King Byng Affair

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The King Byng Affair was a constitutional crisis that occurred in Canada in 1926 . It was triggered when Governor General Lord Byng of Vimy refused to comply with Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King's request to dissolve Parliament and call for a new election.

The crisis was carefully analyzed by the governments of Canada and Great Britain and led to a redefinition of the role of the governor general - not only in Canada but also in the rest of the Dominions . It also had a major impact on the Imperial Conference that year and led to the Balfour Report . Under the constitutional conventions of the British Empire , the Governor General previously represented both the British head of state and the British government. But the convention developed into a tradition of non-interference in Canadian politics under Lord Byng's successors.

Course of the crisis

Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King
Governor General Lord Byng of Vimy

In September 1925, King asked for the dissolution of the House of Commons , which Lord Byng granted. In the October 29, 1925 election, the Conservative Party won 115 seats and narrowly missed an absolute majority, while King's Liberal Party only got 100 seats. King relied on the support of the Progressive Party (which had 24 seats) to win a majority. He did not resign and formed a minority government backed by the progressives. Strictly speaking, it was not a coalition government , as the progressives did not receive any ministerial posts and therefore did not belong to the cabinet.

A few months later, it was revealed that a King-appointed officer in the Customs Department had accepted bribes. The Conservatives claimed that corruption reached the highest levels of government, including the Prime Minister. King dismissed Customs Minister Jacques Bureau , but promptly proposed to the Governor General that Bureau be appointed Senator . This action caused further consternation among progressives, who had already begun to withdraw their support from the liberal government.

The government had already lost two votes on procedural issues and feared it would lose a third because of the corruption affair. King turned to Byng and requested that Parliament be dissolved, but the Governor General refused to do so. He argued that the Conservatives, as the party with the largest number of voters, should be given the opportunity to form a government before a possible new election. Byng was aware that the dissolution of Parliament during the debate on a vote of no confidence could be viewed as interference by the Crown in the freedom of speech in the House of Commons. King asked Byng to seek advice from the British government beforehand. Byng also refused, saying the matter should be resolved in Canada alone.

Convinced that he no longer had the support to remain in office, King resigned on June 28, 1926. Thereupon Byng commissioned the conservative party chairman Arthur Meighen with the formation of a government. Meighen accepted, but only appointed his ministers "provisionally"; they were not sworn in because the government still had a vote of confidence in the lower house and, according to the law of the time, new ministers had to automatically face re-election. The liberals were angry and convinced most of the progressives to overthrow the government. On July 2, she lost the one-vote vote and it was Meighen who moved that Parliament should be dissolved. Byng agreed and called an early election .

In a letter to King George V , Byng expressed astonishment that King, a staunch supporter of greater Canadian autonomy, had asked him to seek advice from the Colonial Office in London on this matter. Byng refused to do so because he saw resolving the crisis as the Governor General's responsibility. Byng wrote: “I will have to await the verdict of history to prove whether I have taken a wrong turn. I do this with the conviction that - whether right or wrong - I have acted in the interests of Canada and have not involved anyone else in my decision. "

consequences

The "King Byng Affair" became the main topic of the election campaign. King managed to rhetorically turn it into a campaign for Canada's independence from Great Britain, even though he himself had called for British interference and Byng had refused. The September 14, 1926 election ended with a victory for the Liberals (who missed the majority) and King was sworn in again as Prime Minister. Back in power, King’s government sought to redefine the role of governor general; he was no longer to represent the British government, but exclusively to represent the head of state. This change met with approval from the rest of the Dominions and the British government at the Imperial Conference .

The Balfour Report , the final document of the conference, stated that the Governor General would no longer represent the British Government in any Dominion. This role was taken over by the High Commissioners , whose duties soon corresponded to those of ambassadors. Five years later, the Westminster Statute gave the Dominions legislative freedom and stipulated that the Canadian monarchy was legally equal to the British. Byng returned to Great Britain on September 30, 1926. Despite the political crisis, he continued to enjoy a high reputation.

The King Byng affair was seen as the most controversial interference by a governor general in the domestic politics of a Commonwealth state until 1975 when John Robert Kerr removed Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam from his office.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ RH Hubbard: Rideau Hall: An illustrated history of Government House, Ottawa, from Victorian times to the present day (p. 158). McGill-Queen's University Press, Montréal 1977. ISBN 978-0-7735-0310-6
  2. ↑ Harold Nicolson : King George the Fifth, His Life and Reign (pp. 475-477). Constable, London 1952. ISBN 978-0-09-453181-9

Web links