results in industrial and agricultural output. The depression ended, prosperity returned, and Canada's economy expanded significantly. During the war, Canada rapidly expanded its diplomatic missions abroad. While Canada hosted two major Allied conferences in Quebec in 1943 and 1944, neither King nor his senior generals and admirals were invited to take part in any of the discussions. Political affairs King's government made an unprecedented intervention in the 1939 Quebec general election to defeat anti-war Premier Maurice Duplessis's Union Nationale and ensure victory for the pro-war Quebec Liberals under Adélard Godbout. Three of King's Cabinet ministers from Quebec (Ernest Lapointe, Arthur Cardin, and Charles Gavan Power) threatened to resign if Duplessis won re-election, claiming that no one would be left to stand up for Quebec in the Cabinet if conscription become an issue again. In his diary, King called Duplessis "diabolic" and a "little Hitler", believing Duplessis's aim was to provoke such a crisis between French Canada and English Canada that Quebec would leave Confederation. King used the powers of censorship under the War Measures Act to keep Duplessis from speaking on the radio. The Quebec Liberals won a landslide victory. King rejected any notion of a government of national unity like the Unionist Government during World War I. When the Legislative Assembly of Ontario passed a resolution criticizing King's government for not fighting the war "in the vigorous manner the people of Canada desire to see", King dissolved the federal parliament, triggering a federal election for March 26, 1940. He held it despite the ongoing war, unlike Britain, which formed a government of national unity and did not hold a wartime election. King won a second consecutive landslide victory, winning 179 seats – 6 more than in 1935. This is the Liberals' most successful result to date (in terms of proportion of seats). The Official Opposition party, the Conservatives, won the same number of seats as R. B. Bennett did in the 1935 election. King's relationship with Liberal Ontario Premier Mitchell Hepburn was damaged due to Hepburn spearheading the resolution criticizing the war effort. King promoted engineer and businessman C. D. Howe to senior cabinet positions during the war. King also suffered two cabinet setbacks; his defence minister, Norman McLeod Rogers, died in 1940 and his Quebec lieutenant and minister of justice and attorney general, Ernest Lapointe, died in 1941. King successfully sought out the reluctant Louis St. Laurent, a