My great aunt Joy was born on September 9, 1926, and she died on January 1, 2017, the same day I started this blog. Having just experienced 2016, when so many beloved celebrities had suddenly and unexpectedly died, I remember thinking, while nursing a dull hangover in a Montreal hotel room, “Joy made it out alive.”
I also thought about what a long time 90 years is, and what a different world Joy must have been born into. She was born just eight years after the conclusion of the Great War (which everyone knew) and 13 years before the beginning of its sequel (which no one knew). There were reasons for both hope and concern on that front. The day before Joy was born, Germany was formally admitted to the League of Nations. Two days after she was born, Benito Mussolini, already the fascist leader of Italy, escaped an assassination attempt (not his first).
Joy was also born in a significant year for both Ontario and federal political history. The Premier of Ontario at the time was Howard Ferguson, which is worth mentioning because when Joy was just two months old he was reelected on a promise to end prohibition by creating the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. The Lieutenant Governor of Ontario at the time was Henry Cockshutt, which is worth mentioning because lol “Cockshutt.”
The reelection of Ferguson was the second general election of Joy’s life. When Joy was only five days old, William Lyon Mackenzie King’s Liberal party won a general federal election, making him Prime Minister again after a break of a few months following the King-Byng affair.
If a common theme of this blog has been “stuff you should have learned in history class,” the King-Byng affair belongs in the opposite category of events that are absolutely always cited in any overview of Canadian history. And certainly, Joy was born into one of the most consequential periods of Canadian political history.
The sequence of Prime Minsters of Canada from this era, between 1920-1948, looks like this:
- Arthur Meighen
- William Lyon Mackenzie King
- Arthur Meighen
- William Lyon Mackenzie King
- R. B. Bennett
- William Lyon Mackenzie King
That is silly, what a silly time.
The King-Byng affair (sometimes known as the King-Byng Thing, which is such an obviously superior name it’s annoying that it’s not the more common one) was a constitutional crisis in which Mackenzie King asked the Governor General, the Lord Byng of Vimy (sometimes known as Julian, which is such an obviously inferior name it’s no wonder he went by the other one) to dissolve parliament and call an election. Byng refused, saying that Arthur Meighen’s Conservatives should have a chance to form a government first.
Both the Prime Minister and the Governor General insisted that they were in the right, and that the other was effectively outside the bounds of the constitution. And what do you do in such a situation?
What’s fun about this is that British parliamentary systems operate so much on convention and nuance that to this day experts disagree on if Byng was right or not to refuse Mackenzie King’s request. What’s less fun is the reminder that democratic norms are so malleable and fragile that it’s almost easy to suddenly not know if a democracy is still healthy and functioning.
Democracy isn’t binary, it’s a spectrum. Democracies oscillate between being more or less democratic all the time. Defining where the safe guardrails are — the exact point on the spectrum when you would no longer consider a country to be a democracy — is a subjective task. So too with declaring if a country enjoys the “rule of law,” a concept that not only fluctuates with time, but even gets applied differently at a single moment in time depending on a person’s race, gender, wealth, and other irrelevant factors.
For example, when Joy was born, women were not yet legally considered “persons” under the law for some purposes, women in Quebec weren’t able to vote in provincial elections, and some Asian and Indigenous men and women weren’t able to vote federally.
Anyway, back to the Thing, because Byng refused to call an election, Meighen got to become prime minister for his second time in the summer of 1926, a few months before Joy was born. But at this time, by convention, MPs had to resign and run for reelection if they were appointed to cabinet. That was a problem for Meighen’s tenuous hold on power, and it led to his government being brought down, and to the election when Joy was five days old, that made Mackenzie King prime minister for his second time.
That election, and the reaction to what some perceived to be a British Lord’s interference in Canadian democracy, was part of a process that finally led to Canada formally gaining more control over its own laws in 1931, when Joy was five. Canada didn’t also gain control over its own constitution until Joy turned 55.
From my perspective Joy was the most important Canadian born in 1926, but she shared a birth year with others including Leslie Nielsen, Dalton McGuinty Sr, and Ben Wicks. She also shared a birth year with Queen Elizabeth II. (Well, one of her birthdays at least.)
While 1926 was an important year, lots happened in the next 90 years as well. Joy was born much closer to Canadian Confederation — 59 years — than to #Canada150, 91 years later. When Joy was born Canada was a different shape, with a big Newfoundland-and-Labrador-shaped hole missing from its eastern border. About 90 sovereign nation states that existed the day Joy died did not exist the day she was born, averaging one new nation for every year of her life. At least 20 new islands were created during Joy’s lifetime, including at least one in Canada.
As the pace of political, technological, and climactic change accelerates, it’s impossible to imagine what the world will look like a lifetime from now.