by Conrad Black
The inevitable advocacy of a defence union, energetically advanced by Churchill (whose bumptious precocity annoyed the dominion leaders), did not meet with favour from any of the other countries, and the Australians, led by Prime Minister Alfred Deakin (1856–1919), were no longer quiescent in the British design effectively to subsume the military personnel and resources of the whole Empire into the forces of the United Kingdom to be disposed around the world according to the overall strategic desires of the British government. It must be said that given how incompetent and insensitive British colonial personnel often were, it is equally astonishing that they still had the effrontery to press such proposals and that they retained any loyalty at all from the dominions and colonies. The standards of British colonial administration were unlikely to have been more exalted and enlightened in other parts of the Empire than they were in Canada, where the Carletons, Bagots, and Elgins were outnumbered two or three to one by the Bond Heads, Colbornes, and Dalhousies. The council was a personal and policy success for Laurier, and there was progress, if it fell well short of the magic wand of Imperial solidarity behind the Mother Country that the new government was pursuing less single-mindedly than had its Conservative predecessor. Britain had recognized the rise of Japan as a potential useful counterweight to the Russians, who intermittently threatened them in India, and to the United States, and had concluded the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902. This caused Japan to be seen throughout the Empire in a friendly light during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905, which the Japanese won. Not so popular were the rising numbers of Japanese immigrants to Canada, and in Canada’s absolutely first autonomous diplomatic act, Laurier sent his labour minister, Rodolphe Lemieux (who was also postmaster general), to Tokyo, where he negotiated “a gentlemen’s agreement” limiting Japanese immigration to Canada of unskilled labour to four hundred people per year. It was a good but modest start on sovereignty.
Laurier spent a month on holiday in Italy and Switzerland and returned refreshed to Canada. Bourassa retired from the federal Parliament, resigned to barricading himself into Quebec, not a separatist exactly, but an isolationist. He was going to run against the Liberal government of Quebec, now and for many years to come in the strong and capable hands of Laurier’s provincial ally and Honoré Mercier’s son-in-law, Sir Lomer Gouin. Laurier told Bourassa, “I regret your going. We need a man in Ottawa like you, though I should not want two.”43 Bourassa stood for the Quebec Legislative Assembly in the Lower St. Lawrence district of Bellechasse, where he was mown down by the Gouin Liberal machine. This was not unexpected by Bourassa, but he declined offers from both Laurier and Borden to run unopposed for re-election to the federal Parliament. He would remain a prominent figure in Quebec for forty years, but would rarely be seen in Ottawa again. Lavergne followed Bourassa out of Ottawa and they were elected in the Quebec general election of 1908, Bourassa having the pleasure of personally defeating Gouin, who was, however, simultaneously elected in another district and easily re-elected province-wide as premier.
Bourassa began a campaign for a moral and intellectual awakening of Quebec, and returned from a visit to France appalled by the secularism of the republic and redoubled in his ardour as a Catholic intellectual. Israël Tarte had died on December 18, 1907, three weeks short of his sixtieth birthday. He had been one of the most unevenly talented political operators in Canadian history, of extremely high intelligence and acuity but of erratic judgment, always fragile integrity, and generally poor health.
Bourassa was absent for the tercentenary celebrations, from July 20 to August 1, 1908, of Champlain’s founding of Quebec. The Prince of Wales was back in Canada, and the French sent the Marquis de Lévis and the Comte de Montcalm, both ostensibly good republicans now. Both Britain and France sent naval squadrons. They were now close allies in the Entente Cordiale, and with Russia, locking arms against the ever-rising Germany. The British speakers over-celebrated Wolfe; the French tricouleurs were a bit conspicuous for the pleasure of the British; and the French were too ostentatiously secular for the liking of the Roman Catholic primate of Canada, Quebec’s archbishop, Cardinal Begin. The United States was distinguishedly represented by Roosevelt’s vice president, Charles W. Fairbanks, the highest ranking incumbent American official ever to set foot in Canada. Laurier enjoyed it and was very generously received by the populace, and it was possible on those fine summer days to believe that he had secured enhanced international recognition for Canada and for French Canada.
It was time for another election, though there was no burning issue. Sifton ran again as a loyal supporter of Laurier. The prime minister launched his campaign at Sorel, Quebec, on September 5. His improvised theme was that he be allowed to finish his work, without much specificity about what that was. The gist of it became clear in Laurier’s assertion at Montreal on September 23: “In 1896 Canada was hardly known in the United States or Europe. In 1908 Canada has become a star to which is directed the gaze of the civilized world. That is what we have done.”44 This was surely more than a century ahead of the facts and as endearingly egregious a piece of self-serving flim-flam and claptrap as anything Sir John Macdonald ever inflicted on a cheering audience, but it drew heavy applause and was not without a vigorous kernel of truth.
On October 26, 1908, Sir Wilfrid won his fourth consecutive term, tying Macdonald’s record for consecutive victories (though Sir John had won two previous non-consecutive terms after Confederation and three times in the Province of Canada). It came out well in the breakdown of the constituencies, but there was clearly, as is inevitable in a democracy, a sense that it was time for a change. Borden was no spellbinder, but he was solid and impressive in his unpretentious way, and the government was getting tired and was carried exclusively by Laurier’s prestige, suavity, and eloquence. The Liberals dropped four seats for a total of 133, the Conservatives gained ten with 85; the Liberals dropped two percentage points in the popular vote, to 48.9, and the Conservatives held their position at 45.9. It was a clear mandate, but far from a landslide, and at times there were signs that Laurier was starting to lose his touch. He had produced his education proposals for Alberta and Saskatchewan knowing that they would be explosive, as if he was seeking Sifton’s resignation, but he must also have known he could not get them through. He seemed happy enough without Sifton, with his bigotry and humourless zeal and distracting ear trumpet, but then tried to seduce him into returning to cabinet when they were working together at the Colonial Conference trying to put over the “All Red Route” of Imperial communication across Canada between the Atlantic and Pacific. Sifton did not return to cabinet but stayed in the fold as a candidate, and it was clear when the election results were in that he was now an electoral liability in the West.
Time would prove that the most important of the many new faces elected in 1908 was that of William Lyon Mackenzie King, thirty-four, in York North, industrial consultant, and specialist in labour and welfare questions. Cautious and unprepossessing, his shadow would be long over the land and he would be much seen in the world the next forty years, most of them as the unlikely but craftily inexorable successor to Macdonald and Laurier. Laurier was disappointed in the election result and decided that it was time to retire. He made an appointment to see Grey and recommend that Fielding be invested as prime minister, but Fielding talked him out of it.45
Roosevelt had honoured his word and declined renomination, though he would certainly have been re-elected easily. He designated as his successor the capable Cincinnati lawyer, former federal judge, very successful governor of the Philippines, and war secretary William Howard Taft. Taft made it clear from the outset that he would pursue a more placid foreign policy than had Roosevelt (who had, however, won the Nobel Peace Prize by brokering the end of the Russo-Japanese War) and that he was interested in freeing trade with all the substantial trading partners of the United States. Taft and his family had a summer home at Murray Bay (La Malbaie), Quebec, and he knew Canada well and liked it. (Many years later, he
laid the cornerstone of the Murray Bay Golf Club, on which he is referred to as “William Howard Taft, President, the Murray Bay Golf Club, President and Chief Justice, the United States of America.”) A distinct uptick in Canadian-American relations seemed to impend.
The great issue in the first session of the new Parliament was the question of a Canadian navy, brought to the floor of the House by George Eulas Foster (1847–1931), a redoubtable Conservative veteran who would serve forty-five years in Parliament and in the cabinets of seven prime ministers. He was from New Brunswick, a professor of classics and an arch-Imperialist, who was only prevented from making a serious bid for the headship of his party by a questionable American marriage to his divorced housekeeper and an awkward role in the failure of a trust company. He is generally credited with originating the phrase, in reference to Salisbury’s Great Britain, “splendid isolation.” On March 29, 1909, Foster introduced a bill for a Canadian navy, the role of which was couched in moderate terms of protection of Canada’s ocean shorelines and as appropriate to “the spirit of self-help and self-respect which alone befits a strong and growing people.”46 The Bourassa Québécois were strenuously opposed to any program of armaments, especially one that would project military forces as a navy could, as likely to involve Canada in European wars. The French Canadians had an even greater horror of such involvements than did the recent immigrants to Canada from Europe who had fled the oppression, poverty, and constant wars of the old continent. The French Canadians had no sense whatever of loyalty to France, now Britain’s most intimate ally, as they felt that the French had simply abandoned them 150 years before and treated them as habitant paysans and colons ever since. Whatever condescensions English Canadians felt they had endured from the British were only slight and subtle compared to the vertiginous hauteur with which the French generally peered down their noses and directed their pretentiously inflected barbs at their long-lost cousins in Quebec. And Foster, who raised the issue, and the Imperialists who filled the ranks of the Conservative Party and were not unheard among the Liberals either, essentially wanted Canada to do its part and leaned to an outright contribution to Imperial defence as conceived and directed by the British without serious consideration of the wishes of the dominions.
Earlier in March, the British first lord of the admiralty, Reginald McKenna, had said that Germany was closing the gap on Britain in the pre-eminent warship the Dreadnought (named after the first such ship, which was a battleship with almost all its armament large guns of twelve-inch barrel diameter or more). McKenna said that if Britain’s naval construction program was not stepped up, the two countries would be of equal strength in these capital ships and that Great Britain could not then assure its mastery of the sea lanes. This challenge to Britain’s maritime supremacy was the first since that posed by the seventeenth-century Dutch, if not the sixteenth-century Spanish, with a German program of battleship construction that aroused the entire British nation to demand immense budgets for their navy with rallying cries of “Two keels for one” (the demanded ratio of battleship construction) and “We want eight, and we won’t wait!” This was the usual alarmism of defence ministers and nationalist public opinion, but there certainly was now a very serious challenge. Traditional battleships were around thirteen thousand to fifteen thousand tons and had four big guns, usually eleven- to thirteen-inch. The British built up a commanding lead in these ships with forty of them, to twelve German, twenty-five American, and fifteen French. Dreadnought, the brain-child of Admiral of the Fleet Lord (Jackie) Fisher, first sea lord from 1904 to 1910, was built in 1906 with ten twelve-inch guns and eighteen thousand tons, and immediately rendered other capital ships obsolete. Fisher (1841–1920) is generally reckoned one of the most important figures in the history of the Royal Navy, and his career in the navy spanned the era of wooden-hulled vessels with muzzle-loading cannon, to the aircraft carrier. When McKenna warned of a possible loss of British leadership, France had no dreadnoughts but projected twelve by 1914, and the United States had six and projected eight more by 1914. Germany had eight, to Great Britain’s thirteen, and projected eleven by 1914. Spurred on by a national and Imperial determination to retain the sceptre of the seas, the British projected and built eighteen more. They grew larger, to between twenty-five thousand and thirty thousand tons, and the later ones had fourteen- and fifteen-inch guns. The British had also developed the battle cruiser, which had a dreadnought’s size and guns but less armour and correspondingly greater speed. In 1909, the Germans had three such ships and projected three more, and the British had seven and projected two more. These vessels could make from twenty-five to over thirty knots and could run down smaller ships, but could not, because of their vulnerabilities, exchange fire with modern battleships, as would be demonstrated at the Battle of Jutland in 1915, when the British lost three of them to German gunnery (which was always very accurate), and again in 1941, when the great forty-two-thousand-ton battle cruiser Hood was blown up by the German battleship Bismarck at a range of sixteen thousand yards, leaving only three survivors in a crew of fifteen hundred. (The Japanese, Italians, Russians, and Austro-Hungarians also had sizeable fleets, but Britain had alliances with France, Russia, and Japan; war was now unthinkable with the United States; and the French and British between them could assure the Mediterranean. The challenge was Germany in the North Sea and in the North Atlantic.) In sum, it was a serious threat, but the British were responding to it, and the diplomatic incompetence of the German emperor had confronted Germany with the threat of a two-front war with Russia and France on land (as neither was capable of challenging Germany alone) at the same time as fighting an uphill battle to gain parity or superiority at sea with Great Britain, which could be counted on to send heavy land reinforcements to France in the event of war on that front. The Triple Entente was apparently stronger than the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary), but it was tenuous and worrisome and the world was almost on a hair-trigger, as these alliances could bring one country into war after the other and plunge all Europe into conflict within a few days. Canada had had no experience of thinking in such terms, and no prominent native-born Canadian had had anything to do directly with combat in Europe since La Vérendrye fought at Malplaquet two hundred years before.
Laurier received Foster’s resolution very cordially and said that he still fervently held that if Britain should be directly challenged, Canada must wholeheartedly support it, and in such event it would be his duty to “stump the country and endeavour to impress upon my fellow countrymen, especially my compatriots in the Province of Quebec, the conviction that the salvation of England is the salvation of our own country.”47 Laurier agreed with Foster and Borden on an amended resolution approving the “organization of a Canadian naval service in cooperation with and in close relation to the Imperial navy.”48 The resolution passed unanimously and all seemed settled in consensus. Laurier sent the minister of marine, Louis-Philippe Brodeur, and the minister of militia, Borden’s cousin Frederick Borden, to London for the Imperial Defence Conference, where they fended off the inevitable British agitation for the construction of warships that could be instantly conscripted into the Royal Navy. They rejected this but asked for British Admiralty advice on the launch of the Canadian navy with an opening annual budget of three million dollars. The British, with no great grace, said they would think about it. Montreal’s Archbishop Bruchési wrote Governor General Grey, “When the bell rings, we shall all go.”49 But it was not long before the consensus of the House of Commons began to fragment. There were denunciations of a “tin-pot navy” and demands for an outright grant of ships and money to Britain, as Borden’s party rippled and wavered under him.
Even less satisfactory was the slow and costly progress of the Grand Trunk, which needed a further ten-million-dollar infusion in this session. Borden claimed that the whole enterprise would cost the country about $250 million in cash and in guaranties of bonds, which Laurier denied, and added that guaranties didn’t particularly ma
tter as long as they weren’t called and didn’t strain the country’s credit. It would get worse.
In June, Laurier founded a Department of External Affairs, though of sub-cabinet rank, and entrusted the Ministry of Labour to the thirty-five-year-old William Lyon Mackenzie King. King was a pioneer in the field of labour relations, had written the Industrial Disputes Investigation Act of 1907, and had proved an extremely effective arbiter. He was an efficient civil servant and armed the Canadian government with one of the world’s most advanced labour statistical services. He was a bleeding heart up to the point of never losing respect for the leading incumbent capitalists. Enigmatic, cold, and efficient, he was never likeable but never to be underestimated. King was a bachelor who was adored by his mother, William Lyon Mackenzie’s daughter, and more than requited the regard; he was a talented, highly intelligent, but colourless idealist, distinctly moulded by calculation and opportunism.
King’s ostensible analogue, Papineau’s grandson Bourassa, was following exactly the opposite course, one at odds with the political establishment around the great and long-serving prime minister, to whom King was constantly trying to come closer and more helpfully. Bourassa’s effort to destabilize Gouin had failed; Gouin denounced Bourassa and Lavergne in a powerful speech to the Legislative Assembly as men “who all their lives have thought only to hate and destroy. At Ottawa they worked only to destroy the men who undertook something for the country – Laurier, Brodeur, Lemieux, Fielding, Sifton.” (The latter two were not popular in Quebec.50) Lavergne, always unpredictable, joined the militia and became a captain, even as he continued as Bourassa’s sidekick; and Bourassa, frustrated at leading a political movement of his own and now forty-one, founded a nationalist newspaper, Le Devoir, on January 10, 1910. The descendants of the unsuccessful revolutionaries of 1837 would be the ultimate insider and the ultimate outsider of Canadian public life in the first half of what their venerable sponsor had announced as Canada’s century.
