10
BOOM AND BUST, 1896–1914
Nineteenth-century consumers: Women shoppers in the elegant Morgan’s department store in Montreal, 1880s.
It was fitting that Canada should be led into the twentieth century by a man of the nineteenth. Wilfrid Laurier was perhaps the most perfect political leader Canada produced—tall (over six feet), slim, and good-looking, with chestnut hair gradually shading into white, eloquent and bilingual (with a Scots accent in English), intelligent and well-educated. Laurier was born into a Patriote family in the countryside north of Montreal, but unlike many ex-Patriotes, he remained “rouge.” He was trained as a lawyer and was a gold medallist at McGill. At a time when parish curés instructed their flock that “Le ciel est bleu, l’enfer est rouge” (Heaven is [Conservative] blue, Hell is [Liberal] red”), Laurier stuck to the Liberal faith.1 He took liberalism, into active politics, becoming first a member of the Quebec legislature, then a member of the federal Parliament, and finally, in 1877, a minister in the Liberal government of Alexander Mackenzie.
Youthful if not young, lively, imaginative, and active, Laurier embodied what many considered to be the archetypal Canadian virtues. Yet like the country he led, his values and attitudes were more those of the century just passing than those of the new century whose promise he claimed to understand. Unlike many Canadian partisans, who came by their politics by way of inheritance or self-interest, Laurier saw Liberalism as a set of clear principles. His definition of Liberalism shaped his party and transformed it into the dominant institution on the Canadian political scene. Laurier had to define where his party stood because of the opposition of the Catholic Church, inspired by the very conservative Pope, Pius IX, to political “liberalism,” which Pius considered to be one of the great errors of the modern age.
Speaking to an audience of two thousand in Quebec City in June 1877, Laurier proclaimed that he was a reformer, not a revolutionary. “I am one of those who believe that in all human affairs there are abuses to reform, new horizons to discover and new forces to develop.” England was the model that Canada should follow. Liberal reforms had “made the English the freest of peoples, the most prosperous and the happiest in Europe.” He continued: “The policy of the Liberal party is to protect [our] institutions, to defend them and spread them, and, under the sway of those institutions, to develop the country’s latent resources. That is the policy of the Liberal party and it has no other.”
The affection for England, or Great Britain, was genuine. Laurier admired British institutions and revered the British Empire. Nor was he indifferent to British wealth and power. The wealth, he hoped, would fertilize the Canadian economy, and British power, unassailable because of the Royal Navy, protected Canada from harm—or at least from harm coming from overseas. There was always the United States, but it was better to deal with the United States as part of a powerful empire than as a small peripheral country huddled along the great republic’s northern border.
Loving England did not mean loving the English, especially the Anglais of Canada. Laurier was well aware of the sectarian divisions in the country, and the national animosities. He hoped to transcend them, but realistically he settled for avoiding them as much as possible. In certain parts of the country, and to ultra-Protestants, he would always be suspect as a Frenchman and a Catholic. (French he certainly was, but it’s doubtful that Laurier was a believing, as opposed to a practising, Catholic.) At home in Quebec, he was suspect to conservative Catholics and nationalistes who believed that accommodating the English and consorting with Protestants was the first step on the road to Hell.
Laurier took Canadian institutions pretty much as he found them. His Canada was not so much an insular country as an isolated colony. And while he talked the language of nation and nationalism—in two languages—he did not intend to rush events. Canada would become a nation, eventually, under its own steam and Laurier did not intend to be rushed. That was one of the great attractions of the British Empire, which to the end of his days Laurier believed to be almost all-powerful, unchallengeable outside North America, and unlikely to be challenged even there. His world was the world of the mid-nineteenth century, a world in which Britain would be, forever, Great. In such a world and such an empire, Canada could mind its own business.
Laurier prized local autonomy, for Canada inside the British Empire, and for the provinces inside Canada. He understood provincial power and prized provincial rights, and may, indeed, have been the most decentralist politician to hold the job of Canadian prime minister. His victory in the 1896 election was as much the result of provincial grievances against the federal government as it was a repudiation of a senile Conservative administration. As a sign of the times, Laurier brought three provincial premiers into his cabinet, from Ontario (Oliver Mowat), New Brunswick (Andrew Blair), and Nova Scotia (W.S. Fielding), and the attorney general of Manitoba, Clifford Sifton. With the exception of Mowat, who was past his prime, they were strong men and powerful politicians, but if they could serve under Laurier then Anglo-Saxon voters could surely trust him too.
Laurier in 1877 had stressed “development,” and it is a term that needs some explanation. Laurier and his generation of politicians saw Canada as a “young” country. The image most often propagated at the time was either of a youthful but virtuous young woman—“Our lady of the snows,” as the imperial bard Rudyard Kipling put it—or a strong young man, also virtuous, and promising but not fully developed. Canada, in Laurier’s view, needed time and space to become mature and prosperous. “The prospects of Canada are truly great,” in the words of an enthusiast of the time, but they were prospects, not yet realized, and Canada needed to be left alone to take advantage of them.
DEVELOPING POLITICS
When it came to economics, Laurier was an optimist, like most of his fellow citizens, and that was undoubtedly part of his electoral appeal. Laurier was also lucky, for his arrival in power coincided with an economic upturn and prosperity. Transportation costs fell, giving better access to the European market. With better methods of cultivation, including Marquis wheat, the arid and frost-prone Canadian plains suddenly became attractive. It wasn’t surprising that immigrants came to “the Last, Best West,” the largely empty Canadian prairie, and that they chose this moment.
Laurier gave the task of peopling the prairie to his interior minister, Clifford Sifton. Sifton sought to attract immigrants through advertising, though under the circumstances of the time they would probably have come anyway. He extended the harvest of migrants to Eastern Europe, bringing Slavs, mostly Ukrainians, to Canada from the Russian and Austrian empires. This aroused atavistic animosities among conservative Canadians, which the Conservative party unwisely tried to exploit in various federal elections. It made Sifton’s remaining task easy: he was the first, though not the last, Liberal politician to remind immigrants that they had come to Canada under a Liberal government.
The immigration statistics, and population statistics in general, are impressive. In 1891 the Canadian prairie had roughly 250,000 inhabitants, mostly in Manitoba. In 1911 there were no fewer than 1.3 million people. Immigration rose from 17,000 in 1896 to 42,000 in 1900 to 141,000 in 1905; it would peak at 400,000 arrivals in 1913.2 There were so many people that in 1905 Laurier created two new provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, and by 1911 Saskatchewan ranked third in provincial population in Canada, behind Ontario and Quebec but ahead of Nova Scotia and the other Maritime provinces. The Maritimes during this period continued to be a source for out-migration, either to other provinces (Ontario and points west) or to New England.
Quebec was in some senses a special case. The province’s fertility rate and the number of births were high—much higher than Ontario’s or the Maritimes’. This was offset by high infant mortality and disease generally, and by the marked preference of immigrants for settlement in the prairies and Ontario. There was virtually no immigration from France, and the immigrants who did come to Quebec would, for the most part, adopt English as their language. At the same time French Canadians continued to leave for New England.3 Though the population of Quebec almost doubled between 1871 and 1911, it actually increased less (68 percent) than the population of the rest of the country (95 percent), thanks to disease and migration patterns, outbound and inbound.4
Acreage seeded to wheat is another index of growth. In 1890, wheat acreage was 2.7 million; in 1900, 4.2 million; and in 1911, 11 million. Wheat production, measured in bushels, was 42 million in 1890, and 231 million in 1911. (Other crops, such as oats and barley, rose in volume and value as well, though not so spectacularly.) Winnipeg suddenly became one of the world’s major centres for trading in wheat.5 Until 1900, Canada had lagged far behind other wheat producers, such as the United States, Argentina, and Australia, in the international wheat trade. Economically Canada was no longer a colonial backwater.
Though prairie settlement is the best known destination of immigrants in the Laurier period, it wasn’t the only one. The industrial cities of Canada received hundreds of thousands of migrants: virtually all Canadian urban areas grew in population, with Winnipeg growing the fastest. Montreal, the largest city, received the most, and the most visible, immigrants, turning the St. Lawrence Boulevard area, “the Main,” into what was effectively the city’s Jewish quarter. In Toronto, it was “the Ward,” just south of the university, and in Winnipeg “the North End.”
The arrival of new varieties of immigrants strained Canadians’ sense of tolerance, never strong. That tolerance did not extend to Asian immigrants, who were discouraged by a series of ingenious, and onerous, burdens: Chinese by a head tax, Japanese through a quota agreed to with the Japanese government, “East Indians” (from India) by impossible conditions on travel. To manifest local sentiment, troublemakers in Vancouver staged an anti-Japanese riot in 1907, and it had its effect, especially on nervous politicians thinking ahead to the next election. Blacks from the United States were also discouraged. Canada was, obviously but unofficially, to be white.
But if you could get to Canada, and be admitted, there were jobs to be had—presumably, well-paying jobs. Judging from the statistics, jobs of all kinds were expanding and, from what we can deduce, wages were rising.6 It should not be forgotten that the American economy was open to immigrants from Canada and Europe. Those who came to Canada by error, or were disappointed, could move on. But most did not. Nationally, the number of “operatives,” factory hands, rose from 543,000 in 1891 to 933,000 in 1911. Other employment categories rose as well—owners and managers, for example, which included contractors for a building boom that straddled the turn of the century and well beyond.
Electricity was the key to industrial development, and thanks to its many fast-flowing rivers and waterfalls, Canada was well positioned to take advantage of the new technology through hydraulic generation. For the country as a whole, hydroelectric installations rose from 72,000 horsepower in 1890 to 977,000 by 1910; that figure doubled during the next few years to almost two million horsepower in 1914. Electricity was especially important to Ontario, which had no coal and very little oil and gas to keep its factories running and its citizens warm. To Ontario, hydro-generated electricity meant personal security and industrial competitiveness. In the words of one hydro developer, it was a “genie out of the bottle,” or, as the Toronto Globe put it, “magic merged in business.”7 So profoundly and so obviously did electricity transform the economy and daily life that it soon came to be seen as an absolute necessity, which soon enough created implications for the political agenda.
Electricity powered streetcars, previously horse-drawn. Electric “radials” connected cities around the Great Lakes, making it theoretically possible to travel from Toronto to Cleveland by transferring from streetcar to streetcar. Electric appliances began to appear—stoves, vacuum cleaners, even refrigerators—in the houses of the very well to do.
Mineral production also increased. Its most spectacular manifestation was the last of the great gold rushes, in the Canadian Klondike in the newly organized Yukon Territory. Gold was discovered near Dawson in 1896, and by 1898 an estimated hundred thousand miners, or would-be miners, were packing their bags and heading for the Yukon, either over land or, more usually, by sea through American-owned Alaska. Dawson City briefly became a real city, with thirty thousand residents in 1898. The Gold Rush climaxed in that year, and was essentially over by 1900, leaving behind a railway from the sea at Skagway to Whitehorse, and a variety of mining enterprises. It also helped stimulate a boundary dispute between Canada and the United States, as we shall see (below, p. 271).
Other mining enterprises were more lasting, and more professional. The Dominion Geological Survey plumbed Canada’s rocks for promising formations, and private geologists and prospectors followed in its wake. Gold, silver, lead, zinc, and the uncommon nickel were all in production by 1914, in mines from the Rockies to Quebec. There were already coal mines in southern Alberta and British Columbia, as well as the long-lasting and productive mines in Cape Breton, where an iron and steel industry was taking root.
Some of these developments were, in a sense, deceptive. Mining, forestry, and agricultural homesteading were “frontier” activities, feeding the Canadian notion that Canada was still an adolescent country, even compared with the United States. The American frontier had “closed,” according to the historian Frederick Jackson Turner; Canada’s was still open, even though, by 1914, most of the feasible arable land had been taken up by farmer-settlers. But at the same time the big cities—Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and even Victoria—were sprouting mansions for the newly rich. Canada was still developing, and its politics, even its culture, remained by definition underdeveloped.
RAILWAYS AND OVERDEVELOPMENT
Luck led to optimism and optimism to confidence where Laurier was concerned. Laurier (Sir Wilfrid Laurier after 1897) met the new century with another election victory in November 1900 and a mandate to carry on with the development of the country. What the country needed, in the prime minister’s opinion, was more settlers, and to entice them, he prescribed railways.
Laurier had already intervened in railway matters. The western farmers needed cheap access to markets, and the railways had an unquenchable thirst for subsidies. So in 1897 Laurier and his interior minister, Sifton, did a deal with the CPR that reduced the railway’s rates for grain shipments in return for cash to build rail lines in southern British Columbia— the Crow’s Nest Pass Agreement.
Andrew Blair, the railways minister, was in a minor way a reformer. He was neither enamoured of private railway companies nor afraid of public regulation. He extended the Intercolonial Railway, still government owned, to Montreal, and in major matters kept it free from party patronage. He also established a Board of Railway Commissioners to give the vexed question of railway charges an expert and impartial supervision—or so he hoped.8
The culmination of Laurier’s railway policy was the issue, much discussed and much anticipated, of a second Canadian transcontinental railway line. Laurier had his own ideas about such a railway. It should start not in Montreal, but in Quebec City, which was Laurier’s own political base. It should cut across central Quebec to northern Ontario, with the hope of opening up the territory to development and perhaps settlement, as had happened in the rest of Ontario. But its prospects were as economically discouraging as they were politically attractive, for the northern Quebec route was likely to be barren of revenue and a money-losing burden to whoever built it.
Blair, with a much greater sense of caution, and of responsibility for the public purse, preferred to cobble together a new system out of existing lines, building afresh only where necessary. The Quebec City route was, in his opinion, definitely not necessary. Laurier persisted, negotiating with the Grand Trunk, and in 1903 his project was nearly in place. Blair resigned, calling Laurier’s scheme “wild, visionary, unbusiness-like and everything else.”
Blair was right in the long run, but the spinoffs of railway construction in contracts and local development were overwhelmingly attractive in the shorter term. In the end, not one but two new transcontinental rail lines were built across Canada, the Grand Trunk Pacific, an extension of the existing Grand Trunk Railway, and the Canadian Northern, the creation of two Toronto capitalists, Sir William Mackenzie and Sir Donald Mann.
Transcontinental Railways, 1915
The new railways were financed by largely British capital, supplied by the proverbial old ladies and retired colonels who populate the literature of investment. The money was, as far as profit or even security of investment was concerned, poured down a rat-hole with every sign of approval from Canadian governments, which themselves invested in Mackenzie and Mann’s schemes, and in the ever-growing debts of the Grand Trunk. There was no profit, but rather depression and war, just as the lines were nearing completion. Both the Grand Trunk Pacific and the Canadian Northern went bankrupt, leaving the investors with nothing, and Canada with a network of steel that could never hope to repay the money, let alone the hopes, of those who had paid for it. (The Grand Trunk and Canadian Northern were combined in a single government system, the Canadian National Railways.) Many years later Canadian newspapers still carried the occasional letter from a bilked British investor, pleading for justice.
There was only one way out: nationalization. Long before the Canadian government reached for that particular solution, Laurier was out of office. He could console himself that he was not out because of his railway policy. That was too tangled a web for the voters to unravel.
THE ECONOMIC BOOM
As the railway experience indicated, Canada in the 1900s was still an outpost of British capital. Canada was also becoming a source of capital and investment in its own right. The colonies before 1867 had developed banks of their own, with varying success. Much of colonial politics turned on favours done by or for a particular bank, and the position of the government’s bank was highly prized. Unlike the United States, Canada had a branch banking system, which encouraged concentration and stronger banks, albeit not strong enough to save some banks and their depositors from ruin.
There was no central bank, though banking was made the definite responsibility of the dominion government in the BNA Act. The governments, Macdonald’s and Laurier’s and those in between, relied on advice and funding from Canada’s banks to keep the dollar steady and the economy ticking over. In a financial panic in 1907, for example, it was the Bank of Montreal that told Laurier what to do, and on whom Ottawa relied to see the country through without a run on its currency. (The currency was, however, only partly that of the dominion government: the banks issued their own notes as well.)
Canadian investors early began moving abroad, and the banks followed the investors, especially into the Caribbean and Latin America. A connection already existed between the Maritimes and the British and Spanish colonies of the Caribbean (Spain retained Cuba and Puerto Rico until 1898), not just through the fish trade but through sugar. Sugar-driven prosperity made Cuba a particularly good receptacle for investment, and even after politics, rebellion, and war took the shine off Cuban investments, there was still profit to be made. Canadian banks established utilities companies, railways, and mines, and extended the banking system. The Royal Bank of Canada and the Bank of Nova Scotia, both Halifax companies, became dominant features in the financial districts of Havana and other cities.9 In some countries, such as Mexico, Canadian investment was an important and sometimes predominant part of “British” investment. Ordinarily, home governments kept an eye on their citizens’ interests abroad, but not Canada’s: it was British diplomats, not Canadian, who looked after Canadian overseas investors.10
British investment flowed into railways, utilities, mines, insurance, mortgage companies, banking,11 land, and even buildings; along with American funds, it totalled $2.4 billion between 1900 and 1913. In 1913 British investment accounted for 75 percent of foreign capital in Canada, down from 85 percent in 1900. The United States accounted for 21 percent, up from 14 percent.
The difference between British and American outlays wasn’t merely quantity. British money went largely into loans—via bonds—to governments or large corporations like the Grand Trunk Pacific or the Canadian Northern. British money financed Vancouver’s new sewer system. British money also laid the tracks that took the Grand Trunk across the Rockies to Prince Rupert, that railway’s hopeful alternative to Vancouver. Many Canadians put their money into the Bank of British North America or Barclay’s Bank, both British-owned.
What the British did not do, by and large, was establish manufacturing branch plants—subsidiaries of foreign firms that vaulted the tariff wall so as to produce for the Canadian market. Their products were more expensive than the original, and variety was often lacking, because it didn’t pay the foreign investor to make every possible line for the small Canadian market. Unquestionably, however, they produced Canadian jobs along with their Canadian-made goods.
Branch plants were usually American, and went back, in some cases, to the middle of the nineteenth century. Some Americans actually moved to Canada to be with their investment, and became naturalized along with their factories. Much of the lumber business in this way passed from “American” to “Canadian” hands, though the hands were usually the same; later this would apply to another firm, the Aluminum Company of Canada, Alcan. “Canadian General Electric” (CGE) was usually assumed to be a branch of General Electric in the United States, but it was in fact owned in Canada until the 1920s. Over time, in some industries, American investors did buy out Canadians who had originally been their partners. This was the case with the new automobile companies, such as Ford and General Motors, located in southern Ontario close to their American parents over the border in Detroit.
The Canadian government also borrowed for its railway adventures, but its ordinary revenue came from taxation, of which the tariff was the most important feature. The Laurier government, through its finance minister, W.S. Fielding, was most innovative on the tariff. First Laurier, anxious to make a gesture toward the British Empire, established a lower tariff (or “preference”) for British goods. The British did not reciprocate at the time, but the Canadian gesture remained for most of a century; it could be said to have outlasted the empire itself. This gave the Canadian tariff three levels: British preference, the lowest charge; “most favoured nation” for countries with which Canada had trade treaties and consequently concessions on duties; and finally the “general” or highest level.
Fielding also introduced special punitive duties to combat “dumping,” meaning goods that had been “dumped”—sold—in Canada at a price lower than in their place of origin. Dumping was held to be a predatory practice, designed to clear the market of competition, bankrupting domestic manufacturers. Once the market was depopulated, the importer could then raise prices to extortionate heights because his goods would monopolize the market. Under Fielding’s anti-dumping legislation, duties could be used to raise the price of imports to a “fair” level, thus protecting local industry against “unfair” (very low-priced) competition. As Michael Hart, the historian of Canadian trade policy, has observed, this was a genuine Canadian innovation that soon affected international trade practice because it was quickly and universally adopted.12 Trade negotiators, including Canadians, are still trying to get rid of it.
Despite government fiddlings, economic conditions remained generally favourable. The depression of the early 1890s passed away, and a brief stock market panic in 1907 was a mere hiccup. Only in 1913 did bad times return, with a sharp recession or depression. The many unemployed of 1913–14 would therefore be available for other work.
ORGANIZING REFORM
The dramatic changes in the economy, and the growth and dispersal of population, strained existing social forms and loosened the proprieties and other expectations that had bound Canada together. In managing change, government was less the leader than a reluctant follower, and none was more reluctant than Sir Wilfrid Laurier.
The heroes of the age were individual reformers—Florence Nightingale, who chivvied the British government into the systematic care of its wounded during the Crimean War of the 1850s; Louis Pasteur, the great French scientist, who revolutionized health care; Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone—and in Canada too. The first obvious application of the principle of organizing government for direct human betterment was by Charles Saunders (later Sir Charles), the inventor of Marquis wheat.
Saunders was a civil servant, a reminder that individuals in government could make a difference. There were also things that only government could do. The organization of cities was the most obvious case in point. As cities grew, so did the substratum of sewers and water mains beneath their streets. Whereas the nineteenth century had left these to private enterprise, the twentieth increasingly preferred public ownership.
The standard for public enterprise was set first on the Prairies, where there weren’t as many entrenched interests. Mistrust of monopoly, based on bitter experience, spurred on not merely “reformers” but the business classes, who saw their own economic welfare jeopardized by private utility owners. A case in point was Niagara Falls, where power generation was firmly in the hands of private interests. Very quickly an influential pressure group was organized in southern Ontario, demanding that this public resource be publicly owned. The proponents of public power were swept into office as part of a reforming Conservative government, which promptly created a government-owned utility, Ontario Hydro.13 It would become the largest electric utility in North America, and a monument in its day to public enterprise.
The most obvious non-governmental organizations were the churches, old and new. Canada was a church-going country, and in all but a few cities the biggest, the most ornate public structures were the churches, dwarfing the usual symbols of secular authority, the post office or the courthouse or the school. The older churches, Catholic and Anglican, had been weaned with some difficulty from their position as the spiritual branch of government, though in Quebec church and state were still symbiotic, at least for the large Catholic majority. Protestants suspected that the Catholic Church would have preferred the state and church to be linked, with the state as junior partner if not willing servant of the church, and undoubtedly some Catholic clerics would have welcomed it. But most church leaders, Catholic or Protestant, weren’t so unworldly as to believe that a church-state of the true medieval kind was really possible.14
The example of the Catholic countries of Europe, even those where Catholicism was still the state Church, was not promising. There the Church was as often as not the handmaiden of government, and not the other way around. Alternatively, the Church would become one political faction among many, with all the hazards of defeat and victory in party politics.15 In such a case the Church might well be defeated. That was what was happening at the time in France, where the state secularized what had previously been a Catholic system of education, to the amazement and fury of conservative Catholics in Quebec as well as France.16 There was, of course, another alternative, a reversion to authoritarian forms of rule in a separate Catholic state, but in the 1890s and 1900s that was not seriously considered.
The churches could have been satisfied with their influence in society, and could have argued that society was the better for their work—more orderly, less violent, and more concerned with the social and mental wellbeing of the citizenry. That was not enough for some. As two historians have observed, “Between 1900 and 1930 the Methodist and Presbyterian churches envisioned their mission as nothing less than the complete Christianization of Canadian life.”17 What that meant was rather complicated. Christianity, in the minds of activist clerics, stood for justice, not merely in the next world but in this one. As William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, put it, there was no point preaching salvation to hungry people.18 A literate and educated clergy was a significant part of Canada’s educated elite, and it shouldn’t be surprising that they shared and contributed to the notion that society must be organized to combat the various aspects of social evils present—especially—in Canada’s cities.
This certainly didn’t mean that everyone in the churches contemplated returning to or preaching for a bucolic and godly version of the past— rather the opposite. They harkened to a vision of society united through a godly concern for the welfare of all its members, not torn apart by class warfare. Nostalgia for an older and undivided social order still existed— the rural society of an earlier age was one attraction, though not for all. In Quebec, some of the clergy recommended expansion of the farming frontier into the rocks and bogs of Abitibi to the north. In the face of emigration from an overcrowded countryside into New England, the Church was prepared to adapt to industrialization inside Quebec, and if the capital establishing a factory happened to be English and Protestant, it was nevertheless doing God’s work by keeping French-speaking Catholics closer to home.19 On the whole the churches hoped to establish agencies for social welfare that would respect and reflect their own values, and they knew that to do so they needed the help of the state.
Since the mid-nineteenth century groups or individuals with the various churches had preached the prohibition of alcohol, and by the turn of the twentieth century they were able to force Laurier to hold a plebiscite on the issue. The prohibitionists almost prevailed, and won a few more votes than their opponents. Laurier, however, noted that Quebec voted strongly the other way, and rather than risk division between French and English on the issue, he declined to act. He abandoned the field to local option, by which a municipality could vote to become “dry,” and to the provinces.
The movement for prohibition had another effect. It mobilized and energized female reformers, and taught them the techniques of political struggle. If women’s voices mattered on such an issue as this, why should women not be heard more generally? In a society dominated by men, in which women were legally excluded and subordinated, this was a revolutionary point of view. It was also one that could, potentially, organize women from all social classes into a demand for the vote, the suffrage. Why, suffragists asked, should respectable, hard-working women, educated or not, be denied the vote when any drunken male loafer could exercise the franchise?
Suffragists asked and kept asking, but for many years there was never incentive enough to give them a positive answer. Plainly the women’s movement did not mobilize enough women to overcome the fixed view that women’s place was in the home and that all that was required was a few marginal adjustments to home life to take care of the supposedly few cases of genuine injustice or misery—the example being the proverbial drunken husband. It was a peculiar position to argue: in some situations, such as farms, the home was the workplace, and directly dependent on female labour; and female labour in any case made up about 5 percent of the industrial workforce.
Nevertheless, when Laurier or the various opposition leaders made up their lists of issues suitable for elections, women’s suffrage never appeared. There were always other issues to be debated and decided. There was, for example, the empire.
IMPERIAL POLITICS
The British Empire was an inescapable fact. Its symbolism pervaded Canadian life, from the universal lithographs of Queen Victoria stuck to kitchen walls to the Union Jack flapping proudly above public buildings from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Iron statues of the queen stood in parks and on the precincts of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. The royal family was an unending source of interest to Canadians, judging from their newspapers, which retailed everything from tales of royal bastardy to improving morality fables involving the queen’s endless mourning for her late husband, Prince Albert.
The queen never visited Canada, though if she had she would have found Prince Albert, embodied as a town in central Saskatchewan, or seen him commemorated in the district (later province) of Alberta.20 She herself gave her name to the capital of British Columbia, a town in Quebec (Victoriaville), and counties in New Brunswick and Ontario, to name only a few. If the United States was a country of Washingtons, Canada was a land of Victorias.
The queen’s father, uncle, two sons, a daughter, and a couple of grandsons toured Canada or spent time there, but no reigning monarch actually set foot on Canadian soil until 1939.21 The monarch was represented instead by a governor general in Ottawa. This personage was always a British aristocrat, usually with political connections, who saw no harm in residing most of the year in a smallish mansion in a tiny colonial backwater. The position of governor general seems to have increased in prestige as time went on, though it was seldom occupied by political figures of the first rank.22
Some of the governors were better at the job than others. Lord Dufferin, governor general in the 1870s, proved to be a skilled and sensitive diplomat—a harbinger of a later very successful diplomatic career. Lord Lansdowne, who succeeded him, commented shrewdly on Canadian issues but did not weigh very heavily in Canadian politics. The Liberal peer Lord Aberdeen, present for the transition from Conservative to Liberal rule in 1896, smoothed the process by insisting that the soundly defeated Tupper recognize the fact by resigning forthwith. Lord Aberdeen’s wife had a more lasting impact by helping found the National Council of Women, a long-lasting female pressure group of a distinctly respectable kind.
It was Laurier’s misfortune to coexist with two of the more active governors general, Lords Minto and Grey. Both were enthusiasts for the British Empire—“imperialists” in the terminology of the time. Minto was a soldier, determined to bring order to the partisan, patronage-ridden shambles that was the Canadian defence establishment.
Minto assumed that the Canadian military was intended for defence, even for combat. And since combat was scarce in a North American setting, that could only mean that it could or should be employed elsewhere, in imperial wars. But before that could happen, incompetent officers and feckless soldiers would have to be whipped into shape, or sent packing.
Laurier saw the military—which was almost entirely a voluntary militia—rather differently.23 It was in his eyes a kind of uniformed fraternal organization like the Masons or the Elks or the Odd Fellows, but with guns and wearing the queen’s uniform. These latter features made the militia especially desirable, conferring ratification of the militiaman’s social status. The government provided them with clubhouses— armouries—in which they could gather and debate the important things of life, run up mess bills, and buy gaudy uniforms. Building armouries was useful patronage, reminding a community who its friends were in government. Conferring military commissions was even better, since it rewarded the friends of the government with honour and prestige, and the status of officers, at very little cost.
As long as soldiering was a matter of parades, parties, and balls, the system worked very well for whatever party was in power, and for their military clients. The defence of Canada—safeguarded by the empire, the oceans, and an American disinclination to military expenditures—was a matter of high return for low cost. As for Canada defending the empire, that was in Laurier’s opinion a contradiction in terms.
The empire depended in large part on the non-resistance of its subjects, and the weakness of its enemies. Prestige as much as anything defended the British Empire and British interests, assisted by a large fleet that showed the flag around the globe. From time to time British public opinion grew excited by perceived threats to the empire. One such occasion was in 1885, when a rash and adventurous general, Charles Gordon, operating in the Sudan, managed to get himself besieged by Muslim insurgents in the city of Khartoum. Public opinion in Great Britain forced the Liberal Gladstone government to send a relief expedition up the Nile to rescue Gordon. Someone in the British War Office remembered that Canada had large rivers and raftsmen—the very thing.
The British government forthwith appealed to Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald. Macdonald did send raftsmen, non-combatants, but as Gordon’s situation worsened—he would be overwhelmed and killed by the insurgents in February 1885—there was pressure for Canada to do more.
Macdonald resisted the pressure. Gladstone was the economically minded prime minister who had withdrawn the British garrison from Canada in 1871, leaving local military defence to the Canadians. Gladstone’s was the government that had insisted on appeasing the Americans in the Treaty of Washington that same year. Macdonald remembered. Why, he asked, should “our men and money” be “sacrificed to get Gladstone & Co. out of the hole they have plunged themselves into by their own imbecility[?]”24 The Canadian army, such as it was, remained at home. Its only foreign activity was the departure of the graduates of Canada’s newly founded (1876) Royal Military College for British army units abroad, since there was no use for their talents at home.25
Macdonald had set a standard for resisting imperial adventurism, but it was not a hard task. Gladstone abandoned his intervention in the Sudan and concentrated instead on the eternal problem of securing the government of Ireland. There too he was unsuccessful, driving off from his Liberal party a “unionist” faction led by one of the most promising of his ministers, Joseph (Joe) Chamberlain. Chamberlain eventually led the dissident ex-Liberals into coalition with the Conservative party. When the Conservatives won office in 1895, Chamberlain had his pick of cabinet positions. Oddly, in the minds of his contemporaries, he chose the previously obscure and somewhat downmarket Colonial Office.
Chamberlain was colonial secretary from 1895 to 1903. Under his direction, life in the colonies was certainly not dull. He wanted to draw the colonies closer to the mother country. A geopolitician, Chamberlain believed that, faced with American and German economic power, Great Britain would soon no longer be great. He assembled a Colonial Conference in London that was timed to coincide with Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, her sixtieth year on the throne, in 1897.
The Colonial Conference was a gathering of the premiers of the self-governing colonies meeting under the presidency of the colonial secretary.26 The idea of “Imperial Federation” was in the air, though no one had as yet produced a version with any appeal to the constituent parts of the empire. The British did not wish to give their colonies any significant say on such items as an imperial foreign policy, or a common imperial tariff policy. The colonies, meanwhile, feared returning to British tutelage because Great Britain in power, wealth, and population dwarfed the various self-governing colonies. Chamberlain hoped to secure emanations of unity from the conference, but he procured, at best, only a superficial harmony. The colonial secretary had little to offer the premiers. As far as the British cabinet was concerned, there was no question of offering the colonies a return to preferential duties and a privileged position in the British market. British politics were founded on free trade, which was as close to a universal consensus as might be imagined; and it was a rash politician who would question it. Chamberlain privately questioned free trade, and would eventually oppose it—but not yet. British immigrants and British capital were flowing to the colonies in any case, and there was nothing the British government wanted or needed to do to spur them on.
Laurier gazed on the parades, attended banquets, was charmed by the requisite contingent of aristocratic hostesses, and travelled to Cheshire to meet his real hero, the retired Liberal leader Mr. Gladstone. After collecting a knighthood—he would say he didn’t know how to refuse it—Sir Wilfrid Laurier returned to Canada.
Chamberlain had other matters to keep him busy. The colonial secretary was determined to solve the “problem” of South Africa, where two British colonies cohabited uneasily with two independent, Dutch-speaking republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. (Their inhabitants were known to themselves as Afrikaners, but they were more commonly called Boers, Dutch for farmers.) To add spice to the mixture, gold and diamonds were present in large quantities in the Transvaal, attracting miners to South Africa. Inevitably, many of them were English-speaking and, indeed, British subjects. The Boers, fearing they would be overwhelmed by immigrants, limited their political rights. To resolve this and other issues of “persecution,” Chamberlain opted for force.
A belief in force was one strain in British political thought in the nineteenth century. It derived from the sense of superiority acquired in the long French wars and ultimate victory over Napoleon in 1815, and was underlined by a hundred minor conflicts over the next eighty years. The choice of enemy varied, but on one occasion when war seemed to be impending against imperial Russia, a popular song proclaimed, “We don’t want to fight, But by jingo if we do, We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.” The ditty gave rise to the term “jingoism,” meaning fierce, aggressive patriotism.27 As far as the Boers and the empire were concerned, Chamberlain was a jingo, and as a good politician he knew he could appeal to that sentiment not just in Britain, but in Canada, Australia, and elsewhere in the British settlements in the empire. In Laurier’s political lexicon there were few terms more freighted with dread. Jingoism was an incalculable force, moving the public in potentially dangerous directions. It was all the more dangerous because in French Canada jingoism had few echoes and no effective political support.28
Chamberlain first tried an unofficial filibustering expedition in 1895, the so-called Jameson Raid, to overthrow the Boer governments and unite South Africa. But the raid failed, and British policy was revealed to be not only belligerent, but duplicitous. The Jameson Raid was a first-class diplomatic disaster for Great Britain. It appeared to be an attack by a great power on two much smaller countries, an action cloaked in hypocrisy, which many continental Europeans already believed was an essential part of the British character. Britain reaped only hostility and isolation in Europe.
Chamberlain was left with the option of outright military force. He began to assemble an army in South Africa, and in his own mind began to consider how best to involve the rest of the empire in a war that he knew could not be far off. The Boers bought arms, organized themselves as best they could, and struck first, in October 1899. The British army was unready, and incompetently led. In a series of small engagements the British were defeated and driven back. The loss of prestige was tremendous, and deeply wounding to British pride.
The South African question was closely followed in Canada. In English Canada, at least, there was almost no question that Chamberlain and Britain must be right, and the Boers, under their curious bearded president, Paul Kruger, deeply wrong. Laurier did not share this conviction, but he mixed his scepticism with insouciance, believing until the end that war wasn’t likely.
When war broke out Laurier was in Chicago. Travelling home, he was told by his English-speaking advisers that he must of course send troops. Chamberlain had asked for troops, the British general in charge of the Canadian militia had publicized the call, and the governor general, Lord Minto, was in favour. Plans already existed, the press learned.29 More pertinently, English-Canadian public opinion would stand for nothing less.
To his credit, Laurier did try to hold out against a contribution, giving in only when prominent English ministers told him they would quit and split the party. The character of English-Canadian public opinion was already apparent: “Canada disgraced,” the Montreal Star proclaimed. More would follow, from Halifax, Toronto, and wherever else jingoes flourished.30 Laurier was able to modify the British requirements for a contribution of troops. The British War Office wanted small, company-size units that could be integrated at will in existing British units. The Canadian government wanted Canadian troops to fight together, in larger formations, and on that point they prevailed. The British picked up the costs once the Canadians got to the theatre of war.
On another point Laurier was less plausible. The dispatch of Canadian troops, he proclaimed, was not to be considered a precedent. He embodied this assertion in an order-in-council at the insistence of his Quebec lieutenant, Israel Tarte. Not everyone believed him. For Henri Bourassa, a young and promising Liberal MP and Papineau’s grandson, sending troops to South Africa was the last straw. He had gone along reluctantly with Laurier’s compromise on Manitoba schools, even though he felt, correctly, that it left the French-speaking minority disadvantaged if not defenceless. He cherished the hope that Canada could indeed become a united country, shared between English and French, but he believed as well that a precondition for this was to persuade the English Canadians to put Canada first, not the British Empire. This was plainly not the case in 1899, and Bourassa took the occasion to resign from the House of Commons on the issue, and run for re-election opposing Laurier’s South African policy. Bourassa was re-elected, but in a general election in November 1900 Laurier carried the country, and actually increased his margin in Quebec, taking fifty-seven of the province’s sixty-five seats.
Some six thousand Canadian troops served in South Africa. They arrived at the right time, after competent generals had taken command of the British army and reorganized it for a campaign to take the enemy capitals. The Canadians participated in the army’s advance and accompanying battles which culminated in the capture of the Transvaal capital, Pretoria, in June 1900. The Boer army had been defeated but not, as it turned out, the Boers.
Canadians could follow the campaign in their newspapers. The Montreal Star, the most excitable jingo newspaper in the country, did its best to encourage confrontation at home as well as abroad. When McGill students paraded before the city’s French-language newspapers as the seat of “suspected disloyalty,” the Star contributed beer to the cause. Naturally there was a riot, the militia had to be called out, and the governor general sent worried dispatches home to say that there was “cause for anxiety.” Carman Miller, the historian of these events, comments on the “verbal abuse and violence of the yellow press” in Montreal—precisely what Laurier feared.31
The anxiety dissipated, though the war dragged on. The Boers fought a guerrilla campaign against the imperial forces, who responded by rounding up Boer non-combatants and putting them in concentration camps, where many perished from disease. The intention was to cut off supplies and support to the guerrillas, and to assist the army in wearing them down. Eventually the Boers did have enough, and surrendered.
Queen Victoria did not outlive the war, and it was her successor, Edward VII, who presided over the proclamation of peace, just in time for his coronation in June 1902. Since all the colonial premiers were coming to London for the occasion, Chamberlain staged another colonial conference.32
Despite victory in South Africa, the situation was not as rosy as it had been in 1897. The British had been diplomatically isolated during the South African War, and British unpopularity in continental Europe was painfully obvious. At the colonial conference Laurier again resisted Chamberlain’s blandishments for imperial unity, however it might be embodied; but even if he hadn’t there is no reason to think that the British government itself would have accepted serious reforms in the empire’s constitution. Things remained much as they had been, although Chamberlain was no longer in government to see it. In 1903 he quit the British cabinet on the issue of “tariff reform”; that is, the reconstruction of a British tariff wall to shield the British economy against foreign competition. Chamberlain’s departure removed tariff reform from the empire’s table for a generation; when it returned, in 1931, it would be in very different circumstances.
There were other reasons to be dissatisfied with the empire. The Treaty of Washington had left a bad taste, but it had not after all been a disaster for Canada. In the years that followed Anglo–American relations were generally pleasant, though punctuated by occasional eruptions from Washington. Those eruptions were symptomatic of a larger problem. As Oscar Wilde put it, the United States and Great Britain were separated by a common language—that is, they could express their disagreements, and be understood. There remained culture, and history. And there was race, very important in the race-conscious 1890s. Ancient attitudes and customs inherited from the British Isles persisted, dating back long before the American Revolution.33
The British government was dimly aware that, while the United States might not be precisely friendly, it was at any rate not hostile. With Britain isolated in Europe, and the balance of power uncertain, the British reasonably opted for prudence in dealing with the United States.34 British and American interests did not clash strongly, and the British hastily cleared away as many irritations as they could find.35 The British were therefore not especially pleased that Laurier had created another along the boundary of the Alaska panhandle.
The boundary had been established by a treaty between Great Britain and the Russian Empire, Alaska’s owner, in 1825. Russia conceded the interior to Britain, and secured the coast for itself. When Russia sold Alaska to the United States there was no change in the boundary, and no interest in changing it until the Klondike gold rush. At that point interest quickened. The Canadian government now claimed that the treaty really gave it access to the sea; the American government maintained the contrary. The matter festered for a number of years, into the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, when in 1903 it was put to arbitration by six “jurists of high repute.”
It was an unusual arbitration. There were three Americans, all of them known partisans of the American case. There were two Canadians, equally partisan on the other side, and the unfortunate British lord chief justice, Lord Alverstone. On virtually all points, Alverstone ruled in the Americans’ favour, as he was expected to do. Roosevelt had accepted arbitration only because he was assured he would win it, which gave the process the character of a slow-motion pantomime.36
Laurier was annoyed, perhaps more annoyed than the strength of his case allowed. Speaking in the House of Commons in October 1903, he let his feelings show. “I have often regretted, Mr. Speaker,” he said, “and never more than on the present occasion. That we are living beside a great neighbour who, I believe I can say without being deemed unfriendly to them, are very grasping in their national acts, and who are determined upon every occasion to get the best in every agreement which they make.”37
CLEANING THE SLATE
The Alaska boundary dispute might have been the harbinger of a century of trouble with the Americans, but it was not. Relations between the Laurier government and the Roosevelt administration sharply improved, and for the first time it was possible to speak of Canadian–American relations of an intergovernmental kind.
Roosevelt wished to be dominant and unchallenged, but he did not wish to be unfriendly. His secretary of state, Elihu Root, took the same attitude, and he met a very friendly response from the British ambassador to Washington, Lord Bryce. Bryce had his own agenda. Most of the business of the British embassy was, in fact, Canadian business, the thousand-and-one housekeeping problems associated with a forty-eight-hundred-kilometre border. Getting instructions from Laurier was a painfully complicated process, which sometimes produced nothing at all.
Bryce’s first task was to persuade Laurier to answer his mail from Washington; his second was to ensure that the content of that mail was friendly and constructive, and not confrontational. Bryce persuaded a senior Canadian civil servant, Sir Joseph Pope, to organize an office in Ottawa that would handle correspondence to and from abroad.38 It could not be a department of foreign affairs—that would concede too much to Canada, which was, legally speaking, just a very large and important colony. Instead it was labelled the department of External Affairs, which was self-explanatory and not especially assertive. It was located above a barber shop in downtown Ottawa, though it would later move to grander quarters. A junior minister was handed the job, but more importantly Sir Joseph Pope took charge of the office.
Bryce proceeded to “clean the slate” of pressing Canadian–American problems. They weren’t for the most part matters of high policy and didn’t require major negotiation. One item did stand out. Many rivers crossed the Canadian–American boundary, and the frontier ran through the middle of the Great Lakes. Some of the boundary lands had been settled for over a hundred years—settled increasingly thickly.
The inhabitants of the Great Lakes basin, the Saint John Valley, the Red River, and coastal British Columbia exploited the ground on which they lived. They built cities, which required water, and into the water they also poured sewage. The city of Chicago even proposed to divert Great Lakes water so that it could flush its sewage, eventually, down the Mississippi. The price of progress was industry, and industry produced pollution, chemical waste, coal dust, noxious effluents. Cities usually buried their problems, as once-sparkling streams became polluted ditches, but it was impossible to do it on a grand scale. Inevitably, Canadian and American economic habits impinged, and interests clashed along the border. Who was poisoning whom?
These were not questions that politicians preferred to solve. Pollution was taken for granted. The grime of cities and the smells of paper mills or mineral refineries were a condition of life, even a signal of prosperity-inducing activity. Reversing pollution was to shake the foundations of society—something best left to the churches.
Remarkably, then, the Canadian and American governments signed a Boundary Waters Treaty in 1909. It established an International Joint Commission (IJC) of three members from each country, and this time there was no provision for British membership. The IJC was to investigate, report on, and, if asked, arbitrate issues relating to boundary waters— which included the Great Lakes.39 It could, if asked, do more, serving as a tribunal on any issue the Canadian and American governments cared to refer to it.
Roosevelt was in his last months in the White House by the time the treaty was signed. It was his successor, William Howard Taft, unlike Roosevelt an eminent lawyer, who undertook to implement it. Taft saw the IJC as a court, a kind of international version of the American Supreme Court. He was willing to accept such a court with Canada, it seemed, because he saw Canada with its common-law traditions and similar customs as an acceptable partner in an arrangement that assumed the limitation of American and Canadian sovereignty along the border. To put it another way, the two countries pooled their interests and saw no contradiction in doing so.
The IJC did not perform precisely as Taft hoped. Laurier did not assign it any great importance, and in fact he failed to appoint any Canadian members before his time in office came to an end. It was Laurier’s successor, Robert Borden, who made the first Canadian appointments, and turned the IJC into a working organization, with a permanent staff and offices in Washington and Ottawa. In practice it established facts through detailed investigation and proceeded to conclusions dictated by the evidence and expert opinion. Its members functioned more as international civil servants than as representatives of their own governments.40
OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS
When Laurier and W.S. Fielding invented the preferential tariff in 1897 they attracted favourable attention among the enthusiasts of the British Empire. A young Anglo-Indian poet and journalist, Rudyard Kipling, composed a poem to honour Canada, “Our Lady of the Snows.” Perhaps because it wasn’t one of his better efforts, it would be endlessly quoted: “Daughter am I in my mother’s house / But mistress in my own.”
Mother’s house was considered to be in increasing need of repairs in the years after 1900. Diplomatically isolated at the time of the Boer War, Great Britain set about acquiring allies: first Japan, through a formal alliance in 1902, and then, rather more informally, France and Russia. (The French and Russian arrangements were so informal that some members of the British cabinet didn’t know of them; but they existed nevertheless.) The combination with the French and Russians was more or less complete and functioning by 1908, to the deep irritation of the German government and its sovereign, the emperor Wilhelm II.
Wilhelm was Queen Victoria’s grandson, an excitable, irascible, and inconsistent personality. As emperor he was the most important political figure in Germany, but his will was not absolute and he was very well aware that he needed the good opinion of important elements in German society. Wilhelm was therefore expressing not merely his personal desires but a strong political current in Germany when, beginning in 1898, he set about constructing a large German navy where there had been practically none before. His naval policy, to be successful, required that he be able to get his ships out of German ports through the North Sea and into the Atlantic Ocean, and to do that he had somehow to outface the British fleet. That in turn meant that he must have more and better ships than the British could float in the waters between Great Britain and Germany.
Wilhelm’s desires must have seemed very odd in distant Canada, but more than any other foreign policy issue they resonated in the North American dominion. Wilhelm became a factor in ending Canada’s colonial isolation. He would also, eventually, help bring the British Empire to an end by exposing its internal inconsistencies and the differences in interest between Great Britain and its colonies, including Canada; but that result lay in the distant future.
The machinations of European courts and the construction of distant alliances held no interest for Sir Wilfrid Laurier. If he ever seriously thought about the matter, he probably believed that British resources were nearly infinite and British power superior. He might have conceded that the British sometimes needed time to get up to speed, but they would get there in the end. Canada’s role in terms of British foreign policy was to observe and applaud a spectacle designed and directed from London. Laurier had only once had the experience of being “daughter in my mother’s house,” during the Boer War. He had no wish to allow the experience to become a regular event.
Laurier did, however, see that British statesmen were politicians like himself. He did not hold them in awe because they were surrounded by vast fleets and marching armies. Fleets and armies had to be paid for, like any other governmental activity, and finding money for such activities was the most painful part of the political process. It was a fundamental tenet of the imperialist self-definition that Britain was weak, not strong, in peril, not secure, and inadequately funded, not infinitely rich. Laurier would have had trouble with any of these propositions.
He reluctantly countenanced some reform in the Canadian army. He paid little attention to expositions by British ministers at imperial conferences (renamed from colonial conferences), and, in fact, those ministers returned the compliment by failing to inform Laurier of what they were about in their European alliance commitments.
Laurier, like the rest of the country, spent much of 1908 contemplating the awesome fact that there had been permanent European settlement in Canada for three hundred years. Propelled by a coalition of local boosters from Quebec City in league with the governor general, Lord Grey, Laurier and the premier of Quebec, Lomer Gouin, financed a huge celebration of the event. The Prince of Wales came, and spoke good French, rather like the governor general. The Duke of Norfolk, an aristocrat of ancient and Catholic lineage, came and charmed the bishops. The vice-president of the United States came, and a French admiral, and the descendants of Wolfe, Montcalm, Lévis, Murray, and Carleton. It was a memorable occasion, and best of all it left a residue of permanent historical reconstruction of the ramparts of Quebec and in useful public works around the city.41
And so Laurier was not prepared in 1908–09 when a wave of hysteria swept the English-speaking part of the country. The Germans were planning to overtake the British fleet using the naval symbols of the day, dreadnought-class battleships, faster and heavily armoured. Britain must have immediate help, in the form of dreadnoughts. The Conservative opposition, led by Nova Scotia’s Robert Borden, obliged with alarmist rhetoric. In the great battle of words that resulted, Borden prevailed, up to a point.
Laurier became convinced that something must be done to pacify public opinion, and he proposed to do it in the form of a Canadian navy. It would consist of smaller ships, not lumbering dreadnoughts, and the ships would be proportionate to what Canada itself might actually need on or near its own shores.42 (The dreadnoughts could only be used overseas, as part of the British Grand Fleet consisting of similar ships.)
A Naval Service Act was duly passed in 1910, naval bases were established at Halifax and Esquimalt where the Royal Navy had formerly resided, and, while Canada’s own ships were being built, two surplus British warships were acquired, one for each coast. In the opinion of the opposition, and imperially minded Canadians, this was not enough. A “tin-pot navy,” the critics scoffed.
In the eyes of French-Canadian nationalistes, it was far too much. In a 1910 by-election in Drummond-Arthabaska, in the heart of rural Quebec, the opposition dressed up its agents in blue suits and sent them around posing as naval officers taking a census of young and militarily viable males. It would be for Monsieur Laurier’s navy, they helpfully explained to voters. The Laurier candidate was accordingly beaten.
The opposition also reached for the elixir of scandal as a means to lever the Liberal ministers out of office with charges of “wine, women, and influence peddling,” but their efforts, while exciting to the press, had no effect on Laurier’s majority. The party, like its leader, was growing old, however, and the ministers were tired. “I carry my advancing years lightly, but I no longer have the same zest for battle. I undertake today from a sense of duty, because I must, what used to be ‘the joy of strife,’” Laurier wrote in December 1909. The government made some minor advances in conservation policy and in labour laws, but it needed more to show that it was truly abreast of the times. Only one minister, Mackenzie King, aged thirty-six, could actually be said to be youthful, and Laurier himself was approaching seventy.
To assist the prime minister in concentrating his mind, the farmers of the West sent delegations to Ottawa in 1910, demanding action on a series of agricultural issues. Foremost among these were complaints about the tariffs, which benefited eastern manufacturers by forcing western farmer-consumers to buy expensive Canadian-made goods. At the same time farmers had to sell their product, grain, on the world market. Laurier was reminded that, thanks to immigration, there were many more farmers than there had been and many more westerners too. The political balance in Canada might tip, and tip against the government.
Luck and timing are important assets in politics, and Laurier, most of his career, was lucky. His luck appeared to hold when the Republican administration of William Howard Taft concluded that it also faced a problem with its western farmers. Like their Canadian cousins, western Americans resented high tariffs, and they made their displeasure known in Washington. Facing a revolt of western Republicans, Taft reached for reciprocity with Canada to demonstrate that his government actually had farmers’ interests at heart. Canadian and American negotiators reached a speedy deal that restored free trade in natural products while limiting it for manufactured goods. Laurier had hit the jackpot: Canadian farm products got free entry into the American market, while Canadian manufacturers kept most of their beloved protective tariff. A triumphant finance minister announced the agreement to the House of Commons on 26 January 1911.
The Conservatives were plunged into despair. Trapped behind an uninspiring leader, Borden, and unsuccessful in their stratagems, they had been sandbagged by Canadian politics’ ultimate weapon. Reciprocity had been the dream of a generation, always out of reach because of American refusal even to consider it. Caught in a desperate situation, the Conservatives grasped at the politician’s last resort: an appeal to principle.
Fortunately, there was one available. Sir John A. Macdonald had opposed “unrestricted reciprocity” in 1891 with an appeal to British Empire patriotism. It might work again. Laurier had seriously underestimated Canadian manufacturers’ attachment to tariff protection. Liberal businessmen, who had been pacified by the Liberals’ 1893 conversion to protectionism, became unsettled by the prospect of reciprocity. Led by Sir Clifford Sifton, Laurier’s former minister of the interior, they flocked to Borden. The Conservatives used delaying tactics in Parliament until finally, in exasperation, Laurier called an election for September 1911. He believed he had every prospect of winning.
Laurier miscalculated. In English Canada the Conservatives had a monopoly on the patriotic side of two issues: the naval scare and reciprocity. Reciprocity was inflated into much more than a commercial arrangement leading to prosperity. Instead it was a slippery slope leading to annexation. “We must decide,” Robert Borden intoned, “whether the spirit of Canadianism or Continentalism shall prevail on the northern half of the continent.” No less a political personage than the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives said so: he hoped to see the day when “the American flag will float over every square foot of the British North American possessions, clear to the North Pole.”
That opened the floodgates. The American flag was booed in cinemas. Unlucky Americans visiting Canada were subjected to personal abuse. Sunday newspapers, crime, and divorce, well-known features of the American way of life, would become prevalent. Only Borden could stop it, and if proof were needed of his commitment to the British Empire, his firm policy on a “contribution” of dreadnoughts to the Royal Navy provided it. That was in English Canada.
French Canada featured a different campaign. There the spectre was the British Empire, not the United States, and the cause was Laurier’s Naval Service Act. Leading Quebec Conservatives were aware of the contradiction between their platform and Borden’s, but they reasoned that the main objective was the defeat of Laurier and the Liberals.
The opposition prevailed. In English Canada Laurier fell for being pro-American and anti-British and in Quebec he lost for being too pro-British. The Conservatives won 134 seats to the Liberals’ 87. A pleasantly surprised Robert Borden became prime minister of Canada. At age sixty-nine, Laurier returned to being leader of the Opposition.
DEPRESSION AND WAR
Having achieved office, Borden had no idea what to do with it. The Reciprocity Agreement was dead, that much was certain. But what about the great naval issue? Taking two different stands had harvested twenty-six MPs (and only 0.5 percent less of the vote total than Laurier) in Quebec. What would happen to them if Borden proceeded to send money to London for dreadnoughts, as his English-Canadian supporters expected?
Like any sensible leader, Borden postponed the issue. He would go to London himself and ask the British what they really needed—an act of stunning naïveté. At least he wouldn’t have to go for a number of months. In the meantime, Borden suspended the operation of Laurier’s Naval Service Act and with it the construction of the “tin-pot navy.”
The prime minister duly visited London in the summer of 1912, collecting a knighthood en route. He asked Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty (navy minister), whether he needed money for dreadnoughts, and unsurprisingly Churchill said yes. Borden was also admitted to the inner councils of the empire, attending a meeting of the grandly named Committee of Imperial Defence. He was not told that the Committee was to all intents and purposes dysfunctional, being paralyzed by quarrels between the army and the navy. In any case the British ministers attending did not tell Borden the truth, that extra battleships were needed because they wanted to make a complicated switch of ships with their unofficial ally, the French.43
Happy but ignorant, Sir Robert Borden returned to Canada. The naval contribution would have to go through, he told his colleagues. Winston Churchill wanted it. One of his Quebec ministers resigned, but his other Quebec colleagues put party before promises. Borden’s naval contribution passed the House of Commons, only to be stalled in Canada’s appointed Senate. There it stayed, for the Liberals had a majority in the Senate, and on the naval issue they could reasonably argue that the legitimacy of Borden’s action was questionable. Borden toyed with calling an election on the matter, but put it off.
It was by now 1914, and electoral prospects for the Conservatives were growing dimmer. A severe depression afflicted Canada in 1913–14, straining the country’s limited social services. There were rumours of starvation, but no suggestion that the dominion government should fill the gap. In the spring, Borden was preoccupied with repelling a shipload of Sikhs who had got around Canada’s immigration laws by chartering a Japanese ship, the Komagata Maru, to bring them to Vancouver. There they sat under the guns of Canada’s museum-piece navy while Borden struggled with the law (but not his conscience) to find a way to send them back to India. Borden was in luck: the Sikhs gave up and agreed to go home, just in time for the prime minister to take a summer vacation in Muskoka. He hadn’t been paying much attention to the newspapers, though he was aware that there was a crisis in the Balkans—the third in as many years. Doubtless it would be resolved. That was the British government’s business, not Canada’s.
On that point Borden and the British government were in full agreement. It mattered not at all what Borden thought of the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Borden knew nothing of the precarious politics of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and how they meshed with the need to assert Austrian predominance over the empire’s troublesome neighbour, Serbia. With German encouragement, Austria-Hungary confronted Serbia, which set in motion Russia, supporting Serbia, and France, supporting Russia. By the end of July the two sides were lined up prepared for war, with only the lingering uncertainty of Great Britain standing in the way. In the end the British government could not betray its commitments to France, realizing that if Germany prevailed over France, the German position in Europe would be immensely strengthened, to Britain’s peril.
The German general staff did the rest, laying down an invasion of France via neutral Belgium, which the British, the French, and everyone else had once agreed to leave alone and neutral in any conflict. Britain could therefore go to war in defence of neutral rights—Belgium’s—and that was what the empire could be told. Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914.
The news was well received in some quarters in Canada. As elsewhere in the Western world, politics and society seemed ill-matched. The spectacle of politicians scratching away on the surface of the world’s problems irritated the earnest. There had been too many compromises, too many small corruptions; Canada, and the world, needed decisive action. Canada’s minister of militia and defence, General Sir Sam Hughes, felt the need and heard the call. He had feared he might not, that this man and his hour of destiny would not after all be matched. When it seemed that peace might prevail, briefly, he had the Union Jack fluttering outside his headquarters hauled down. On the fourth of August, Hughes proudly returned it to the top of the flagpole. It was a grand thing to be British, after all.