King · 1939
Mackenzie King and Canada's seven-day pause
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.
It is twenty past eleven on the morning of Sunday the third of September 1939, in the Prime Minister's office at Laurier House on Laurier Avenue East in Ottawa, in pale late-summer Ontario light. He is sixty-four years old. He is William Lyon Mackenzie King, born at Berlin, Ontario (the town renamed Kitchener in 1916 on the anti-German-name change of the First War), on the seventeenth of December 1874, grandson of the Upper Canada Rebellion leader William Lyon Mackenzie of 1837, schooled at the University of Toronto (BA 1895, MA 1897), Harvard (PhD 1909), and the University of Chicago, in the Liberal Party of Canada since 1900, Prime Minister 1921–26, 1926–30, and (in his third term) since the twenty-third of October 1935.
On the radio in the office is the BBC broadcast of Neville Chamberlain's Downing-Street announcement of fifteen minutes earlier (at 11:15 London time, 7:15 Eastern Canadian time, but King has been listening to the rebroadcast at the Ottawa time of 11:15 Eastern Canadian time, the CBC having relayed the BBC announcement on a four-hour delay through the trans-Atlantic short-wave). Chamberlain's line consequently this country is at war with Germany has just been spoken into the radio.
He thinks: the 1931 Statute of Westminster establishes the principle that the Dominions of the British Commonwealth are sovereign-and-equal under the Crown. The principle has not, until this morning, been put to the decisive constitutional test of the foreign-policy-and-war-declaration domain.
He thinks: Australia and New Zealand have, on Chamberlain's broadcast just now, declared war on the automatic-following principle of the pre-1931 imperial-constitutional convention. The Australian-and-New-Zealand declarations are, in plain reading of the Statute of Westminster, constitutionally unnecessary; the Dominions are sovereign in foreign-policy. The Australian-and-New-Zealand decision to declare automatically is, on the Australian-and-New-Zealand domestic political preference, the political-symbolic statement of loyalty to the Imperial centre.
He thinks: Canada will not declare automatically. The Canadian Parliament will be recalled from the summer recess. The Parliament will debate the question of declaration for the required minimum-period of about three days. The Parliament will vote in favour of the declaration. The declaration will be issued by the King-in-Council of Canada on the tenth of September 1939, seven days after Britain's declaration.
He thinks: the seven-day pause is, in plain reading, the deliberate constitutional-political assertion that the Canadian declaration is a Canadian sovereign act of the Canadian Parliament. The seven-day pause is the political-symbolic statement that Canada is, in September 1939, no longer in the pre-1931 imperial-foreign-policy regime.
Mackenzie King recalled the Canadian Parliament from the summer recess by formal proclamation of the Governor-General Lord Tweedsmuir on the third of September 1939. The Parliament reconvened on the seventh of September. The three-day debate ran from the seventh to the ninth of September on the Address-in-Reply to the Speech-from-the-Throne. King gave a two-and-a-half-hour speech to the House of Commons on the eighth of September, advocating the declaration of war on the explicit grounds that Hitler's Polish invasion was incompatible with the principles of international peace and Commonwealth solidarity. The House voted in favour of the declaration without a recorded division (the vote being procedurally subsumed into the Address-in-Reply); the Senate confirmed on the ninth.
The Canadian declaration of war was issued by the King-in-Council of Canada on the tenth of September 1939, seven days after Britain's declaration. The declaration was the first sovereign-Canadian act of war in the country's constitutional history. Canada contributed about a million men-and-women to the Allied war effort 1939–45 (the First Canadian Army of about three hundred thousand troops in Northwest Europe 1944–45; the Royal Canadian Navy of about ninety-five thousand serving personnel; the Royal Canadian Air Force of about a hundred and fifty thousand) and about forty-five thousand Canadian war-dead, the largest single-country contribution to the Allied war-effort after the British Empire-itself and the Soviet Union.
William Lyon Mackenzie King won the 1940 and 1945 elections, retired on the fifteenth of November 1948 (the Louis St Laurent succession), and died at his Kingsmere country-home in Quebec on the twenty-second of July 1950, seventy-five years old. He is buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto. He served as Prime Minister of Canada for twenty-one years and one hundred and fifty-four days, the longest term of any Westminster-system Prime Minister in history. The Mackenzie-King 1939 Canadian-sovereign-declaration-of-war is, by every careful Canadian-constitutional-historian, the foundational political-symbolic exercise of Canadian sovereignty under the 1931 Statute of Westminster. The Kingsmere estate is, since 1948, a public memorial in the care of the National Capital Commission of Canada.