This article originally appeared in the National Post.
By Patrice Dutil, October 29, 2025
William Lyon Mackenzie King (who had been the Liberal prime minister since 1921) decided that his government would seek re-election on Oct. 29, 1925. He felt he had no choice. The rumbling inside the cabinet was driving him crazy and he was so tired that he even welcomed the idea of being defeated. He was 51 years old. Finally, he told his diary, he could get some rest.
One hundred years ago, the Liberal government was actually reduced to a minority and it faced the Halloween goblins in a dejected state. Much like Mark Carney now, King had to skate hard to rethink his party and survive the votes in the Commons. He didn’t manage, as history unfolded, and the government was handed to the Arthur Meighen Conservatives a few months later.
So why does King still matter today? The answer is simple: success. No Canadian prime minister served longer — 7,828 days, nearly 22 years — and his record is unlikely ever to be matched. Yet longevity alone does not explain King’s achievement. He succeeded because he understood how to build, balance and sustain power in a country chronically divided by region, language and class. Politicians today could learn a few lessons from him.
King’s success rested on four pillars: his ability to forge flexible political coalitions, his management of caucus and cabinet, his growing competence in administration and his sense for the most effective policy at crucial moments. None of these qualities made him visionary or inspiring — he was neither — but they made him effective.
When King became Liberal leader in 1919, Canada was in turmoil. The Winnipeg General Strike had just shaken the country; the Spanish flu still ravaged communities; and deep regional, linguistic and class resentments threatened the fragile national fabric. Yet King navigated these tempests with an extraordinary intuition for political survival. His Liberal party of the 1920s was not a movement of passion or principle; it was a coalition of convenience, anchored in Quebec and the Maritimes, occasionally reinforced by the Prairie progressives. In the 1930s, that coalition shifted westward. By the 1940s, it was reconstituted as a Quebec–Ontario–Maritimes axis. King’s genius lay not in creating unity, but in managing fragmentation.
He was often accused of timidity, and with reason. As the political scientist R. MacGregor Dawson observed in William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Political Biography, King “was always reluctant to venture into the unknown.” He rarely led public opinion; he followed it. He avoided decisions that risked splitting the country, and when forced, he waited until the last possible moment to act. His carefulness was not cowardice — it was calculation. “Government,” King once wrote, “is organized opinion.” He governed not by charisma but by consensus, and his instinct for where that consensus lay was unmatched.
Critics from every direction accused him of emptiness. The left saw him as a manipulator of reformist rhetoric who did little for workers or the poor; the right viewed him as dangerously sentimental. Both were correct — and both missed the point. King’s elasticity was his strength. In a country of perpetual compromise, he made compromise a governing philosophy.
As a manager, King was deliberate and demanding. He recruited exceptional civil servants and ministers and gave them room to act, provided they stayed loyal. He prized education and competence, and by the late 1930s his government had evolved into a sophisticated machine. His cabinet management was equally meticulous. He balanced regions, languages and interests, ensuring no faction ever dominated for long. Even during the bitter conscription crises of the 1940s, when his cabinet nearly fractured, King kept the government intact through a mix of patience, persuasion and timely sacrifice.
The Second World War defined him. From 1939 to 1945, King became the capable wartime leader few expected. He mobilized a nation of 11 million into an industrial and military force of global significance, forging close ties with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill while maintaining Canada’s autonomy. His government’s wartime measures — family allowances, union recognition, veterans’ benefits — laid the foundations of the modern welfare state.
By war’s end, he was exhausted and politically vulnerable. The 1945 election nearly ended his career, but even then, he managed to retain power through a minority. When he finally retired in 1948, he had outlasted every rival and reshaped Canadian politics.
Mackenzie King succeeded because he mastered the art of balance: between ambition and restraint, between unity and division, between leadership and survival. His triumph was not that he changed Canada, but that he kept it together when it might well have fallen apart. In a country that rewards moderation and mistrusts zeal, that remains the ultimate definition of success.
Patrice Dutil is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and editor of The Enduring Riddle of MacKenzie King, a book of essays published by UBC Press.
