by Conrad Black
The wheels started to come off the train car of Laurier’s new railway almost at once. By early 1904, the British financial houses that were supposed to underwrite the Grand Trunk bond issue, which the government was guarantying, pointed out that the peg of the guaranty to the cost of driving the railroad through the mountains was impractical because, as the experiences of Canadian Pacific and the American transcontinental railroads had shown, it was impossible to see what rock slides, washouts, and other obstacles would arise. Laurier approved what amounted to an open-ended guaranty of the cost of the mountain section of the railway and jammed the revised bill through the House in April 1904, over Borden’s prudent but unexciting proposals to trim, wait, and study, and to build up the Intercolonial Railway, which ran to his native Halifax, dispense with the National Transcontinental, which would serve Laurier’s Quebec, and distribute a few plums to the ubiquitous Mackenzie and Mann. The Grand Trunk and Intercolonial Railways eventually proved invaluable in moving Canada’s war effort in munitions, food, and supply during the two world wars, but for a time they seemed to be questionable political projects.
The 1904 session opened with the introduction of twenty-four-year-old Bourassa protégé Armand Lavergne (1880–1935) as the MP from Montmagny, sponsored by Laurier. He was widely alleged to be Laurier’s illegitimate son, as his mother, Émilie, was a Laurier intimate from Arthabaska. Lavergne’s father, Joseph, Laurier’s law partner, had been named a judge by Laurier, and the senior Lavergnes and Laurier, though they did not deign to refer to the rumours publicly, privately denied them. When the young Lavergne, who did have a physical resemblance to Laurier, was taunted on the hustings with the allegation that he was a bastard, he replied that he obviously could not be certain who his biological father was, that he had always been told that it was Joseph Lavergne, but that he had cause for pride whether it was Mr. Justice Lavergne or Sir Wilfrid Laurier and he was proud of his close relationship with both. This generally shut down the snickerers.
Less remarked on at the time, but of greater importance to the future of Canada and the Liberal Party, was the acclamation the same month of Ernest Lapointe (1876–1941) as MP for Kamouraska for the first of eleven consecutive terms, which would raise him to a position analogous to George-Étienne Cartier’s as a virtual co-prime minister for most of the twenty years between 1921 and 1941. The session ended with minor confected acrimony over Laurier’s reference to the British commander of the Canadian militia, the Earl of Dundonald, as a “foreigner,” which he immediately amended to “stranger” (the French word étranger means either), after he had fired him by order-in-council following heel-dragging by Minto when Dundonald condemned agriculture and acting militia minister Sydney Fisher’s rejection of some of Dundonald’s recommendation, for the militia. Dundonald accused Fisher of scurrilous interference, and Fisher replied that the local militia regiment in his Eastern Townships constituency was being transformed into a “Tory political organization.”35 The brief uproar passed quickly and after the summer holiday, Laurier requested dissolution for new elections on November 3.
It was in this election that Laurier warmed up the theme that “the twentieth century belongs to Canada.” He told audiences that some of them would live to see Canada achieve a population of sixty million. If the rate of growth of the first decade, 34 per cent, had been sustained, the population would have passed that target. Even if the decades in which there were to be world wars are put at increases of half that percentage, Canada would have reached one hundred million people at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, but its actual population in 2010 was one-third of that figure. Of course, Laurier could not foresee the collapse of the French-Canadian birthrate, nor the sharply rising prosperity of Central Europe in the last half of the twentieth century. His optimism was necessary to the imposition of his aggressive program and to inspirit his countrymen with a vision of a much stronger and more self-reliant nation than the one in which they lived, but it was bound to lead to some disappointments.
On October 18, Andrew Blair, the former railways minister, resigned as chairman of the railways commission, a position Laurier had given him as a sinecure and placebo, and repeated his opposition to the Grand Trunk extension plan and his entry into the election campaign in opposition to the government. There were briefly wild rumours that Mackenzie and Mann had bought the newspaper La Presse from the ailing Trefflé Berthiaume to turn it against Laurier, and that secret arrangements had been made, should the Conservatives unseat the Liberals, for Blair to become Opposition leader Robert Borden’s railways minister and make a sweetheart deal with Mackenzie and Mann over the corpse of Laurier’s plan.
Borden, a man universally conceded to be honourable and upright, publicly warned anyone who had contributed to his party in expectation of special favours that his money would be refunded. Laurier warned Berthiaume that if La Presse were sold to Mackenzie and Mann, he would expose the affair as a betrayal of French Canada and an attempted sleazy purchase of a federal election, and he had Blair explicitly warned that he was flirting with his own ruination if he got into any of this. There was no sale of La Presse, Blair returned to his native New Brunswick and said nothing, and on November 3 the country re-elected Laurier with an increased majority. He won 137 MPs (up from 128) to 75 Conservatives. It was a loss to the Conservatives of four seats, including Borden’s own constituency; he returned the next year in a by-election. The Liberals gained 0.6 per cent to take almost 51 per cent, and with 45.9 per cent the Conservatives lost 1.65 per cent.
On January 18, 1905, Hugh Graham, owner of the Montreal Star, who had patched together the arrangements between Berthiaume and Mackenzie and Mann, brought the parties back together at the Saint James Club in Montreal and the sale of La Presse was completed with a rider that the paper would continue to be a “generous” supporter of Sir Wilfrid Laurier.36
Five days after the Canadian election, Theodore Roosevelt won the most lopsided American presidential election since James Monroe ran unopposed for re-election in 1820. Roosevelt won 56 per cent of the vote to 38 per cent for his Democratic opponent, Judge Alton B. Parker, and his eighty-one-year-old running mate, Henry Gassaway Davis, and 336 Electoral College votes to 140. But on election night Roosevelt made an ill-advised statement he would soon regret, that he would not seek another term. At the end of 1904, Minto departed, not entirely lamented, and was replaced as governor general by Earl Grey, grandson of the reforming prime minister who passed the First Reform Act and abolished slavery and was a leading proponent of Catholic Emancipation, and nephew of the Earl Grey who as colonial secretary from 1846 to 1852 was one of the decisive champions of responsible government. This was a promising pedigree.
6. Challenges to the Laurier Ascendancy, 1905–1910
The main work of the next session was the admission of Saskatchewan and Alberta as provinces, and the principal issue in this activity had to do with the schools. This had been a shabby tale since the original very fair agreement made by George-Étienne Cartier and George Brown to launch Confederation. In that arrangement, in the four founding provinces, Roman Catholics and Protestants, whether in a majority or minority, had the right to their own schools, supported by a school tax levied on the whole population. The original Manitoba compromise, in response to the first Riel uprising, closely followed that pattern, as did Mackenzie and Blake’s statute for the North-West Territories in 1875. This last was effectively revoked by the Ordinances of the North-West Territories of 1890, as the Manitoba arrangements had been revoked by Sifton and Greenway in the mid-1890s. All that could be done for these two new provinces in their current capacities as territories was that, where the numbers of French-speaking students made it practical, French instruction was provided in the last hour of the school day, and the priest could take the last half of that hour for religious instruction, although such schools were provided for by a supplementary tax on parents who wished it, who were also obliged to pay the school tax for the Protestant s
ystem. With Clifford Sifton taking treatment for arthritis in a thermal spa at Mudlavia in Indiana, Laurier re-enlisted Henri Bourassa and set him to work with the apostolic visitor Monsignor Donato Sbaretti, former bishop of Havana. On February 21, Laurier introduced his bill, and when interrupted by a question from Dr. Thomas Sproule,* a Conservative Ontario MP and grand master and sovereign, and later world leader, of the Orange Order, Laurier put down his notes and confirmed that the bill addressed the issue of schools not as a matter of state and separate schools, but as a matter of national policy and Canadian patriotism: “Are we to tell [the French and the Catholics], now that Confederation is established, that the principle on which they consented to this arrangement is to be laid aside and that we are to ride roughshod over them? … I have never understood what objection there could be to a system of schools wherein, after secular matters have been attended to, the tenets of the religion of Christ, even with the divisions which exist among his followers, are allowed to be taught.”37
It was a cathartic moment. Sir Wilfrid Laurier – who had fought many of the bishops over Manitoba and lobbied Pope Leo XIII directly and via his friend Cardinal Merry del Val to approve the climb-down in Manitoba so that he could accommodate Sifton and win the 1896 election; who was certainly a Roman Catholic but not at all a fervent, pious, or overly obedient one, and no slave to the episcopate – as the thrice-chosen head of the whole country, would not indulge the bigotry and debasement of Confederation again. The Roman Catholics among the nearly five hundred thousand people of Saskatchewan and Alberta were not numerous, but Laurier would not again disappoint sentiment in Quebec, which, as he had told Bourassa, ruled that province, not opinion. (Leo XIII had died in 1903 after a pontificate as distinguished as his predecessor Pius IX’s had been tumultuous. Pius X was now pope and was on his way to sainthood.) Laurier effectively proposed a return to the original policy of Confederation in the schools of the new provinces.
Sifton returned from Mudlavia five days later and resigned from the ministry. An intense internecine struggle ensued in the government and the Liberal caucus. Laurier allowed others to carry the debate as he tested the waters to ascertain what was possible. William Fielding, the powerful and respected finance minister, returned from abroad and told Laurier he would resign too if the bill was not altered. Eventually, by mid-March, Sbaretti acknowledged that Laurier could not be asked to sacrifice his government and lose everything, and that some compromise was necessary. Sifton would not return to the government, and Laurier did not want him back, but Sifton and Solicitor General Charles Fitzpatrick, through intermediaries, worked out a compromise that was quite close to what Laurier and Sifton had worked out for Manitoba nine years before.
Sifton and even Fielding were not happy taking a backward step, any more than Laurier was from his initial position, but Laurier understood that he could go with this or face the disintegration of his government, and he presented the amended clause to the House on March 22, 1905. The balance of the debate was grim but civilized. Bourassa was relatively restrained but indicated, then and thereafter, that Quebeckers had only their own province as a country, “because we have no liberty elsewhere.”38 Unfortunately, he was not entirely inaccurate, and eventually Canada would pay a heavy price for this shabby and bigoted dismemberment of the rights assured in 1867 to the French and the Roman Catholics (which with massive immigration were decreasingly coextensive designations). Once again, Sir Wilfrid Laurier had done his best for his co-religionists and fellow francophones, but above all for the adherents to the original spirit of Canada, the continuators of Carleton and Baldwin and LaFontaine and Macdonald and Cartier, and even, in the supreme moment of his public life, of George Brown, of the double French and English majority. And once again, Laurier had pushed it as far as he could but made the compromise he had to make to preserve as much as possible of the ideal he was defending. Laurier lost Bourassa and Armand Lavergne, but held the rest of his bloc. The enlistment of Bourassa as an author of the original bill, and then his disembarkation, was a dangerous trajectory, and Laurier knew it. With Sifton and Bourassa, he had lost large chunks off both sides of his governing coalition, on a very secondary issue. It was more, not less, difficult than it had been to hold the ultramontanists and the Orangemen in one country in the times of Baldwin and LaFontaine and Macdonald and Cartier. And with such internal strains, it was no time to have a confrontation with either the British or the Americans, both of whom had substantial blocs of loyalists and emulators within Canada. Laurier had committed one of the few serious errors of his long career.
In 1906, Laurier had to cope with a great many challenges to the probity and decorum of his ministers. After ten years of government, his administration was less distinguished than it had been. Not only Mowat, Tarte, and Sifton, but Mulock and Fitzpatrick had gone, the last two to the bench. The able Alaska boundary commissioner, Allen Aylesworth, initially replaced Mulock as postmaster general, but then replaced Fitzpatrick at justice, and the capable Rodolphe Lemieux took over the Post Office. Fielding, having been found responsible for some improper electoral practices, resigned but was immediately re-elected in a by-election and continued as minister of finance. Richard Cartwright, less obstreperous than in the past, continued at trade and commerce, but from the Senate. The railways minister, Henry Emmerson, was such a chronic alcoholic, he kept incapacitating himself with pratfalls and finally signed a pledge to Laurier that he would abstain completely, which carried him through the year. Robert Borden’s cousin Frederick Borden, the luxuriantly moustachioed militia minister, was the subject of constant and intense rumours of a scandalous degree of philandering. Henri Bourassa found it all too tempting to resist and made an unctuous speech about moral decay in the House on March 26, 1907, but Laurier dismissed him as one who “gropes in the gutter … after insinuations and tittle-tattle.” 39 Bourassa called for an initial inquiry, but “without submitting himself to the drudgery of obtaining evidence.”40 Emmerson fell off the wagon, and Laurier informed the governor general, Earl Grey, that he had to be removed, which he was, solemnly declaring to the House as he resigned, in response to an innuendo of Bourassa’s, “I have never been in a hotel in Montreal with a woman of ill repute.”41 The effect of these problems was to put an increasingly heavy workload on the prime minister.42 Laurier exercised his usual finesse in passing a Lord’s Day Act that pleased Protestant Ontario but was actually written with the collaboration of Montreal’s Roman Catholic archbishop, Paul Bruchési, who was concerned about the profanation of Sunday; and with the working class in mind, as, in the name of religiosity, it assured everyone a holiday. Laurier touched all the bases.
Laurier went to London in April 1907 for his third Colonial Conference. Much had changed. Chamberlain had split the Conservatives with his impassioned advocacy of an Imperial trade bloc that would not be stunted or inhibited by deferences to Germany and Belgium, and in 1905 Balfour had led the divided party to defeat at the hands of the Liberals, led by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The ministry was divided between converts to the virtues of Chamberlain’s claims for Imperial preference and Gladstonian advocates of an ad hoc foreign policy and skepticism about the Empire. Chamberlain himself had suffered a severe stroke in 1906 and had gone from public life. The colonial secretary was Earl Elgin, son of the distinguished governor general who had been selected personally by Queen Victoria and who installed the Great Ministry of Baldwin, LaFontaine, and Hincks. His undersecretary was the thirty-one-year-old, three-term MP Winston Churchill, who was much in evidence and already clearly a coming figure. Churchill and Herbert Henry Asquith, chancellor of the exchequer, and David Lloyd George, the president of the Board of Trade, both also future prime ministers, were the strong men of the government. It was bound not to be as contentious as previous councils, not least because of Chamberlain’s absence. The former leader of the Boer army and once the most wanted man in the British Empire, Louis Botha, absolved and knighted, attended as president of the new dominion the Union
of South Africa, but the dean of all the government leaders present was the august prime minister of Canada. Laurier opened with the assertion that all the delegation heads were His Imperial Britannic Majesty’s prime ministers and all should be of equal status and the meeting, effective at once, and that hereafter these meetings should be renamed the Imperial Conference, and this motion was adopted unanimously.
Laurier was impressed by the presence and cooperative participation of Botha, and thought it reflected generously on both sides in the late South African War; it was a reassuring demonstration of the liberality of the British practice of government. He and all the dominion leaders made the point that they could not subscribe to an Imperial parliament that would override the local parliaments, most of which, including Canada’s, had not come quickly or easily to an exercise of any sovereign authority. Not much emphasized, but in the minds of the delegates, was the realization that the British plan was more of an extension of British control over autonomous dominions than a submission of all the participants to an international legislature. On Imperial preference, Laurier led discussion by saying that all the natural forces in North America were for trade on a north-south axis, and that successive Canadian governments for nearly a century had poured resources into canals and railways to superimpose an east-west trade route, that Canada was already largely excluded from the immensely rich market of the United States and could not go an inch or a farthing deeper into the abstention from non-Imperial markets. Sifton happened to be in England, and he collaborated closely with Laurier in the presentation of the trans-Canada connection between Great Britain and the Atlantic parts of the Empire and Australia and the Pacific. Obviously, the Suez Canal served as the link from Great Britain to India, but Laurier insisted on increased use of Canadian ports and railways for shipments between the south and far Pacific and the British Isles, the Caribbean, and West Africa.
