Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  The election result was the last straw for Edward Blake, a brilliant but inconsistent man, who had neither the personal charm to develop a warm rapport with his close colleagues nor the flamboyant personality that would make him accessible to a broad public. Macdonald always appeared more companionable to his partisans, as well as more human and yet more substantial to the public, which had grown accustomed to his presence and his quick wit, and even his amiable rascality. Blake was a successful advocate of the provincial interest in cases before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council after his retirement from Canadian politics, and was chancellor of the University of Toronto from 1876 to 1900. He served as an Irish nationalist member of the British House of Commons from 1892 to 1907. He returned to Canada after retiring from that role and died in Toronto in 1912, aged seventy-eight. A committee under Sir Richard Cartwright (1835–1912) of eight prominent Liberals was struck to choose a new leader. (Cartwright had been a follower of Macdonald but quit the Conservatives to join the Liberals in 1869 when Macdonald brought back Sir Francis Hincks. Cartwright had been Mackenzie’s finance minister.) Blake ignored the recommendations of Cartwright’s committee and, in his most important contribution to Canadian history, proposed Wilfrid Laurier as leader of the Opposition. Laurier, born in Saint-Lin, in the Laurentians, thirty miles north of Montreal, was a lawyer and the founder of a rouge newspaper called Le Défricheur (the deforester, or woodsman) in Arthabaska on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, which was effectively closed by a prohibition on buying, advertising in, or reading it from Trois-Rivières authoritarian ultramontane bishop Louis-François Laflèche (who allegedly said of his episcopal method, “Rule them with a rod of iron, and break them like a vase of clay,” and prior to one election allegedly reminded his diocesans that “Heaven is bleu [Conservative], and Hell is rouge [Liberal]”). Laurier, after his term in the Quebec Legislative Assembly from 1871 to 1874, was a member of the federal Parliament continuously from 1874 to 1919. He was not overly prepossessing in his early parliamentary years, and he was outraged by the hanging of Riel, but he had impressed Blake, and would soon be recognized as a political leader of unusual talent and qualities, and would rival Sir John himself, in Parliament, on the hustings, and in his stature in the history of Canada. But the selection of a French-Canadian and Roman Catholic leader of a national party two years after the execution of Riel was a bold move, the first sign of the genius of the Liberal Party that would chiefly guide the country for a century.

  Mercier started what would be a durable tradition by convening an interprovincial conference to share grievances with Ottawa, so Quebec’s secessionist ambitions could skulk forward behind the skirts of English Canadians who only wanted some degree of decentralization. Then, and for at least the next 125 years, such unholy alliances would be announced and sustained with a great bellowing of bonne ententiste platitudes and claptrap.

  Tupper’s forceful performance in London as high commissioner helped produce Anglo-American agreement to hold a joint commission for the settlement of all abrasive issues between the United States and Canada. Tupper was rewarded by being appointed the Canadian delegate at the joint commission in Washington, where the British would be represented by the redoubtable and strenuous Joseph Chamberlain. Macdonald managed to generate some optimism about the meeting, but when it convened it was soon clear that the Americans were not serious and that the Cleveland administration was so intimidated by the Republicans in the Senate that they would not discuss tariffs at all. The thin agenda that remained was not worth the trouble of attendance even of Tupper and Thompson (who again made a good impression), much less Chamberlain. Tupper and Thompson suggested a vastly scaled-down proposal of licensing American ships to be serviced in Canadian ports in exchange for agreed fees or reciprocal rights to bring Canadian fish into the United States duty-free, but the conference adjourned without this proposal being taken up. More important and even less promising was Mercier’s interprovincial conference, which swiftly descended into a contest over who could demand a more systematic dismemberment of the prerogatives of the federal government. Macdonald completely ignored the provincial bloviation and had a pleasant sojourn with Chamberlain, who spent the holiday in Toronto and Ottawa and gave a strong address at the Toronto Board of Trade on December 30, 1887, warning darkly that free trade and commercial union, which the Canadian Liberal Party was embracing, was interchangeable with annexation. Macdonald found Salisbury and Chamberlain infinitely preferable to Gladstone and Granville.

  On March 14, 1888, Cartwright introduced a motion calling for complete commercial reciprocity with the United States, which obliged Macdonald to lean more heavily than he would have liked on the Anglo-Canadian alliance, as any such course as Cartwright proposed would almost certainly lead eventually to the absorption of Canada into the United States. Cartwright argued that one of every four native-born Canadians had had to emigrate to the United States, and that three of every four immigrants to Canada had moved on to the United States. His figures were probably exaggerated (Cartwright was an over-whiskered one-trick pony about commercial union with the Americans), but the panache of America was overwhelming, and its ability to draw the “wretched refuse of the teeming shore” of Europe produced astonishing figures of population and economic growth in the 1880S.59 In comparison, Canada seemed a plodding country, clinging to the border of surging America like a hobo trying to board a passing express train. Canada had almost completely surpassed the danger of American military assault, only to be threatened by the irresistible suction of the swift rise of post–Civil War America.

  Macdonald did agree to a further guaranty of Canadian Pacific along with Stephen’s ultimate acquiescence to the ban of new rail charters in Manitoba, which somewhat appeased sentiment in that province. The desultory discussions in Washington were not proceeding anywhere. A very soft agreement was rejected by the U.S. Senate on August 21, and two days later the normally very pacific President Cleveland (who would not even authorize the takeover of the Hawaiian Islands), asked for congressional authority to sever all commercial contact with Canada. Macdonald hoped for Cleveland’s re-election in 1888, as he believed that if Benjamin Harrison won, James G. Blaine “will be, as secretary of state, the actual government.”60 The British minister in Washington, Sir Lionel Sackville-West, incautiously wrote a British resident in America that Cleveland would be a better president for British interests. This was made public, and Sackville-West immediately resigned. Harrison won the election, though Cleveland led in the popular vote, and Blaine was back as secretary of state. He had been the secretary under presidents Garfield and Arthur, and the presidential candidate in 1884, and was a Maine nationalist. As 1888 ended, the Canadian harvests had been good and some of the formerly widespread rural discontent was clearly subsiding.

  Honoré Mercier, whose attempt to promote a provincial common front for the dismemberment of the authority of the federal government had also subsided, was by now on to a new controversy. The Jesuits’ estates in Quebec, going back to French rule, had been frozen when the Spanish and French kings prevailed on Pope Clement XIV in 1773 to repress the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), apart from in Prussia and Russia. The extensive Jesuit properties in Quebec were taken over by the British Crown in 1800 when the last Quebec Jesuit died, and handed on from Britain to the Legislature of Lower Canada in 1831 for use for educational purposes. The Jesuits were re-established by Pius VII in 1814 and by the 1860s were agitating for a restoration of their position in Quebec. The Roman Catholic bishops in Quebec claimed that the property reverted to them, in their diocesan authority, not to the Society of Jesus. Mercier, a comparative secularist, asked the pope, Leo XIII, to decide between the Jesuits and the bishops and said the government of Quebec would abide by that decision. His Jesuits’ Estates Bill providing for that solution was adopted by the Assembly. The pope’s decision, which Mercier proposed to execute, was for the distribution of four hundred thousand dollars to be divided among the Jesuits and bish
ops, and sixty thousand dollars was allocated to the Protestant Committee of Public Instruction. Opposition gradually rose to this measure, based on the supposed outrage of a papal decision causing the distribution of property in a country within the British Empire. The correspondence between Leo XIII and Mercier was largely reprinted in the preamble to the bill. Protestant opinion was very vexed (and even Donald Creighton referred to it as “this most iniquitous law”61), but Macdonald declined to be drawn and was able to tell Tupper he could reassure the Duke of Norfolk (the traditional lay leader of Britain’s Roman Catholics, and the premier duke and earl marshal of England) that Mercier’s law would not be revoked. In fact, the government of Quebec had every right to consider that it had only been a trustee and take the pope’s guidance on the merit of the different claims from among the Roman Catholic authorities, and the Protestants were provided for proportionately. D’Alton McCarthy, an arch Imperialist (and the Protestant parliamentary equivalent of the unfortunate Joseph Guibord’s bishop), had supported a bill calling for revocation of Mercier’s measure, but Macdonald spoke against it on March 29, 1889, referring to the religious and racial strife of bygone years, and the revocation motion was defeated 188 to 13. Unfortunately, McCarthy had already launched a public movement against the bill in English Canada, though the authority of Mercier’s government to act as it did was not seriously at issue.

  McCarthy’s agitations led to a demand for the end of the protection of French and Catholic rights in Manitoba and the North-West Territories. In the parliamentary session that opened in January 1890, McCarthy proposed abrogation of French rights in the (very small) school system of the North-West Territories, and on February 12 Macdonald adopted the expedient of allowing a proposal to go forward that left the matter for local determination. This would not work for the French, who, in the person of one of Laurier’s Quebec members, Cléophas Beausoleil, moved an amendment stating that the pursuit of racial harmony was the reason for the protections and nothing had changed to reduce the desirability of that end. This split the House and the Conservative caucus, whose French-speaking members endorsed the Liberal motion. Macdonald and Laurier crossed swords when Laurier effectively described the Conservatives as a party of bigotry. Macdonald replied very effectively that the Conservatives had repealed the Act of Union’s provision for English-only parliamentary debates; that he had prevailed over Liberal George Brown’s vehement opposition to a co-equal status for French in the country; Macdonald forcefully said: “There is no paramount race in this country; there is no conquered race in this country.”62 But he pointed out that the sensibilities of Quebec were not the only point at issue and the wishes of the local majority had to be considered, as Quebec, in other contexts, was never slow to assert. Macdonald made his point, and was still, at seventy-four, and after forty-six years in Parliament, twenty-six of them in power, the master of the scene. But it was then, as it would be in the future, an unbridgeable gap. Finally, on February 18, the vote on the Beausoleil motion confirmed the nightmare of both Macdonald and Laurier: every French-speaking member of the House except Joseph-Adolphe Chapleau (next to Thompson, Macdonald’s most talented minister) voted for the motion, but both caucuses split, and the English-Canadian MPs, who were almost twice as numerous, including the prime minister and friends of Laurier, voted against or abstained. Macdonald and Thompson proposed a final compromise which assured government publications and court proceedings in the North-West Territories in both languages and reiterated the official status of French in the country, and left it to the Legislature of the territory to determine the language of its proceedings. This peeled back a number of the French MPs and increased the majority to 149 against 50 opponents, a mixed bag of McCarthyites and die-hard rouges. Macdonald had reassembled the centre again, one more time, and Laurier had not opposed him.

  On February 26, 1890, Tupper’s son, Charles H. Tupper, the new minister of marine and fisheries, arrived in Washington for a resumption of the endless discussion of fishing and sealing, specifically fur-seal hunting in the Bering Strait. The American secretary of state, the inevitable James G. Blaine (known to his followers from his presidential campaign of 1884 as the “plumed knight”), made Tupper feel very unwelcome. The British minister, the third party in the negotiations, Sir Julian Pauncefote, engaged in the now customary British practice of urging acceptance of everything the Americans wanted or offered. Blaine (only the second person twice to be the secretary of state, Daniel Webster being the first) made it clear that he was surprised and not pleased to see a Canadian representative at all. Pauncefote wrote up a draft agreement which Tupper brought back to Ottawa and Macdonald and the cabinet examined. The Canadians demanded the inclusion of the American Pribilof Islands in the agreement, and not just regulation of the high seas, and had to threaten the British with acceptance of the draft only under protest if Canadian wishes were not complied with. This threat carried the point, and the draft agreement was given to the Americans on behalf of Great Britain and Canada on April 29. They learned on May 22 by the cavalier means of a State Department press release that it had been rejected by the Americans, who were sending a coastguard cutter to seize vessels sealing in the Bering Sea. A Royal Navy squadron then took station at Esquimalt, British Columbia, as Salisbury was a good deal more purposeful than his minister in Washington.

  Relations with the Americans were further clouded by the impending McKinley Tariff, which threatened a severe reduction in Canadian exports to the United States. Macdonald conducted a speaking tour in the eastern provinces in the summer of 1890, and stated in Halifax that the United States still aimed at the annexation of Canada, either straightforwardly or indirectly through commercial union. The immediate crisis lifted with the Democratic victory in the congressional elections of November 1890, which sank Senator (and future president) William McKinley’s tariff. But the United States entered into direct tariff reduction negotiations with Newfoundland, and Macdonald demanded of the British that they not allow British North American interests to be divided and exploited by the Americans. He suspected the Americans of preparing to pour money into the next Canadian election to support the Liberals as the party of reciprocity, which he assimilated to annexation. On Macdonald’s forceful insistence with the British, the Newfoundland discussions were delayed, and Britain sponsored direct Canadian negotiations with Washington through Canadian plenipotentiaries and not as delegates on a British mission. Blaine dragged his heels on this but on January 28, 1891, had an extensive interview with an editor of the Liberal Toronto Globe on which the secretary of state tried to stampede Canadian voters from under the prime minister in what was assumed to be an election year. Blaine had betrayed Macdonald with an offer of informal talks to be held secretly, in preparation for which Macdonald sent out comprehensive proposals, and then Blaine revealed the American desire for talks to a Canadian opposition newspaper with assurances that no talks were in progress.

  Blaine was a veteran of bruising American political wars going back to Lincoln’s time, but he was not as experienced as or cannier than Macdonald, who responded to this challenge by dissolving Parliament at once and returning to the people for a fourteenth term and for the eleventh time as party leader. He campaigned vigorously, though seventy-six and struggling with bronchial problems and, toward the end of the campaign, acute fatigue. The United States and Great Britain were closely watching the election. The Conservatives had had problems with financial indiscretions in Langevin’s public works department, though the minister himself was not directly implicated. But such matters were obscured in the Conservative campaign for Canadian independence behind their slogan “the old flag, the old policy, the old leader.” The Liberal editor who had interviewed Blaine, Edward Farrer, had printed up a rabidly pro-American pamphlet for very private circulation, but the Conservatives got hold of it and accused the Liberals of being a virtual annexationist front and, in a recurring Canadian theme, a Trojan Horse for the United Sates. All assumed that this would be Sir
John A.’s last campaign, and as long as his stamina held, he put all he had into it, and was everywhere received as a legendary, folkloric figure. Any man nearly fifty years of age (Laurier was forty-nine) had been in his cradle when Macdonald was first elected to Parliament, and it was twenty-seven years since he had formed the Grand Coalition with Brown, Taché, Cartier, Galt, Mowat, and McGee to bring on Confederation. On March 5, 1891, the old chief did it again, winning 118 constituencies to 90 for Laurier, or 52 per cent of the vote to 46.4 for the Liberals. Macdonald made the race all the way, and it was a sweet victory, not so much over Laurier, who ran a very respectable and civilized race and gained ten MPs, but against the Ontario commercial unionists and the overbearing government of the United States. There was little sign of American financial assistance to the Liberals. Congratulations flowed in to Macdonald, including from Salisbury and, via Stanley, Victoria herself, queen and empress.63

  Macdonald met the House and seemed in good form on several days, though rather tired on others, and he suffered a series of strokes and was confined to his home after May 29. The entire country conducted a vigil, and in the evening of June 6, 1891, the prime minister died. Langevin, his faithful follower of thirty-three years, and Laurier gave parliamentary eulogies on June 9, French Canadians both, though each spoke in English and French. Langevin broke down and had to resume his chair, saying, “My heart is full of tears.” Laurier, as was his custom on serious occasions, was tasteful and eloquent and sonorous, and he spoke for all. The place of the deceased in Canadian life, he said, “was so large and so absorbing that it is almost impossible to conceive that the political life of this country – the fate of this country – can continue without him. His loss overwhelms us.… [It] overwhelms me and it also overwhelms this parliament as if indeed one of the institutions of the land had given way.”64 It had.