

The Liberals' overwhelming triumph in the 1940 election allowed King to continue leading Canada through the war. Days after the Second World War broke out, Canadian troops were deployed. The government also established Trans-Canada Air Lines (the precursor to Air Canada) and the National Film Board. King negotiated the 1935 Reciprocal Trade Agreement with the United States, passed the 1938 National Housing Act to improve housing affordability, introduced unemployment insurance in 1940, and in 1944, introduced family allowances – Canada's first universal welfare program. Soon after, the economy was on an upswing. The Conservative government's response to the depression was heavily unpopular, and thus, King returned to power in a landslide victory in the 1935 election. King's slow reaction to the Great Depression led to a defeat at the polls in 1930 at the hands of the Conservatives. His government also introduced old-age pensions based on need and removed taxes on cables, telegrams, and railway and steamship tickets. After this, King sought to make Canada's foreign policy more independent by expanding the Department of External Affairs while recruiting more Canadian diplomats. King and the Liberals decisively won the resulting election. This sequence of events triggered a major constitutional crisis, the King–Byng affair. Byng refused and instead invited the Conservatives to form government, who briefly held office but lost a motion of no confidence. In 1926, facing a Commons vote that could force his government to resign, King asked Governor General Lord Byng to dissolve parliament and call an election. In the 1925 election, the Conservatives won a plurality of seats, but the Liberals negotiated support from the agrarian Progressive Party and stayed in office as a minority government. King established a post-war agenda that lowered wartime taxes, moderately reduced tariffs, and evolved the national capital, Ottawa. Taking the helm of a party bitterly torn apart during the First World War due to the Conscription Crisis of 1917, he unified both the pro- conscription and anti-conscription factions of the party, leading it to victory in the 1921 federal election. Following the death of Laurier in 1919, King acceded to the leadership of the Liberal Party and won a by-election to re-enter the Commons shortly after. After losing his seat in the 1911 federal election, King worked for the Rockefeller Foundation before briefly working as an industrial consultant. He entered the House of Commons in 1908 before becoming the federal minister of labour in 1909, serving under Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier. In 1900, he became deputy minister of the Canadian government's new Department of Labour. He later obtained a PhD – the only Canadian prime minister to have done so. With a total of 21 years and 154 days in office, he remains the longest-serving prime minister in Canadian history.īorn in Berlin, Ontario (now Kitchener), King studied law and political economy in the 1890s and became concerned with issues of social welfare.

He played a major role in laying the foundations of the Canadian welfare state and established Canada's international reputation as a middle power fully committed to world order. King is best known for his leadership of Canada throughout the Great Depression and the Second World War. A Liberal, he was the dominant politician in Canada from the early 1920s to the late 1940s.
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William Lyon Mackenzie King OM CMG PC (Decem– July 22, 1950) was a Canadian statesman and politician who served as the 10th prime minister of Canada for three non-consecutive terms from 1921 to 1926, 1926 to 1930, and 1935 to 1948. Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto, Ontario
