King

On the third of September 1939, at 11:15 in the morning London time, Neville Chamberlain announced from 10 Downing Street that Britain was at war with Germany on the expiration of the Polish-guarantee ultimatum. Australia and New Zealand declared war the same day on the formal-imperial principle of automatic-following on the British declaration. South Africa declared on the sixth of September after a three-day parliamentary debate. Canada, alone of the Commonwealth Dominions, deliberately delayed. William Lyon Mackenzie King, the sixty-four-year-old Berlin-Ontario-born Prime Minister of Canada (Liberal, 1921–26, 1926–30, and again from 1935), called the Canadian Parliament back from recess and held a three-day debate on the question of whether Canada should declare war. The Canadian Parliament voted in favour of the declaration on the ninth of September; the formal declaration was issued by the King-in-Council on the tenth of September 1939. The seven-day pause was, by every careful judgment of Canadian constitutional historians (Eugene Forsey, J. L. Granatstein), the foundational assertion of Canadian sovereignty under the 1931 Statute of Westminster: the Canadian declaration of war was a Canadian sovereign act of the Canadian Parliament, not an automatic-imperial follow-on from the British declaration. Mackenzie King held the Prime Ministership through the war-and-post-war period and is, by every careful Canadian-political-historian, the longest-serving Westminster-system Prime Minister in history at twenty-one years and one hundred and fifty-four days.

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