Bennett

Disponibilité:
Ebook en format EPUB. Disponible pour téléchargement immédiat après la commande.

Protection:
Filigrane

Année de parution:
2012

ISBN-13: 9780864927446

<p>In the late 1920s, Canada&#39;s economy was showing all the signs of a full-fledged depression. Life savings were evaporating, unemployment was up, and exports were dramatically down. Riding on the popularity of his promise to &#34;blast&#34; Canada&#39;s way into world markets &#8212; and thus stop the economy&#39;s downward spiral &#8212; Richard Bedford Bennett defeated William Lyon Mackenzie King at the polls on July 28, 1930, and assumed the leadership of the country. Over the next five years, however, Bennett&#39;s name became synonymous with the worst of the Depression &#8212; from Bennett buggies, to Bennett tea, to Bennett-burghs.</p> <p>Eighty years later, he is widely viewed as a difficult man, an ineffectual leader, and a politician who &#34;flip-flopped&#34; on his conservative beliefs in exchange for popularity. John Boyko offers not only the first major biography of the man, but a fresh perspective on the old scholarship. Boyko looks at the Prime Minister&#39;s sometimes controversial and often misunderstood policies through a longer lens, one that shows not a politician angling for votes, but rather a man following through on a life-long dedication to a greater role for government in society and the economy. It is easy to understand why Bennett has been so misunderstood. It is not often, after all, that a Conservative Prime Minister finds himself to the left of his Liberal opposition, but that it exactly where Bennett landed. Bennett&#39;s New Deal &#8212; a series of proposals that included unemployment insurance; the establishment of a minimum wage and limits on work hours; an extension of federally backed farm credit; fair-trade and anti-monopoly legislation; and a revamped Wheat Board to oversee and control grain prices &#8212; was certainly a departure from the Conservative politics of the day. The same could be said for his creation of the Bank of Canada and the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission.</p> <p>Boyko explores the origins and hardening of those beliefs as he details Bennett&#39;s birth &#40;into relative poverty&#41; in Hopewell Cape, New Brunswick, his stunning success as a corporate lawyer and financial entrepreneur in Calgary, his years in politics, and his eventual retirement in England. As he ranges through the ups and downs of his subject&#39;s career, Boyko also invites his reader to compare the challenges faced by Bennett to those faced in Canada&#39;s more recent history. Nearly every other Canadian prime minister finds his or her way into the analysis, with Bennett&#39;s beliefs and actions measured against theirs.</p>