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MacKenzie King and No. 6 AOS continued from page 3

As King no doubt realized the letters from the Air Minister, flippantly initiated "G.C.P.", were prepared by members of Power's staff, principally by Mr. Gordon Apedaile, the Department's financial advisor for civilian schools. In other words, King, almost like any ordinary citizen, was fighting the bureaucracy and coming off second-best. He was, more-over, experiencing an unpleasant feeling of being conspired against by members of his own party and the military. A few more letters were written on the subject, but King knew he was fighting a losing battle, and with the real war far from over, matters of much greater significance were demanding his attention. On 21 August he fired a parting shot blaming the whole unfortunate affair on the failure to provide hard-surfaced runways at Prince Albert and "a governing motive ... to appease one of the chief critics of the RCAF in its Air Observer Policy."24 This last, of course, was a reference to Diefen- baker, but how much truth was contained in the statement would be most difficult to determine. Certainly, if Diefenbaker, a relative newcomer to Parliament, had known of it he would have been most gratified to know of the importance which the Prime Minister, in a negative sort of way, attached to his standing in the House of Commons.

No. 6 AOS was disbanded in September 1942, the last class of observers completing their training on the 11th. In its last weeks of operation, the unit had 211 pupils on strength and 33 aircraft, of which only one was unserviceable, indicating that it had made considerable headway in overcoming its maintenance problems. In its eighteen months of existence, from March 1941 to September 1942, it had graduated 615 navigators including Canadians, Britons, Australians, New Zealanders, and Norwegians, most of whom went overseas to serve on bomber operations. As soon as No. 6 AOS was closed, No. 6 EFTS was doubled in size from a student population of approxi- mately one hundred to just over twice that many. It continued to operate until July 1944 when aircrew training under the BCATP was being curtailed. In all, 2647 pilots, practically all of them Canadians, learned to fly at the Prince Albert airfield.

As for the M. and C. Company, it continued to operate its small repair depot until the elementary school was closed, when it was able to resume commercial operations on a full scale. Flying from the Prince Albert airport and using, among other aircraft, some of the Ansons that had become surplus after No. 6 AOS was closed down, it continued to serve northern Saskatchewan until 1947 when it was purchased by the newly formed Saskatchewan Government Airways, thus ending another chapter in the history of Canadian bush transport operations.

In spite of Mackenzie King's remonstrations and in spite of the contribution which Prince Albert had made to Canada's air effort, it was one of the few air training centres which had not been given hard- surfaced runways at the end of the war. Not until after peace was restored and Prince Albert again became a base for commercial air operations, this time on a much greater scale than before, was the airfield fully modernized. Yet, even if he was unable to persuade the Air Minister that Prince Albert deserved to have permanent runways, the Prime Minister was not entirely without influence. The air observer school promised for Davidson to which King so strenuously objected and which Power, and possibly the RCAF as well, had come to realize would be a personal humiliation, was quietly forgotten. Instead, Davidson was given an elementary flying training school which carried less prestige and was thus much less of an affront than a larger school would have been.

In retrospect, one might well ask what effect this series of events had on King's political fortunes. Perhaps not much. On the other hand, it is certain that he would have dearly loved to continue to represent Prince Albert, where he had triumphed in five elections. But he was very much aware that he was an outsider, that Liberal influence in Saskatchewan was on the wane, and that his own popularity among his constituents, who had given him a majority of nearly six thousand votes in 1935, was now marginal. After opening No. 6 AOS in July 1941, the Prime Minis- ter does not appear to have visited Prince Albert again until just before the election of June 1945. When the results of that contest were in it could not have been a great surprise to him, though it was undoubtedly a keen disappointment that he was the loser by just 129 votes. Although he had no difficulty finding a safe seat in eastern Ontario, one cannot help wondering what difference it might have made if the air observer school had been kept open or if the runways at Prince Albert airfield had been paved. Would King then have been able to muster enough votes to win Prince Albert for the sixth time? Most likely he would, but only by the narrowest of margins.

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