William Lyon Mackenzie King OM CMG PC (December 17, 1874 – July 22, 1950) was a Canadian statesman and politician who was the tenth prime minister of Canada for three non-consecutive terms from 1921 to 1926, 1926 to 1930, and 1935 to 1948.

He strengthened Canadian autonomy by refusing to support Britain in the Chanak Crisis without Parliament's consent and negotiating the Halibut Treaty with the United States without British interference.

In 1926, facing a Commons vote that could force his government to resign, King asked Governor General Lord Byng to dissolve parliament and call an election.

In August 1944, he ordered the displacement of Japanese Canadians out of the British Columbia Interior, mandating that they either resettle east of the Rocky Mountains or face deportation to Japan after the war.

In his final years in office, King and his government partnered Canada with other Western nations to take part in the deepening Cold War, introduced Canadian citizenship, and successfully negotiated Newfoundland's entry into Confederation.

He was in close touch, behind the scenes, with Vice-Chancellor William Mulock, for whom the strike provided a chance to embarrass his rivals Chancellor Edward Blake and President James Loudon.

King failed to gain his immediate objective, a teaching position at the university but earned political credit with Mulock, the man who would invite him to Ottawa and make him a deputy minister only five years later.

[25] In 1901, King's roommate and best friend, Henry Albert Harper, died heroically during a skating party when a young woman fell through the ice of the partly frozen Ottawa River.

He never gave up his Ottawa home, and travelled to the United States on an as-needed basis, performing service to the war effort by helping to keep war-related industries running smoothly.

The Liberal party became deeply split, with several Anglophones joining the pro-conscription Union government, a coalition controlled by the Conservatives under Prime Minister Robert Borden.

He outmaneuvered more senior competitors by embracing Laurier's legacy, championing labour interests, calling for welfare reform, and offering solid opposition to the Conservative rivals.

[6] As prime minister of Canada, King was appointed to the Privy Council of the United Kingdom on 20 June 1922[41] and was sworn at Buckingham Palace on October 11, 1923,[42] during the 1923 Imperial Conference.

Their effective and passionate leader, Thomas Crerar, resigned to return to his grain business, and was replaced by the more placid Robert Forke, who joined King's cabinet in 1926 as Minister of Immigration and Colonization after becoming a Liberal-Progressive.

[52]` In June 1926, King, facing a House of Commons vote connected to the customs scandal that could force his government to resign, advised the Governor General, Lord Byng, to dissolve Parliament and call another election.

If membership within the British Commonwealth means participation by the Dominions in any and every war in which Great Britain becomes involved, without consultation, conference, or agreement of any kind in advance, I can see no hope for an enduring relationship.

After the King–Byng episode, King recruited many high-calibre people for the new venture, including future prime minister Lester Pearson and influential career administrators Norman Robertson and Hume Wrong.

Though he gave the impression of sympathy with progressive and liberal causes, he had no enthusiasm for the New Deal of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (which Bennett eventually tried to emulate, after floundering without solutions for several years), and he never advocated massive government action to alleviate the Depression in Canada.

King also denounced the "blank cheques" that Parliament was asked to approve for relief and delayed the passage of these bills despite the objections of some Liberals, who feared the public might conclude that the party had no sympathy for those struggling.

Using the slogan "King or Chaos",[73] the Liberals won a landslide victory, winning 173 out of the Commons' 245 seats and reducing the Conservatives to a rump of 40; this was the largest majority government at the time.

Upon his return to office in October 1935, he demonstrated a commitment (like his American counterpart Roosevelt) to the underprivileged, speaking of a new era where "poverty and adversity, want and misery are the enemies which liberalism will seek to banish from the land".

However, some colleagues, to King's surprise, opposed that idea and instead favoured job creation to stimulate the economy, citing British economist John Maynard Keynes's theory that governments could increase employment by spending during times of low private investment.

[100] After 1936, the prime minister lost patience when Western Canadians preferred radical alternatives such as the CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) and Social Credit to his middle-of-the-road liberalism.

[109][110] Under King's administration, the Canadian government, responding to strong public opinion, especially in Quebec, refused to expand immigration opportunities for Jewish refugees from Europe.

[133] Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japanese Canadians were categorized by Canada as enemy aliens under the War Measures Act, which began to remove their personal rights.

"[141] In contrast, BC's attorney general, Gordon Sylvester Wismer reported that, while he had "the greatest respect for" and "hesitated to disagree with" the RCMP, "every law enforcement agency in this province, including ... the military officials charged with local internal security, are unanimous that a grave menace exists.

French and English conscripts were sent to fight in the Aleutian Islands in 1943 – technically North American soil and therefore not "overseas" – but the mix of Canadian volunteers and draftees found that the Japanese troops had fled before their arrival.

Otherwise, King continued with a campaign to recruit volunteers, hoping to address the problem with the shortage of troops caused by heavy losses in the Dieppe Raid in 1942, in Italy in 1943, and after the Battle of Normandy in 1944.

[158] King kept a very candid diary from 1893, when he was still an undergraduate, until a few days before his death in 1950; the volumes, stacked in a row, span a length of over seven metres and comprise over 50,000 manuscript pages of typed transcribed text.

However, Allan Levine argues that sometimes he did pay attention to the political implications of his seances: "All of his spiritualist experiences, his other superstitions and his multi-paranoid reactions imprinted on his consciousness, shaping his thoughts and feelings in a thousand different ways.

These included Elizabeth Gourlay's novel Isabel, Allan Stratton's play Rexy and Heather Robertson's trilogy Willie: A Romance (1983), Lily: A Rhapsody in Red (1986), and Igor: A Novel of Intrigue (1989).