It is like discovering a Canadian prime minister we never knew we had, a 23rd prime minister in a previously known roster of 22.Richard Bedford Bennett , Liberal-Conservative prime minister through the grim Great Depression, a millionaire grain company owner and railway lawyer, father of the Bennett Buggy and a caricature of privileged wealth in a land of want, was a left wing radical?So says John Boyko, dean of history at Ontario’s Lakefield College School and author of a new biography of Bennett that sets his image as a heartless big business capitalist on its head. And he uses the record to make a credible argument that Bennett’s hard-hearted image is the product of Liberal and media propaganda rather than reality.Consider this description of the 1935 federal election that saw William Lyon Mackenzie King and the Liberals demolish the Conservatives:“Bennett had situated the Conservative party on the crowded ideological left. All Canadians who saw value in such a political point of view, and the programs that view inspired, had a host of electoral choices. Meanwhile, Mackenzie King had for years been inching the Liberals to the centre-right.”It is Canadian history as we’ve never read it. Of course, the facts remain. Bennett was a wealthy lawyer and industrialist living well while millions of his fellow Canadians sank into poverty and desperation.He was despised as an uncaring capitalist and thoroughly rejected by Canadian voters in 1935 and the Conservative party in 1938. He did leave the country to live in a luxurious country estate in England, taking a seat in the House of Lords and becoming the only former prime minister to abandon his country.But Boyko makes an argument that Bennett’s famous 1935 radio addresses that proposed a series of state programs to deal with the Depression, including help for farmers and creation of the Canadian Wheat Board, were not, as King called them, a “death bed repentance” with an election looming but a reflection of Bennett’s life-long belief in the need for government to counterbalance capitalism.The party election platform approved at the 1927 Winnipeg convention that elected Bennett leader promised help to farmers that the King Liberals were denying.“We pledge ourselves to foster and develop agriculture and the livestock and dairy industries now so sadly neglected,” said the platform, highly influenced by the new leader.It was consistent with his record.In 1911 as a rookie MP from Calgary, Bennett had used his maiden parliamentary speech to call on his government to help prairie farmers by constructing and regulating grain elevators for storage and marketing.And in 1914, after a prairie drought, Bennett pressed his government to offer unprecedented farm aid.“It is even true that the children of the farmers in some instances have been suffering from the pangs of hunger, almost starvation, and under these circumstances, the government relief is absolutely necessary,” he told the CommonsIt is not the hard-hearted anti-government R.B. Bennett we thought we knew. Like NDP icon J.S. Woodsworth, he was a disciple of the social gospel. Who knew?
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