Read The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 Online
Authors: Pierre Berton
It was the British in Canada and the British press in the mother country who worried about the effects of the American invasion. British periodicals and newspapers were concerned about the dilution of British blood in Western Canada, the “loosening of ties,” as a writer in the
Fortnightly Review
called it. The Americans might make good Canadians, he wrote, but would they become loyal subjects of the Empire?
Another British writer warned of a Canadian policy “seemingly not pro-British” and wrote darkly of future political complications. And the correspondent of the London
Daily Mail
asked: “Is Canada going to absorb these people or are they going to absorb the Northwest?” He was not worried about Eastern Canada with its Loyalist strengths, but English settlers in the West might easily “be lost in the multitude.”
The English came to Canada with a strongly developed national personality, honed over the centuries. Unlike the Americans, they had not developed an individuality by breaking the soil or hewing down the forests. The Englishman was far more conservative than the American, who had learned to mould himself rapidly to new conditions during his westward trek. It’s significant that while the English in Canada invested cautiously in real estate and bonds, the Americans put their money at risk into industrial firms and branch plants. By 1909, one hundred branches of American companies were operating in Winnipeg.
The Americans were adaptable. They gave their allegiance swiftly to the new country that nurtured them so well. “Four years ago,” one American farmer told a Canadian journalist, “I lived in Iowa with a $2000 mortgage hanging over me. Taxes and interest were eating me up. I came up here, got 160 acres of land as a gift from the Canadian government, and for two years I lived in that shack. Now I own that house and every board in it is paid for. Eighty acres of my land are under cultivation. My wife and my children are well fed and well clothed for the first time in years. Do we want to be annexed? I guess not!”
The British were right to worry about the loosening of Imperial ties. F.E. Kenaston, an American businessman, correctly predicted in 1903 that within a few years the Americans in the West would be more ardently Canadian than the Canadians themselves. But
not
more ardently British. The result of the American invasion was to produce exactly what the British feared.
With the coming of the Americans, the population shift was accelerated. Soon, almost one-third of the settlers in the West would have no sentimental attachment to the Empire. But they did have a strong feeling for the land that nurtured them, and some began to question the Imperial connection. Why was another nation still in control of Canada’s foreign policy? And what was a titled Englishman doing in Rideau Hall? The idea of a British peer dictating to Canadians even in the mildest way did not sit easily in a region where, in principle at least, every man was considered the equal of every other if he was willing to work. Like the young aristocrats in their breeches and puttees leaning on the bar of the Alberta Hotel, the governor general lived on a
remittance
from the Old Country; to some, the difference was only one of degree.
No Eastern Canadian newspaper, indeed, could have supported the attitude that two wildly different Western papers, the
Free Press
in Winnipeg and the
Herald
in Calgary, adopted toward the King’s representative. As early as 1901, John Dafoe, whose burgeoning nationalism was to be reflected more and more in
Free Press
editorials, was sharply critical of Lord Minto’s attempts to act as viceroy rather than governor general. His Excellency, Dafoe declared, had a radical misconception of his position, an extraordinary belief that Canada wasn’t in total control of its own army. Dafoe was more judicious than his Alberta contemporary, couching his thoughts with ifs and buts; but there was no mistaking the veiled warning in his editorial:
“If … there is to be built up at Rideau Hall, a military, political and social power with roots beyond the sea, which is to regard itself as privileged and exempt from the obligations of Canadian law, it is well to know the fact, in order that proper steps may be taken at once to prevent any such condition of things becoming established here.”
The
Herald
tossed diplomacy out the window when Lord Minto’s successor, Lord Grey, came to town in 1906. It was an embarrassing visit. When a reception was planned in His Excellency’s honour, scarcely anybody turned up, to the dismay of his staff. There were extenuating circumstances: a Masonic excursion to Banff, a bad storm, a civic holiday. But when the Governor General’s entourage let it be known that they considered Calgary ungrateful and disloyal, the
Herald
responded with a broadside entitled “The Sentiment of the West”:
“Vice-royalty is a mere accident. High position has a mere cash interest but a dollar’s a dollar, and Western men are after it.
“The West usually takes a man at his face value. The graduate drops his degree … the nobleman loses his title.… In the face of this levelling process … can Lord Grey or any other nobleman expect a great demonstration?
“The West, moreover, is becoming more democratic through its American immigration. Thousands from the United States have come into Canada, and with them have brought their conception of the sovereign people. All that is formal and symbolic in our institutions and our government must give way before the democratic leaven which has been coming into Canada during the past five years.…”
Both editorials brought howls of protest from Eastern Canada, but it was sentiments such as these, both circumspect and crude, that paved the way for the Balfour Declaration of 1924 and the Statute of Westminster, which, in 1931, created the Commonwealth, loosened Imperial ties, and was more in keeping with the new spirit of democracy bubbling up on the Canadian plains.
Chapter Seven
The Passing of the Old Order
1
Sifton’s mysterious departure
1
Sifton’s mysterious departure
Nineteen hundred and five, like most other years, was one of beginnings, endings, and turning points, in Canada as in the rest of the world. Jules Verne died; Greta Garbo was born. Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity, Freud his “Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex.” Russia crushed a revolution; Norway and Sweden parted company. Ty Cobb began his baseball career and Isadora Duncan opened her dancing school. The Rotary Club was born; so were the Wobblies. Picasso began his “pink period”; Debussy wrote “Clair de Lune”; Upton Sinclair published
The Jungle
. The world was introduced to Ovaltine, Vicks VapoRub, Palmolive Soap, and the first neon sign. The New York censor closed Bernard Shaw’s play
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
after a single performance. And in Pittsburgh, David Belasco had a new hit,
The Girl of the Golden West
.
The Golden West! In Canada that phrase had a romantic ring, for the West had reached the half-way point of what can be called its Golden Age. Nine years had passed since Clifford Sifton and the Laurier Liberals took office and launched the settlement wave. Another nine lay ahead before the opening thunder of the Great War would cut off the flow of immigrants. In the West, too, 1905 was a year of beginnings and endings. It was the year in which two new provinces, Saskatchewan and Alberta, were carved out of the old North West Territories. Provincial autonomy, for which Westerners had fought so long and often so bitterly, was a
fait accompli
at last. And 1905 was also the year in which Clifford Sifton suddenly resigned as Minister of the Interior in the Liberal government, signalling the end of one era and the beginning of another. The two events were not unconnected.
Sifton’s resignation followed the federal election in the late fall of 1904, a particularly hard-fought contest, bitter and acrimonious in the Minister’s case. Sifton’s nerves were badly shattered. As soon as he had cleaned up the backlog of work in his office after the Liberal victory, he left Ottawa at the end of the year for treatment in the mud and sulpho lithia water baths of the Indiana Springs Company at Mudlavia. His staff expected him back within two or three weeks, but Sifton stayed out of the country for two months. His nerves, he wrote to Laurier, were much worse, “more shaken than I thought.” He did not return until after Parliament opened near the end of February, 1905.
It is difficult to picture the imperturbable Sifton, the platform
battler who sprang joyously into the lists each time an election was called, emerging with nerves shaken so badly he was forced to immerse himself in mud for the best part of two months. But then the fight in his own constituency had been particularly nasty. Vicious rumours flew about regarding Sifton’s private life: stories that he had been caught in an affair with a married woman, that he would be named co-respondent in a messy divorce suit.
The rumours were so persistent that Sifton’s own paper felt the need to try to scotch them, charging that they were planted by campaign workers for his old nemesis, R.L. Richardson of the
Winnipeg Tribune
, who, the paper said, was planning “a sensational roorbach” on the Brandon electorate. Richardson vigorously denied the charge while making it clear that the rumours regarding Sifton’s private life did exist. “They originated in Ottawa and have been in circulation over all the eastern provinces for some weeks,” the
Tribune
reported, adding piously that even if there were grounds for the rumours, the paper would never use them in any campaign against the Minister.
Sifton’s resignation was precipitate. Parliament opened on February 21. Sifton returned on the twenty-fifth and officially resigned two days later, touching off a bitter political and religious controversy that saw the West pitted against the East. Sifton gave as his reasons his objection to the educational clauses in the government’s bill to create the two new provinces, although there is no hint of that in the curt, one-paragraph letter of resignation he submitted to the Prime Minister.
In hindsight, the affair looks like a tempest in a teapot. Hairs were split, constitutional phrases subjected to legal quibbles. But it is necessary to understand the temper of the period, the depth of feeling in Ontario and the West, to comprehend the bitterness of the issues involved.
The North West Territories were demanding total autonomy, which meant the right to control their own educational system. Laurier had no intention of giving them that, nor was he legally required to do so. He insisted on safeguarding minority rights in education but was prepared to maintain the status quo in both new provinces. Territorial law had allowed minority groups to establish separate schools (in practice, Roman Catholic) and to be “liable only to assessments of such rates as they may impose upon themselves.” In practice these schools weren’t all that separate. A series of federal acts, consolidated in 1901, had made education, textbooks, curriculum, and teachers’ qualifications uniform throughout the Territories. Instruction was in
English, but a half-hour was set aside for religious instruction (in French if desired) for any minority group that wanted it. That was the status quo; the Territories were happy with it.
Laurier turned the job of drafting the educational section of the bill over to his Minister of Justice, the prickly Irish Catholic Charles Fitzpatrick, a Quebecker and former Laval professor. There was no love lost between Fitzpatrick, the one-time chief counsel for Louis Riel, and Sifton, the former Methodist lay preacher. Sifton had wanted the Justice portfolio for himself; he didn’t get it. Fitzpatrick is said to have declared that “as long as Sifton is in the cabinet we are sitting on a powder keg.” No doubt that attitude helped to frustrate Sifton’s ambitions. When the remark was relayed, Sifton, it was reported, announced that “Fitzpatrick carries a knife in his boot for me.”
Fitzpatrick boasted that he had drafted the new bill entirely by himself, “with my own hand clause by clause, line by line, word by word.” He relied, however, on the loose phrasing of the original federal legislation of 1875, which did not make it clear whether the Catholic Church or the government controlled the minority schools. It hadn’t mattered then, with only a handful of settlers in the West, and for a time the church had run its own schools but the later federal acts had changed all that, and the West was satisfied. Nobody considered turning back the clock.
What was in question wasn’t much more than a matter of wording, of tightening up an ambiguous piece of legislation. But Sifton clearly had other views. Was the cunning Fitzpatrick, whose piety sometimes seemed to exceed that of the Pope, trying to bring back Catholic-run schools in the West? That was Sifton’s publicly expressed opinion, and it was enough to arouse Orange Ontario. And there was more: when school lands were sold by the new provinces, where was the money to go? Laurier wanted the educational funds to be shared by the schools on a proportional basis. To Sifton that was “a most colossal endowment of sectarian education from public property.” Why, there’d be a Catholic university next, paid for out of public funds! By the time Sifton returned from Mudlavia his resignation was being hinted at. He met with Laurier on the night of February 27 and quit immediately.
This was an odd business. In Sifton’s correspondence with Laurier during his stay in Indiana, the educational provisions in the new bill were barely discussed. The two colleagues went into some detail in their letters about grazing leases, irrigation policies, and public lands, but on the highly sensitive schools question there was scarcely anything.
“You do not say anything about the school question and I assume that you have not as yet discerned any serious difficulty in dealing with it,” Sifton wrote to Laurier on January 22. Four days later, in a letter that crossed the Minister’s, Laurier remarked casually that “there also remains the school question which I am slowly working out. I am satisfied with the progress which we have made on it, though everybody dreads it.” That was all. Sifton, who had originally joined the Laurier cabinet only after the Prime Minister came to an agreement with him on similar terms in Manitoba, showed no further curiosity. Laurier made no effort to enlighten him on the details of a bill the effect of which he admitted he dreaded.