King, William Lyon Mackenzie

King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 1874–1950, Canadian political leader, b. Kitchener, Ont.; grandson of William Lyon Mackenzie. An expert on labor questions, he served in Wilfrid Laurier's Liberal administration as deputy minister of labor (1900–1908) and minister of labor (1909–11) and was editor (1900–1908) of the Labour Gazette. He first served in the House of Commons from 1909 to 1911, and during World War I he was engaged (1914–17) in investigating industrial relations in the United States. Chosen in 1919 to succeed Laurier as leader of the Liberal party, Mackenzie King led the opposition in Parliament until 1921, when he became prime minister, a post he filled, except for a brief interval in 1926, until 1930. Leader of the opposition during Richard Bedford Bennett's government (1930–35), he afterward again served (1935–48) as prime minister. Called upon to guide Canadian affairs during World War II, King enunciated his position in Canada at Britain's Side (1941) and Canada and the Fight for Freedom (1944). In 1940 he concluded with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt the Ogdensburg Agreement and in 1941, the Hyde Park Declaration; by these Canada and the United States agreed to create a permanent joint board of defense and to cooperate in the production of defense materials. King served as chairman of the Canadian delegation at the conference (1945) in San Francisco to draft the Charter of the United Nations and at the Paris Conference of 1946. With President Harry Truman and Prime Minister Clement Attlee of Great Britain, he signed in 1945 the Washington declaration on atomic energy.

Bibliography

See biography by R. M. Dawson (Vol. I, 1958) and H. B. Neatby (Vol. II, 1963); J. W. Pickersgill and D. F. Forster, The Mackenzie King Record (4 vol., 1960–70); J. E. Esberey, Knight of the Holy Spirit: A Study of William Lyon Mackenzie King (1980).

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King, William Lyon Mackenzie 

Born Dec. 17, 1874, in Berlin (now Kitchener), Ontario; died July 22, 1950, in Kingsmere, Quebec. Canadian statesman.

King served as minister of labor from 1909 to 1911. From 1919 to 1948 he was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. He served as prime minister from 1921 to 1926, from 1926 to 1930, and from 1935 to 1948. In 1942, King’s government established diplomatic relations with the USSR; in the postwar period his government’s policies led to a sharp worsening of Soviet-Canadian relations. King’s foreign policy was based on the idea of weakening Canada’s dependence on Great Britain and strengthening Canada’s ties with the US in every way possible. King pursued an antiworker policy, which he concealed behind a bourgeois theory about the mediatory role of the state in relations between capital and the workers.