by Conrad Black
Borden’s cabinet was, of necessity, unexciting. Bourassa had declined a place, and Lavergne declined without having been asked. George Foster was not acceptable to the monied Toronto interests as minister of finance, and he had to settle for trade and commerce, as Cartwright had before him. Thomas White took finance. Sam Hughes, at militia, was a human grenade with the pin pulled, and Frederick Monk at public works was scarcely less highly explosive. Borden would write of Hughes that he had “earned a promotion but I hesitated for some time because of his erratic temperament and his immense vanity.… [Hughes] frankly admitted his faults and told me that he realized his impulsiveness but that he would be more discreet in the future. However, discretion did not thereafter prove to be a prominent characteristic.”60 The young, at thirty-seven, Arthur Meighen of Manitoba was soon named solicitor general, while Laurier managed to find employment for his protégé Mackenzie King as head of the Liberal Party Information Office, a position well-suited to his talents as an inside fixer and schemer, as Meighen would prove a talented and articulate holder of his position. Meighen and King would be at each other’s throats intermittently for more than thirty years. Monk was the senior party figure in Quebec, who had been the link with Bourassa and Lavergne. Bourassa had helped to elect most of the twenty-seven Quebec Conservatives, and Monk had to be given the customary French-Canadian patronage playpen of public works, but Borden was under no illusion that he was really in control of his Quebec colleagues. The grand leader of the Orange Lodge, Dr. Thomas Sproule, took his place as Speaker of the House of Commons (in which capacity his performance would be exemplarily gentlemanly).
In April 1912, Borden holidayed in New York City and Hot Springs, Virginia, from which place, in an illustration of the latest progress in communications, he spoke, as did President Taft from Washington, to a meeting of the American Press news cooperative at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel by telephone, and their remarks were conveyed with perfect clarity to all those attending by individual telephone receivers. Among those present were former Canadian resident Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922), inventor of the telephone, and Thomas Edison (1847–1931), inventor of the electric light.61 This was a subtle but profound change from forty years earlier, when James G. Blaine professed to find the presence of even one Canadian commissioner at the Washington Conference to be distasteful. Borden had an intense visit to London and Paris in July and August and made a good impression in both capitals. He was unaffected, forthright, and knew his mind, a respectful Empire man but clearly a patriotic Canadian, and never an overawed toady. He spoke at numerous banquets and weathered the sumptuous, liver-busting London circuit fatigued but unbowed, neither giddy, bumptious, or unnatural, a gracious, solid, colonial statesman, though there was little of the sly and entertaining Macdonald fox or the elegant Laurier showman about him. The French, including the premier, Raymond Poincaré (who would only relinquish that post to become president of the republic the following year), were pleasantly surprised that Borden could give an address in French, as he did at the Société France-Amérique, and Poincaré complimented him that his French was more comprehensible than that of his colleague, the postmaster general, Louis-Philippe Pelletier, who accompanied Borden in place of Monk.62 This cultural gap was long a problem in France-Quebec relations, though it abated eventually as the quality of spoken French improved in Quebec and the French became more appreciative of French Canada’s accomplishments and status as the second French entity in the world by most measurements.
Borden was impressed by Churchill as first lord of the admiralty, both by his energy and his high and quick intelligence. He found the prime minister, Asquith, urbane and convivial (Campbell-Bannerman had died in 1908), but was especially impressed by Lloyd George, now the chancellor, and Balfour, the Opposition leader, as gracious, charming, and very witty men. Of course, these four were all prime ministers at some point, and all would play important roles in the great dramas about to unfold. Churchill waxed very enthusiastic about the plan for a Canadian payment for three capital ships for the Royal Navy, and explained to Borden that this was a win-double, because it would not only make an important addition to the British battle fleet, but would not technically be British construction and might therefore avoid an escalation in the tensions with Germany. Borden records this in his memoirs without comment, but it is inconceivable that either man could have believed Germany would not consider any such step as the straightforward escalation of the naval arms race between the two empires that it would be.
This constituted a change in the British position of 1909, which had been to encourage Canada and Australia to build their own forces (even if in British shipyards) and use them to see off enemy surface commerce raiders, and if necessary merge them as required into the Royal Navy. The change reflected the increasing severity of the German challenge. Borden asked for both a private memorandum on the naval crisis and a publicly usable one that would smooth matters for diplomatic purposes but convey enough urgency to be useful to him in his own Parliament. Churchill complied, but allowed to close colleagues that it was challenging to run the gauntlet between admission that Britain was underprotected, or that Canada would be underprotected, all the while avoiding an outright imputation of impending treachery to Germany (though Churchill considered all three to be the case and told Borden that Germany could attack Great Britain at any time.)63 Borden called it “the most irritating document from authority in Britain since the days of Lord North.”64
While this issue raged in Canada, the United States had a tumultuous election, between three presidents. Theodore Roosevelt had been scandalized by what he thought were reprehensibly primitive measures in support of monopoly capitalism undertaken by his successor, President Taft, and was particularly outraged at Taft’s comparative lack of interest in conservation. He entered the presidential primaries against his successor, and was generally successful, but was sandbagged by the old guard conservative members of the Republican Party, who assured the renomination of Taft. Roosevelt stalked out of the party, announcing, “We are at Armageddon and I fight for the Lord.” He announced his candidacy at the head of the Progressive Party, and the governor of California, Hiram Johnson, ran with him as vice president. The Democrats had had a rending battle between three-time unsuccessful nominee and leader of the bimetallists (the broadening of the gold standard to include silver), the silver-tongued orator William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska; the Speaker of the House, Champ Clark of Missouri; and the reformist governor of New Jersey and distinguished former president of Princeton University, one of America’s foremost educators and public intellectuals, Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Bryan, thrice previously denied the highest office by the voters, running third, withdrew and gave his support to Wilson, thus, given the Republican split, effectively anointing him to the great office that had so tenaciously escaped Bryan. Wilson won, Roosevelt came second, Taft eventually became the only person in the country’s history to be both president and chief justice, and Bryan became secretary of state. Wilson was an anti-militarist and anti-imperialist, an intellectual anglophile, an expert on comparative government, and an admirer of the parliamentary system. A very promising era in trans-border relations seemed to be opening.
Robert Borden unveiled his naval program to the House of Commons on December 5, 1912. There would be thirty-five million dollars to pay for three British dreadnoughts, and the Canadian navy was scaled back to practically nothing. When he finished his presentation, he sat down abruptly, missed his chair, and sat heavily on the floor, breaking his spectacles, an awkward moment and unpromising augury.
“Oh, ye Tory jingoes,” taunted Laurier. “You are ready to furnish admirals, rear admirals, commodores, captains, officers of all grades, plumes, feathers, and gold lace; but you leave it to England to supply the bone and sinews on board those ships. You say that these ships shall bear Canadian names. That will be the only thing Canadian about them.… You are ready to do anything except the fighting.”65 The program was the work of Win
ston Churchill, now thirty-eight. He promised “the largest and strongest ships of war which science can build or money supply,” and was feted around Whitehall for a golden egg from the yokels in the great Dominion, which would employ thousands of British shipbuilders and fulfill the dreams of storybook Imperialism: overseas cash for British industry, defence, and deployment in the great European game. The gloating was premature.
The satanic alliance with Bourassa came apart with Ontario’s Regulation 17 in 1912, which rolled the teaching of French back to the first years of public education and in heavily French districts only. Monk resigned from the cabinet in September, dissatisfied with the indifference of the government to the French Canadians and alarmed at what was shaping up as the government’s naval policy. Monk had sought a plebiscite on the issue of a contribution to the Royal Navy of thirty-five million dollars, but the English-Canadian ministers, representing staunchly the parliamentary rather than the referendary tradition, declined. It was not a bad idea of Monk’s, as the government would have carried the plebiscite; it would have lost the plebiscite in Quebec, where both Laurier and Bourassa would have opposed it, but Quebec having made its statement, and the country overall having voted for the government, Laurier would have found it difficult to use the Liberal majority in the Senate to block it. This, as Borden had tried to explain to the British on his visit, was a distinct possibility. Monk retired from the House in March and died in May 1913, aged only fifty-eight. He had been a fairly able man but had been completely overshadowed by Laurier and Bourassa, and even by Lavergne and Tarte.
Borden made a good argument, technically, that Britain was seriously challenged and that the British Empire was not a great land power and that the entire defence of it rested on the naval forces. The British, and thus the whole Empire, were severely challenged, and according to Borden, Canada would squander precious time and resources building a department of the navy from the ground up with the personnel and physical plant of a new ministry; it was better to inject money directly for maximum and swiftest possible assistance to the common effort. The problem with this was that it completely ignored the national aspect. Borden, no less than Laurier and Macdonald, proclaimed at every opportunity the growth, predestined greatness, and rising strength of Canada, yet his idea of defence, for a country that was not itself under any possible threat from anyone, as long as the Americans did not become neurotic (which was almost unthinkable under Woodrow Wilson), was simply to pay a form of filial tribute for Britain’s use against Germany. It was a course of action that lacked grandeur in itself, and which directly assaulted ingrained French-Canadian dislike for what Quebec considered needless involvement in Europe’s quarrels. And it did nothing for Canada, no navy, no sailors, no employment. Canada was going to have to have a navy, a serious shipbuilding industry (at which it had made a promising start nearly 250 years before in Jean Talon’s time), and a defence ministry eventually; why not now? Borden told the House of Commons, “Almost unaided, the Motherland, not for herself alone, but for us as well, is sustaining the burden of a vital imperial duty and confronting an overmastering necessity of national existence. Bringing the best assistance that we may in the urgency of the moment, we come thus to her aid, in token of our determination to … defend on sea as well as on land our flag, our honour, and our heritage.”66
This was pretty heavy going; no one could doubt that Britain was not reciprocally quite so committed to the interests of Canada. There were and had always been, as has often been recorded in this narrative, distinct differences in the interests of Canada and Great Britain, and Borden was proposing a course that would pretend that there were no such differences. At least if Canada built her own navy, as the British had asked until recently and Laurier had proposed, it would be a card in Canada’s hand and not anyone else’s. Once the thirty-five million dollars were paid out to the British Exchequer, British shipyards would get the orders, the British Admiralty would deploy the ships, and Canada would have nothing beyond the lighthouses on her shores. It was a conceptually vulnerable position that in some ways replicated Laurier’s error with the Alberta and Saskatchewan schools: Borden was completely writing off Quebec. But Laurier had blundered into the schools question of the new provinces in his fourth term as head of the government; Borden had been prime minister for only eighteen months. He had never had the Quebec nationalists in his camp other than for reasons of their rank opportunism, and he would never get them back now. He could have assuaged the imperialists in Canada by modifying Laurier’s bill a little, and produced the ships almost as quickly. Churchill and Asquith and Balfour had no votes in Canada, and on this issue Britain did not have much bargaining power; the British were in a challenged position and they should be grateful for any assistance Canada furnished them. Borden was advised by the new governor general, the Duke of Connaught (third son of Queen Victoria, brother of Edward VII, and uncle of King George V), that the king was highly pleased with his bill and his supporting address.67 This was fine, but how did the king, the duke, and the prime minister propose to get this divisive measure through the Senate? Laurier, in his reply to Borden, was clearly aiming at forcing a dissolution, confident that he would take everything in Quebec on this issue and convince English Canadians that it was no betrayal of Britain for Canada to build her own navy.
The debate dragged on, and Borden, who habitually suffered from carbuncles on his neck in stressful times, finally enforced closure in the House of Commons. But on April 29, 1913, Laurier had his Senate leader, Sir George Ross, advise the government leader in the Senate, James Lougheed, that the Liberals would not allow the Navy Bill to pass the Senate unless either it was simply added to Laurier’s Navy Act so that the thirty-five million dollars would be contributed to a Canadian navy, or, in addition to the contribution to the Royal Navy, twenty million dollars was voted to the Canadian navy. This was reasonable, as well as good politics. Borden and Laurier could both have what they wanted. In his memoirs, Borden claims that Laurier would not support either of these compromises,68 but that cannot be accurate. It had, as great questions often do in Canada when they are not carefully managed in a way that builds the centre of the controversy to adequate strength to prevail over the opposite ends of the issue, degenerated into a farcical impasse. Borden claimed an unlimited international emergency but floor-managed a divisive bill in a way that assured he could not win in Parliament and could not win if he took the issue to the country. He told the House of Commons on June 6, 1913, a year after his formative trip to London, that Canada “expected to take over and pay for the three ships which Great Britain proposed to lay down in substitution for those which Canada would have provided under our Bill.”69 This too was moonshine, a dream, though not a bad improvisation in response to Laurier on the day of prorogation. The Canadian Parliament adjourned to January 15, 1914, as Europe sleepwalked toward the most terrible war in human history (though not 1 per cent of it would be fought at sea).
In the debate on the speech from the throne, Borden quoted the German newspaper Hamburger Nachrichten rejoicing at the decision of the Canadian Senate, and then Parliament debated what Borden described in his memoirs as “the importation of Hindus into Canada,” and all seemed oppressively normal as the House adjourned for the summer.
The prime minister went to Muskoka for a month’s holiday on July 23, but was induced by an increasingly urgent series of messages from Ottawa to return to the capital as war clouds suddenly darkened in Europe. Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on June 28, 1914, by an anarchist, Gavrilo Princip, who was acting for the Pan-Slavic group Black Hand. The Serbian government seemed to have been slightly aware of the conspiracy, though it was not directly involved in it. The German emperor gave Austria-Hungary, under their alliance, what he called “a blank cheque” to deal with Serbia as it wished. The world was generally sympathetic to the Habsburg dynasty on the tragedy it had suffered, as Vienna prepared its stance toward Serbia, which was a state
sponsored by Russia in the Romanov ambition to lead the Slavic world opposite its ancient Austrian and Turkish enemies. The French president, Poincaré, and premier, René Viviani, visited St. Petersburg from July 20 to 23 and urged the Russian government not to yield to excessive Austro-Hungarian bullying of Serbia. As soon as the French leaders had left the Russian capital, Austria served an ultimatum on Serbia demanding suppression of anti-Austrian organizations and publications, dismissal of officials hostile to Austria, prosecution of accessories to the plot, sanitization of school curricula, and abject apologies. Serbia responded in conciliatory terms but was fuzzy in some areas and declined the requirement of prosecutions without suitable evidence.
The British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, proposed an international conference on Austrian-Serbian problems, which France and Russia accepted but Vienna, with German support, declined as unsuitable in the circumstances of the affront to the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s honour. Vienna and Berlin believed the czar was bluffing in his support of the Serbs, and Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28. France urged a strong response on Russia, and Germany offered non-violation of France and Belgium if Britain remained neutral. Britain declined, as Germany was effectively seeking to pummel Russia to its own unlimited satisfaction. Between July 29 and August 3, all five of the great European powers (excepting Italy), were ratcheting up toward general mobilization while tossing out conditional offers of de-escalation. It was a game of chicken between governments in varying states of gross irresponsibility.
