Daniel John Grant, "T. D. Pattullo's Northern Empire: The Alaska Highway and the Proposed Annexation of the Yukon Territory, 1933-1941" (MA thesis, University of Victoria, 1980)

The preface (pp. i-xxx) read from the scan, 10 Oct 2026; supervised by Patricia E. Roy. It draws on the Pattullo Papers and quotes:

• Mackenzie King's diary, 25 April 1934: "I thought he was shockingly egotistical, conceited beyond words and very Bennett-like in his mentality... I greatly fear—and the more so as I saw him drinking cocktails and whiskey tonight—that he will 'blow up' one of these days and lose his head altogether."
• Bruce Hutchison, Vancouver Province, 3 November 1933: "His power in the Liberal Party is not the power of the glad hand, but of sheer force of character... he has always been boss without question."
• Pattullo to the Toronto Globe and Mail, 18 March 1939: "Even if it sounds egotistical, I tell you this: what I say goes in this province."
• Grant's own portrait: "Pattullo not only governed, he ruled"; "the youngest looking sixty-five year old in the Province"; clothes "from the finest New York haberdashers"; he wrote to George VI "direct, and in the first person"; and "In negotiations with the United States over the Alaska highway he flew to Hyde Park to have a personal 'chat' with 'our mutual friend F.D.R.'," citing a letter to his brother George of 7 June 1938. Mackenzie King stayed at the Pattullo home on Beach Drive, Oak Bay.

The chapters, read in full from the scan, 12 Oct 2026.

• The Yukon (ch. I): the plan to annex the Yukon and build a Vancouver-Fairbanks road: "Simply put, the plan Pattullo devised was gargantuan" (p. 4). King's cabinet discussed it on 4 March 1937 and Crerar offered $125,000 a year for five years (p. 10); it was announced on 26 April 1937, in the election campaign; Yukoners said they were being "sold as chattel slaves" (p. 12), Yukon Consolidated Gold lobbied against it, and the territory's Catholic school raised the separate-schools question; on 5 October 1937 it was left to "stand in abeyance." Grant: he erred in "giving the impression that he alone had a monopoly on vision" (p. 19).
• The highway (ch. II): "As long as someone else paid for it... the road had apparent possibilities as a grand relief scheme" (p. 25). He lobbied in Washington in 1938; King's diary, 3 May 1938: "Pattullo like a fool, has been telling the Americans what to do to get underway with public works in Canada" (p. 30). The federal Interdepartmental Committee found the road "would not be justified" (p. 40) and gave road figures for the five years to 31 March 1938: Ottawa $3,815,000 on British Columbia's roads, the province $15,500,000 (n. 55). King's diary, 31 May 1940: "Believes in spending millions instead of thousands because the people do not know the difference" (pp. 46-47). The highway built in 1942 "did little to link British Columbia's northern and southern regions" (p. 48). R. L. Maitland, 1937: "There's a parallel between Julius Caesar and Pattullo, but Julius Caesar had a good road policy" (preface, n. 28).
• Conclusion (ch. III): "In the midst of the depression he refused to allow British Columbia to be depressed" (p. 58); "Later premiers, in times of prosperity, built where he laid the plans"; "A man of politics, he would have made a better king" (p. 59).

See Thomas Dufferin Pattullo and Duff Pattullo, 22nd Premier of British Columbia: what did he get right, and what did he get wrong?.