Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  At this point, the ineffable Israël Tarte – infirm, semi-unilingual victim of a speech impediment and bearer of an unenviable but well-earned reputation for irascible and unstable judgment, high in chicanery at all times – made his play, imagining that he might be able to take Laurier’s place. Two days after his return, on October 20, Laurier abruptly fired Tarte, “having expressed to you my well-settled opinion upon the consequences of your recent attitude.”27 Laurier’s doctors finally diagnosed asthma, not the cancer he and his wife had feared, and he departed in mid-November for a convalescent holiday at Hot Springs, Virginia, interrupting it only for an unproductive and cool, though perfectly civilized, meeting with Roosevelt and his secretary of state, John Hay, in Washington. He went on to Florida, one of the early trailblazers in what would become a passionate French-Canadian love affair with that state, and returned to Canada in January in good health and spirits, having even placated Bourassa by sending him the record of his dealings with Chamberlain, eliciting the reply “Now that the procession of boot-lickers has passed … I become again your firm and sincere supporter.”28

  In his navigation of the vagaries of Anglo-French relations in Canada, Laurier was both calculated and intuitive, and his performance both masterly and artistic. In the high and mysterious tradition of Champlain, Frontenac, Carleton, Brock, Baldwin and LaFontaine, and Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier was the indispensable man who protected the magic golden thread of Canadian sovereign nationhood that had been spun out imperceptibly from the founding of Quebec nearly three centuries before. His greatest test and contribution were to come, but he was already an eminent figure in Canadian history.

  5. Railways, Anglo-American Relations, and the 1904 Election, 1903–1905

  The gigantic grain harvests in the western provinces and territories overloaded the capacity of the Canadian Pacific and forced consideration of new railway construction. From 1900 to 1905, Manitoba’s grain production doubled from fifty million to one hundred million bushels, and approximately equal harvests were coming or were very foreseeable from the territories between Manitoba and the Rocky Mountains. (Between 1901 and 1911, Calgary and Edmonton both increased in population from four thousand to forty thousand.29) The intrepid railwaymen Donald Mann and William Mackenzie (both knighted in 1911) had bought and built and extended some western spur lines and announced plans for the Canadian Northern Railway. Mann (1853–1934) was from Acton, Ontario, and studied to be a Methodist minister before becoming a lumberman and then working on the construction of the Canadian Pacific followed by railways in China and Latin America. Mackenzie (1849–1923) was a local politician and sawmill operator from near Peterborough, Ontario, who also worked on the CPR for many years, and then became a co-founder of the Toronto transit system and of the Brazilian Traction Company in São Paulo. These adventurous and able men were eager to fill the need for greater railway trackage.

  Laurier had come to regard the Americans with as much suspicion as Macdonald had. They had tariff walls against most Canadian manufactures and foodstuffs (though the remains of the National Policy reciprocated to some, but to a lesser, degree. The Americans maintained constant tariff pressure toward continental assimilation as a matter of policy). The Americans made the most dire threats against any Canadian adherence to Imperial preference, and to some extent held the Canadian railway system hostage, as Canadian Pacific now had fifteen hundred miles of track inside the United States, the terminus of the Grand Trunk Railway was at Portland, Maine, and even Mackenzie and Mann’s Canadian Northern ran through Minnesota. Only the indifferently managed and unprofitable Intercolonial Railway was entirely within Canada, running from Montreal to Halifax. Laurier settled on the new ambition to rationalize the rail system, ran a rail line across the country to the north, giving width and depth to the ribbon of the CPR and to increase the strategic mass and strength of the country thereby. This would assure that there were no bottlenecks in fully exploiting the work of the millions of immigrants who would arrive in the first decade of the new century. There were vast tracts of timber, hydro-electric resources, and promising indications of mining prospects all across Central and Northern Canada, and it was time to access and populate and exploit these areas. It was a rational sequel to the government’s ambitious immigration policy.

  Laurier’s preferred plan was to link the Grand Trunk, which came out of the east as far as North Bay, Ontario, with the Canadian Northern, which came as far east from Edmonton as Thunder Bay, at the head of Lake Superior. Laurier was determined to handle the key stages of the railway arrangements himself to be sure of avoiding any replication of Macdonald’s debacle with the Pacific Scandal. He would accede to the long-standing demand for an impartial railway commission to set rates and schedules, and he planned a commission of inquiry generally into the country’s transport needs. The fissiparous politics and self-interested antics of some of his ministers frayed even Laurier’s strength and patience, but it was tentatively agreed that a new company, Grand Trunk Pacific, would be set up, jointly owned by Grand Trunk and the Canadian government, to lay track west from North Bay, and the government would build a line east from North Bay through northern Quebec to the Atlantic, call it the National Transcontinental, and lease it to Grand Trunk when it was finished.

  The project started on this basis, though there were obviously a great many contentious loose ends left to be resolved. Laurier acknowledged that the government would be building track that the private sector (the Grand Trunk) thought uneconomic, but in the tradition of Simcoe and Hincks and Sir Charles Tupper (as railways minister), he was justifying a mixed public-private sector approach as essential to the national interest, which he broadened in this case to include facilitating the development of northern Quebec. On the assumption that the government would never be called on its guaranty of Grand Trunk Pacific bonds, and that the lease of National Transcontinental would amortize its cost, Laurier could claim the government wasn’t really spending much. The reliability of those assumptions was another matter. Canadian Pacific, which because of its market position and preferments from the government could take no part, let it be known privately that it thought Laurier was overbuilding for the country, though everyone conceded that only the politicians could judge the politics. As plans developed, the line would not extend as far northwest of Quebec as had been hoped, and the narrow projection of Canada to the west seemed unlikely to be much broadened.

  The plan arrived at was for an eastern terminus at Moncton, New Brunswick, because it was politically impossible to choose between Saint John and Halifax, and it would plunge through northern Quebec, join up in the approaches to North Bay with the Grand Trunk, run north of Lake Superior to Winnipeg, and proceed somewhat north of the Canadian Pacific the rest of the way, making as much use as possible out of the Canadian Northern. Laurier was suspicious of his railways minister, Andrew Blair, and considered him too friendly with Mackenzie and Mann, and a few days before Laurier proposed to table his Railway Bill, Blair resigned and tabled to the House of Commons his correspondence with the prime minister, declaring that the government’s proposal was “one of the most indefensible railway transactions that has ever taken place in this country.” Van Horne, whom Laurier had hoped would head his transportation commission, declined to do so, but Laurier pressed on with his bill and presented it himself on July 30, 1903, on such a forced legislative march that he was unable to furnish Robert Borden, the Opposition leader, with whom he enjoyed very cordial relations, with a copy. It was a tremendous gamble, but Laurier was determined and led the debate with all flags flying:

  We cannot wait because at this moment there is a transformation going on in our national life which it would be folly to ignore and a crime to overlook; we cannot wait because the prairies of the Northwest, which for countless ages have been roamed over by the wild herds of the bison or by the scarcely less wild tribes of red men, are now invaded from all sides by the white race. They came last year one hundred thousand strong and still they
come in greater numbers.… Heaven grant that while we tarry and dispute an ever-vigilant competitor does not take to himself the trade that properly belongs to Canada.30

  It took him until September 29 to get his bill through, and Laurier then pronounced, with what his biographer Schull called “the same nervous shrillness” he had employed in presenting the bill, that “a new star has risen upon the horizon, a star not in the orbit of the American constellation but a star standing by itself resplendent in the western sky, and it is toward that star that every immigrant, every traveler, every man who leaves the land of his ancestors to come and seek a home for himself now turns his gaze.”31 The prime minister’s prognosis was to prove optimistic, but it was an interesting vision. It possessed the grandeur appropriate to his optimism and necessary to lift the Canadians out of the slough of demeaning comparisons with their neighbour. And although the United States was not going to provoke the newly maternally protective British, it did not, in the person of its assertive young president, favour or even accept the durability of the Canadian effort at nation-building.

  Canadians played a role in international railway-building; Sir Edouard Percy Girouard (1867–1932) was engaged by Lord Kitchener to build a railway 235 miles across the Nubian Desert in 1897, which facilitated the British victory at Omdurman in 1898. He became the president of the Egyptian State Railways, the director of Imperial Military Railways in South Africa, which greatly aided the Empire in the South African War, and was appointed by Winston Churchill, then colonial secretary, as governor of Northern Nigeria, where he built more railways and was an efficient economic planner. He was recalled from his position as a managing director at armaments maker Armstrong-Whitworth to be Director General of Munitions in the “Shell Crisis” of 1916.

  While the railway debate raged, any prospect of a satisfactory outcome of the Alaska boundary issue evaporated. The treaty the Americans wrote up left everything to a commission of arbiters, composed of three Americans, two Canadians, and one British, all of whom would take an oath “impartially [to] consider the arguments and evidence.”32 No informed person, and certainly not Laurier, could doubt what a rigged outcome that procedure would produce. Chamberlain, despite his Imperial effusions, gave the store away in advance by accepting all this without consulting Laurier, and the outcome was sealed when the Americans revealed that their arbiters would be Elihu Root (1845–1937), who was Roosevelt’s secretary of war; Henry Cabot Lodge (1850–1924), a strident Rooseveltian expansionist, six-term U.S. senator, and critic of the British Empire and of Canada in particular; and Senator George Turner (1850–1932) from Washington, whose constituents would not tolerate, and he would not entertain, any concessions to Canada. The British delegate, the chief justice of England, Lord Alverstone, could be assumed to be under orders from Chamberlain to throw in with the Americans. Chamberlain had even suggested that there be two British and just one Canadian, but Laurier brusquely rejected that and named Sir Louis-Amable Jetté (1836–1920), the lieutenant-governor and former chief justice of Quebec, and Allen B. Aylesworth (1854–1952), who would soon join Laurier’s cabinet and be the minister of justice of Canada, and would be a senator from 1923 until his death at age ninety-seven. These were capable men, as were Alverstone and Root; Lodge was a belligerent and rather treacherous patrician; and Turner was a journeyman one-term senator and lawyer from Spokane.

  The discussions were learned and mannerly, but Roosevelt made it clear that the matter would be resolved as he wished or he would have Congress authorize him to resolve the matter by force. The British were not going to go to war over such a trivial matter, and Canada was cooked. Alverstone, on orders, effectively defected to the American side, and Jetté and Aylesworth wished to walk out and return home rather than be a party to the charade that was developing. Laurier told them to remain and to tell Alverstone that while Laurier understood realities, the Americans were cranking up simply to seize the territory necessary for their interoceanic canal in Central America, and that while no one could stop that either, the approval of the British would be desired by the Americans. Jetté and Aylesworth were to tell their British colleague, in Laurier’s own words, that “if we are thrown over by [the] chief justice, he will give the last blow to British diplomacy in Canada. He should be plainly told this.”33 He was, but it had no effect, and on October 20, 1903, the commissioners came down four to two for the United States on all points. The Alaska boundary would follow a line between the peaks of the mountains nearest to the ocean, excluding any sea access for Canada. Three days later, in a vigorous debate in the Canadian House of Commons, all sides were in agreement. Borden was infuriated by the British, and Bourassa, for once, spoke for many of his anglophone colleagues when he said that nothing was to be expected from the British connection. Laurier, disappointed but realistic as always, spoke for the country and all parties when he said, “We are only a small colony, a growing colony but still a colony.… We have not in our own hands the treaty-making power which would enable us to dispose of our own affairs.… So long as Canada remains a dependency of the British Crown, the present powers that we have are not sufficient for the maintenance of our rights.”

  This was ground-breaking and important, a piercing recognition of the truth (the significance of which was noticed publicly in Britain only by the Manchester Guardian).34 Of course, underlying it was the greater truth that Canada, if completely independent, would have to absorb worse outrages from the Americans. Canada had finally almost run out the string; it was still not able to protect itself from the Americans, and the British were barely able to make up enough of the difference in the correlation of forces. Canada had to get greater support from Britain while making itself a less tempting target for the bullying tendencies of the Americans. The problem was not as daunting as others Canada had faced throughout its history, but it was not easily tractable and in one way and another would grate on the country for most of the century. Canada was on a treadmill of world politics, running faster and faster but gaining only slowly in its ability to assure its own security, because as quickly as it grew in importance to the British, the power of the United States grew also and Britain’s dependence on the goodwill of the Americans grew with it. The solution was conceptually simple: the development of Canada into a fully self-reliant country. But Canada still inhabited a bipolar political world, and of the two poles, the United States still coveted Canada, its appetite only reduced to dismissive extortion and unequal treaties by the deterrent power of the British, whose will to deter was now barely greater than their need to appease the Americans, and was only sustained by their ambition to retain Canada as a source of natural and human resources to be put to use in the event of war with Germany.

  No one cared about the Canadians qua Canadians except the Canadians, and they were riven by Imperial, annexationist, and French-autonomist factions. Fashioning and pursuing a national interest out of these domestic and foreign ingredients was unusually challenging. Macdonald and Laurier had brought the country along as quickly and astutely as anyone could, but a great power, as the Americans had discovered in the previous century, could not be raised up quickly out of a rugged wilderness, and a great power was the only country the other great powers weren’t always trying to pluck like a chicken.

  Laurier thought better of his promise to table his correspondence with Chamberlain. If he revealed publicly the extent of his anger with the British sellout to the Americans over the rather secondary issue of the Yukon’s access to the ocean, it could alter the delicate and already very imperfect balance in relations with the United States and the United Kingdom. Roosevelt had not scrupled to sever the province of Panama from Colombia by inciting a farcical banana-republic secessionist coup and then buying the rights to an isthmian canal for less than the Colombians had had the impudence to request, all in November 1903. Laurier could not be certain that if he had had a public bust-up with the British government over the Alaska boundary, Roosevelt would not have offered Balfour and Chamb
erlain an alliance against Germany in exchange for a free hand in Canada with respect for British commercial interests, and that the British would not have taken it. Roosevelt was so strong politically and so popular with his countrymen, with such a rich prize as Canada to collect he would probably have got a British alliance through the Senate. (It would not have been a bad deal for anyone except, assumedly, the Canadians, as Germany would not have got into war with a British Empire shorn of Canada but backed by a United States that held all North America above the Rio Grande and was allied also to France and Russia. Strong though Germany was, she could not have taken on those four powers at once. The United States would have doubled its natural resources in one stroke, and if world war ever occurred it would be on more favourable terms for the West than was ultimately the case.) It is unlikely that any such precise conjecture was in Laurier’s mind, but his duty and purpose were the advancement of Canadian interests, and this sometimes required the observation of more discretion than came naturally, even to such an equable and gracious statesman. Chamberlain’s pre-emptive capitulation to the Americans over the Alaska boundary made his previous advocacy of Imperial solidarity all the more hollow.