Wednesday 24 November 2019--William Lyon Mackenzie King was Canada's longest-serving prime minister, holding that office for more than twenty-one years over three terms from 1921 to 1948. He is remembered as a shrewd and steady politician, but lacking in charisma and personal warmth; a man of whom it was said that he had many allies, but few friends. Early experience in the Ministry of Labour honed his skills as a mediator and consensus builder, which later served him well in threading the hazards of the Depression and World War II. Keenly aware of Canada's regional differences, he made a Quebecker, Ernest LaPointe, his Minister of Justice and closest colleague. He fostered Canadian autonomy from the UK; Canadian citizenship, separate from British, became a reality in 1947, and King was given the first Canadian passport. He encouraged open debate in his cabinet, and mostly trusted his ministers to do their jobs as they saw fit, only rarely overruling them. King was a lifelong bachelor, and his personal life has been the subject of some speculation. There have been suggestions that he was a closeted gay, but there isn't any real evidence for that. He's known to have made one unsuccessful proposal of marriage. It's undoubtedly true that, as his career advanced, he was married to the job; but I think it's also likely that his reluctance for intimacy was informed by the pain of loss. His closest friend from his university days, Bert Harper, drowned in 1901, attempting to save a skater who'd fallen through the ice on the Ottawa River. One of his sisters died in 1915, and his father the following year. He took in his invalid mother and nursed her until her death in 1917. King kept meticulous journals through his adult life, and when they were published after his death in 1950, the public learned for the first time about his interest in spiritualism, and his employment of mediums to communicate with his late mother, bygone politicians, Leonardo Da Vinci, and several of his deceased dogs. It's unclear how seriously he took this--he sometimes referred to it as "psychic research"--and his journals made it plain that he didn't look for any pragmatic advice from it. Nonetheless, a man who had in life been thought of as a dull gray fellow earned a posthumous reputation as something of an oddball.

King's entry at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is worth a read.

Early in his political career, King acquired property near Lac Kingsmere in the Gatineau hills, north of Ottawa, and built a cottage on it. This was his summer refuge for the rest of his life. He would occasionally entertain foreign visitors (including Franklin Roosevelt) there, but cabinet members and bureaucrats were invited for business. Nevertheless, the esthetics of his surroundings were obviously important to him--he and Bert Harper had enjoyed long walks in the woods around Kingsmere--and in the mid-'30s, he started to acquire bits of stone buildings being demolished in Ottawa, and had them erected on the property as faux ruins. The estate is now a historic site within Gatineau Park, and visiting is my first order of business today. It's a lovely area; I'd like to explore more of the park and the adjacent valley of the Gatineau River.

I cross the Ottawa River back into Ontario and drive an hour south to Merrickville, where I am spending the next three nights. William Merrick, a Loyalist from my hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts, arrived here in 1794 and built a dam on the Rideau River to power grist, saw, and carding mills. Construction of the canal displaced some villages along the river, but this one was fortuitously sited, and improved transportation afforded by the new water route made the town an important industrial center. Aside from the Springfield connection, this seems like as good a place as any to base an exploration of the area. It's a small town now, but there are two pubs...enough said.