Times of Transformation: The 1921 Canadian General Election

Times of Transformation positions the watershed 1921 federal election in the context of activist efforts and the revolutionary mood in the years following the Great War. New Liberal leader William Lyon Mackenzie King, who went on to become Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, came to power, with his party capturing every Quebec seat. This election brought many Canadian firsts: the first post-Confederation minority government, the first time women were eligible to vote on terms equal to men, and the first effective fracturing of the two-party system, with the establishment of a federal Labour party and the dramatic rise of the Progressives. These changes had been brewing before the end of the war. The Progressive party owed its success to the increased politicization of farmers and the concerns of the western voting base. Suffrage came after a decades-long battle for political rights for women. Labour strikes swept the nation in the post–Great War era, and a new national Labour party gained Commons representation. In short, this election manifested long-building forces for change and the global zeitgeist of postwar disillusionment and hope.