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The 1930 Canadian federal election was held on July 28, 1930, to elect members of the House of Commons of the 17th Parliament of
Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by to ...
.
Richard Bedford Bennett Richard Bedford Bennett, 1st Viscount Bennett, (July 3, 1870 – June 26, 1947), was a Canadian lawyer, businessman, philanthropist, and politician who served as the 11th prime minister of Canada from 1930 to 1935. Bennett was born in ...
's
Conservative Party The Conservative Party is a name used by many political parties around the world. These political parties are generally right-wing though their exact ideologies can range from center-right to far-right. Political parties called The Conservative P ...
won a
majority government A majority government is a government by one or more governing parties that hold an absolute majority of seats in a legislature. This is as opposed to a minority government, where the largest party in a legislature only has a plurality of seats ...
, defeating the Liberal Party led by
Prime Minister A prime minister, premier or chief of cabinet is the head of the cabinet and the leader of the ministers in the executive branch of government, often in a parliamentary or semi-presidential system. Under those systems, a prime minister is ...
William Lyon Mackenzie King.


Background

The first signs of the
Great Depression The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...
were clearly evident by the 1930 election, and Conservative party leader Richard Bennett campaigned on a platform of aggressive measures in order to combat it. Part of the reason for Bennett's success lay in the Liberals' own handling of the rising unemployment of 1930. Touting the Liberal formula as the reason for the economic prosperity of the 1920s, for example, left the Liberals carrying much of the responsibility, whether deserved or not, for the consequences of the crash of the American stock market. King was apparently oblivious to the rising unemployment that greeted the 1930s, and continued to laud his government's hand in Canada's prosperity. Demands for aid were met with accusations of being the part of a great "Tory conspiracy," which led King to make his famous "''five-cent piece''" outburst, alienating a growing number of voters. In retrospect, one can understand King's reasoning. Both the Western mayors and provincial Premiers who had visited King with requests of relief were overwhelmingly Conservative: in the Premiers' case, seven out of nine. King concluded in Parliamentary debates that though aid was a provincial jurisdiction, the fact that he believed there to be no unemployment problem meant that the requests from the provinces appeared to be nothing more than political grandstanding. The Federal Conservatives had certainly exaggerated the Depression in its early stages solely to attack King's government. Several other factors entered into King's defeat. Although obtaining funds from sometimes dubious sources was not a problem, the Liberal election machine was not as efficient as it once was, primarily due to the cause of the age and poor health of many chief strategists. King's campaign was the epitome of Murphy's law: every campaign stop appeared to meet the Prime Minister with some kind of mishap. By contrast, Bennett's Conservatives were electric. The self-made man who led them had practically rebuilt his party (a significant part of it with his own funds) and developed an election machine which could rival the Liberals'. Aside from superior party organization, the Tories used it. They bought out newspapers in key areas (notably the Liberal strongholds of the West, and Quebec) and ensured that pro-Tory slants were kept. In the first election where radio played an important role, Bennett's vibrant, zealous voice was extremely preferable to King's. (The Tory machine, of course, ensured that only the best radio spots were available to Bennett.) Also, Bennett's tariff policy, epitomized by his infamous promise to "blast" Canada's way into world markets, was extremely well received in the key Liberal strongholds of the West and Quebec. In the West, agricultural production had been hurt by worldwide overproduction, and certain agricultural groups in Quebec firmly endorsed Bennett's tariff policy. Bennett's Conservatives won much of the former Progressive and Farmers' vote in the West, and they were elected with 44% of the popular vote in Quebec as a protest vote. All those factors led to Bennett's eventual election. Canadian voters agreed with Bennett and the Conservatives were elected with a majority of 137 seats in the House Of Commons. The incumbent Liberals under William Lyon Mackenzie King became the official opposition after being reduced to 89. The Progressives continued their decline, winning only three seats. The United Farmers of Alberta did somewhat better - despite finishing third place in the popular vote in that province they managed to hold on to nine of its seventeen seats (of which the UFA only contested ten). This would be the last federal election the Progressives or the UFA would win any seats. Unfortunately for Bennett and the Conservatives, the Depression brought complex problems to politicians and extreme hardship for most Canadians. Bennett and the Conservatives lost the 1935 election to the Liberals under the previous
Prime Minister A prime minister, premier or chief of cabinet is the head of the cabinet and the leader of the ministers in the executive branch of government, often in a parliamentary or semi-presidential system. Under those systems, a prime minister is ...
William Lyon Mackenzie King, and would not return to government until 1957.


National results

Note: * The party did not nominate candidates in the previous election.


Vote and seat summaries


Results by province

* xx - less than 0.05% of the popular vote


See also

*
17th Canadian Parliament The 17th Canadian Parliament was in session from 8 September 1930, until 14 August 1935. The membership was set by the 1930 federal election on 28 July 1930, and it changed only somewhat due to resignations and by-elections until it was disso ...
*
List of Canadian federal general elections This article provides a summary of results for Canadian general elections (where all seats are contested) to the House of Commons, the elected lower half of Canada's federal bicameral legislative body, the Parliament of Canada. The number o ...
* List of political parties in Canada


References


Further reading

* {{election canada Federal 1930 July 1930 events