R. B. Bennett
R. B. Bennett governed Canada through the worst five years of the Depression and is the only Canadian prime minister buried outside the country. He was a corporate lawyer from Calgary and one of the richest men in the country, having inherited a match-company fortune. He won in 1930 promising to end unemployment or perish in the attempt, and he raised tariffs sharply within weeks of taking office, which is what he had said he would do and which deepened the collapse of a trading economy. The Statute of Westminster was passed in his first full year. It ended the British parliament's power to legislate for the dominions and gave Canada full control of its foreign policy, and it came into force in 1931 with one Canadian exception: the constitution itself stayed in London, because the provinces and Ottawa could not agree how to amend it at home. That took another fifty-one years. His response to the Depression was relief camps run by the defence department, where single unemployed men worked for twenty cents a day. In 1935 the men in the British Columbia camps set off for Ottawa on freight trains. The trek was stopped at Regina, and the police attack on the meeting there killed a plain-clothes detective and a striker. In January 1935, five months before the election, he went on the radio and announced a programme of unemployment insurance, minimum wages and a regulated working week, having read about the American New Deal. Almost nobody believed the conversion, and most of the legislation was struck down as beyond federal power. He lost the election badly, moved to England in 1938, became a viscount, and died there.
- Lived: 1870 CE – 1947 CE
- Nationality: Canadian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
