CHANNELLING KING AND BYNG

The constitutional crisis of 1926 is still paying it forward nearly a century later

Nearly a century on, the KingByng affair of 1926 is still considered the mother of all constitutional crises in Canada and the example everyone turns to when serious drama breaks out in Parliament.

It all kicked off with a scandal involving customs officials taking bribes to overlook bootlegged U.S. liquor. Faced with censure in the House of Commons, a weakened Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King sought to have Parliament dissolved and a new election called.

At this point, Mackenzie King had been in power for less than a year after the October 1925 election, and had hung onto power in a minority government despite having won fewer seats than his arch-rival, Conservative leader Arthur Meighen.

Governor General Julian Byng was having none of it. He rejected Mackenzie King’s request and asked Meighen to try forming the government instead. Mackenzie King was outraged; he railed against Byng for having the gall to reject the advice of an elected leader.

At any rate, it didn’t last long. Within weeks, Meighan proved unable to keep the confidence of the House and a new election was called. Mackenzie King framed the campaign around the issue of a governor general (who at this time was still a British citizen) doing the bidding of London and interfering in how Canadian politicians run the country. And it worked: Mackenzie King won a majority government. He would go on to win three more elections afterward (and lost one in 1930).

The whole messy affair was beneficial in the long run, though. It helped clarify the relationship between colonial Canada and the imperial centre in Britain, as there was still a sense in the 1920s that the governor general was there to supervise the dominion. In the years afterward — thanks in no small part to Mackenzie King’s insistence — it became firmly established that the governor general acted on the advice of Canadian ministers, not British ones. The Statute of Westminster, signed in 1931, further made it clear that Canada had legislative independence from the British Parliament.

Though Canadian politics still sees moments of tricky situations around minority governments, few have been as controversial as the 2008 coalition crisis — and that’s when the King-Byng lessons paid off. Just weeks after Stephen Harper’s Conservatives won the election with a minority, the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Québécois announced an agreement to jointly defeat them and form a government. The catalyst was a fall fiscal update that included, among other things, a surprise cancelling of the per-vote subsidy that the opposition parties were more reliant on. The deal would make Stéphane Dion prime minister despite having already announced his resignation as Liberal leader.

After much speculation over whether Governor General Michaëlle Jean should allow a new election if requested by Harper, it turned out that question was never put to her. Instead, Harper asked for a prorogation, and Jean agreed to the request. Parliament reconvened nearly two months later, Harper’s government survived, and went on to win the next election with a majority.

For all the world of differences between 2008 and 1926, the debate over the governor general’s role was on much firmer ground. And the country avoided a coalition government that, in retrospect, was even shakier than it seemed at the time. Thanks, King-Byng affair.