9
EXPANSION AND DISAPPOINTMENT, 1867–1896
The members of the Charlottetown Conference pause for photographic immortalization: Charles Tupper, Nova Scotia (top row, third from left); Thomas D’Arcy McGee (top row, seventh from left); George-Etienne Cartier (in front of McGee); John A. Macdonald (sitting in centre); John Hamilton Gray, PEI (second right from Macdonald); Samuel Leonard Tilley, New Brunswick (in front of third pole); George Brown (far right).
The Dominion of Canada established in 1867 disappointed some of the hopes of its founders. They predicted a great transcontinental country, abounding prosperity, and a population to rival the United States. They were not entirely wrong. The dominion was by 1896 the third largest political entity on earth, more than seventy-seven million hectares, behind only Russia and China. It had expanded to the prairies in 1870, buying out the lands of the Hudson’s Bay Company, to the Pacific in 1871, with the addition of British Columbia, and filled out on the Atlantic in 1873, when Prince Edward Island finally joined. The British government transferred the largely empty Arctic Archipelago to Canada in 1880, extending the dominion’s nominal jurisdiction all the way to the North Pole.
The land, however, lacked people. This fact occasioned first puzzlement, embarrassment, then resentment among patriotic Canadians. The acquisition of a transcontinental territory matching that of the United States, coupled with superior British institutions, seemed a logical formula for national greatness, with a population to match. As for the population—thirty, forty, a hundred million were plausible figures; plausible enough, at least, to float without serious contradiction in the oratory of the period.
Reality was somewhat different. The west had first to be acquired, and when it was it came with strings attached. There was a discontented local population on the prairies, made up of Indians and whites, and the Métis, who were a mixture of the two. They would have to be mollified and subsidized before they could be governed. Farther west there was British Columbia, attached to Canada in 1871 by a Canadian promise of a transcontinental railway. But the railway cost money and took time. There was less money than expected, thanks to an international economic downturn in the 1870s. Nation-building turned out to be a heavier burden than expected, and it was hard to attract immigrants to a country with a disappointing economy and inferior prospects.
When Canada was judged inferior, it was always with reference to the United States, the giant next door. Canadians admired, envied, and resented their neighbour. Many Canadians measured their own status against that of the United States, and drew their own conclusions. American prosperity was its own advertisement, so much so that between 1867 and 1896 some two million Canadians left for points south and west.1 Immigrants arrived to replace them in the lesser opportunities available in Canada—but never enough.
The departure of so many Canadians masked another trend in the population: Canadians were living longer, with life expectancy in urban areas rising, which mirrored improvements in medicine but also a rising standard of living. There were proportionately more females at the end of the century than at the beginning—due in large part to the development of safer practices regarding childbirth. Rising living standards beckoned people from farms to towns, or to Canada’s few large cities.
If Canada was underpopulated, with a surplus of emigrants over immigrants, it was also divided. The divisions were racial, between Natives, or half-Natives like the Métis, and the majority whites; linguistic, again between Natives and whites, but also between English and French; religious, between Catholic and Protestant, and among the various Protestant sects; geographical, pitting region against region; and finally constitutional, between the layers of government in Canada’s federal system, meaning the dominion against the provinces.
There were unifying factors too. Canada’s British identity evoked varying degrees of enthusiasm, but few indeed railed against the empire and all it stood for. There was politics, especially the party system, which was organized on a pan-Canadian basis. Partisan loyalty subsumed some of the differences between religion and region and language. There was economic advantage, as local interests discovered that profit sometimes knew no boundaries. There were large corporations, especially the railways but also banks, manufacturers, and retailers, employing thousands from coast to coast in hierarchically organized companies. There was technology, linking east and west in Canada through the railway and the telegraph and then, in the 1880s and later, through the telephone and electricity.
Finally, there was government, which in the later nineteenth century was expanding. Sometimes government acted through agents—for example the government bankers, the Bank of Montreal, or the various railway companies that government patronized and subsidized. Governments sometimes competed on behalf of the interests they represented, or tried to monopolize rewards and other concessions.
At the head of government were the politicians, of whom the most successful, Sir John A. Macdonald, became prime minister on 1 July 1867 as leader of a Liberal-Conservative administration. So skilled was Macdonald that he occupied the post of prime minister for nineteen of the next twenty-four years; his was the mould from which most of Canada’s successful political leaders were formed. Macdonald was fortunate in his associates, some of whom, like Sir Leonard Tilley, Sir George-Etienne Cartier, and Sir Charles Tupper, were former provincial premiers. Macdonald’s particular skill was to bind his party to him in loyalty, for as he and his followers knew, in party politics loyalty is a precondition for success.
Canada was governed on three levels: provincial, for local matters; federal, with a government headquartered in Ottawa; and imperial, located, as always, in London. The London government spent little directly on Canada, but Canadians nevertheless relied on it for identity and support. The Union Jack flapped proudly over Canadian land. Portraits of Queen Victoria were universal, and in larger cities actual statues of the queen gave her a physical presence. But the main benefit of the queen and her monarchy for Canadians was psychological. Being part of Great Britain and the British Empire meant identity, tradition, and stability, at least for those Canadians who chose not to emigrate to the United States and harvest the fruits of republican prosperity.
Canada was fortunate in one respect: nobody wanted to attack it from the outside. The Americans were preoccupied with their own development, and had no time to spare for the colony to the north, so nearly identical, so inexplicably separate. Canadians shared with Americans the benefits of geographical isolation, protected by the Royal Navy from European intervention—the only direction from which an organized invasion could possibly come. Accordingly, the burden of defence was slight. Canada’s defence establishment, such as it was, was primarily a social club, an occasion for Canadian males to wear bright uniforms and look fierce and gallant. Over the first thirty years of Canada’s existence the military confronted an actual enemy only twice—both times in the distant west.
RIEL AND RAILWAYS
The largest aggregation of British territory in North America was, until 1869, Rupert’s Land, the property of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The company’s rule sat lightly on the inhabitants of Rupert’s Land, but light as it was, it was too much both for the company and for its western subjects. When the Canadian government came calling at the Bay Company headquarters in London with an imperial loan guarantee, it found a willing seller. In return for £300,000, some land around its western posts, and 5 percent of the estimated arable terrain of the west (about 2.8 million hectares), the company relinquished 390 million hectares of territory. The transfer of land was to be effective on 1 December 1869.
In Ottawa, Sir John A. Macdonald’s government rejoiced. He appointed a lieutenant governor to manage Rupert’s Land, and dispatched him via Minnesota (where there was the nearest rail line) to the territory’s only large settlement, on the Red River.
The inhabitants of Red River had other ideas. Under the leadership of a youthful and charismatic figure, Louis Riel, some of the locals demanded promises and conditions before they would allow the foreign Canadians to assume control over themselves and their lands and properties. Riel’s followers were both Métis and white—he himself was Métis— but the incident is usually called the Riel rebellion and chronicled as a predominantly Métis occasion.
There were numbers of Canadians at Red River, mostly from Ontario. Bold and irresponsible, their leaders tried to anticipate Canadian control and overthrow Riel, but were themselves overthrown. It was a foolish and pointless gesture, because by early 1870 negotiations were well underway to appease Red River’s concerns. Riel followed with a foolish gesture of his own, appointing a firing squad to execute the most disruptive of the Canadian party, a young man named Thomas Scott. “We must make Canada respect us,” Riel helpfully explained, but he had chosen the wrong gesture. An armed but bloodless rebellion was one thing; the quasi-judicial murder of Scott was something else.
Scott’s untimely demise awakened demons in Ontario. English, Protestant, and an Orangeman, he could be fashioned into a symbol, a martyr no less, for Anglo-Protestant liberty against the French and Catholic Riel.2 A military expedition composed of imperial and colonial troops was already being mounted under a British officer, Colonel Garnet Wolseley. Riel had furnished the Canadian part of the expedition with a war cry. But when Wolseley arrived at the old Hudson’s Bay fort at Red River in August 1870, after a lengthy journey by steamer and canoe from central Canada—there was no railway north or west of Georgian Bay— Riel slipped out the rear gate, and escaped to the United States.
The Red River rebellion produced the province of Manitoba as part of Macdonald’s hasty deal with Red River’s inhabitants. (It was originally a tiny rectangle south of Lake Winnipeg.) Manitoba, like other Canadian provinces, had its own government and elected legislature, which was autonomous and representative of local politics and pride. Unlike the older provinces, it was totally dependent on subsidy from the dominion government, which gave it some utility as far as Macdonald was concerned. Manitoba thus became Canada’s fifth province.
As prime minister, Macdonald had troubles enough. He had to create institutions to match Canada’s transcontinental aspirations, and some of his early efforts stumbled. Two finance ministers resigned over banking policy; only the third, Sir Francis Hincks, succeeded in passing a Bank Act, which favoured, but not too obviously, the Bank of Montreal and the Montreal financial community over other regional banking centres such as Halifax and Toronto.
The government needed money. It taxed as best it could, within the limits of a revenue tariff, but to do what it needed to do it must borrow. Territorial expansion was expensive: there was the cost of buying Rupert’s Land, and after that there was British Columbia, which was induced into joining Canada in 1871 by the promise of a transcontinental connection to the rest of the country. Macdonald promised a railway within ten years, to the British Columbians’ initial surprise and pleasure. They knew, and he knew, that it would cost a great deal of money. British Columbia, vast in space and tiny in population, became Canada’s sixth province.
Next came Prince Edward Island, which in the 1870s had many times the population of British Columbia, plus a fishery, and a railway. The Islanders couldn’t afford their railway, and began to think of ways to pay for it. Canada might not have had much money, but it had more than the Island and, with the sun of imperial approbation beaming down, Prince Edward Island joined Canada in 1873, becoming Canada’s seventh province.
Macdonald had the components for a country. Now he must join them together. He couldn’t expect much help from outside: the British government, headed by the economically minded William Ewart Gladstone, did not wish to be reminded of what Canada had already cost. As part of his own program of economy, he withdrew the remaining British army garrisons from Canada, leaving only two residual naval bases at Halifax and Esquimalt, on Vancouver Island. It was an admission that Great Britain had little prospect of mounting a successful land defence of Canada.
Great Britain nevertheless retained responsibility for defence and foreign affairs. In token of the former, a British officer commanded the Canadian militia as well as a tiny permanent force. Canada didn’t control its foreign relations, but Canadian concerns could still be heard within the empire. Thus the British government appointed Macdonald as one of three commissioners to visit Washington to resolve outstanding issues of Anglo–American diplomacy. Most of these related to American grievances over British conduct during the American Civil War.
The grievances were real enough. The British had allowed the Confederacy to build commerce raiders like the ship Alabama in British shipyards. There had been the St. Alban’s raid in 1864, and other minor incidents of cross-border depredations. On the other hand, there were the costly Fenian incursions into Canada, which were arguably the product of American official negligence. The Americans complained about Canadian fisheries policy that restricted American fishing boats in Canadian waters, and the Canadians wanted to see the Reciprocity Treaty restored. Indeed, Macdonald hoped to use access to Canada’s fisheries as bait to induce the Americans to return to reciprocity. Unofficially, the Republican senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, suggested that the whole package of disputes could be wrapped up by the simple expedient of giving Canada to the United States in return for the cancellation of American claims on Great Britain.
That was never a prospect, but neither was reciprocity. Instead, the British paid handsomely for the Alabama and related claims, while the Americans rented access to the Canadian fishery for ten years, at a cost to be determined by arbitration. The Fenian losses were simply omitted. All this was embodied in a treaty signed in Washington.
The significance of the occasion was not lost on Macdonald. He resented the fact that the British had disposed of Canadian interests to meet their larger objective of re-establishing peace and harmony with the United States. Though in a sense three countries had been present at the negotiation, it was the two larger ones that decided the outcome. Canada’s role was not to obstruct.
It was a lesson that the British Empire was not an equal opportunity association. A colony like Canada might no longer be subordinate, but it was definitely not equal to Great Britain. Colonial requirements might be considered or even indulged by British ministers, but they had not the same shape, urgency, or importance as strictly British interests. In any case, if relations between the United States and Great Britain did deteriorate, if negotiations failed to solve outstanding issues, Canadian interests in a larger sense would suffer.3
But would Canada have done any better negotiating on its own? The answer to that question, as Macdonald probably knew, was no, and as Sumner’s half-serious suggestion that Canada be annexed indicated, there was more at stake than a discussion of limited issues. The Americans might not like what they saw in the British Empire, but the empire was a powerful entity, something that had to be considered.4 Canada was not.
Macdonald, in any case, had to bear in mind that he needed British money to provide for Canada’s future, if it was to have one. He needed it for the Intercolonial Railway connecting Quebec and Halifax, and he needed it for his railway to British Columbia, a huge undertaking. The United States, with its wealth and resources, had only just completed a rail link to California in 1868 over much more favourable geography.
The Intercolonial Railway, which was finally completed in 1876, by itself absorbed $21 million of borrowed money, and is estimated to have taken twice as long to build as it should have. Its chief engineer, Sandford Fleming, applied the experience to laying down a route for Macdonald’s visionary Pacific railway.5 Macdonald’s friends and political allies seem to have benefited from the experience, which dispensed money in politically sensitive areas. The Intercolonial thus succeeded in knitting the scattered colonies together in a metaphysical as well as a physical sense.
The Pacific railway took longer, and of course required more money. The scent of money attracted railway promoters, such as the Montreal steamship magnate Sir Hugh Allan. Allan valued the prospect of heading up a railway syndicate (largely composed of American investors) so highly that he contributed freely to Sir John A. Macdonald’s Conservative party during the 1872 federal election. Sir John, understanding Allan’s interest, drew freely on him, at one point telegraphing “I must have another ten thousand.”
The 1872 election returned Macdonald and his Conservatives to power, but Macdonald’s ally, Sir George Cartier, was personally defeated in Montreal. Shortly afterward Cartier died. Macdonald was soon beset by rumours of scandal concerning Sir Hugh Allan’s “Canada Pacific Railway.” The rumours proved all too true. Some of Macdonald’s MPs quailed in the face of public outrage, and his parliamentary majority melted away. Drunk and depressed in the face of so much adversity, Macdonald was unable to rally his troops. The government was defeated in the House of Commons on 5 November 1873.
Macdonald’s collapse gave the opposition Liberals their chance. An ill-assorted collection of oppositionists, they had no natural leader, and settled on a parliamentary veteran, Alexander Mackenzie, originally a stonemason from Sarnia, Ontario. Mackenzie was at least hard-working and honest, though he was also unimaginative and vindictive—not the best recommendation for a party leader. An election swiftly followed, which even Mackenzie could not have lost. The Liberals were returned with a comfortable majority in the House of Commons, just in time for an international depression to take hold in Canada.
Mackenzie presided over a shrinking economy and an emigrating population. Less economic activity meant fewer imports, and therefore lower tariff revenue, the government’s principal source of taxes. Mackenzie had little option but to raise taxes and spend frugally. His honesty and frugality did not benefit his party, since he had little in the way of patronage to hand out to his supporters.
What Mackenzie could do, he did. Construction began on a Canadian Pacific Railway along a route surveyed by Sandford Fleming. The government would build it, but given the government’s limited financial resources, it proceeded very slowly, so that by 1878 it reached from Fort William on Lake Superior partway through Manitoba. Winnipeg, the new capital of the new province, was connected east to the Great Lakes and south to the American border. There was also a short stretch of railway east from Fleming’s chosen terminus on Burrard Inlet on the Pacific—the future Vancouver. In between, and from central Ontario to Fort William, there was nothing.
The Liberals also organized the West, beyond the postage-stamp province of Manitoba, into the Northwest Territories, with a capital first at Battleford, and later, after 1882, at Regina. All important questions were managed from Ottawa—especially land, settlement, and natural resources. As in the east, land was free to those who could afford to settle upon it, and then cultivate it. But few came—only fifty-six thousand lived in the Territories by the time of the 1881 census.
By 1878 the Liberals were out of power and Sir John A. Macdonald and the Conservatives were back. They returned to construction by private enterprise—heavily subsidized, to be sure. The railway must be seen to be Canadian, and government aid was justified by appeals to national sentiment. The line was built entirely in Canada, across the barren rocks of the Canadian Shield in northern Ontario. A syndicate of Montreal capitalists led by George Stephen and Donald Smith undertook to find the necessary finance, and under the direction of an American engineer, William Van Horne, the railway began to make progress. The government provided inducements on the American model—5 million acres (2.02 million hectares) of land, $25 million in subsidy, all the existing government-built portion of the railway (estimated at $38 million), and a monopoly on rail lines south to the United States. Prairie settlers would deal with the CPR—or nobody.
Generous as the government assistance was, it wasn’t enough. The syndicate took its investment where it could find it—in Great Britain, but also in the United States, a fact that wasn’t emphasized in government and company propaganda. Labourers were imported—many from central Canada, some from Europe, and many, an estimated fifteen thousand, from China, to work on the westernmost section. By early 1885 only a few gaps remained in the rail line between the Rockies and in northern Ontario.
SETTLING AND PACIFYING THE WEST
The railway was needed, for in that year Louis Riel led a new rebellion along the banks of the Saskatchewan River. Riel in 1885 was not the man he once had been. Older, sadder, scarred by experience and misfortune, Riel was convinced that he had a divine mission to secure justice for himself, for his people, the Métis, and more generally for the settlers of the West. Macdonald treated the West with distant unconcern, sending out governors and Indian agents and occupying it with a gendarmerie, the North-West Mounted Police (or NWMP, the ancestors of the later Royal Canadian Mounted Police or RCMP).
The government had signed treaties with the Plains Indians, to get them to surrender their lands in return for government-supported reserves. They could see easily enough from the Indian wars in the neighbouring United States what their fate would be if they tried to resist. Starvation helped the government’s policy: those Natives who might have been disinclined to move onto reserves found they had little choice if they wished to feed their families.
A trickle of settlers moved in from the east, mostly from Ontario, with many stopping in Manitoba. The old Métis way of life was disappearing: the fur trade had shrunk and moved on, the buffalo were gone, and the settlers imported new ways of doing things and a government to enforce them. The Métis responded by moving farther west, to the Saskatchewan Valley; there, too, they had white neighbours. Many of the neighbours were disgruntled at what they took to be official neglect and eastern exploitation: the beginnings of regional feeling in western Canada can be reasonably said to date from this time.6
That settlers’ grievances existed is certain. Were they justified? Most of their problems concerned land, land surveys, and land titles. Ottawa moved to respond, but for a variety of reasons—some beyond the government’s control—the response was slow and too late. And so in the summer of 1884 the communities of the North Saskatchewan River, settlers and Métis, invited Louis Riel, in exile in the United States, to return to Canada, and to advise if not represent them in their disputes with the dominion government. Riel accepted the invitation.
Riel’s agenda was certainly different from that of the settlers. He was on the hunt for reparations and compensation, some for himself, and some for his people, the French-speaking Métis. He believed that the Métis were the inheritors of the land, along with the Indians; but unlike the Indians they hadn’t conceded their patrimony by treaty to the Canadian government. There was no place in Riel’s universe for the settlers, except as interlopers. The government did in fact negotiate with him, and it might have been possible to reach an agreement based on the land claims of the Métis in their river lots along the North Saskatchewan. But reality clashed with Riel’s messianic fervour. He saw himself as a prophet and the organizer of a new church, in which the Bishop of Montreal, whom he admired, would be pope.
Macdonald saw greed and sharp practice in Riel while Riel saw delay and deceit in the government. When Riel turned to armed rebellion, Macdonald raised an army of eight thousand and sent the troops west over the new Canadian Pacific Railway. Transported by the CPR and supplied by the Hudson’s Bay Company, the soldiers easily reached Riel’s headquarters at Batoche, and defeated the insurgents in May 1885. Some of the rebel leaders fled, but Riel surrendered to Canadian troops. In his brief rebellion, some eighty people had lost their lives.
Riel was tried in Regina before a local jury and convicted of treason. His lawyers tried to persuade the court that their client was insane and, given his religious delusions, they had at the very least a plausible case. Riel, however, was anxious to establish his credibility as a prophet, and he was inspired by a genuine sense of personal grievance and injustice. He managed to convince the court that he was, indeed, sane enough to have committed treason. Convicted, he was sentenced to hang.
This was in August 1885. There followed a prolonged and very bitter political crisis. Riel was, after all, French Canadian and, in a sense, Catholic. His cause was widely adopted in Quebec, where he became a symbol of minority rights unjustly trampled by an unfeeling majority. The fact was that the majority too was aroused, and demanded that Riel hang, according to law. Sir John A. Macdonald was pressed to spare Riel’s life from the side of Quebec, and to carry out the sentence from Ontario.
Macdonald was not inclined to sympathy, but he went through the motions of having Riel examined for proof of insanity. Two doctors, one English and one French, were sent to Regina to examine the prisoner, and they reported in precisely opposite ways. Then and later Macdonald played fast and loose with the medical opinions, misleading the House of Commons and effectively confusing the issue. In the words of a prominent Canadian historian, J.R. Miller, “Macdonald believed that no matter what his government did they would be damned by some group. If they were damned if they did and damned if they didn’t, then he was damned well going to do what he personally believed was right.”7 Riel was hanged on 16 November 1885. He believed, until the end, that he would rise on the third day after his execution.
The rights and wrongs of Riel’s life have remained controversial in Canadian history ever since. In Quebec there was considerable resentment. Some of Macdonald’s French-Canadian supporters (including ministers) tried to defend the government, while others remained prudently silent, hoping the storm would pass.
The Liberal opposition, on the other hand, discovered both a vocation and a role in the storm over Riel. The Liberal leader, Edward Blake, questioned the policies and performance of Macdonald’s government. A Quebec Liberal MP, Wilfrid Laurier, went further, telling a mass meeting in Montreal that if he had lived on the banks of the Saskatchewan, he too would have shouldered a rifle and marched beside Riel. It didn’t help the Liberals in Ontario, but it would, eventually, have an impact in Quebec.
The Quebec Conservative party suffered considerable damage in the aftermath of Riel’s execution. The provincial Conservatives lost an election in 1886 to the Liberals (travelling with a few ex-Conservatives under the label Parti National) under Honoré Mercier, and the federal party lost ground in the successive federal elections of 1887 and 1891. Nevertheless, the Conservatives did not entirely disappear in the province, and elsewhere Macdonald’s western policies, and his stand on Riel, helped his party’s fortunes.
Riel became the stuff of legend. He was a western symbol, a Métis hero, a French-Canadian martyr, and an Aboriginal champion. Historians of western Canada, and Canadian historians in general since about 1940, have reinterpreted Riel in a kindly light.8 Politicians invoked his memory, usually favourably. An opera was written about him. In 1999 the Canadian House of Commons even debated and passed a bill asserting the justice of Riel’s cause. (The “Louis Riel Act” never entered the statute books, expiring with the Parliament of the day when the 2000 election was called.) The governor general, flanked by an RCMP honour guard wearing Métis sashes, solemnly eulogized Riel, in effect admitting him into the pantheon of Canadian heroes. Insofar as Canadian history has produced a martyr, Riel is it.
The West, however, developed on very different lines from Riel’s, lines that were already apparent when the Métis took up arms in 1885. The West of the buffalo hunt and unlimited prairies had vanished, and with it the basis of the hunting economy of the western Native tribes. More importantly, Indians were by the 1890s a small minority of the population of the Canadian West, an afterthought even in the minds of their neighbours, dependent on and powerless against a society that barely gave them a second thought.
What the settlers and their government were thinking about was wheat, and the settlement and development that accompanied it. Ontario had flourished because of wheat, but since 1860 there had been no new viable arable land in the province. The acquisition of the West gave Ontarians reason to hope: it meant land for their children and markets for their manufactures—“the promise of Eden.” Government pamphlets extolled the richness of the West—its fertile soil, its mild climate, and its assured agricultural bounty. Even the semi-desert along the 49th parallel, named “Palliser’s Triangle” after its first surveyor, was converted on paper into a bountiful garden.9 But settlement was slow and sparse: by 1886 only 163,000 people lived on the Canadian prairie, including the older communities in Manitoba. The railway, completed the previous fall, would help change that, though slowly.
The dominion government did something practical to assist agriculture by establishing, in the 1870s, a system of experimental farms. Where wheat was concerned the main problem was the short growing season in the prairies, where frost came early and stayed late. The solution would not be found until 1903, when short-growing wheat, called Marquis, was developed. Marquis had as much to do with the subsequent wheat boom as any other factor.
And there were, of course, other factors. Agricultural machinery evolved considerably in the nineteenth century—steel plows first, then mechanical reapers and combine harvesters, which separated seeds or grain from hay. The combines made large-scale farming easier, much less labour intensive, and therefore cheaper. All this assisted settlement.
Most of the settlers were English-speaking, but not all. French speakers—some five thousand of them—came to the Red River Valley from New England. (Government encouragement to get more to come, from New England or Quebec, proved futile.) German-speaking and pacifist Mennonites arrived in Manitoba from Russia, happy to locate to a country where they wouldn’t be conscripted into the army. The transformation was most obvious in Manitoba. The province’s population grew from 25,000 in 1871 to 152,000 in 1891. But where the early population was evenly balanced between Protestant and Catholic, and English and French, by the 1890s Manitoba was overwhelmingly Protestant and English-speaking.
Farther west, in the foothills of the Rockies, a ranching industry grew up. Though similar in some respects to the cattle industry south of the border, the land tenure system was different, as was the social composition of the ranchers. (Land was leased from the government on a system adopted from Australia instead of pre-emption by squatters as in the United States.)10 The ranchers used the new railway, the CPR, to ship their product: the first Alberta beef reached England in 1886.
RAILWAYS AND THE NATIONAL POLICY
Inbound, the railway brought supplies to the western farmers, many of them made in Canada. As part of the price of the CPR’s construction, the government had guaranteed it a monopoly. At the time, facing an empty West, it seemed a good bargain. Later, as the West filled up with farmer-voters, it became clear that there was a political price to pay. The politics of Manitoba turned on the question of the CPR and its monopoly over rail traffic.
But the CPR was only a small part of the links that bound the citizens of the West to central and eastern Canada. It was paralleled by the railway connection between the centre and the east, the Intercolonial Railway. Owned and operated by the government, the Intercolonial provided rewards and employment to government supporters in the East, and helped shore up the structure of patronage and influence that characterized party politics in the late nineteenth century.11 The CPR and the Grand Trunk, more straightforwardly, gave money to the party in power, which could then dispense it in the form of favours or bribes as it saw fit.12
The railways did more than traverse the Canadian wilderness: they opened it for business, assisted by the simultaneous development of electricity in the 1880s. The age of steam was supplemented, rather than replaced, by the age of electricity. Coal, distant and costly though abundant, was replaced as far as central Canada was concerned by hydroelectric power from the rapids and waterfalls of Ontario and Quebec’s rivers. Niagara Falls, the most impressive of all, had functioned mostly as a tourist attraction since the eighteenth century. With the arrival of electricity, it became a destination of a different kind, boasting one of the world’s largest hydroelectric generating stations.
In northern Ontario and Quebec, electricity and abundant water made possible lumber mills and then pulp and paper factories in the midst of the boreal forest. Crews blasting rock out of the railway lines discovered nickel near Sudbury; a huge nickel mine soon followed.
Governments actively meddled in the economy. Agriculture was Canada’s most important industry, and most Canadians depended directly or indirectly on farming. The federal government developed experimental farms to assist agricultural productivity and spread farming to areas previously considered too cold or too dry to attempt farming. The provinces dabbled in agricultural education. A federal geological survey, founded before Confederation, explored Canada’s subterranean geography and published its findings. Governments subsidized railways to accomplish public purposes, built canals and docks, and dredged rivers and harbours.
There was nothing unusual in this—or different from what was happening at the same time in the United States. Technological developments were broadly similar in both places. Electricity, for example, made its appearance in Canada within a few years of its first American application. The telephone—another invention of the 1870s—was actually developed between the two countries as its inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, lived in both. The Americans too subsidized railways, dabbled in technical assistance to farmers and miners, and practised other forms of government intervention in the economy. This is a point worth stressing, given a later tendency among scholars and other ideologues to portray an inherent difference between Canada, a monarchical society, government-oriented and cultivating community, and the United States as a republic that was free-standing and individualistic. There is little in the nineteenth century to sustain such an analysis, and even less as time passed.
What was happening in both countries was that economic institutions were changing along with the economy. The new technological economy depended on time—the timely delivery of goods, the timely transport of people. That in turn meant that the companies that delivered goods and people, or assembled supplies into finished goods, must have reliable and precise standards of performance. The railways were the prototype, with their hierarchical organization, departmental subdivisions, and large workforces. Maintaining a roadbed, and ensuring supplies of water for engine boilers and of coal for furnaces, required organization.13
Other utilities followed, also organized from top to bottom to perform routine tasks predictably and reliably. In cities, department stores grew out of dry goods shops or general stores or fur trade posts: Eaton’s and Simpsons in Toronto, Morgan’s and Dupuis Frères in Montreal, and, eventually, the Hudson’s Bay Company and Woodward’s in Vancouver. Large, attractive, multi-storey retail palaces appeared in the downtowns of the larger cities, which customers could reach using horse-drawn streetcars, and later electric transit. But advances in merchandising weren’t confined to the cities. As the railways made reliable supply and customer deliveries possible, some of the department stores established a catalogue sales business from large central warehouses, relying on the mail for delivery.
Electricity made many larger enterprises possible, and expanding markets made them desirable. Pulp and paper mills, chemical factories, carriage works, all grew in the late nineteenth century—up to a point. As late as 1910 the average Ontario factory employed fewer than thirty employees, certainly more than the blacksmith shops of mid-century, or the modest water-powered flour mills that still dotted the countryside at the century’s end.14 But except in the largest cities, “managers” were either clerks or foremen, not the basis for the sudden growth of a new, intermediate, class. In most Canadian towns, the local elite comprised the clergy, a lawyer or two, the doctor, and the local bank manager (himself part of a larger hierarchy) or, in Quebec, the notary, who often mixed (or mixed up) the law and banking.
Organization and hierarchy also expanded opportunities for the practice of tyranny, while removing most of the workforce from the direct scrutiny of a business’s owners or even its topmost management. “Middle managers” made their appearance, supervising the departments or sectors into which a business was organized. And with large numbers of workers regulated and paid in common, it wasn’t hard to discover common interests, which were expressed through the development of trade unions.
Workers and investors were mobile in late nineteenth-century Canada, and indeed neither labour nor capital was confined to the northern dominion. The same was true of their rudimentary trade unions, which in Canada dated back to the early nineteenth century. Workers travelled wherever there was work, moving freely across the frontier to the United States. They arrived in distant cities anxious for their credentials to be accepted, especially in skilled trades, like printing. Communication between local Canadian unions and their American counterparts, and the common interests of their members, eventually led to absorption in larger American syndicates, like the National Typographical Union.15
The American character of Canadian unionism is worth noting. Many Canadian workers were British-born, coming from a country where trade unionism was very strong if not universally accepted, but although British trade unionism existed in Canada, Canadian workers mostly joined American unions that crossed the frontier. The National Typographical Union wasn’t the only one. The Knights of Labor was another, more important, organization, and when it perished it was succeeded by others. There were Canadian unions too, but they were increasingly subordinated to the dominant American strain in trade unionism.16
Employers were not charmed by the emergence of unions, and none less so than George Brown, the imperious owner of the Toronto Globe. Brown’s confrontations with labour dated back to the 1850s, and lasted all his life, which was terminated by a disgruntled ex-employee who shot him in 1880.
Sir John Macdonald, Brown’s great political rival, further irritated the newspaperman by passing legislation regularizing and legalizing unions’ status in 1872. Other regulations were much slower in coming. Employer resistance to the regulation of wages and working conditions kept the federal government from acting, at least under Macdonald; and it was left to the provinces to act, or not, as they saw fit. Ontario did act in 1884, hiring a single inspector to patrol all of the province’s industries. Under the Ontario legislation, boys under twelve and girls under fourteen were forbidden to work. Once in the workforce they could work sixty hours a week or ten hours a day, though they could also work a maximum of six weeks at twelve hours a day. Things did eventually improve, but it was examples of this kind that gave Canada the reputation of being socially and economically very conservative, if not actually retrograde.
Local, national, and international unions faced an uphill battle in Canada. They could organize, collect dues, and go on strike, but employers could respond by hiring replacements. Riots frequently resulted, which in turn gave employment to the local militia. Whether the militia gave satisfaction to those who called them out was another question. “[They] did not fire upon or bayonet the strikers,” one labour newspaper happily observed. “They were workingmen themselves.”17
The house of labour was, however, divided if not fragmented. “Workingmen” had an occupational identity and with it some kind of class solidarity, certainly. But they had religious, cultural, and regional loyalties as well. Self-interest didn’t necessarily or even often mean leftwing or working-class politics, or translate into a working-class culture distinct from the bourgeois culture that surrounded it.18 Even a large and occasionally militant union like the Knights of Labor organized itself with symbols and ceremonies and rituals that mimicked those of contemporary “secret” societies like the Masons. This was hardly accidental, since fraternal bonds—the “brothers and sisters” of the union movement—were at the core of union solidarity.
That kind of solidarity, in terms of the general culture of the time, was neither strange nor alarming. The workers weren’t isolated from the world around them. That fact could, and did, mean that workers frequently listened to conservative politicians who promised them “protection,” meaning a tariff so high as to keep out competition from lower-wage or lower-cost jurisdictions. As often they harkened to appeals from co-religionists, sometimes spiced with threats of celestial retaliation if they failed to vote their group loyalty on election day.
But, all things being equal, it was the question of the tariff as much as any other government policy that determined voting patterns down to 1896, mixing with other forms of devotion (ethnic, linguistic, and religious) to create an electorate willing to support national political parties. Tariffs are by definition a subsidy, transferring money from consumers to protected industries, but their special attraction to politicians was (and is) that most consumer-voters don’t recognize this point.
Tariffs were the great theological question of nineteenth-century politics, and not just in Canada. Though the debate over free trade versus protection was stilled in Britain for most of the nineteenth century, it lurked in the background as one of the great taboos of British politics. In the United States tariffs remained a lively issue, especially among farmers who received little benefit from higher prices for farm machinery or textiles. The miracle was that in a predominantly agrarian country the tariff could be so powerfully sustained as to be practically untouchable.
Canadian governments would have preferred to return to lower tariffs with the United States, but that was an unrealizable ambition. There remained the domestic market, and the politics that surrounded it. Political advantage dictated a high-tariff policy, whose benefits were on display in the neighbouring United States, where tariffs were an invisible cement binding manufacturers to the high-tariff Republican party. The convergence of interests was veiled in nationalism, assuring voters that it was patriotic to support high tariffs. Macdonald saw no reason not to imitate the Republicans. He called his tariff regime the “National Policy.” Inaugurated in 1879, it remained the basis of Canada’s commercial policy for the next hundred years.
The technique was simple. The Canadian market, though small, was large enough to sustain local industry, if that industry was protected against competition from abroad. So the government asked interested industries to make representations, and then passed their ideas by a small group of advisers in Ottawa. Only occasionally did the consumers’ interest play a part—if the consumer was another business interest able to make its influence felt in Ottawa. Politics certainly played a part: tariff exactions had to be weighed against resentment in the various regions of the country. For example, in British Columbia the tariff was a trade-off against the promised railway.19 In rural areas the tariff was unpopular. In Ontario anti-tariff sentiment could be balanced by other interests and issues, while the Canadian West was still so underpopulated that its interests didn’t count for much. The argument that industry was an essential component of nation-building was powerful, suggesting that present sacrifice in higher prices would be rewarded by future economic and political greatness. The result was a tariff that was certainly high enough, though less high than its American counterpart—which only showed that there was room for growth, in tariffs as in the economy.
THE AMERICANS AGAIN—TRADE AND RECIPROCITY
Trade, in late nineteenth-century Canada, was the handmaiden of politics. It was the product not merely of Canadian politics but of American. (Because Great Britain maintained free trade with all comers, active British politicking wasn’t a factor.) American protectionism ran high in the late nineteenth century; anti-protectionism or liberal trade views were restricted to academic economists, farmers, and other congenital complainers. It was a period of executive weakness and congressional dominance, and Congress harkened only to arguments that paid off in votes, or occasionally cash to buy the votes.
The prevailing idea was that trade with Canada should be considered product by product, as it came to Congress’s attention; it depended on whether there were enough interests that could be mobilized to block a particular Canadian import. The fisheries were periodically a lively issue. New England senators responded with alacrity when their fishing constituents complained, which was bad news for the Canadian government, struggling to maintain primacy for fishermen from the Maritime provinces on Canadian fishing grounds.
The Treaty of Washington provided for the Americans’ renting access to Canadian fishing areas and established an arbitral tribunal to determine the rent. The result, the Halifax Award of 1877, produced $5.5 million for Canada, more than the Americans had anticipated. The U.S. government paid the award with an ill grace as American politicians fulminated. In 1885 Congress instructed the American administration to denounce the fisheries arrangement, but as a result the fisheries question returned to its previous uncertain and confrontational state.20 Congress offered no solution, leaving the hapless executive to manage as best it could.
Neither government particularly wanted a confrontation, and through a series of temporary expedients they staved off the worst. Fish formed the basis of a series of negotiations in the late 1880s that did little to resolve the problem, but had the effect of reviving, on the Canadian side, the whole issue of trade with the United States.
Many Canadians were troubled by their country’s lagging economy. Canada’s slow growth, the unremitting provincialism of its politics, and the relative lack of prosperity and opportunity compared with the United States persuaded some to seek a broader union with the republic. The most prominent proponent of this view was Goldwin Smith, a former professor at the universities of Oxford and Cornell, and in the 1880s Toronto’s resident gadfly. Immune to local pressures thanks to his wife’s money, Smith boldly wrote of the failure of the Canadian experiment and urged annexation to the United States.
It’s not surprising that Smith’s opinions irritated Sir John Macdonald and his government, but they were uneasily aware that many Canadians would plump for a return to the reciprocity agreement of the 1850s and the prosperity with which it was associated in the public memory. Macdonald knew he couldn’t get it on any terms remotely acceptable to his party or to the country, for the only possibility of beguiling the Americans into any comprehensive or effective agreement was to combine economic agreement with political union.
Macdonald was lucky in his opponents. The Liberals hankered after free trade, but knew it wasn’t enough to detach the various interests that Sir John’s protectionist program—grandly styled the National Policy—had attracted to the Conservative party. Free trade plus access to the American market—there was the trick to confound the Tories and win the next election. Wilfrid Laurier, the Liberal leader since 1887, found the prospect irresistible. For the 1891 election the Liberals would stand for Unrestricted Reciprocity with the United States.
Once again, politics trumped economics in 1891. Sir John played the loyalty card, implying that the Liberals were at best a pack of fools—there was good evidence for that—and at worst villains and traitors. “A British subject I was born,” Macdonald proclaimed. “A British subject I will die.” It was a promise that, at age seventy-six, he was in a good position to fulfill, and sure enough, after leading his party to victory in the March 1891 election, he died in June. All this left to one side the minor point that there was no very good reason to expect that the politicians in Washington considered Unrestricted Reciprocity without annexation a bargain they could not refuse.
A chastened Laurier was left to wonder why the reciprocity sword had wilted in his hand. He drew the right conclusion—tampering with Canada’s British identity was political poison. Loyalty was the best policy, and high tariffs were indisputably a symbol of Canada’s identity. Macdonald had grafted tariffs onto Canadian politics, and for the next century politics and protection were symbiotic in Canada.
A Liberal party convention in 1893 ratified a change in policy. The party still adored free trade in the abstract, but free trade counted as nothing compared with the prospect of electoral success. The Liberals therefore wouldn’t tamper with the essence of the Canadian tariff. Tinkering at the margins of the tariff was permissible, for the sake of farmer-voters in Ontario and the West, but reciprocity with the United States was not to be contemplated. Not, at least, until memories of the 1891 election faded.
RELIGION AND PATRIOTISM
It was fitting that the nineteenth century should end in Canada as it began, on a note of religious difference. Religion counted for a great deal in Canada, as it did virtually everywhere in the Western world. In the United States, in Ireland, in Australia, as in Canada, political practice was rooted in sectarian differences, and religious persuasion was the single most reliable predictor of how a given individual would vote.
The main division was between Protestants and Catholics who, officially at least, regarded one another with fear and loathing. Protestant households still featured Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, first published in 1563, detailing the bloody end of the Protestant saints at the hands of Catholic persecutors. The Orange Lodge kept green the memory of English liberty’s narrow escape from Catholic tyranny in 1688, and the Orange Parade on 12 July was still a major event in a country that loved marching bands and processions as part of its meagre spectrum of free public entertainment. Like other patriotic festivals, 12 July in Canada was focused on a heritage and a world outside Canada—religion and empire were Canada’s historical endowment.
The Irish Catholics had their St. Patrick’s Day parades, and in Quebec no religious procession was complete without its marching contingent of Pontifical Zouaves—veterans or would-be veterans of the brief war to preserve the Papal States from incorporation into united Italy in 1870. As the historian Arthur Silver puts it, in Quebec there was a “marriage of religion and patriotism.”21 If English Canadians looked to Great Britain and by extension its Protestant monarch and political establishment, French Canadians contemplated the wider world of Catholicism. The reality of Catholicism was to be menaced by the forces of nationalism, Protestantism, modernism, and secularism, and these forces were at work in Canada too.
The Riel rebellions in 1870 and 1885 made their mark on French–English, and Catholic–Protestant, relations, but there were other frictions too. Religion and schooling were a volatile mixture. Schooling was highly prized, closely linked to progress and development but also to the moral formation of the future citizen. Education was a provincial matter, and all provinces supported schools through taxation. In Ontario and Quebec public (effectively Protestant) and Catholic systems coexisted, embedded in the constitution and beyond the ability of the local religious majorities to alter. Manitoba’s constitution reflected the original balance between English and French speakers, and between Catholic and Protestant: French was officially sanctioned and there was a separate Catholic school system. Elsewhere the Catholic minority depended on the tolerance of the Protestant majority to fence off segments of the school system for Catholic education. Language practices were similarly a matter of grace and favour, for except in Quebec, Manitoba, and the federal Parliament and courts, there was no right to the use of French.
And yet there was an ambiguity in the relations of Catholic Canadians, English- and French-speaking, with other Canadians and the Canadian state. The Catholic Church cohabited with the Protestant state for over a hundred years, and in Quebec it absorbed it. In Ontario the state had accommodated the Catholic minority through a separate Catholic school system. Some Catholics were doubtful of the bona fides of Queen Victoria and her ministers, British and Canadian, but others were not. There was the sense that as a minority they couldn’t go too far in provoking the majority; put another way, many Catholics were anxious to prove that they too were loyal—that their religion was as loyal and patriotic as any other.22
Catholic and French patience was tried by the actions of the Manitoba government. In the 1880s the province had filled up with Anglo-Ontarian settlers, while the proportion of French speakers steadily declined. The provincial election of 1888 ratified the demographic fact. The Liberals, under Thomas Greenway, took power and promptly moved to abolish both the official status of French and separate schools.
The British North America Act had provided for such an eventuality. The federal Parliament had the right to pass legislation to remedy the grievances of the minority in Manitoba and, eventually, the Conservative government in Ottawa nerved itself to do just that. By the time it did, in 1896, the Conservatives were on the brink of losing power. Four prime ministers passed in quick succession: Sir John Abbott, 1891–92; Sir John Thompson, 1892–94; Sir Mackenzie Bowell, 1894–96; and finally Sir Charles Tupper in 1896. It was Bowell, ironically an Orangeman, who acted on the Manitoba Schools Question, but Bowell was about to be deposed by his own party. It was therefore Tupper who confronted Wilfrid Laurier in the 1896 federal election, and Tupper who decisively lost it. Tupper was bound by the Conservative record on Manitoba Schools, while Laurier’s position on the question was impossible to discern. Instead of confrontation with Manitoba, Laurier recommended “sunny ways” and conciliation as the key to an amicable solution. It should not have recommended itself to Quebec, but it did.
In the election it was Quebec that made the difference to Laurier’s success or failure. In seeking an explanation as to why Quebec rejected the Conservatives, who were supporting the French language and Catholic rights in the West, it is well to bear in mind that there were other issues and other circumstances before the electorate. The Conservative party leadership was old and vulnerable. As with any long-entrenched government, the Conservatives had offended widely. Younger and brighter politicians had become discouraged, or, like the very able Israel Tarte in Quebec, deserted the party. Laurier at fifty-five was hardly youthful, but he was at any rate younger than the seventy-five-year-old Tupper. In an age that prized oratory, Laurier was a brilliant and eloquent speaker, and he proved to be a resourceful leader. In June 1896 he emerged from the federal election with a majority of thirty in the House of Commons. He would be prime minister for the next fifteen years.