In The Shoe Guys, we bring you insight and experience from some of the most prominent figures in business, politics and beyond. We talk business, we talk style, we talk shoes. In this edition, we look back at a customer who walked into a Hartt retailer more than a century ago — and into one of the most consequential careers in Canadian history.
Some customers you remember for a season. One you remember for a century.
William Lyon Mackenzie King served as Prime Minister of Canada for more than twenty-one years — longer than any prime minister in the country's history. He led Canada during the Great Depression and the Second World War. And he did it as a loyal customer of a New Brunswick shoemaker.
King was born in Berlin, Ontario, now Kitchener, in 1874, the grandson and namesake of William Lyon Mackenzie, the firebrand who led the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837 and became the first mayor of Toronto. Where his grandfather was a rebel, King was a reconciler. He trained as an authority on labour relations, studying at the University of Toronto, Chicago and Harvard, and became Canada's first Deputy Minister of Labour before he was thirty. He rose to Minister of Labour and then to the position of Prime Minister.
King was not a man of grand gestures. He was no orator, and he built no cult of personality. What he had instead was judgment, patience, and an almost unmatched instinct for holding a fractious country together. His defining principle was national unity, keeping English and French Canada in the same tent. His most quoted line, on the most divisive question of the war, captures the method: "Not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary." It sounds like a man dodging a decision. It was, in fact, a man buying the time to make a hard one without breaking the country in two. Historians consistently rank him among Canada's greatest prime ministers for exactly that reason. Not for flash, but for endurance.
His vision was a Canada that stood on its own feet. In 1926 he forced a constitutional crisis with the Governor General over who truly governed Canada and won, advancing the principle, recognized that year at the Imperial Conference, that Canada was equal in status to Britain rather than subordinate to it. At home, his governments laid the first stones of the modern Canadian social safety net: old age pensions in 1927, unemployment insurance in 1940, and the family allowance in 1945. He built things to last, the way a country, like a well-made pair of shoes, ought to be made.
King's style was the style of correctness. He was not a peacock; he left the flourishes to others. But he understood that the office of Prime Minister carried a duty to be dressed for it — properly, soberly, with quiet dignity. His was the wardrobe of a man who believed appearances mattered because the country's standing mattered. Dark, well-cut suits. Nothing careless. Nothing loud. And beneath it all, footwear chosen for the same reasons he chose everything else: it was well made, and it would last.
Pictured below: The Hartt Shoe store located at 64 Bank St. in Ottawa, just a few steps from Parliament Hill.
King's loyalty to Hartt runs through both the private record and the public one. In the diary he kept faithfully for more than half a century, now held by Library and Archives Canada as one of the most important personal documents the country possesses, the Prime Minister of Canada mentioned the Hartt brand by name.
"After breakfast, I spent a little time with Chaloux, of the Hartt Shoe Company, who brought me samples of different shoes, as a result of yesterday’s talk. I need new equipment for the winter and thought it well not to wait until rationing began or poor qualities came on the market. Ordered a pair of winter black shoes, a pair of brogues heavy brown, for the country, and a pair of low tan shoes for the city, also a pair of overshoes for the winter, and rubbers. This is insurance against the seasons and the years. He is probably right in saying that I will not need to buy any more for the rest of my life, with the supply I have. The quality of all is of the best."
In 1949, The Saint John based Telegraph-Journal reported plainly that the Rt. Hon. W. L. Mackenzie King "has frequently bought Hartt shoes through the firm's Ottawa retailer." He was in distinguished company: the same article named a second Hartt customer from the nation's highest office — the late Viscount Bennett, R. B. Bennett, the New Brunswick–born statesman who served as Canada's eleventh prime minister.
Two prime ministers. One Canadian brand.
More than a century later, Hartt is still made the way it was when Mackenzie King first pulled on a pair: Goodyear-welted, built from premium leather, and fully re-soleable — footwear meant to be repaired and worn for decades, not replaced. Our Heritage Collection carries that same construction forward today.
King understood the value of things built to endure. He spent his life building one — a country — and he did it, in part, in a pair of Hartt shoes.