Read The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 Online
Authors: Pierre Berton
As Smith continued to speak and the House continued in disorder and the Speaker tried to say that he had “very much pleasure in informing the House it now becomes my duty to receive the Messenger,” Tupper’s powerful voice was heard, over all, bellowing, “Coward! Coward!” at the imperturbable Smith.
Smith held his place.
“Coward! Coward! Coward!” Tupper boomed.
“You are the coward,” replied Smith, evenly. Then he tried to squeeze in a final blow. Two members of the Government, he said, had come to him on the eve of the vote of 1873 and offered to get rid of both Macdonald and Langevin if Smith would agree to support the ministry.
This produced a chorus of rage from the Opposition. Tupper was beside himself. “Mean, treacherous coward!” he shouted.
“Who is the coward?” Smith retorted. “The House will decide – it is yourself.”
“Coward!” shouted Tupper once again. “Treacherous …”
Smith began to speak again, but the harried Speaker interrupted him and asked that Black Rod be admitted.
It was Macdonald who got in the last word, surely the most unparliamentary expression ever to appear in Hansard.
“That fellow Smith,” he cried, “is the biggest liar I ever met!”
The Gentleman Usher was admitted, performed his graceful triple bow, the Sergeant-at-arms shouldered the mace and the Speaker descended from his chair, followed by “as excited a mob as ever disgraced the floor of a Parliamentary chamber.” Tupper and Macdonald and several other Tories, enraged beyond endurance, rushed
at Smith, bent on physical assault. Several tried to strike him. The Speaker, without naming them, called for their arrest. Macdonald had to be pulled away from Smith, crying that he “could lick him quicker than hell could scorch a feather.” The disorder was so great that the Speaker could not at once leave the House because of the throng at the door. Finally he was allowed to proceed to the Senate chamber, followed by the dishevelled crowd. Thus did the Mackenzie regime come to an end, not with a whimper but a bang. It could not accommodate Donald A. Smith and his colleagues with an exclusive lease of the Pembina Branch but it could grant running rights for ten years over the line and it did just that in August. That was one of its last official acts.
Chapter Seven
3
The Strange Case of Contract Forty-two
1
Resurrection
September 17, 1878, was the day of a political miracle in Canada. True to Charles Tupper’s forecast, made in the dark days of ’73, the party had risen again. Long before the election was called, it was clear that the Conservatives were on the rise; but nobody could be sure of the results. When they began to come in few could give them credence.
In the election, the Liberals found themselves on the defensive, with their railway policy trenchantly supported and vehemently attacked in rival political pamphlets, some of which, it turned out, were written by the same scriveners. There is a story about Edward Farrer, of the
Mail
, walking around Parliament Hill in a brown study after a sleepless night.
“What are you doing up at this hour?” asked a friend, who encountered him.
“Thinking over my paper in defence of the Government’s railway policy,” Farrer told him.
“Well, are you satisfied with your work?”
“Satisfied, yes. I am so damn well satisfied that I don’t see how I’m going to answer it and that’s what’s keeping me up.” He had undertaken to write a similar campaign sheet for the Tories.
But the political battle was not fought entirely on a philosophical level. Young Joseph Pope, who had been seconded to the giant Senator Macpherson in Toronto, recalled a singular scene at the height of the campaign. Into Macpherson’s office strode a man named Piper from St. John’s ward, wearing a black top hat and a light-coloured tweed suit.
“The boys in the ward are waiting to be fixed,” said Piper to Macpherson in a hoarse whisper.
“Fixed?” exclaimed Macpherson. “What an extraordinary expression. Good gracious, Mr. Piper, what do you mean?”
Piper replied in a surly tone that “those chaps have got to be looked after or there’ll be trouble,” and left it at that. A day or so later he returned, leaned over Pope’s desk and told him confidentially that “the boys in the ward are all right. Harry was down there last night and attended to them.” Harry was the Senator’s brother and
he
knew what “fixed” meant. It was apparent that the example of the Pacific Scandal, which did bring about some changes in electoral laws
and practice, had not entirely eliminated tried and true methods of vote-gathering.
Fixes or no fixes, the country was on Macdonald’s side more strongly than even he suspected. Macdonald was not a man to share his innermost thoughts with anyone; even his wife had no idea how he thought the vote might go. Towards the end of July it became a necessity for her to gain some inkling, since a Conservative win would mean a move back to the capital from Toronto where the Opposition leader had been practising law. She prodded her husband to give her a hint until, at last, he spoke: “If we do well, we shall have a majority of sixty; if badly, thirty.” As it turned out, he did better than his most optimistic forecast.
Election day dawned in Ontario bright and crisp. Before the sun was up tens of thousands of canvassers from both parties were scouring the incredibly rutted and hilly concession roads for doubtful voters. The political uncertainties were compounded by the fact that this was to be the first federal secret ballot in history. This time no one could count noses or threaten wavering electors. Each man marked his X on the ballot paper, secure in the knowledge that prying eyes could not identify him if he changed his allegiance.
The night that followed was exciting and memorable. The polls closed at five and by seven it was clear that Macdonald had suffered personal defeat in Kingston. But this news was superseded by indications of massive Conservative gains. By nine, it was apparent that the Mackenzie administration had fallen, by eleven, that Macdonald and his party had scored a landslide of unprecedented proportions. In the session just past, the Liberals had held 133 seats to the Conservatives’ 73. In the new Parliament, the Conservatives would have 137 seats to the Liberals’ 69. Both Blake and Cartwright had gone down to defeat. For Macdonald, who would soon win a by-election in Victoria, B.C., revenge was sweet.
He was overwhelmed by the magnitude of his victory. The elections, Lord Dufferin reported to London, had “taken the entire political world by surprise.” A week later both parties were still in a state of shock: “Sir John himself was as much astonished by the sweep as anybody.” As for Mackenzie, he wrote a friend that “nothing has happened in my time so astonishing.”
Mackenzie’s railway policy had cost him the West. He had made an election eve gesture of moving rails from Esquimalt to Yale, in the interior of British Columbia, at a cost of thirty-two thousand dollars.
But this hint that the railway might at last be commenced along the canyons of the Fraser did not help him.
Worse, Mackenzie had also lost Ontario. By election day he was an exhausted man, teetering on the edge of a long decline, made irritable by the tensions and travails of office. Macdonald had the ability to bounce back after defeat. Part of the secret of his long tenure of office was his refusal to worry – the gift of putting things from his mind once events had taken their course. Unlike Mackenzie, he had the ability to delegate authority. Mackenzie attempted personally to handle the smallest details of his department and when his subordinates disappointed him by being unable to meet his standards, he broke under the strain. He would not lead his party for long for, truth to tell, he was already “a dry shell of what he had been.” One day on the steps of Parliament Mackenzie spoke of his depressed spirits to Macdonald, who replied: “Mackenzie, you should not distress yourself over these things. When I fell in 1874, I made up my mind to cease to worry and think no more about [it].” To which Mackenzie made the candid and illuminating reply: “Ah, but I have not that happy frame of mind.”
For two years after his defeat, the Tory chieftain had kept his peace while the Liberal press continued to announce his imminent retirement. In his first two years as Leader of the Opposition, he rarely divided the House for he “saw no advantage in publishing to the world every morning that we numbered only a handful.” During that time the unquenchable Tupper spoke more often for his party than did his leader. Then, during the session of 1876, Macdonald revived and the country became familiar with the phrase “National Policy,” on which the election of 1878 was fought.
It was not a new term. Tupper had used the phrase as early as 1870 when he talked of a national fiscal policy to make Canadians masters of their own economic affairs. The slogan was not a popular one and it was quietly dropped. By 1876, however, the industrial situation had become critical. United States manufacturers, protected in their own markets by heavy duties, were dumping their surplus products into the Canadian “slaughter market” at cut-rate prices. On occasion they even sent their own travellers to follow in the wake of Canadian drummers and offer to cut any of their rates. Industry after industry was forced to the wall and still Mackenzie, the traditional free trader, made no move towards protection.
The Tories were convinced he would raise the tariff and seize it as an election issue. In 1876, Tupper actually had two speeches ready – one
in each pocket – since he had no way of knowing what policy Mackenzie would announce. One was an eloquent, all-out attack on the tariff; the other was an equally impassioned defence of it. To his considerable relief, he was able to use the second one. The Macdonald administration was never overburdened by anything as consistent as a political philosophy. The leader himself was totally pragmatic. At one time he had avoided protection like the pox. “You needn’t think I am going to get into that hole,” he remarked. Just two months later he was prepared to embrace it. “Yes, protection has done so much for me that I must do something for protection,” he jested, in justification.
In 1876 and again in 1877 and 1878, Macdonald called for a National Policy in the form of a series of resolutions before the House. In brief, he proposed to readjust tariffs so as to support local manufactures, mining and agriculture, to restore prosperity to the struggling native industries, to stop the flow of Canadians across the border to the United States and to protect Canadian interests from unfair competition. He did not use the word “protection,” which the free-trading Grits had made so unpopular. (“There is no policy more consistent with what we call the Dark Ages of the world,” Mackenzie had said.) Instead, at a series of political picnics, which became an established feature of the Canadian scene in the late seventies, he talked of prosperity and “Canada for the Canadians.” In a depression-ridden nation it was an attractive slogan.
The National Policy was an aspect of Macdonald’s instinctive anti-Yankee philosophy, and his speeches on the subject set the pattern for political rhetoric for another century. “We will not be trampled upon and ridden over, as we have [been] in the past, by the capitalists of a foreign country,” he told an audience in the Eastern Townships of Quebec in 1877. Mackenzie was all for making everything “as cheap as the state of the revenue will permit,” through free and unfettered trade, but Macdonald sensed the mood of the country more accurately. The movement from the farms to the cities had already begun but there was no work in the cities – hence the leakage across the border of those who did not wish to farm. By offering protection for urban manufacturing firms, Macdonald convinced the country that he was widening the opportunities for employment in Canada – “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” as he put it. He was also reinforcing the traditional Conservative alliance with vested business interests and laying the basis for the introduction of American branch plants into Canada.
In 1878, the National Policy was nothing more than a euphemism
for a protective tariff but in later years it was seen as one leg of a three-cornered foundation on which the superstructure of the transcontinental nation rested. The other two legs were the encouragement of western settlement and the construction of the Pacific railway. The railway was the key; without it western settlement would be difficult; with it there would be more substantial markets for the protected industries. Macdonald himself saw this. “Until this great work is completed, our Dominion is little more than a ‘geographical expression,’ ” he told Sir Stafford Northcote, the Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. “We have as much interest in British Columbia as in Australia, and no more. The railway once finished, we become one great united country with a large interprovincial trade and a common interest.”
The National Policy, which won Macdonald his stunning victory in 1878 and which helped to keep his party in office for almost twenty years, was to become the policy of the country. The future would extend it to include a variety of awkward, expensive and contentious Canadian devices which, like the railway, would continue the horizontal development of the nation that Macdonald began.
Though the two parties differed on the tariff, there was not much difference, in 1878, between the new government’s railway policy and that of its predecessor. Mackenzie had long since abandoned his original idea of a land-and-water route (a mixture which, Macdonald quipped, “generally produces mud”) and clearly wanted to get rid of the piecemeal method of construction, which was causing so much trouble west of Lake Superior. His excuse for not proceeding faster and linking the two main sections under construction in that area was that he wanted the whole undertaking to be in the hands of a single private company.
That was Macdonald’s hope, too. But in the absence of any offers from private capitalists, his administration was forced to continue Mackenzie’s policy of building the line in instalments: the 171-mile gap in the Lake Superior area would be completed; an additional two hundred miles would be contracted for, to run west of the Red River. It would be accomplished without raising taxes. As Tupper, the new Minister of Railways, announced in May, 1879, the line would be paid for by selling the uncultivated land of the western plains. “We believe,” said Tupper, “that we have there the garden of the world. We believe we have something like 180 million acres of land which, in regard to the fertility and grain-bearing qualities, are equal to any on the face of the globe.”