Mackenzie King and his Liberals returned to power after their general election victory on this date in 1926. They did so after the months-long political battle that historians now call the King-Byng Crisis. It began with the unprecedented decision by Prime Minister King to resign suddenly, leaving the Governor General with no advisor, after Lord Byng refused his request to dissolve Parliament. Had His Excellency done so, King and his government would have avoided a vote of censure by MPs over a swirling scandal in the federal customs department.
With no Prime Minister, Byng was forced to invite Tory leader Arthur Meighen to form a government. A few days later, however, King engineered the defeat of the Meighen government on a confidence motion. The GG, left with no options, then granted PM Meighen’s ensuing request for a dissolution of Parliament, something he had denied King only days before.
Canadians went to the polls after an election campaign that featured King running, it seemed, against the Governor General, while Prime Minister Meighen defended Byng.
Whatever the merits of the cases argued before Canadians by King and Meighen, it was the former who returned to the PMO in the aftermath of the hard-fought campaign that ended on this date in 1926.
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.