Mackenzie King and Canada's seven-day pause

Sovereignty is rarely declared in the abstract. It is declared in the interval a country chooses to leave between somebody else's telegram and its own. A week is nothing in the life of a nation; a week, used correctly, is everything. The constitutional documents have already been signed, the lawyers have already agreed, the statute is already eight years old on the books. What remains is the small physical act by which a country shows itself, to itself, behaving as the thing the paper says it is.

THE GRANDSON OF THE REBEL

William Lyon Mackenzie King was sixty-four years old in the September of 1939, and the name he carried had been a political object in Upper Canada for a hundred and two years. His grandfather, the first William Lyon Mackenzie, had ridden down Yonge Street in 1837 at the head of an armed column against the Family Compact and the Crown's Lieutenant-Governor, lost, fled across the Niagara into exile, and returned a quarter-century later neither rehabilitated nor entirely disowned. The grandson was the inversion: cautious where the old man had been reckless, ecclesiastical where the old man had been incendiary, a Harvard PhD in political economy where the old man had been a Dundee printer with a pamphleteer's grievances. He had been Prime Minister of Canada in 1921, again in 1926, and a third time since October 1935. He had been born at Berlin, Ontario, on the seventeenth of December 1874; the town had renamed itself Kitchener in 1916 under the pressure of the First War, and the renaming was the kind of fact he kept by him. He had spent his political life refusing to be hurried, and refusing to be hurried was the temperamental form of a constitutional argument.

THE BROADCAST FROM DOWNING STREET

On the morning of Sunday the third of September 1939, the office at Laurier House on Laurier Avenue East was in the pale, slanted light of late Ottawa summer. The radio was on. The CBC was relaying the BBC short-wave from London on the trans-Atlantic delay. At a quarter past eleven Ottawa time, Neville Chamberlain's voice, dry and tired and unsuited to the sentence it was about to say, came through the speaker grille and pronounced that consequently this country is at war with Germany. The Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies had already, by then, told Australians over the wireless that as a result, Australia is also at war. New Zealand had said the same. The two southern Dominions had read Chamberlain's sentence as a sentence read out for them. In Pretoria, Hertzog was already losing the argument that would put Smuts in his place and bring South Africa in three days later. Only in Ottawa was the radio set down and nothing said.

THE WEEK THAT WAS NOT ANNOUNCED

The Statute of Westminster of 1931 had, in plain words, made the Dominions equal in status under the Crown and competent in their own external affairs. The statute had not yet been tried on the largest question a foreign-policy can ask. King had been at the imperial conferences. He knew the architecture. He understood, as he understood the weather over Kingsmere, that an automatic following on Britain's declaration would write the architecture out of the document by the simple force of habit. The Dominions of Australia and New Zealand had chosen, on their own domestic temper, to declare with London on the principle of the older convention; that was their constitutional right and their political preference, and he held no quarrel with it. Canada had a different temper. Quebec would not be told its sons were at war by a wireless from Downing Street. The Liberal Party held together on the understanding that Parliament, and Parliament alone, would speak. He had given Ernest Lapointe his word on the matter years before, and the word stood. The pause was not hesitation. The pause was the constitutional act itself, lengthened until it could be seen.

THE SECOND IN THE OFFICE

He sat for some moments after Chamberlain finished, with the radio still on, the dial filling the room with the soft hiss of a closed Atlantic. The decision had been made weeks ago, in private memoranda, in correspondence with Tweedsmuir at Rideau Hall, in the silences between cabinet sessions. What sat in front of him now was not the decision but its execution: whether, in the next minutes, he would speak to a microphone himself and ratify the imperial sentence at Ottawa speed, or whether he would do the slower, harder, more Canadian thing of summoning the elected House. To speak now was to be one of the Dominions; to wait was to be a country. A man trained in his grandfather's discipline of grievance might have spoken now and let the rhetoric do the work. He had not been trained in his grandfather's discipline. He had been trained, at Toronto and at Harvard and in the Rockefeller offices and in twenty years of caucus rooms, in the discipline of letting the institutions speak for themselves and taking the credit for their silence. The seven days, when he counted them, fitted: a formal proclamation today through the Governor-General, a recall of members from across a continent by rail, the three sitting days the Speech-from-the-Throne would require, the Address-in-Reply, the King-in-Council on the tenth. The arithmetic was constitutional, not theatrical, and the more constitutional it looked the more it would do. He rose, eventually, and went to his desk to draft the language that would put the recall in motion.

THE RECALL AND THE SPEECH

The proclamation went out under the hand of Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor-General, on the third of September. Members took the trains east from Vancouver and Victoria, west from the Maritimes, up from Windsor and London and the lake towns. Parliament reconvened on Thursday the seventh of September in the chamber on Wellington Street. The debate ran on the Address-in-Reply to the Speech-from-the-Throne, and it ran for three sitting days. On the eighth, King rose in the House of Commons and spoke for two and a half hours. He argued the declaration on the grounds of the German invasion of Poland, the incompatibility of that invasion with any settled peace, and the obligations of Commonwealth association freely entered upon. Lapointe spoke for Quebec, against conscription for overseas service, for the declaration. J. S. Woodsworth of the CCF, alone, opposed; the House heard him out, and let him sit. The Address carried without a recorded division on the ninth. The Senate concurred the same day. On Sunday the tenth of September 1939, the King-in-Council of Canada issued the declaration of war against the German Reich. It was the first sovereign Canadian act of war in the country's history.

THE COUNTRY THAT WENT

What the seven days had purchased was paid for at length and in full. About a million Canadian men and women served in the war that followed. The First Canadian Army of roughly three hundred thousand fought through Northwest Europe in 1944 and 1945, from the Normandy beaches to the Scheldt and into the Netherlands. The Royal Canadian Navy grew to some ninety-five thousand serving and ran the convoys across the North Atlantic. The Royal Canadian Air Force put roughly a hundred and fifty thousand into uniform and trained the Empire's aircrews on the prairie airfields under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. About forty-five thousand Canadians did not come home. After the British Empire taken together and the Soviet Union, no single country gave more to the Allied effort. The declaration that authorised that giving had been made, not at the Imperial centre, but on the floor of a Parliament summoned for the purpose.

THE RETURN TO KINGSMERE

Mackenzie King won the 1940 election and won 1945. He retired on the fifteenth of November 1948 and handed the office to Louis Saint-Laurent. He died at Kingsmere, his country place in the Gatineau Hills north of Ottawa, on the twenty-second of July 1950, in his seventy-sixth year, and was buried at Mount Pleasant in Toronto beside his mother. His twenty-one years and one hundred and fifty-four days in office remain the longest tenure of any Prime Minister in the Westminster system. The week he took in September 1939 is read now, by the constitutional historians who reach for it, as the moment when the Statute of Westminster acquired its working meaning; the act, rather than the document, by which Canada became competent in its own wars. A country is what it does in the interval it leaves. The Kingsmere estate, with its lawns and its assembled fragments of stone from the bombed Houses of Parliament at Westminster, has been kept in public hands since his death by the National Capital Commission, and the ruins he arranged there in the years before the war stand open to anyone who walks up through the hills.