by Conrad Black
The Conservatives still thought they had Laurier on the horns of a dilemma and their stupefaction was considerable in all areas of their party when Laurier crossed the Rubicon on March 3, 1896, and proposed that the remedial bill that Bowell had introduced be tabled and allowed to die with the parliamentary session. The Liberals obstructed the bill, dragging it to the end of the session, despite a strong effort by the returned seventy-year-old Tupper, and the bill was withdrawn on April 16, the House was dissolved on April 26, and Bowell resigned as prime minister and party leader the following day, to be replaced by Tupper. Bowell continued as an active member of the Senate right up to his death on December 10, 1917, seventeen days short of his ninety-third birthday. He had made a strenuous trip to the Yukon the year before he died.
The campaign was already well underway, and was a shabby fraud on both sides, replicating and surpassing the most inelegant chicanery of Macdonald; it was as if the old chief had not really died. The Conservatives told Quebec they were the only defenders of the Catholics and the French, and told the other provinces they were only doing what the supreme judicial authorities and the governing legislation required. The Liberals pitched directly to the bigoted voters of English Canada and told Quebec they were upholding the dearly embraced Quebec totem of provincial rights, and that Laurier would resolve it all with his now terribly tired pieties about his “sunny ways,” and if necessary would punish an inflexibly narrow-minded province. The more conservative Roman Catholic bishops were in full cry throughout Quebec, and their influence was not negligible.
The Liberal cardinal Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau’s successor as cardinal-archbishop of Quebec and primate of Canada, Louis-Nazaire Bégin, verged on publicly accusing Laurier of heresy. Monsignor Louis-François Laflèche of Trois-Rivières, who had shut down Laurier’s newspaper Le Défricheur twenty years before, was, predictably, the most outspoken and vehement of Laurier’s episcopal opponents. In English Canada, where the Roman Catholic Church had historically been less influential, the episcopate was more restrained. Canada voted on June 23. Tupper’s gallant fight and the cynicism of Tarte’s playbook that Laurier had followed were discernible in the close popular vote: 46 per cent Liberal to 45 per cent Conservative, but Laurier carried Quebec, forty-nine MPs to sixteen, which provided his margin of victory. Blood and language counted more than uncompromising piety, and Laurier and Tarte’s calculation that even rigorous Roman Catholics would vote for the only co-religionist in the race was accurate. Laurier won the country 117 to 86 Conservative MPs, with 10 independents. Oddly, Manitoba returned four Conservatives to three Liberals. Laurier was invested as prime minister on July 10, 1896.
It was a strong ministry, led by William Fielding as minister of finance, after twelve years as premier of Nova Scotia (he had won his first election as premier on an overtly secessionist platform); Sir Oliver Mowat as minister of justice, after twenty-five years as premier of Ontario; Sir Henri-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière at Inland Revenue, the former (Protestant) premier of Quebec and future lieutenant-governor of British Columbia, an authentic Frenchman, descendant of the Vaudreuils, pioneer scientific forester, and son of a professional daguerreotypist (who was the first person to photograph the Acropolis); William Mulock as postmaster general; Sydney Fisher at agriculture; the uncommonly abrasive and even querulous Sir Richard J. Cartwright at trade and commerce (he had wanted finance, but his fervour for commercial union with the United States made that politically unfeasible); Israël Tarte at public works; Charles Fitzpatrick in the semi-cabinet post of solicitor general; and, soon, Clifford Sifton as minister of the interior and superintendent of Indian affairs.
Thus ended, for over a century, the Conservative era in federal affairs. Five leaders of that party would be elected prime minister in the next century, but only one would win a second full term for his own party. Macdonald and his squabbling heirs had dominated the public life of Canada since Macdonald became attorney general in Sir Allan MacNab’s government with Augustin-Norbert Morin in 1854. The improbable country was well-launched, though still attached to Britain’s apron strings and terribly overshadowed by its neighbour. But it was a testimony to the country’s quickening maturation that it handed itself over to a French-Canadian Roman Catholic despite all the frictions that had followed the colonial combat in North America and that trickled through the land yet.
It shortly emerged that in Laurier, Canada’s luck had held. It had, without suspecting it, set at its head a very talented statesman. These two prime ministers, Macdonald and Laurier, led their parties for a total of sixty-seven years, overlapping only for four, and governed forty-three years, thirty-four of the first forty-four years of Confederation. Between them, they dealt with all ten of the U.S. presidents between Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, and were undoubtedly more talented political leaders than all of them except Theodore Roosevelt. Apart from all their other talents, the suavity and finesse of John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier contributed indispensably to Canada’s navigation of the last years in its three-hundred-year history of vulnerability to the Americans. The country’s passage to nationhood would not be untroubled, but its very life would never be threatened with sudden extinction by foreign force majeure again.
Laurier’s presence at the head of this cautiously emerging country demonstrated the uniqueness of its ambition and tentative achievement as the world’s first transcontinental, bicultural, parliamentary Confederation. Astonishingly, Wilfrid Laurier would prove a statesman of approximately equivalent stature to the country’s principal founder, the ultimate proof of a new country’s strength and raison d’être.
Canada’s progress since the Seven Years War had been in some ways more surprising than that of the United States, but it was comparatively modest, subtle, and under-celebrated; and it was, even more than 130 years later, suspensive and dependent on hoped-for events and outcomes. After one long lifetime from the achievement of American independence, the former thirteen colonies rivalled the British and pre-nascent German empires as the greatest nation in the world. The great United States had emerged from the horrible and noble agony of its Civil War a mighty force in the world and one unchallengeable in its hemisphere, and destined in fifty years to grow, demographically and economically and by all the indices of the power of a country, on a scale the world had never seen. Canada’s task, as its new leader saw, was to keep pace quietly with that growth, and simultaneously reduce its vulnerability to America and its consequent dependence on Great Britain to counterbalance that diminishing vulnerability. It was not a heroic task, or one easily rendered in anthems and slogans to rouse a people, but it was, for that, no less a desirable and, when attained, brilliant achievement. The emergence of a magnificent country was the more remarkable for being unsuspected. Unlike the United States, Canada was never predestined to greatness.
Wilfrid Laurier (1841–1919), federal leader of the opposition 1887–1896 and 1911–1919 and prime minister of Canada 1896–1911; a permanent symbol of French–English conciliation, largely responsible for getting the country through World War I without immense domestic strife, and chief ultimate architect of the rapid development of Western Canada. Laurier was suave, mellifluous, and very bicultural. British statesman Joseph Chamberlain called him, unflatteringly, “the dancing master,” but he was a consummate politician of great principle and durability.
* Gladstone wrote that, if pushed, Canada would say “If gifts are to be made to the United States, surely we are better to make them ourselves and have the credit of them.”
* Disraeli added that “I think there is a resemblance” (between Macdonald and himself). Disraeli was relieved that Macdonald had “No Yankeeisms except a little sing-song occasionally at the end of a sentence.”
* The term “gerrymander” was named after the fifth U.S. vice president, Elbridge Gerry, who redistricted sometimes in the shape of a salamander to achieve his ends.
* The only foreign war for which French Canada has ever had any genera
l enthusiasm was the Italian Risorgimento, to which Quebec contributed corps of “Papal Zouaves” to help defend the Papal States against the secular Italian unificationists. The cause was not successful, and the Zouaves’ contribution to it, though they received a delirious public send-off, was not noteworthy.
CHAPTER 5
Laurier, the Dawn of “Canada’s Century,”* and the Great War, 1896–1919
1. Internal and External Stresses, Manitoba Schools, and Relations with the United States and Great Britain, 1896–1897
With the election over, and given Charles Tupper’s victory in Manitoba, the government of that province was interested in settling what it could with the federal government over the province’s separate schools. Wilfrid Laurier had said he would do what he could for the French and Roman Catholics of Manitoba, and he asked Oliver Mowat as justice minister to deal with Manitoba’s attorney general, Clifford Sifton, when the Manitobans arrived in August 1896 in Ottawa to try to settle the issues. Laurier sent his local pastor from Saint-Lin in the Laurentians and another mid-level clergyman to open up a back channel with the senior curial officials in Rome, and sent Israël Tarte and the young Henri Bourassa to Manitoba to conduct research there. Bourassa wrote up a report on the positions of the various parties that so impressed Laurier he sent it to Rome under his own signature and with the approval of the cabinet. What had emerged by November as a settlement was retention of the blending of schools rather than separate boards, but a restoration of Catholic and French-language teaching where parents wished it and their numbers were adequate to justify it. Otherwise, no distinction was made between French and other languages apart from English, but instruction was available in the other language and in the Catholic religion where a workable threshold of numbers was attained. Reasonable influence was to be accorded Roman Catholics on school boards and in the determination of curricula and school texts. Laurier released the outline of the agreement on November 19. The Orange Lodge attacked the settlement as a sellout to priestly influences, and Archbishop Adélard Langevin of St. Boniface denounced it as a “farce,” saying, “The fight has only begun.”1 But most Catholics and Protestants in English Canada thought it a reasonable compromise. At the end of the year, Laurier organized a more powerful delegation to go to Rome to hose down the still-squawking Canadian bishops: Solicitor General Charles Fitzpatrick (1853–1942); Edward Blake, who had acted for the Manitoba Catholics at the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council; and, thanks to the intervention of Governor General Aberdeen, Charles Russell, son of Lord Russell and an influential figure in Rome. Russell quickly obtained for Fitzpatrick and Blake an audience with Pope Leo XIII’s thirty-two-year-old assistant, Rafael Cardinal Merry del Val (1865–1930), who conducted them to a meeting with the genial and much admired eighty-seven-year-old pontiff. Laurier made steady progress assuring and building moderate opinion; implementation of the settlement began.
Cardinal del Val would arrive in Canada for a very thorough and strenuous visit in May, and met and intensively interviewed everyone with an interest in Manitoba schools, including Premier Greenway, whom the cardinal tracked down in rural Ontario. Laurier pronounced him “the most prince-like man I have met,” 2 and the cardinal returned to Rome having made a splendid impression on everyone but without giving a hint of the advice he would give to the pope. The nod from the Holy See would completely disarm Laurier’s local episcopal critics, and would have a halcyon effect on the whole sectarian climate of the country.
Laurier departed for Britain and the immense festivities around Victoria’s diamond jubilee on June 5. Laurier was suspicious of Joseph Chamberlain’s role in the occasion, as one who had leapt upon the Imperial bandwagon and was calling for a united Empire in war and peace. The Boer War was almost under way, and few of the colonial leaders were much interested at this early stage in following Great Britain into that morass. Laurier was eloquent and sociably adroit and made a good impression on everyone, including the monarch and the vast crowds that came out for all parts of the ceremony. And he was happy to receive a knighthood. At the end of the splendid British state parliamentary session, Chamberlain convened the eleven colonial premiers present, with Laurier their undisputed leader, and pushed his notions of an Imperial Parliament, an Imperial defence plan, and Imperial free trade. Laurier was admirably prepared from all the ambiguities about his sunny ways that he had employed to obfuscate and finesse his way through the more treacherous domestic issues, to defer and postpone any such ambitions, and he did so. On Imperial free trade, he stuck amiably to his guns that Canada was ready but would not make exception for Germany and Belgium as Chamberlain wished, and if Britain did not put the Empire ahead of her chief rival in trade, she should not expect startling progress in the other areas; the Dominions were not, for instance, going to give an unlimited military commitment to a Great Britain that put German commercial relations ahead of Imperial ones. Even the London newspapers supported the colonial/Dominion position. Lord Northcliffe’s mass circulation Daily Mail pompously announced, “For the first time on record, a politician of our new world has been recognized as the equal of the great men of the old country.”3 Laurier withdrew and went on to France, much decorated and celebrated, something of an oddity as the French-speaking (bilingual) head of the premier (and still the only) British dominion, a reassurance to the British of the general success of their own mission civilisatrice. In France, where, after a couple of his impeccably inflected and affectingly respectful speeches, Laurier’s reception was very positive, and with a good deal less condescension than in London – and then he went to Rome for a pleasant reunion with Merry del Val and a very cordial audience with Pope Leo XIII, who was still looked to expectantly to help de-escalate Canadian sectarian tensions. All Canada welcomed the prime minister home at the end of August. Thirty years after Confederation, Laurier had added a large cubit to the stature of Canada in the world. He followed this success with a visit to Washington in November, where he was well-received by the new president, William McKinley. They agreed to establish a joint high commission to negotiate all outstanding trade issues, and Laurier selected Joseph-Adolphe Chapleau, who was about to retire as lieutenant-governor of Quebec, to head the Canadian side, an able Conservative and former Quebec premier, who would be a unifying figure.
On December 18, 1897, Leo XIII was heard from at last. His encyclical, Affari vos, addressed the Manitoba Schools Question. The pope noted the rights guaranteed to Roman Catholic children and parents in the British North America Act, and that these rights had been violated by the Manitoba Legislature and that the Roman Catholic episcopate of Canada had correctly objected to these violations. The pope described the Laurier compromise with Premier Greenway, without mentioning the individuals, as providing improvements that were “defective, unsuitable, insufficient,” and assured that bishops who sought further enhancements of Catholic rights “have our concurrence and approbation.” However, moderation should be maintained, he wrote, and if “anything is granted by law, or custom, or the goodwill of men which will render the evil more tolerable and the dangers more remote, it is expedient and useful to make use of such concessions.… There is no kind of knowledge, no perfection of learning, which cannot be fully harmonized with Catholic doctrine.”4 The pope had given Laurier enough to work with to end the acute schism between the Quebec clergy and much of the Liberal Party.
The controversy still rippled the waters in the French Roman Catholic clergy that aspired to a strong French presence in the West. St. Boniface’s archbishop, Adélard Langevin, never ceased to declaim publicly against the iniquities of Laurier’s betrayal, and at two meetings organized in Ottawa between Langevin and Laurier by Montreal’s archbishop, Paul Bruchési, the prime minister warned the archbishop that if the issue were reopened it would do great damage to the French fact throughout Canada and divide the country unfavourably along sectarian lines, with most of the Roman Catholics and all of the Protestants seriously irritated by this continuing agitation. In
all of the circumstances, he had done his best – the pope himself had said as much – and whatever improvements could be made to the status of the French in Manitoba would now have to come with time (and were unlikely, given the demographic trends; this was the last throw in the French attempt to challenge the English-speaking population and settlers in the West, and it was unpromising). Laurier was at the head of a country where many “were more British than the queen and many were more Catholic than the pope.”5
Comparatively composed and civil though America was becoming, an example of its proclivity for belligerent juvenilism and jingoism arose over the absurd issue of the border between British Guiana and Venezuela. Britain snatched most of Guyana from the Dutch in 1814, as it facilitated and its army largely accomplished the liberation of the Netherlands from Napoleon. Britain surveyed the border with Venezuela and produced a demarcation in 1840 that Venezuela did not accept, but as it was trackless jungle unpopulated by any civilized people, no interested party considered it worth arguing about until there were discoveries of gold along the border in 1887. At this point, the British withdrew their 1840 suggestion and pressed a new one well to the west of it, miraculously including rich gold-producing areas. Venezuela rejected this, severed relations with Britain, and asked for American support. The issue finally bubbled up to American notice in 1895, when Venezuela asked for American mediation, which Britain rejected. President Cleveland’s last secretary of state, Richard Olney, produced an astoundingly expansive notion of the Monroe Doctrine (which conceded established European positions in the Americas, including Canada, forswore any interest in Europe, and only objected to new initiatives for extra-hemispheric conquest in the Americas). Olney informed the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, that “the United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition. Why?” – as if he were conducting a primary school tutorial and not addressing Victoria’s first minister, head of the world’s greatest Empire, and, with the death of Disraeli and the impetuous dismissal by German emperor Wilhelm II of Bismarck in 1890 after twenty-eight years as minister-president of Prussia and seventeen as chancellor of the German empire which Bismarck founded, the most accomplished international statesman in the world –“It is because, in addition to all other grounds, its infinite resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and practically invulnerable as against any or all other powers.”6
