"Parliament will decide" : Mackenzie King and the Imperial Conference of 1923

This research paper was completed and submitted at Nipissing University, and is made freely accessible through the University of Toronto’s TSpace repositoryThis paper focuses on William Lyon Mackenzie King’s attitudes towards the subject of foreign affairs at the Imperial Conference of 1923. His perspective on foreign affairs was predicated on the belief that the Parliament of each Dominion should have the right to determine the degree to which its country participated in the foreign ventures of the British Empire. For Mackenzie King, this position was largely pragmatic because he strongly believed that participation in imperial ventures threatened Canadian national unity, upon which continued growth and prosperity depended. Mackenzie King also felt that the British government’s pursuit of greater centralization in imperial affairs posed a direct threat to Canada’s powers of self government. He feared that greater centralization in foreign affairs would tie the Dominions to the foreign policies and imperial ventures of the British government, effectively removing the Dominions from the decision-making process. Accordingly, he believed that in order to be an autonomous country, Canada had to be in control of its relations with the rest of the world