It was a great date to be a Conservative in Canada on July 28, 1930. R.B. Bennett, the leader of Canada’s federal Tories since 1927, received a majority mandate from Canadian voters in the general election.But, in the temporary glory of victory on election night, the Prime Minister-designate could hardly imagine the dark times he and his government would face over the next five years. In his ground-breaking biography of Bennett, John Boyko, one of modern Canada’s leading historians, sets the scene in Bennett: The Rebel who Challenged and Changed a Nation.

“As Bennett stood (from the PM’s private office on Parliament Hill) gazing out the bank of windows over the wide expanse of the Parliament Hill lawn below, he could, of course, not know all that was befalling the country at that time or predict all that would soon and forever alter the lives of the people he had just earned the privilege to read,” Boyko writes. “But he knew that things were bad and getting worse, and that the country deserved something beyond the false optimism of King’s wait-and-hope-for-the-best-policies. Rather than waiting patiently for market forces, the very forces that had played an enormous role in causing the crisis in the first place, to eventually right things, it was time to begin.”