William Lyon Mackenzie King (redirected from McKenzie King)

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.