Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  Macdonald lay in state in the Senate chamber and thousands came to pay tribute to him. Sir Casimir Gzowski laid a wreath of roses from Queen Victoria on his chest. There was a simple service in St. Alban’s Church, where the Macdonalds had been frequent worshippers. Most of Ottawa’s population watched the progression of the funeral cortege from Parliament to the church and then to the railway station. Historian Arthur Lower was moved to invoke Wordsworth: “Thou linnet in thy green array, Presiding spirit here today, Dost lead the revels of the May, and this is thy Dominion.”65 So it was. Every engine on his transcontinental railway was draped in black and purple, including the one that pulled the funeral train to Kingston. Thousands more conducted him to City Hall and the next day to join his family in Cataraqui Cemetery, near the site of the fort built by Frontenac more than two centuries before, in ground overlooking where the Great Lakes funnel into the St. Lawrence for the mighty, broadening surge to the Atlantic Ocean.

  Canada was alone, without the great man who had assembled it, bound it together with immense diplomacy and cunning between all the regional and factional pressures inherent to the country, and between the foibles and sinister traits of appetite and indifference of which the American and British governments were always capable. He had consummated the long struggle for national life with a successful start, and had guided the new and gangling country along the path of early nationhood. John Alexander Macdonald had been brilliant and unerring at critical moments: Confederation, completing the railway, avoiding commercial union with the United States, preserving relations between the founding races. He had dominated the public life of his country for nearly two whole generations, since the Great Ministry of Baldwin and LaFontaine. Even in the era of Lincoln, Bismarck, Disraeli, and Gladstone, he was a great statesman. His work was far from over, but now someone would have to take his place.

  5. The Confused Succession and the Liberal Hour, 1891–1896

  The country, the Conservative Party, the governor general, were all completely unprepared for the death of Sir John A. Macdonald. The only person who wasn’t was the Opposition leader, Wilfrid Laurier, who would have to wait almost four and a half years for the end of one of Canada’s great anticlimaxes.

  The logical successor to Sir John A. Macdonald was John Sparrow David Thompson, the very capable minister of justice. Thompson himself had misgivings about accepting such a call, because he was a convert to Roman Catholicism, which he thought might not be acceptable to Conservative voters. He was not a theologically complicated convert like Cardinal Newman and the other leaders of the Anglican Oxford Movement who rallied to Rome in the middle of the nineteenth century; he had adopted the faith of his wife at the time of their wedding, and was a strenuous communicant. This could be assumed to alienate a substantial number of Protestants, and he had not endeared himself to the Roman Catholics by his vigorous defence of the execution of Louis Riel, heretic though Riel was. Governor General Stanley (son of the former, often misguided colonial secretary and prime minister) hoped that Macdonald would have left some hint of whom he favoured as his successor, but he did not. Stanley canvassed the senior cabinet members and Thompson declined the post, because of his religion and because, at forty-eight, he believed he was not ready.

  Apart from Thompson, the outstanding younger man of the cabinet was Joseph-Adolphe Chapleau, the former premier of Quebec. But he was a tempestuous character who had almost quit over the hanging of Riel and had little feel for English Canada. Macdonald’s contemporaries were led by Langevin, who was already severely damaged by scandals in his public works department, and was tired and far from uplifting; Tupper, who had the stamina and intelligence, but was enjoying himself in London and did not want the position; and the leader of the Senate, Sir John Abbott. Abbott had had a varied career, originally famous as the defender of the St. Albans (Vermont) raiders, and then as Sir Hugh Allan’s lawyer from whose office the damaging leaks of the Pacific Scandal were stolen. Abbott had signed the annexation petition after the Parliament Buildings in Montreal were burned down in 1849, but repented that; had one term as mayor of Montreal; and had an indifferent electoral career and held several secondary positions. Thompson advised Stanley to invest Abbott with the position of prime minister as an interim choice, and he became the first native-born Canadian and the first senator to hold that office. He made it clear that he was a caretaker.

  The public works scandal forced Langevin’s departure in the autumn of 1891, as Langevin’s former fixer, the inconstant and shadowy Joseph-Israël Tarte, ferreted out too much damaging information for him to continue. Tarte (1848–1907) had begun as a mainline Macdonald-Cartier-Langevin Conservative and editor of several newspapers, including Le Canadien and L’Événement; drifted over to be an ultramontanist and first a supporter and then an opponent of Chapleau; drifted back toward Chapleau and Langevin; and then veered over to Laurier. Abbott tried to tidy things up, and instituted some civil-service reforms and revisions to the Criminal Code, but had no ideas about what to do to alleviate deepening economic problems that swept much of the Western World. He had no impact at all on the public consciousness and made no effort to settle in as a serious incumbent with the ambition to remain. He was only six years younger than Macdonald and there was no hint of renovation to him. The weaknesses of a government that had won six of seven general elections since Confederation were temporarily disguised by the Baie des Chaleurs Scandal in Quebec, which ended Honoré Mercier’s meteoric career, and by another of Edward Blake’s self-detonating grenades, in which he announced what became known as the West Durham Letter, in which he expressed the probability of annexation to the United States. (Baie des Chaleurs was a miniature Pacific Scandal, as the government of Quebec issued a contract to finish a railway from Matapédia to Gaspé, which had suffered severe delays and cost overruns, and it came to light that much of the payoff to the former contractor was kicked back to the Quebec Liberal treasurer, Ernest Pacaud, and some of that went to pay for a luxurious holiday for Mercier in France. Lieutenant-Governor Auguste-Réal Angers, a partisan Conservative, dismissed Mercier, who was indicted with Pacaud, but both were quickly acquitted. Mercier became a much admired figure of Quebec history, but died just two years later of diabetes, aged fifty-four.)

  Abbott, too, was afflicted (by brain cancer), retired in November 1892, and died eleven months later, aged seventy-two. (Some of his descendants were prominent, including his great-grandson, the film actor Christopher Plummer.) The government and governor general did the only sensible thing and called on Sir John Sparrow David Thompson, former premier of Nova Scotia, judge, and federal justice minister. Thompson’s stoutness (he was still overweight for his five feet seven inches), at forty-eight, must have impaired his health. He had a great foreign policy success when he argued Canada’s case personally in Paris in March 1893 at the arbitration of the Bering Sea dispute over seal hunting, in which the United States claimed effectively a sole right to the hunt. Thompson led the argument for other countries and was upheld. (Again it must be said that if the Americans had just done what they wished by force majeure, while it would have ruffled some important feathers, the Royal Navy would not have challenged the United States, and it is unlikely at this point that the Russians or Japanese, the only other countries with serious naval units in the area, would have either.)

  By the time of Thompson’s accession, the Manitoba Schools Question, a return of an issue which Macdonald had hosed down with the utmost difficulty in the North-West Territories, had flared up, fanned by local Protestant elements led by Clifford Sifton (1861–1929), a formidable lawyer and publisher who became attorney general of Manitoba when he was just thirty. Sifton was immensely energetic and competent, and possessed a powerful and imaginative vision for Canada. The core of the Manitoba problem was that the province was set up in 1870 in haste, under the pressures of Riel’s initial agitation at the head of the Métis, and reflecting a thoroughly bicultural (if far from sophisticated) society, and had then been inun
dated with settlers who spoke English or were continental European immigrants who assimilated to the local English-speaking community. The Manitoba Legislature’s abolition of state aid to Roman Catholic schools, which had been provided for in the Manitoba Act, was contested by the Manitoba Catholics, successfully at the Supreme Court of Canada, which spared the federal government the political difficulty of entering the controversy, but in 1892, in a perversely meddlesome misreading of the basic spirit and texts of Canadian federalism, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council overturned the Canadian Supreme Court decision. Thompson was Abbott’s minister of justice at this point and litigated over whether the federal government had the right to legislate directly in such matters. As if to complicate Canadian public life as much as possible, the Imperial Privy Council now determined that Ottawa could do so. Thompson was considering how best to juggle this hot potato when he visited Great Britain in the late autumn of 1894. He got on exceptionally well with Queen Victoria and stayed with her at Windsor for three days. Thompson was urbane and witty, and might have been a great prime minister, but he died of a coronary at lunch at Windsor in the queen’s presence. She gave him a state Roman Catholic funeral (a unique occasion) at St. James’s Church, Spanish Place, Manchester Square, London, attended by Cecil Rhodes, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Dr. Leander Starr Jameson (a year before his famous raid in South Africa), Lord Mount Stephen (as George Stephen had become in 1891), Sir Charles Tupper, and, representing Lord Rosebery’s government as the senior Roman Catholic in British public life, the Marquess of Ripon, former viceroy of India, first lord of the admiralty, and colonial secretary. At Ripon’s urging, Thompson was returned to Canada on the cruiser Blenheim, painted black for the occasion, for a state funeral in Halifax on January 3, 1895, attended by the governor general, most of the government, and five lieutenant-governors (including, from Quebec, the newly installed Chapleau). Thompson was respected by all, and his premature death was seen, even by Laurier and the opposition, as a great personal and official loss.

  The new governor general, the Earl of Aberdeen (grandson of the prime minister replaced by Palmerston in the Crimean War), had only one choice, to bring back Tupper from London. But inexplicably, except for his dislike of Tupper and the fragmentation of the government, Aberdeen called upon one of the most improbable figures ever to head the Canadian government, Mackenzie Bowell, former head of the Imperial Triennial Council (i.e., the world council) of the Orange Lodge. He was Sir John A.’s emissary to the lunatic papophobic vote, though his views had softened somewhat, and he was a prominent figure in Belleville, Ontario, having been an MP there for twenty-five of his sixty-nine years before becoming a senator. He owned the Belleville newspaper the Intelligencer. Bowell was minister of customs from 1878 to 1892, and then minister of militia (he was a reserves colonel and had taken part in the repulse of the Fenians), and minister of trade and commerce and leader of the Senate under Thompson. His most important public service had been the mission that Thompson entrusted to him to Australia in 1893, which led to an intercolonial trade conference he organized in Ottawa in 1894 attended by six Australian provinces, Fiji, the Cape Colony of South Africa, and Hawaii (which the newly re-elected President Cleveland refused to annex to the United States). It was a considerable success and aroused British concerns about creeping autonomy within the Empire. Bowell was not a bad or completely incompetent man, but he was an utterly insane selection for the office of prime minister, especially in the midst of the Manitoba schools controversy. He was a small, bald, heavily white-bearded man who looked like “a bitter Santa Claus with crafty eyes.”66

  Bowell was a doubly unlikely person to grapple with the Manitoba schools problem, but he groped his way toward a strategy: on the recommendation of Charles H. Tupper (son of Sir Charles), he would propose remedial legislation which was issued as an order-in-council on March 21, 1895, requiring restoration of the provincial government’s aid to separate schools. The plan was to represent that the Privy Council decision enabling such a remedy effectively made it obligatory, to conform with the promises entrenched in the British North America Act and the Manitoba Act. The plan was to defend Catholic rights and hang on to enough of the French vote in Quebec and elsewhere (Acadia, the Ottawa Valley in Ontario, and pockets of Manitoba), and the Irish and German Catholic vote, while retaining the Protestant base of the Conservative Party’s support by professing merely to be obeying the law, upholding the spirit of Confederation, and keeping faith with Sir John A. It wasn’t a bad plan for a very difficult problem, if Bowell had had the stature and credibility to hold the line in his cabinet and caucus. Sir Joseph Pope, Macdonald’s long-time secretary, recalled, “a weak and incompetent administration … a ministry without unity or cohesion of any kind, a prey to internal dissensions until they became a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men.”67 More generously, Arthur Lower wrote: “The ex-grandmaster of the Orange Order prepared to coerce the Protestants of Manitoba in the interests of French Catholicism.… It is to [Bowell’s] honour that he decided to follow the arduous path of duty.”68 Laurier was waffling and obfuscating, and drowning the issue in platitudes about his “sunny ways” with the implication that the whole matter could be smoothed over with a little goodwill and soft soap. This was moonshine, not only in fact, but also because Laurier did not believe a word of it himself. He was carefully considering his position, and exploiting his advantage in being able to await the government, which had to make the first move. Tupper had wanted to issue the executive order and then go to the country at once, but Bowell allowed himself to be persuaded to await another session in 1896, hoping that the issue would subside. Tupper, who must to some degree be assumed to have been representing the interest of his father in taking his rightful place as prime minister, was only dissuaded from resigning by the interventions of Aberdeen, the ubiquitous Sir Donald Smith, and Senator George Drummond (1828–1910), the principal director of the Bank of Montreal. The minister of agriculture, Senator Auguste-Réal Angers, resigned in irritation at the delay in July 1895, and Bowell was unable to replace him with a French Canadian. At the other end of the ethno-sectarian spectrum, Nathaniel Clarke Wallace, one of Bowell’s successors as grand master of the Orange Lodge, resigned in December. Instead of recognizing that he was losing his tenuous hold on the government, Bowell hung grimly on into 1896.

  Joseph-Israël Tarte was the supreme calculator of Quebec opinion, who had been on every side of the main issues in that province from flirtation with the rouges and the English Tories to being a potential candidate as a papal Zouave to defend ultramontanism and the Papal States from Italian nationalism and the insolent independence of the secularists.* Tarte had fetched up in the entourage of Wilfrid Laurier, and gave the Liberal leader the undoubted benefit of his considered opinion that Laurier could vote against the imposition of federal remedial legislation and hold the Liberals’ Protestant and English-speaking vote. He even thought Laurier could pick up some votes from the bigots if Bowell opted for remedial legislation and that he would be able to defend himself in Quebec because he was the only French-Canadian party leader in the electoral race, that blood was thicker than water, and he could hold the line on the necessity, when running for national office, to put country ahead of religion and sell the greater vision of a French-Canadian head of the country rather than Catholic schools for a small knot of people in a remote frontier province. Laurier was persuaded, though he continued to keep his own counsel, even expressing a readiness, at one point, to stand aside for Sir Oliver Mowat if the twenty-five-year premier of Ontario wished to take the federal leadership. (This offer was undoubtedly insincere, and was not pushed with any vigour, but it was very disarming. Here was a party leader who manoeuvred cunningly to hold his opinion and translate it into the headship of the government while professing readiness to hand over to another. It was subtle tenacity wreathed in modesty and team spirit.)

  Once his plan was in place, Laurier advanced it very assiduously; he maintained the smo
kescreen of indecision and enigmatic vagueness, but concerted with Sifton and Thomas Greenway, the Manitoba premier, that they would call a snap provincial election on the issue, which they did. They were overwhelmingly re-elected (thirty-one constituencies to seven Conservative) on January 15, 1896, after a campaign that consisted entirely of hammering the Roman Catholics and thumbing the province’s nose at Ottawa. Bowell could not imagine that Laurier was prevaricating for any reason than to disguise his helpless shackling by the French Catholic faction of the country, but he had to act, as he had been challenged by Manitoba and was pledged to deal with it in the 1896 parliamentary session, or call an election without indicating what the government’s position was on what the country now considered the main issue of public policy. And the election had to be held before May. Bowell’s cabinet revolted, led by the finance minister, George Foster, and Charles H. Tupper, who was, in his own right, a respected veteran of the battles with Washington. Bowell falsely told Aberdeen that the disenchanted ministers balked at the remedial legislation, in contravention of well-established Conservative and government policy, and offered his resignation, which Aberdeen rejected, out of respect for the principle Bowell claimed to be defending, and out of dislike of Tupper. The resigning ministers canvassed enough colleagues to ensure that they could not be replaced; no one would accept to stand in the place of those who purported to resign, and the governor general was advised that the revolt was not caused by policy differences but by lack of confidence in Bowell, whose resignation Aberdeen then accepted at once. Bowell was facing removal by his own caucus and loss of a confidence vote. Snarling that his government was “a nest of traitors,” he folded his hand: the elder Tupper, who should have been called when Thompson declined after the death of Macdonald, and certainly after Thompson died, was summoned back from the sumptuous consolations of London, and Bowell would hold the fort while he returned and won a by-election and remedial legislation was brought forward.