With Mackenzie King’s calling of the 1930 election, he found himself facing a Tory leader and party ready for battle. On this date in 1930 R.B. Bennett kicked off his national campaign before an audience of 7,000 people in Winnipeg. As the campaign continued, R.B. used a variation of the same speech at each stop. His biographer, John Boyko, reproduced a section of the Bennett stump speech in his seminal biography of the 11th PM.
“(Canada is) a land endowed by heaven with incalculable wealth,” Bennett would say. “A people free and brave and strong with the strength that comes from the mountains, the prairies, the rivers and the sea. Both untouched by age. A shrine – this Canada – which holds inviolate those laws of truth, justice and equality brought with us when we ourselves came first to this western world. The three, a trinity of power.”
“The task of government -- its great right and privilege – to support this power, to be diligent in the trust you will impose upon it,” Bennett would continue as his audiences cheered, “to achieve, that your labours may not be fruitless, to work, that you may know some leisure, to hold before your eyes the vision that is drawing nearer, the vision built out of a common understanding and a common purpose, with tools forged in the workshops of steadfastness and faith, the vision of the Canada soon to be.”
Even today, all these decades on, it is hard not be swept along by this appeal from Bennett.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.