett represented Canada at the imperial conference at which the Statute of Westminster was drafted.

He had promised aggressive action to combat the effects of the economic downturn, but in office found it difficult to develop a coherent program. His business instincts did not always serve his political interests. His initiative to persuade the British Empire to adopt preferential tariffs brought some economic relief to Canada, but not enough. By , the nadir of the Depression, Bennett appeared indecisive and ineffective. He became the butt of endless jokes. By , Bennett was increasingly isolated and faced major dissent both in his party and the country.

Through all this, he was often touched by letters Canadians wrote to him about the hard times they were facing. Never one to follow the crowd, he neither smoked nor drank and he dressed formally at all times. He could work like a horse, long hours with no play. The Lougheed—Bennett practice went slowly at first but by Calgary was growing and by , when Alberta became a province, growing rapidly.

Calgary had become the centre of a large farming and ranching community. There were soon oil leases and oil companies as well. His reputation grew throughout, as an honest, versatile, clever, persistent lawyer.

By he had an extremely busy and profitable practice. And R. He was then well into Conservative politics. There he challenged the view of the premier, Frederick William Gordon Haultain , a Conservative, that party politics had no place in the territories. He lost, but was elected in In that contest the Liberals took 37 seats; there were 3 Conservatives and 1 Socialist. He was a vigorous debater, not afraid of challenges, confident, perhaps too confident, of his own knowledge.

Bennett was that rare being, a successful Alberta Conservative, and was elected to the House of Commons for Calgary in As he put it in his maiden speech in the commons, 20 Nov. He had come to Ottawa feeling, however, that the party owed him more than just the address in reply. He could not be appointed to cabinet because Lougheed was government leader in the Senate. His independence was starkly revealed in his opposition to the Canadian Northern Railway Guarantee Bill of When World War I came late that summer, Bennett tried to enlist, but he was turned down as not medically fit; perhaps the reason was, as he would reveal to William Lyon Mackenzie King , that two of his toes were missing.

Then the sudden death of his mother, whom he had visited in New Brunswick each Christmas, supervened in October. They soon moved to Vancouver, where Dick bought them a house. In July Borden invited Bennett as his assistant to London, to ascertain how Canada might help British military and civilian needs.

The following year he was made director general of the National Service Board, charged with determining the number of prospective recruits in Canada.

The war seriously affected his practice in Calgary, enlistments taking his political organizer, George Robinson, and several others from his office. What did that signify? He had been a devoted son, a dutiful and loving brother. Benevolence was an obsession; he was giving money to deserving students, needy widows, and a host of charities, altogether ten per cent of his gross income.

What then were the springs of his nature? He loved hard work for the sheer satisfaction of mastery, in finance, accounting, law. He was a wizard with legal precedents and uncanny with errors in a balance sheet. At the same time he was a sublime egotist, clever, irascible, unsparing of himself or others.

Forgiveness was one of the Christian virtues he found difficult to practise. He had a volatile temper, explosive while it lasted. Wound up in the coils of his own nature he seems rarely to have considered the effects of his words and actions.

His receiving antennae were weak; sometimes they did not appear even to be deployed. Bennett scorned hypocrisy. He had the dangerous habit of saying what he really thought. What drove Bennett was his own mind, not what others might think of him. He thought an alliance between Conservatives and Liberals, even for purposes of war, would end in disaster for his party.

It did. Thus while in the election of December R. Borden chose instead an obscure Alberta Liberal, William James Harmer, to satisfy coalition arrangements. Bennett was furious. As for being senator, Bennett needed neither position nor money; his object was to put his knowledge and experience at the service of his country. He wrote Borden an aggrieved page letter. There was no reply. By Bennett had acquired a growing commitment to the E. Eddy Company of Hull, Que. When she herself died in , her will left shares to Bennett and 1, to her younger brother, Joseph Thompson Harry Shirreff.

Harry died suddenly in , bequeathing all his shares to Bennett. He thus became the principal director of the company. Some said that Mildred Bennett, born in , was really their daughter. There was no truth in it. Bennett replied that when Mildred was born he had not even met Jennie Shirreff. As to romance, he said, Jennie was almost eight years older than he was, as if that were an impediment. When the Unionist caucus chose Arthur Meighen as successor, many Liberals in it were already feeling the tug of ancient loyalties.

Laurier had died in and the Liberals had chosen Mackenzie King as leader. In Meighen, with his majority crumbling, called an election for 6 December. To strengthen his government he asked Bennett to be minister of justice. Soon enough he knew that there was little hope for the Meighen government. Bennett and his friends were also too confident of his own seat in Calgary West; the contest was so close that the outcome of a judicial recount depended on the way the X on the ballots was made.

Bennett lost by 16 votes. By March he was spending much time with the Eddy firm in Hull. He was thinking of giving up his year-old partnership with Lougheed. Sir James was 67 years old, was doing little work, and had been hiring juniors whose quality Bennett distrusted.

He was seeing Lougheed about dissolving the partnership when a Privy Council appeal called him to England. Arrangements with Lougheed were left in suspense, but Sir James was persuaded that he could proceed with dissolution.

His unilateral action set off irascible cables from Bennett, who indignantly bounced back to Canada. Thus began a messy litigation. By the mid twenties Bennett was extremely well off. Only 25 per cent came from his legal practice.

Eddy and Alberta Pacific Grain mostly, totalled 7 per cent. The bulk of his income, 62 per cent, derived from dividends. Half of these came from Alberta Pacific Grain, of which he was president; he sold this firm to Spillers Milling of England late in Two other firms, E. Eddy and Canada Cement, represented 16 and 13 per cent of dividend income. The dividend portion kept growing. That was the high point until At the same time Bennett was being urged by Meighen to get back into politics.

Going into the election of Meighen offered the justice portfolio should he be prime minister. Bennett threw himself into the campaign. He won Calgary West with a comfortable majority, and in Alberta his party gained three seats and 32 per cent of the vote. The election had resulted in no seats and 20 per cent of the vote. Across Canada the Conservatives took seats, the Liberals King was personally defeated in York North.

It looked like a Liberal defeat, but King did not resign; he believed that with 24 Progressive mp s he could carry on.

It was dangerous going. By this time Progressive loyalty to the Liberals was nearly gone. King, who had been returned to the commons at a by-election in Prince Albert, Sask.

Byng refused, King resigned, and the King—Byng crisis was on. He tried to renege, but his Alberta friends held him to it.

Meighen did not, as yet, have a seat; Bennett was paired and in Calgary. Had Bennett been in the house, he would have been able to face down King, and Meighen almost certainly would not have been defeated.

Meighen got the dissolution he had to ask for, with the election set for 14 Sept. Meighen expected to win the election with the customs scandal; King won it with an obscure constitutional issue made vital by the throb of Canadian nationalism that King put into it. Meighen was devastated.

It then called a convention to elect a new leader, to be held after the session of parliament. One of the principal issues in was old-age pensions, which Bennett strongly favoured. King had tried to bring in old-age pensions that year, but the legislation had been killed in the Conservative-dominated Senate. In he reintroduced it, revised but still with weaknesses that Bennett thought unfortunate. The cost was still to be shared 50—50 with the provinces, though the provinces had not been consulted about the plan.

He thought old-age pensions should be funded wholly by Ottawa. Thrift in the form of pension contributions would thus earn its own reward. Those who could not afford such contributions would have them paid by Ottawa.

In March, however, the bill as King presented it passed both the commons and the Senate, the upper house having apparently decided that the Canadian people had endorsed the scheme in the election.

Unemployment insurance should be funded by premiums paid by both the person concerned and the government, he argued. The subscription principle would encourage economy and industry.

Bennett, he joined the firm in before volunteering for the Royal Canadian Navy. He was the first person to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law Society of Alberta, which also honoured him in as the first member to celebrate 70 years of service.

Following on R. Bennett's tenacity in the court room, Bennett Jones has been blessed with some of the best legal minds in Canada. The Honourable Harry Nolan was a member of Bennett Jones from its inception in , a period interrupted only by service to his country as deputy to the Canadian Army Judge Advocate General during the Second World War and as the Canadian prosecutor before the International Military war crimes Tribunal.

Harry was named to the Supreme Court of Canada in The Honourable John C. Jack rejoined the firm as a consultant in upon his return to private legal practice. From its birth in Calgary, the firm grew with the Western economy, expanding to Edmonton and then eastward to Toronto and Ottawa —95, In , we opened in Vancouver. Bennett died in , a week before his 77th birthday; he remains the only prime minister not buried in Canada. Dalhousie University. About Dalhousie University. Home Dal.