CHAPTER 14

The Costs of Consolidation 1871–1873

As the first phase of confederation ended, as the union of British North America merged with the expansion of Canadian and Maritime society into a new nationality, the census of 1871 was taken. The new Dominion might hold it up as a mirror, like an eager adolescent, to see how its body had grown and its features firmed since 1861. In that convulsive decade all the old lines of formation, all the old ties within America and without, had threatened to dissolve. Now the United States, having fought the Civil War and undergone its second revolution, was territorially as before, but constitutionally strongly centralized. Mexico had expelled the French and resumed its own revolution under Benito Juarez, the revolution that was to bring the Indian to citizenship. And British North America, except for Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, and the Arctic islands, had come into the Dominion of Canada, the whole devolved by England on the ambitious and aggressive colonies of the St Lawrence. Now it was time to take a look at what had been accomplished in those turbulent years.

One fact was abundantly clear, that of physical expansion. The old Canada and the Maritimes, settled British North America, had been no mean area. It had included some 33,373 square miles,¹ and reached halfway across the continent. But the new Dominion now included the vast northern territory to Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait, the great Nelson-Saskatchewan and Mackenzie basins between Lake Superior and the Rockies, prairie, forest, and the forested surf of mountains and the inland grasslands between the Rockies and the Pacific, in all some 3,000,000 additional square miles.² It was an enormous addition of territory, known, except for the prairies, only by its rivers. Much, men sensed, was barren, never really to be settled, but their eyes were on the millions of acres of fertile prairie and on the commerce of the Pacific. So excited were they that they used the exuberant language of American expansion to describe the hopes inspired by the fantastic growth. When a dour New Brunswicker surveyor, Alexander Monro, was to write sardonically of the size and inhospitality of the Precambrian Shield, no attention was paid to him.³

The key to political tenure and commercial exploitation of such an expanse was, of course, some adequate means of communication. These too had grown, but by no means as before 1861. In that year the provinces of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia had some 2,146 miles of railway in all In 1871 Canada had 2,685 miles, a mere 500 more, much of it the Intercolonial, which had been begun in 1869.⁴ Nor had its number of river and lake steamers greatly increased. Regular summer sailings to Fort William had begun, but as yet the great body of people and goods went by Duluth to Moorhead, and from there by steamer, flat boat, or cart train to Winnipeg. One great change was that the telegraph had reached Winnipeg in 1871. The new Dominion had not achieved the communications it needed, but was still making do with those of the old British North America. Here, in large part, was the cause of the urgency for rushing the Pacific railway. The great, inert body of the Dominion needed the nerves the telegraph would furnish, and the muscles the railway would give.

If Canada seriously lacked communication, even more, to the point of fantasy, did it lack people. All the provinces of British North America in 1861 had been pressing on the margins of the resources of land, timber, and minerals, as exploited by existing means. Now the growth of territory made that pressure of population seem faint indeed, on the assumption that Canadians of all kinds might move into the newly acquired territories. Nor was the rate of growth of the population what it had been in the preceding decade. The total population of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia in 1861 had been 3,090,581.⁵ In 1871, with the additional few thousands of the Northwest and British Columbia, it had grown to 3,689,257.⁶ Nova Scotia had increased from 330,857 in 1861 to 387,800; New Brunswick from 252,047 to 285,594.⁷ Quebec had grown from 1,111,586 to 1,191,516; Ontario from 1,396,091 to 1,620,851.⁸ French Canadians in the four original provinces numbered 1,082,940; English and others, 2,402,821.⁹ Total immigration since 1861 was reckoned at 179,000, and natural increase at 550,698.¹⁰ If only 14.2 per cent as against 32.6 per cent for the previous decade, it was a good rate of growth in what, for all its perils, had been a prosperous decade. Clearly, however, immigration must be encouraged as never before, if the lands of the new Dominion were to be settled and its resources exploited at a rate to justify the daring that had carried confederation from sea to sea and now proposed to build the Pacific railway.

The census figures represented a society of hearty and moral people, moral, that is, in that they were much repressed. Law-abiding, they were given to crimes of violence, if to misbehaviour at all, and not to sins of pleasure. A conscientious hypocrisy resulted. With many people who used liquor freely, society was, none the less, moving in Protestant Canada toward temperance, regulated by law. Steady and thrifty, attached to land and home, hard-working and anxious to thrive, it was somehow a society not devoted to the quest for power or profit, as were the British and American societies with which the Canadian intermingled. This was the basis of Canadian society, first formed by those who resisted or had fled the fundamental contradictions of American life, conformity by consensus and individualism unchecked by social constraint. Canadian life was quieter and slower than American, more modest than British, duller than both, but, many Canadians were pleased to think, more godly than either. These differences, felt but undefined, which distinguished Canada from the two great states in whose orbits it moved, were the ultimate basis of its independence in America.

Such feelings were struggling confusedly for expression in Canada in 1871. There were strong currents of nationalism running in Canadian political life, currents that had at once helped bring confederation about, and at the same time were liberated and strengthened by it. How this might help the political parties was not clear. The Canada First group had not been daunted by their defeat in Red River; indeed, by making an amnesty impossible, they denied Riel and the French the full fruits of victory. They had acquired further recruits, notably W. A. Forster and J. E. Edgar, even, in a sense, Edward Blake, the abstracted giant of Ontario politics. But the ferment of their ideas – a racial, a British, a Canadian imperialism, an independent Canada, a national literature – was a ferment only. There was no coherence, no program, no future in Canada First. Ironically, it was taken up by Professor Goldwin Smith, Manchester Radical, British free-trader, North American continentalist, whose patronage was the cold kiss of death to any national aspiration.¹¹ In Quebec, moreover, the Red River Resistance and the denial of the amnesty fed the nationalism, cultural and passionate, at once of the Rouges and the ultramontanes. The ferment of utramontane doctrine and Rouge extremism continued to work. The ultramontanes now drew up a “Programme,” a statement of a political platform designed to realize socio-clerical ideals. Les Programmistes received the support of the ultramontane bishops of Montreal and Three Rivers, Monsignors Bourget and Laflêche. This entry into the political field by the ultramontanes suggested that they and their ultimate enemy, the Rouges, might unite to fight their immediate foe, the dominant Bleus.¹²

Canada First nationalism might perhaps help the Conservatives; a union of Rouge and ultramontanes would not help the Bleus. There was, however, hope to be cultivated here and there. By 1872 Canada First was beginning to develop economic interests and talk of a “national policy.” It was a good term for a country developing its secondary industries; Macdonald noted it. Quebec nationalism, too, was protectionist. And a printers’ strike for the nine-hour day against all the Toronto press but the Leader in 1872, both signallized the growth of organized labour in Canada since the 1850’s and gave Macdonald a chance to score politically against his ancient rival. He quietly introduced Gladstone’s Trades Union Act of 1871 into parliament in 1872, and saw it pass with satisfaction. Workers in Canada had occasion to vote Conservative, should they choose.¹³ But the political radicalism of the Liberals would seem to many the more natural expression of their economic needs.

How Canadians might choose to vote was becoming more and more an urgent question, as 1871 moved into 1872 and the session of parliament approached. It was a session that must be its last, and the business parliament had to do would not necessarily aid the government to return to power and complete its work of union and expansion. The failure to have a single Canadian company organized to undertake the building of the Pacific railway was such business. And there remained the ratification of the Treaty of Washington, not yet finally approved in London or Washington, and the object of continuous attack in Canada since May of 1871 by the Liberals, as “the humiliating treaty.”

In all this time Macdonald had held his peace about the outcome of the negotiations at Washington. He had resolved to say nothing that would check or divert the Liberal attack on the treaty. He wished to have them fully committed to its rejection, so that he would himself gain the more credit by carrying its ratification. He had a deep plan afoot to convert his surrender of the fisheries without reciprocity into a kind of triumph. This was to trade the British guarantee for the costs of the fortifications of Montreal into a guarantee of £4,000,000 for new canals and the building of the Pacific railway. This would turn past failure into success, and obtain British help in a way painless to the British Treasury, mere guarantees it was unlikely ever to have to meet. Without such a substitute, wrote Lisgar, it was unlikely that the treaty would be ratified in Canada.¹⁴

Macdonald himself wrote Kimberley in confidence to say Canada could not give up claim to the guarantee promised for the fortifications of Montreal. But if the British government suggested it, it might be given up in return for the guarantee of the £4,000,000. If this were done, the Canadian government would pledge itself to carry the treaty with “a moral certainty of success.” But Lisgar had also written to say that £3,500,000 or even £2,500,000 would do. Kimberley himself felt the United Kingdom could not suggest the giving up of the guarantee of fortifications, particularly while relations with the United States were still uncertain.¹⁵

Macdonald was facing his own real difficulties and was not blackmailing the British. Yet he was determined, if he could, to escape from the dilemma of Washington with sufficient advantage to blunt the edge of the pounding Liberal attack, most relentless in the Globe. A British guarantee of expansion of the means of transport would do this. The Colonial Secretary and the British cabinet writhed under these Canadian demands, but faced the fact that Canadian ratification might have a good effect on the Americans, while “on the other hand the rejection of the Treaty by Canada might have disastrous results.”¹⁶ Finally, they decided not to suggest withdrawal of the guarantee for fortifications, but to guarantee a loan of £2,500,000 for the construction of the Pacific railway when the Canadian parliament ratified the treaty. The Canadian government was informed of the guarantee in early April, and Lisgar informed privately of the decision as to the fortifications.¹⁷ If the British decision was not all Macdonald had sought, it was none the less enough to persuade the cabinet to support the treaty. They agreed to seek ratification by parliament. Macdonald had won by the narrowest of margins the difficult trial of finesse that the settlement of Washington had involved.¹⁸

He was thus reasonably well prepared to meet parliament when it convened on April 11, 1872. In raw winds and through muddy streets, the members of parliament came to meet with the usual ceremony of Windsor uniforms and ladies in crinolines in the now familiar Senate Chamber of the buildings towering over the houses of Wellington and Sparks streets. The Speech from the Throne was not a lengthy document. It called for the ratification of the Treaty of Washington, and for the enactment of a charter of incorporation for a Pacific railway to be assigned by Order in Council to such directors as the government might approve. This was a device for dealing with the fact that the government had not persuaded the two companies of Montreal and Toronto to unite, or Allan to divest himself of American support. Because of the census of 1871, there would be a redistribution of the electoral districts of the House of Commons, that decennial recourse to representation by population that was Brown’s great achievement in confederation. And, a novel touch, there was to be legislation on trade unions.

The chief work of the session was, of course, the ratification of the Treaty of Washington. The debate had been preparing for almost a year and there was in fact nothing new to be said. Nevertheless, the Liberal barrage came thundering down on the government benches, denouncing the treaty as a betrayal of Canada’s interests by the Canadian prime minister, who had weakly come home empty-handed. The burden of reply was left to Sir Francis Hincks, now Minister of Finance, to carry, and support to other members of the cabinet. Macdonald, who had said no word on the treaty since his return from Washington, said none now. He sat through this, one of the great debates of his day, and said never a word. But when the imperial guarantee of £2,500,000 was announced, he must have smiled with more than his usual jauntiness; he had not come home empty-handed.

Finally on May 15 the fateful vote of second reading came. Ratification carried by one hundred and twenty-one votes to fifty-five.¹⁹ Canada had paid up for the settlement which accepted its existence, and Macdonald was vindicated. Indeed, as Lisgar noted, the government had had a majority in every province.²⁰

The other great debate was over the bill for the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was introduced by Cartier on May 7. It called for the line to be completed from the Pacific to somewhere near Lake Nipissing in ten years from July 20, 1871. The private company building it was to receive 50,000,000 acres of land and $30,000,000. The bill went on to provide for a union of two or more companies such as might compete for the charter, and for the grant of the charter by Order in Council under the bill.²¹ The Opposition attacked, not the purpose of the bill, but the amount committed to carry out that purpose, and the speed with which the project was to be completed. It was the old charge of overspending of the Liberals against the Conservatives, and the old charge of using the resources of Ontario for the benefit of the rest of the country.

Events were to justify the criticism, and it is impossible not to feel that Carrier’s rashness in 1870 had committed the government to more than the country might reasonably be expected to perform. But on the other hand, it was evident that, however much Canada might have changed, the character of Canadian politics had changed very little. The Conservative party was the party of the expansive forces of Canadian life, prepared to win the support of habitant and farmer by the well-known methods of electoral appeal, the Liberals the party of the thrifty middle class, both townsman and farmer, which was committed to safeguarding private interests and was suspicious of large measures. So much did it represent popular feeling, however, that the government accepted an amendment to the effect that the subsidies were to be so given as not to increase the rate of taxation in Canada.²²

With these great measures passed, the bulk of the work of the session was done, and the issues of the next election drawn. But there were other bills of note. One was in its nature a sequel to the Canadian Pacific bill. It was the Dominion Lands Act of 1872, by which the policy of granting free homesteads to bona fide settlers was established in Manitoba and the Northwest.²³ Another was Macdonald’s bill to legislate for trade unions after the manner of Gladstone’s Act of 1871, and recognize the right of collective bargaining by prohibiting the doctrine of conspiracy being applied to unions. It was, in the circumstances, a clever statement of the Tory belief that society exists for all classes and not only for men of property, and it was a shrewd blow at Brown and his ready assumption that his middle-class Liberalism extended to the whole of society.²⁴

There was also an extended debate on the New Brunswick School Act of 1871. That Act had deprived the Roman Catholic parish schools of such public support as they had had for the past decade. The defenders of separate schools now demanded the protection of section 93 of the BNA Act. Macdonald’s government kept aloof from the question, but in the Commons P. J. O. Chauveau, premier of Quebec, moved that the BNA Act be amended to ensure what was intended at the Westminster conference, the guarantee to educational minorities of their rights as they existed at the time of union. New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were to be named explicitly. But the resolution was defeated on a free vote of one hundred and seventy-six to thirty-four.²⁵ Here was the first clear revelation that the agreement of 1867 was not to be interpreted as both dual and general in principle, but a matter of limited, local agreement, and in all matters of education subject to control by local democratic majorities.

Finally, there was the redistribution. By it Nova Scotia had twenty-one seats, New Brunswick sixteen, Manitoba and British Columbia still their assigned four and six respectively. Quebec had its standard sixty-five, but Ontario’s representation increased from eighty-two to eighty-eight. The province that had grown steadily Liberal since 1854 was more than ever important to electoral victory.

The House prorogued on June 14, and dissolution followed. By the end of July, the election was in full swing. Both sides had occasion for hope, and it was clear the contest would be hard fought in every constituency of the Dominion. The Opposition could count on the discontent with the Treaty of Washington that their attack had made traditional as the “humiliating treaty.” Their protest against the cost of the Pacific railway, and particularly against the breakneck speed of construction which would, they alleged, put the cost beyond the resources of the country, was bound to tell in Ontario, with its long tradition of resistance to spending by the general government, and in the Maritimes, where interest in the Pacific railway was slight.

The government, on the other hand, could take hope. The Treaty of Washington had now been ratified in London and Washington. Canadian fishermen had access to American markets; Canada, because it had stood by the Empire, had a large guarantee for the Pacific railway. And that railway was being paid for in large part out of the lands in the Northwest, not the pockets of the Canadian taxpayer. The case for haste was strong; the work of political union had to be completed by a railway to prevent local dissatisfaction and American competition, renewed in the form of the Northern Pacific. It was necessary also to complete the work of political union by making the Dominion a national economy, complete with prairie wheat lands, Pacific ports, and industries in both east and west.²⁶ In the last session Hincks had already made the first move in this direction by raising the tariff once more to a general level of 15 per cent. It was the first formulation of that “national policy” of which Canada First was speaking in confused terms, and which Macdonald was to make an economic policy.

Macdonald himself moved into the election with his usual casual shrewdness. At Peterborough on July 9 he opened the campaign with easy charm and banter. He referred to the abounding prosperity, and told a story of the old Grit who had expressed the fear that such good fortune could not last, particularly under a Tory government. Be assured, his friend had replied, “the weevil will come with the Grits.” Governments then as now claimed credit for good times, and blamed their opponents for bad. And when Macdonald reviewed the record of his government, he declared that all had gone well. The only calamity that was to have been feared was that of war with the United States. And that, he went on, putting his finger on the essential meaning of the settlement, had been removed by the Treaty of Washington. Then, with the audacity of the consummate politician, he, who had suffered such embarrassment from the treaty, now presented it as the great achievement of his career. “If he wished,” ran the report, “to have any record on his tombstone, it was this, that he had been a party in the making of the Treaty of Washington.” Reciprocity he had sought, yes, but in issues of peace or war he had taken what he could get.²⁷

This, then, was to be the main issue of the campaign – whether the government had protected Canadian interests in the Treaty of Washington. Second to it was the cost of the Pacific railway. Other issues were local, even that of protection. The idea of a national policy, present in all its parts, had not fully crystallized and did not rise to dominate the campaign. As a result, the contest was very much a local one, as usual, but with the political in-fighting of the electoral districts much intensified by the realization of the politician of the size of the stakes for which elections were now fought. The government had to fight closely contested elections in every part of the country. But there was special trouble in Montreal East, where Rouges and Programmistes had united behind one Louis-Amable Jetté to oppose Cartier with every violence, even to denying him a hearing. Cartier, already ill with Bright’s disease, was in no shape to fight such a campaign. And in the rural seats of Ontario, where the failure to get reciprocity was most regretted, the contests were exceedingly close and intense. The two great chiefs were thus in serious danger, Cartier of losing his own seat, Macdonald of losing control of Ontario.

The rest of the story is well known. Elections had always been corrupt in British North America, with bribery, treating, and promises of patronage. The Clear Grits had always resisted this traditional corruption. Now, in what seemed a desperate election, corruption was employed extensively and no doubt the cost of the election, like all others, had increased in the general prosperity. Even Cartier and Macdonald, openly and repeatedly, sought funds from their friends and especially from Sir Hugh Allan, one of the contenders with American backing, for the Canadian Pacific charter. The rashness of their conduct was to have its consequences.

Meanwhile, they had won the election. Cartier himself was defeated, but Bishop Taché at once arranged for his return in Provencher in Manitoba. The ailing warrior had, indeed, to pull out of the fight, and retired to the London he loved in search of medical aid. But the government majority was reckoned by the Gazette at one hundred and twenty-six to seventy-three. In all the outlying provinces the government was in a majority. In Quebec the result was thirty-eight to twenty-seven; in Ontario, thirty-eight to fifty – a total of seventy-six to seventy-seven.²⁸ Thus the old Upper and Lower Canadian deadlock still endured. The rest of the country, brought in to end it, did so to give a majority to the government. Knowing the habits of Maritime and frontier constituencies, the Opposition might well feel that the government had bought its way to victory. The truth was that Canada had not yet changed the basic nature of its politics. But it had imposed on the old political ways issues too great for them to bear.

On the morrow of the elections, however, all went well. The drive to consolidate renewed, expansion could go forward unchecked. The next great task was to grant the charter of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Under the Act, the government could now enforce its will. It no longer had to seek to exclude American capital or to persuade rival Canadian companies to come together. A union might still be attempted, but the way was clear for action despite MacPherson’s formidable gathering of strength. A witness could write in November that Macdonald had been in Toronto and failed to persuade MacPherson to join Allan, “though he seems to think that he has collected a sufficient number of adherents in Ontario to render him independent of MacPherson’s assistance.” And in Montreal Sir Hugh Allan, Dufferin reported, had explained to him “how entirely independent he intended to be of American assistance if the management of the Canadian Pacific were entrusted to him….” Macdonald, at any rate, had thought of an ingenious device, not explained by Dufferin, for ensuring that the slippery Sir Hugh was as good as his word.²⁹

The government could choose those it thought most likely to fulfil the national purpose in building the road, and those most likely to be able to raise the necessary loans. It chose some from each province of the Dominion, thirteen directors in all. They were Sir Hugh Allan, the Honourable A. G. Archibald of Halifax, the Honourable J. O. Beaubien, the Commissioner of Crown Lands for Quebec, J. L. Beaudry, Egerton Ryerson Burpee of Saint John, F. W. Cumberland of Toronto, Sandford Fleming, R. N. Hall of Sherbrooke, the Honourable J. S. Helmcken of Victoria, Andrew McDermot of Winnipeg, Donald McInnes of Hamilton, Walter Shanly, at that time living in the United States, and John Walker of London, Ontario,³⁰ The president was Sir Hugh Allan, head of the Allan Steamship Lines, protégé of the Montreal Gazette, a capitalist of weight and influence, and the chief contributor to the political funds of the Conservatives in the recent election.

The railway company was thus launched. In the meantime the giant task of running the survey had been going ahead in 1871 and again in 1872 under the direction of Sandford Fleming, Inspired by the knowledge drawn from the journals of exploration and from the experience of the fur-traders, he directed the surveyors to follow a northern route in the Northwest by the present Selkirk on Red River, the interlake country to the Narrows of Lake Manitoba, the Swan River, and the Saskatchewan, to the low northern passes of the Rockies, the Yellowhead, or the Peace River. From these he hoped to find a route to Bute Inlet and so to Vancouver Island.³¹ It was a daring plan, and the early surveys seemed to promise well.

By 1873 all was in train. The Canadian Pacific Railway Company had been formed, the route was under survey, the government that had built the nation was safely returned to power. The general prosperity, moreover, had risen like a volley of rockets into a golden boom. Everything seemed possible, even a Pacific railway from Nipissing. The American line had been built from the Mississippi.

It was fitting, then, that when Parliament met on March 5, 1873, it should be a warm, bright, spring day of “crisp, bracing qualities.” The Foot Guards were out in their regimentals, and the Ottawa Field Artillery had a battery present to fire a salute for the new governor general, Lord Dufferin, as he drove up from Rideau Hall to Parliament Hill. As the guns thudded in regular succession, and the viceregal party disappeared into the emphatic Gothic doorway, everything seemed to promise an early spring and a good summer.

Macdonald also seemed to be very much in command of the situation. True to his policy of trying to engraft the precedents of Westminster on the new Canadian parliament, he proposed, counter to the custom of having French and English Speakers alternately since 1841, that the Honourable James Cockburn should once more be Speaker. The House concurred unanimously. It was a new departure, itself promising to lift Canadian politics a little further from the old sectionalism.

The Speech from the Throne was in keeping with the auspices of the opening of parliament. All conditions of the national life were, it declared, wholly favourable; Canada was prospering as never before. The charter for the Pacific railway, it went on, had been granted. It was proposed to enlarge the Welland and to build the Baie Verte (Chignecto) Canal, the first appearance of an election promise of breathtaking magnitude and evidence of the fierceness of the political struggle in the Maritimes. The government would bring down legislation to aid immigration, improve the method of census-taking, consolidate the laws, improve the trial of disputed elections, assist the pilotage of the St Lawrence, and adjust the offices of the Secretary of State and the Secretary of State for the Provinces.³² It was a useful but pedestrian program, the legislation of an established country, not the heroic undertakings of the first parliament.

Yet at once there were signs that this would be a bitter session. The first division took place on March 7 over the disputed election in West Peterborough; the government was sustained by ninety-five to seventy-nine – a mere sixteen. And the struggle over the charter of the Pacific railway erupted the same day. In the upper House, Senator MacPherson complained of an attack on him by the Montreal Gazette. The senator said Allan had tried to obtain his co-operation more than a year before, but he had refused because of foreign interests associated with Allan. On March 10 Alexander Mackenzie declared in debate that the Opposition did not oppose the construction of the Pacific railway, but did protest the government’s procedure, its taking power to grant the charter, and its failure to avert the danger of foreign interests. He was opposed not to foreign capital, but to foreign control. Macdonald in reply asserted that the government had “omitted no protection which could be devised for keeping the entire control of this great Canadian enterprise in Canadian hands, and to ensure its being dealt with by Canadian means and Canadian ingenuity and skill, and by Canadian or English capital, or both.” After this nationalistic pronouncement, Macdonald added that he, too, had no objection to foreign capital.³³

The skirmishing then ceased, and the session moved leisurely on into April. On April 2, however, L. S. Huntington, Liberal member for Shefford, moved a motion of no confidence which would appoint a committee of seven to go into charges that Allan and one G. W. McMullen, acting for American capitalists, had made payments to members of the government in order to receive the charter to build the Canadian Pacific Railway. This was a stunning charge, the outcome of the machinations of the rival companies to obtain the charter, the interest of the Northern Pacific in the Canadian route from Winnipeg to the Pacific, the electoral needs of the hard-pressed Cartier and Macdonald, and the theft of incriminating letters by agents of the Liberal party. As a motion of no confidence, however, it was at once voted down by one hundred and seven to seventy-six. The seventy-six were solid Liberals; the one hundred and seven were solid Conservatives with independents who believed the government innocent. They would have to continue in this belief if the government was to remain in power.

On the next day, however, Macdonald himself moved for a select committee, and on April 8 a committee of five was appointed. The attack was still kept up. On April 17 MacPherson asked in the Senate that the charter granted Allan and his associates be withdrawn. The next day the House discussed the constitutional uncertainty about the committee’s having the power to examine witnesses on oath, a most desirable matter in an investigation of such a nature. All haste was made to pass a bill giving it such power, which passed all the readings on April 21. On May 15 Huntington made his charges explicit, saying that Allan, as part of a corrupt bargain to obtain the charter, had paid $360,000 to the government party. Here the matter still stood, the committee pursuing its work, the government under the gravest charge, for the whole session from April 2 until it adjourned on May 23.³⁴

During this time Macdonald and his colleagues pressed through a number of measures that were to help round out confederation. The first was brought down on May 3 by Macdonald himself as minister of justice. Its purpose was to establish a mounted police for the Northwest. There were to be one or more stipendary magistrates appointed with summary jurisdiction in the North West Territory, and the courts of Manitoba were to have jurisdiction over more serious cases. A police commissioner was to be appointed, with superintendents, aides, and specialists, and up to three hundred constables. The commissioner and his superintendents would be ex officio justices of the peace. The force would be built up to this strength by degrees, as the militia force in Manitoba would be reduced by degrees. The Northwest, so long derelict and void of law, if not lawless, was now to be policed by a force carefully planned, as it was to be carefully trained for its special task. Such was the origin of the famous force that was to be the greatest of all Canadian achievements in doing much by slight means and an athletic economy of effort.³⁵

Then on May 17 Tilley moved a resolution to bring Prince Edward Island into confederation. That isolationist community had been brought to seek union by the overwhelming cost of its island railway. So apt was this to Canada’s purpose that a pamphleteer charged that Canada had arranged the matter, and that the Island had literally been “railroaded” into confederation.³⁶ The Island’s government had been defeated in April 1872, and Robert Haythorne had formed a new ministry.³⁷ Reluctantly it had to seek union, as a remedy for the old ill of land purchase and the new ill of railway debt. In November Lieutenant-Governor Sir William Robinson wrote to Dufferin to ask the Canadian terms.³⁸ Macdonald stood on the terms of 1869,³⁹ but ultimately more generous provisions were conceded. These Tilley now outlined before the House: $800,000 for land purchase of some 400,000 to 500,000 of the Islands’ total 1,250,000 acres; a debt allowance increased to $50.00 from $27.77 a head because of the Dominion’s and the Island’s increases of debt through railway construction. Steam communication with the mainland was to be maintained at all seasons at the Dominion’s expense. A newly built post office was to be taken over, as were a number of smaller things.⁴⁰ Both Parliament and the Island in due course agreed, and Prince Edward Island became the sixth province, to the relief of the Department of Marine and Fisheries and the Department of Finance, still in charge of customs. By union the Island escaped, or diminished, its ancient evils of the land grants and isolation. But never did railways more clearly, or in more unlikely fashion, make for political union.

The third measure was the creation of the Department of the Interior, to take over, on the model of the American department of the same name, the administration of the Northwest and especially the administration of the Dominion Lands Act of 1872. The office of Secretary of State for the Provinces was abolished. So reasonable was this measure that the bill was not debated.⁴¹

Thus the work of confederation, and the administration of the Northwest that was indispensable to confederation, were completed when on May 23 the House adjourned to meet in eight weeks to hear the report of the select committee on Huntington’s charge. The sad news of Carrier’s death in London stressed this note of finality on May 20.⁴² As his daughter Josephine wrote: “Almost his last words were to say how happy he was that the union with Prince Edward Island had been completed.”⁴³ He was to be spared the coming ordeal of his great colleague. Macdonald’s critics thought he was dragging out the inquiry to gain time, but in fact he thought the Oaths Act unconstitutional. Dufferin had assented to it, but referred it to the imperial government in June. In July it was disallowed.⁴⁴ The select committee could continue, but it could not take evidence on oath.

Macdonald now proposed a royal commission of inquiry, and, when a third commissioner was added, Dufferin agreed.⁴⁵ He also agreed to a prorogation, should Macdonald advise one, on conditions accepted by Macdonald in writing.⁴⁶ But the Liberals thought the commission a further evasion of the Huntington charges. When parliament met on August 13, ninety-two members protested furiously, and petitioned Dufferin not to appoint the royal commission. He refused on the ground that he could not properly do so, appointed the commission and prorogued parliament. Thus to the original charges was added a fierce constitutional debate.⁴⁷

Dufferin had been well informed all along as to the grant of the charter and of the proceedings of the commission. He was favourable to Macdonald as the only man capable of leading his party, or indeed of conducting the affairs of the country,⁴⁸ There was, he wrote, no necessary connection between Cartier’s telegrams and the grant of the charter. The cabinet had already decided that Allan was “the best figurehead” for the Pacific railway, and thought that probably Allan knew he would, with or without a promise of the charter, have to give money to the government party. Beyond the promise of the chairmanship, the charter had not been corruptly modified to Allan’s advantage.⁴⁹ Macdonald’s great mistake, even if the money was to go to the central committee of the party,⁵⁰ was “to allow himself to be brought into such close connection with so unsafe a man as Allan.”⁵¹ In September Dufferin was still hopeful Macdonald might survive if the charter were to be shown to be in the best interests of Canada.⁵² Such was the case for Macdonald: he and Cartier were not scoundrels; they had not given the charter for a consideration. But they had, themselves, in the heat of the campaign openly sought funds for the electoral use of the party from the man who was shortly to receive the greatest grant in the gift of the Canadian government. This was the “Pacific Scandal” – not a calculated corruptness in the discharge of office, but a reckless carelessness in electioneering.

The Opposition’s attack on the royal commission’s constitutionality, given its most forceful statement in Blake’s speech at London on August 17, however, had its effect. And when the commission began to prepare its report in October, Dufferin changed his view. He wrote Macdonald, as a friend, that he could not continue in office. “It is still,” he said, “an undisputed and patent fact that you and some of your colleagues have been the channels through which extravagant sums of money derived from a person with whom you were negotiating an arrangement on the part of the Dominion were distributed through the constituencies of Ontario and Quebec and have been applied to purposes forbidden by the statutes.”

It was true, he continued, that everyone did this, but it must affect Macdonald’s personal position as minister, and particularly as minister of justice. He did not condemn Macdonald. On the contrary, he wrote, “I believe there is no one in the country capable of administering its affairs to greater advantage than yourself. It is to you in fact that Canada owes its existence and your name will be preserved in History as the Father and Founder of the Dominion.”

But this would not save him.⁵³ Dufferin wanted Macdonald’s resignation. That grim fighter, however, would have nothing to do with the suggestion. He was, in fact, counting on having a majority in the vote on the report of the commission of from sixteen to twenty-five.⁵⁴ He faced parliament, when it met as usual on October 23, with a legislative program and with an un-cowed resolution. But as Dufferin had condemned his acts in the campaign, so had the country. This was shown by the shift of independent members, a shift beyond even the expectation of the Opposition.⁵⁵ It was shown also by the surrender of its charter by the Canadian Pacific. Mackenzie moved a vote of “severe censure” on October 27. Debate raged all that week, and until Wednesday of the next. On November 5 Macdonald informed the House that the majority he had anticipated had unexpectedly defected. He then announced the resignation of his colleagues. He had finally thrown himself upon the mercy of his country and of posterity.⁵⁶

Dufferin at once called on Alexander Mackenzie, who formed a government that was the long shadow of George Brown, “the initiator of union.”⁵⁷

Thus the last stages of Macdonald’s program had collapsed, despite his ingenuity in carrying the Treaty of Washington and arranging the building of the Pacific railway. But, as Dufferin noted, it collapsed after fierce debate and searching constitutional argument “in the regular working of the machinery of a free Parliament.”⁵⁸ Macdonald had failed by his error, and his error had been exposed by Canadian action, with no American pressure and no British intervention. And the Liberal opposition, in opposition almost necessarily provincial and sectional, had now risen to a national occasion and succeeded to national power.

Moreover, the boom of the early ’seventies had ended with a crash on Wall Street in September 1873. Macdonald, thereafter, no more than Mackenzie, could have built the Pacific railway. Neither could he have held the loyalty of the Canadian voters, even if he had never wired Allan for funds. In the winter election, affected by the crash of the boom in September 1873 and by the beginning of the great depression of the century, the country turned from Macdonald’s prosperity and Carrier’s daring to the austerity of Blake and the prudence of Mackenzie. In its own turbulent way, confederation had become more Canadian by the process of checking the last master strokes of union.

Whatever the voters and politicians might do, however, British North America was now Canada, and Canada was still Canada. The schooners nosed out from Yarmouth; the autumn smoke was blue over the potato fields of Woodstock; the habitant plodded in the furrow up the long slope of the Laurentians; the steamers bellowed in Collingwood harbour as they set out for Fort William; the cart brigades creaked and shrieked along the Saskatchewan trail bound for Fort Edmonton; the last buffalo herds drifted towards the foothills of the Rockies; and along the coast of Vancouver Island the Pacific rollers, rolling as from eternity, broke now on a Canadian shore. The moral purpose of confederation, the union of the provinces in a partnership of English and French, was at last embodied in a territory reaching from sea to sea.