Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  Le Devoir, after the predictable launching pieties, opened fire on Laurier as the man who had sent troops to South Africa, abandoned the French and the Roman Catholics in the schools of Alberta and Saskatchewan, and now wished to create a navy, while he “veiled in golden clouds the betrayals, weaknesses, and dangers of his policy.”51 The day following this churlish tirade, January 12, Laurier presented his naval bill; a naval college and naval board were to be set up, and an entirely voluntary force in all circumstances was to be established. A fleet of five cruisers and six destroyers, a respectable opening force, would be created and would be entirely under the control of the Canadian government. It could be put at the disposal of His Majesty (that is, Great Britain), but only by act of the Canadian Parliament. The naval question reigned for several months, despite Grey’s agitations, on orders from London, for Laurier to agree to American trade offers even before they were formally made. The British government was now incapable of thinking of any foreign policy issue but the great-power equation with Germany, and the United States was the only nation left that could really shift the balance. The British doubted that Italy would throw in with the Central Powers, who had so little to offer Italy; the Japanese couldn’t influence the balance in Europe, important though they were in the far Pacific; and the Turks had faded. But, if it came to it, the Americans could be determining (as it did, and they were).

  Laurier could not have been more clear that there was no open-ended commitment to Britain’s wars, as there had not been in South Africa. The Quebec Conservative leader, Frederick Debartzch Monk (grandson of Louis Gugy, debunker of Papineau; it seemed everyone except Laurier in Canadian politics in this era was the grandson of some politician), echoed Bourassa’s comments, which were that the bill was “a national capitulation … the gravest blow our autonomy has suffered since the origin of responsible government.… Let the notion occur to a Chamberlain [completely incapacitated], a Rhodes [dead], a Beers [a reference to the de Beers brothers, two Boer farmers who sold their land to Cecil Rhodes and never did anything that could have offended even Bourassa], to gold-seekers or opium merchants, of causing a conflict in South Africa or India, in the Mediterranean or the Persian Gulf, on the shores of the Baltic or the banks of the Black Sea, on the coasts of Japan or in the China Seas, we are involved, always and regardless, with our money and our blood.”52 This was rank demagogy, rabble-rousing rubbish that was an excavation in irresponsibility even for Bourassa.

  Borden was wobbling under threat of his own imperialists and stuck to supporting Laurier’s navy, but he expressed a preference for simply giving to the British Admiralty the cash that creating a navy would require. No war was imminent, Laurier was not in the slightest enfeebling the national interest, but Laurier was beset from both sides by fantastic imputations of an ambition to transform Canadian youth into British cannon fodder on one side, and of treacherous betrayal of the motherland on the other. This was Bourassa’s refrain; the following year he harangued a large audience with his theory that Laurier and Borden were “only cowards and traitors.… I say that when a man [Laurier], whatever his personal qualities, so despises the confidence and love which a people has given him – such a man is more dangerous to his religion, his country, even to the British Crown than the worst of Orangemen.”53 It was hard to imagine that the mass of decent, sensible Canadians could be much swayed by such venomously bankrupt arguments. The naval bill passed on April 20, but the controversy was not over. And Bourassa could still be dangerous to Laurier, who was more dependent than ever on Quebec to provide him a majority in the country’s Parliament.

  7. Reciprocity, 1910–1911

  Given the delicacy of relations with London, Laurier was especially sensitive to a possible improvement in relations with the United States. President Taft made very amicable noises, and a giant of three hundred pounds and a moderate jurist by background, he was a good deal less ferocious and opinionated than his predecessor. Fielding visited him in Washington in March 1910, and Taft explained that he disapproved of the tariff his Republican colleagues in Congress had recently legislated which imposed a 25 per cent duty on anything coming from a country that gave any other country a preferable tariff treatment to what it gave the United States. Canada did that under Imperial preference. Taft sought a plausible escape hatch, and after consultation Fielding proposed that a group of thirteen obscure items, such as prunes, on which Canada gave a preference to Britain and British possessions, be subject to preferential entry from the United States also. Taft happily and cordially agreed, and the super tariff was waived for Canada. Canada went a step further and made the thirteen items subject to free entry from all countries, and the U.S. secretary of state, Philander C. Knox, who had been Roosevelt’s trust-busting attorney general, wrote Laurier expressing a desire for a broader tariff reduction between the countries. Taft and Knox coined the term “dollar diplomacy” and were, in foreign affairs, chiefly concerned with American commercial and trade interests.

  King Edward VII, a talented and popular monarch, died on May 6, 1910, and was of course succeeded by the Duke York and Cornwall, who had twice visited Canada and who became King George V.

  Mackenzie King deftly settled a Grand Trunk strike that threatened to delay or interrupt the prime minister’s extensive tour in the West in the summer of 1910. King’s meticulous report of his mediation spared no opportunity for self-praise, but Laurier had come to appreciate King’s cunning and thoroughness, though “he still was not wholly sure of his tiresome little minister.”54 Laurier returned from the West to Montreal on September 9 to speak to the Eucharistic Congress, a great event in official Roman Catholic circles, where he and Bourassa would be rival attractions. There were a cardinal legate from Rome, large episcopal delegations from the United States and Europe, and five hundred thousand pilgrims. The Irish Roman Catholics, now quite numerous and stronger in Ontario than the French, led by Bishop Michael Francis Fallon of London, Ontario, advocated curtailing French-language rights and divided Catholic opinion in Canada. In Montreal, the Irish met in St. Patrick’s Church and the French in Notre-Dame Church. Laurier arrived for lunch at the opulent home of Thomas Shaughnessy, president of Canadian Pacific, with the most senior foreign clergy who attended the congress. He went on to a reception at the Windsor Hotel given by the New York Catholic Society and then spoke at Notre-Dame in Place d’Armes. He was presented very respectfully by Bruchési and gave a cautious address that gave no offence to Protestants but no inspiration to Catholics either.

  He was followed the next day by Archbishop Francis Bourne of Westminster, who rivalled in his blundering insensitivity the most inept of his secular countrymen who had intervened in Canada and said that Canadian Catholicism must not be linked to the French language, but as English-speaking co-religionists multiplied, by immigration and assimilation, it must rather be identified with the English language. What possessed him to say such a thing in the second largest and most Catholic French city in the world defies imagining. Two innocuous addresses followed, and then Bourassa had the chance of a lifetime. He both rose and stooped to it, delivering a paean to French Canada’s service to Catholicism and its heroic history of defying the numbers and being the leading carrier of the flame of Roman Catholicism in all of North America: “We are only a handful, it is true; but in the school of Christ I did not learn to estimate right and moral forces by numbers and wealth. We are only a handful, but we count for what we are and we have the right to live.… Let us go to Calvary, and there on that little hill in Judea which was not very high in the world let us learn the lesson of tolerance and of true Christian charity.”55 That of course was almost the last cause that Bourassa was promoting, but it was a powerful address that electrified the masses of Quebec and seriously overshadowed Laurier’s bland performance.

  Laurier saw the dangers of Bourassa, but still had deep support in Quebec, unlike Conservative leader Borden, who could not control Monk (a disciple of Bourassa) and could not control his servile Brit
annophiles like Foster either. With the foreign bishops and the fervent pilgrims gone, Laurier returned to Montreal on October 10. He spoke to a large and admiring crowd and denounced the “Pharisee … defenders of a religion that no one attacks; who wield the holy water dispenser like a club, arrogate to themselves the monopoly of orthodoxy, who excommunicate those whose stature is greater than theirs; who have only hatred and envy as their motive and instinct, who insulted Cardinal Taschereau and made Chapleau’s life bitter; those whom the people with their picturesque language described as ‘Castors.’ ” These were fighting words, forcefully delivered and almost deliriously received. Bourassa, a formidable intellectual snob, would be particularly outraged to be called a Castor, or beaver, the popular description of ignorant and reactionary Catholic bigots and know-nothings.56

  Fielding’s negotiations in Washington went better than he or Laurier had dared, or had any reason, to hope. Taft proved completely congenial and full of genuine goodwill. The Americans were prepared to allow free entry for Canadian agriculture and forest products, minerals, and fish; tariffs on Canadian manufactures would be lowered appreciably; and all the United States asked was that Canadian tariffs be lowered on American imports to the levels enjoyed by other countries. Fielding broke new ground in what eventually became the widespread concept of “anti-dumping” provisions. Taft was interested in giving American consumers lower prices; he was not overly concerned with protection of American agriculture and industry, which were both booming and didn’t need protection. On January 26, 1911, Fielding announced the astonishing trade agreement to a House of Commons that was mainly pleased and, for the rest, stunned. But as debate wore on, opposition arose and gathered strength. Sifton, though he had accepted the chair of Laurier’s commission on natural resources, was against the agreement and went over to the Opposition on the issue. Borden, though silent at first, received the demurral of his Imperialist base, though Imperial preference was not affected. Such was the suspicion of the United States in these circles that it was assumed something reprehensible must be behind the Americans’ sudden rush of apparent reasonableness. It was claimed that this was starting down the slippery slope to commercial union and annexation. The railways, led by Van Horne, were opposed, and behind them the principal banking and financial interests. Sifton attacked the reciprocity agreement in the House on February 28; he even lamented that there would be a decline in the entry of U.S. capital to build branch plants, as they would no longer be necessary, though Canadian manufacturing tariffs were scarcely being adjusted at all. Laurier spoke with great power and authority on March 7 and dismissed all opposition as based on narrow self-interest or unjustified fear. That analysis was almost certainly accurate, but unfortunately it affected a very large and susceptible share of the population.

  Laurier sailed for Britain on May 12 to attend the coronation of George V and the attendant Imperial Conference. All went well, and more even than at Victoria’s jubilee and Edward’s coronation and the previous conference, Laurier was the eminent statesman of the British Empire. He was graciously received everywhere, and Asquith himself, now prime minister, agreed with him that it was time to bury Chamberlain’s apparently almost imperishable notion of an Imperial legislative council. The countries were affiliated by the Crown but they were autonomous and were not puppets of Westminster. The Canadian prime minister returned to Quebec on July 10.

  On the next day, he told a very large crowd on the Champ de Mars in Montreal, as Henry IV told his young followers at the Battle of Ivry, “Follow my white plume and you will find it always in the forefront of honour.” Laurier believed that he could rout the unholy alliance of the foes and slanderers of his government and of his reciprocity agreement, and on July 29 he dissolved Parliament for an election on September 21. To get his side of the arrangement adopted, Taft had had to resort to the American manifest destiny infelicities of old about Canada becoming “only an adjunct to the United States.” In a letter to Theodore Roosevelt published on April 25, Taft continued that reciprocity “would transfer all [of Canada’s] important business to Chicago and New York, with their bank credits and everything else, and it would increase greatly the demand of Canada for our manufactures. I see this as an argument made against Reciprocity in Canada, and I think it is a good one.”57 And the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, Beauchamp “Champ” Clark, of St. Louis, Missouri, announced that “We are preparing to annex Canada.” Laurier’s opponents naturally made great hay of this, but Laurier fought hard and energetically, and slathered his opponents as cowards and hypocrites. In Trois-Rivières on August 17, he recounted all that he had been accused of in English and French Canada, always opposite failings, over a public career of forty years since his first election campaign. In Ontario, he said that John A. Macdonald was the Moses of reciprocity who showed the country the Promised Land. “I am the Joshua who will lead the people to their goal.”58

  On September 19 in Montreal, Laurier’s automobile was caught by a crowd dispersing from one of Bourassa’s meetings. The young militants rocked and kicked the car and insulted the prime minister. Tory money was pouring in to support Bourassa, including a miraculous payment for tens of thousands of subscriptions to Le Devoir, thus reducing Bourassa to the indignity of paid hack of reactionary and protectionist English-Canadian finance. “O Canada” was reworded in a version that began “O Bourassa,” and in a very brief foray to Ontario, Bourassa even spoke to the French Canadians at Sudbury. It had been an inexplicable tactical error for Laurier to arouse the hopes of Bourassa on Catholic schools in Alberta and Saskatchewan, losing Sifton and his like-minded followers, and then to reverse field and lose Bourassa and his large following. He seems briefly to have wearied of the inevitable Canadian compromise, and only rediscovered a taste for it after he had taken a lethal dose of the poison of sectarian strife. It was preposterous that Bourassa would be making common cause with the francophobic, ultra-Imperialist Orangemen of Ontario and the Anglo fat cats of English Montreal, but Laurier had suddenly allowed the Siftonian bigots to grasp hands with the ultramontanist crypto-separatist Zouaves.

  On September 21, the Liberals lost 48 MPs, dropping from 133 seats to 85, and the Conservatives gained 47, rising from 85 to 132. The Liberals lost 3.1 per cent of the popular vote, descending to 45.8, and the Conservatives gained 2.3 to bring in 48.6 per cent. Laurier lost seven ministers in their own districts, including Fielding, Fisher, and King. The prime minister had not really renewed his government, had been reckless about the damage that Sifton and Bourassa could do at the fringes, had been overconfident after four consecutive victories and the negotiation of such a brilliant trade arrangement with the United States, and had gone to the country prematurely, as he could have waited up to two years before promulgating reciprocity, an issue that did require popular endorsement but could have been better prepared and presented. He should not have allowed his opponents to represent it as commercial union and the slippery slope to annexation when in fact Canadian tariffs were almost unaltered and Imperial preference was unaffected. He had had a winning issue with the navy but let it slip. For all his talent and suavity and courage, Laurier proved not to have entirely consistent political judgment. And he should have reflected on the fact that no democratic leader had ever won five consecutive terms as head of a national government (and none has since).

  Although he lost control of the radical centre at the end, Laurier had held the country together through fifteen difficult years and vitally strengthened it with immense immigration and development. The population had grown by 40 per cent under his government, and the economic indices had advanced even more. Even in this election, he had won as many English-speaking votes outside Ontario, Manitoba, and British Columbia as had Borden. He had shown English Canada that a French and Roman Catholic leader could serve their interests well, and shown French Canadians that one of theirs could be accepted in English Canada. He had popularized a national interest of progress, goodwill, and confidence, em
bodied it in his own universally respected person, and greatly enhanced the standing of Canada in London, Washington, Paris, and Rome. He had been a leader of very high distinction. Although Laurier would surrender the government almost on the eve of his seventieth birthday, Gladstone and Disraeli had shown that great things could be done by democratic leaders in their seventies. His service to his country was, in some respects, still to achieve its greatest and noblest height.

  8. Robert L. Borden and the Coming of the Great War, 1911–1914

  Borden personally could not have been more gracious. He would not have his victory procession, on his return to Ottawa on September 24, in which a hundred men pulled his carriage with a network of ropes, go down Laurier Avenue, and he told Sir Wilfrid to take all the time he wanted before handing over. Laurier was magnificently dignified and unbowed in defeat and won, yet again, the admiration of all for his human qualities. Borden wrote admiringly in his memoirs of “Sir Wilfrid’s … chivalrous and high-minded outlook and attitude.”59