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The following is excerpter from William Watson's review of In Search of R.B. Bennett by P.B. Waite.
One of the strangest things I’ve read in a long time concerns the final day of the Parliament that met between 1930 and 1935. After five of the hardest years in Canada’s economic and political history it convened for the last time on July 5, 1935. The mood of the House, according to Mackenzie King’s diary entry that day, was sad and sentimental. King himself, leader of the Opposition, got a great laugh by asking all Conservative members expecting to be appointed to the Senate to please rise. A Conservative member returned the favour, to at least equal laughter, by asking all Liberal members who thought they’d be cabinet ministers after the coming election to so indicate. King then crossed the floor and shook hands with Prime Minister R. B. Bennett, after which the MPs sang Alouette, Show me the way to go home, and Auld Lang Syne. King wrote that “he’d never seen the Commons in such a friendly mood.”
Can you imagine the current generation of MPs laughing and joshing and breaking into song on the eve of a federal election? (That October, the Liberals won 173 seats to the Conservatives’ 40, though Bennett’s party did get 30 per cent of the vote.) For that matter, are there songs to which all MPs would know the words, except maybe Na-na-Na-na Hey Hey Goodbye? They certainly couldn’t sing Alouette in 2012: It’s about serially plucking a lark, which would have the animal cruelty people bringing suit.
I get this vignette from In Search of R.B. Bennett, P.B. Waite’s lovely new biography, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Waite, who was born in 1922 and was therefore just entering his teens in 1935, is the distinguished Dalhousie historian, author of two previous prime ministerial biographies (on John A. Macdonald and John Thompson). He brings the vividness of personal recollection to his chapter on everyday life in Canada in the 1920s: watching “big, black (steam) engines going by, fascinated by the elemental force of ruthless driving wheels and hissing pistons”; testing “that force by putting one of the big Canadian 1927 pennies on the track to see how the train would flatten it”; bringing up coal from the basement in mid-winter to stoke the furnace; once in a while enjoying the rare luxury of fresh fruit out of season; and, above all, singing.
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