The Chariot Wheels Drag
The name of Alexander Mackenzie, the stonemason, who succeeded Sir John
Macdonald as Premier of Canada in 1873, deserves to be uttered with
profound respect. By the most intense application to work and the most
diligent use of his opportunities in the right way, he rose steadily,
not only in circumstances, but in the esteem of his fellow-countrymen,
till he attained the highest office in the gift of the Canadian people.
Born in the Highlands of Scotland, he came out to Canada as a young
stonecutter. He returned some thirty years later to the romantic scenes
of his childhood as the Premier of the Dominion, a credit alike to the
land of his birth and the land of his adoption. Once, in my student
days, I met him in Winnipeg. He had made the trip to the far West, but
was in poor health—a rather pathetic figure, I thought, whose
unflinching resistance of down-grade influences had made his public life
harder than stonecutting.
But while we thus pay him personal tribute, we find that, whether as a
result of the dissolution of the Allan Company, or pressure of lean
years, or the lack of enthusiasm amongst his following in the House,
Mackenzie, despite his good intentions, made little progress with the
building of the Canadian Pacific Railway during his five years in
office. It was not easy for Mackenzie and his supporters, after
attacking the general extravagance of Sir John Macdonald’s plan for a
transcontinental, to accommodate themselves to carrying out the scheme
of a railway from ocean to ocean. Edward Blake, Mackenzie’s great
lieutenant, had openly said more than once that the rounding out of
Confederation by pledging a railway to British Columbia within a fixed
term was too costly. The population of the West Coast Province was only
some ten thousand or so of white people, he said, and this country was
“a sea of mountains.” One of the chief newspapers of Mr. Mackenzie’s
party said that the Canadian Pacific “would not pay for axle grease”
over certain sections. Mr. Blake, it is true, in 1891 visited the West
Coast over the completed railway, and made a brilliantly humorous and
eloquent apology for his mistaken conception of the country. But that
was too late to help Mackenzie with his problem, and the fact that Mr.
Blake and some others of his party actually voted in the House against
Mackenzie’s proposal regarding the Esquimault railway on Vancouver
Island did not help the heavily burdened Premier. But one must allow
that it is much easier to be optimistic about British Columbia now than
it was at that time. Very few people then dreamed of the development
that could and would take place in the Province which Mr. Blake,
speaking for thousands in the East, called “a sea of mountains.” It
looked like that in those days before the world knew that British
Columbia had not only mines and forests and fish, but that vast areas
would be opened up along the rivers and in the mountain valleys which
would prove immensely adapted to agriculture, fruit-growing and
dairying. Therefore let us be kind to the men who were sceptical about
the whole railway undertaking. We are quoting their scepticism here only
to show the problem that Premier Mackenzie had to face when he came into
power in 1873. Under all the circumstances he did the best he could at
the time—that is, the best that could be done by any man who lacked the
full-hearted support of some of his own friends, and who felt that to
meet the demands of the naturally impatient and almost resentful British
Columbia, was practically impossible in the lean years that seemed
imminent and beyond his power to control.
But Mackenzie began on the problem and we find him, in 1874, in an
election address to his own constituents in Lambton, Ontario, unfolding
his plan. Briefly, the transportation system was to be a sort of
amphibious animal. Mackenzie, realizing that traffic by water is the
cheapest type of transportation, thought he saw a possibility of
securing a transcontinental, without undue cost, by utilizing “the
magnificent water stretches” across Canada, linking them together by
rail as funds would be available. In this way he claimed that railway
construction would be gradual enough to avoid excessive financial
expenditure, and that the country would be gradually settled. Settlement
would keep abreast with railway construction and thus the possibility of
having the railway going ahead of the settlement across an uninhabited,
and therefore unproductive, country would be eliminated.
Mr. Mackenzie was perfectly sincere in this, as he was in everything.
The plan was not without merit under the circumstances, but it had
defects which arose out of a lack of knowledge of the Western country
generally, and particularly of the attitude of the people of British
Columbia. It also ignored the strange, but characteristic, impulses of
human nature in regard to migration. Every now and then in history some
section of humanity strikes its tents and goes on the march, railway or
no railway. Especially does the Star of the Empire draw people westward.
Before there was a railway in the West at all, many of my own kith and
kin loaded their few belongings on ox-carts and took their way five
hundred miles north-westward to Prince Albert, on the North
Saskatchewan. And so also will some people go on in advance of the
railway, despite all advice to the contrary. For years I heard it said
by some that had the Canadian Pacific not been built so rapidly,
settlement would have been more compact along the line. But this theory
is contradicted by the actual fact, as we saw it, that when the trains
were only running to Brandon, west of Winnipeg, settlers were leaving
the train there and trekking on westward with prairie schooners. Great
numbers may not thus go forward in any particular case, but since a
country grows by the enterprise of the adventurous, it becomes the duty
of such a country to follow with utilities, the people who thus widen
the horizon of the land.
Moreover, Mackenzie’s well-intentioned policy of using the water
stretches would have made transportation too slow and too expensive for
shippers, owing to the constant need for transfers, with necessary
delays and damages. And, most important of all, that policy indicated
too tardy a construction of the transcontinental to satisfy British
Columbia, which had entered confederation on the distinct understanding
that a railway would be built to the Pacific within reasonable time.
Mackenzie made an effort, by sending Mr. J. D. Edgar to British
Columbia, to secure a modification in the terms of Confederation in
regard to railway construction. This mission was resented in British
Columbia, and Mr. Edgar was recalled. The people of British Columbia
looked on the attempt to change the Confederation terms as a breach of
faith on the part of Canada, and said so in their usual straight-flung
words. Both parties put the case before Lord Carnarvon, who offered to
arbitrate. His award was on the whole rather favourable to Mackenzie’s
effort for modification, and was accepted in the meantime as the best
obtainable. British Columbia, feeling that even the modified terms would
not be carried out, began to discuss withdrawing from Confederation, and
motions to that effect were actually submitted in the Legislature.
Things were not looking well, and that master diplomat, Lord Dufferin,
then Governor-General of Canada, resolved to visit the West Coast,
accompanied by his gracious lady. They crossed via Chicago and San
Francisco by rail, thence by H.M.S. _Amethyst_ to Vancouver Island. They
were warmly welcomed to Victoria, but were given, from the beginning, to
understand that British Columbia wanted the railway and wanted it
without delay. At one point they saw a horse blanketed and upon the
blanket were the words “Good, but not iron.”
In Victoria arches were numerous. One arch had an inscription, “Our
railway iron rusts,” and another very conspicuous one had the menacing
message “Carnarvon terms or separation.”
Lord Dufferin knew his relation to the Crown and to the Government of
the day too well to allow his courtesy to run away with his conception
of duty as Governor-General of Canada, and so he declined to drive under
the arch which had upon it the threat of secession. So he ordered the
carriage to detour until that arch was passed. Afterwards Lady Dufferin
said, “The Governor-General would have driven under the arch if one
letter had been changed so as to have the inscription read ‘The
Carnarvon Terms or Reparation.’” The incident caused some excitement,
but Lord Dufferin knew his constitutional law too well to be moved. On
the whole the visit of this brilliant diplomat and magnetic orator made
a great impression for good. His speech at the close of the tour of the
Coast was a noble eulogy of the wonderful beauty and potential wealth of
British Columbia. While not becoming a partisan advocate for the
Dominion Government, Lord Dufferin expressed his view that Mr. Mackenzie
had done his best under all the circumstances, and would continue so to
do while he was in power. The speech of the eloquent and tactful
Governor-General had a pronounced effect in allaying the indignation of
the people against the Government of the day. They settled down to wait
development with as good grace as possible.
However, after waiting two years more without seeing any railway
construction begun on either the mainland of British Columbia or
Vancouver Island, Premier George A. Walkem, in the Legislature at
Victoria, moved the famous resolution to the effect that unless the
Dominion started railway construction by May of 1879, the Province of
British Columbia should withdraw from the Confederation and even ask
damages from Canada for delay in carrying out their railway promises to
the Province. This extraordinary motion was carried by fourteen to nine,
with the probable intention of waking up both the Imperial and Canadian
Governments to the discontent on the Western Coast. The resolution
reached Ottawa in October, 1878, just after the Mackenzie Government had
been defeated, and owing to the confusion caused by the change it was
put into some pidgeonhole for a rest, and did not reach London till
March, 1879. By that time Sir John A. Macdonald, who had come back to
power with his aggressive and indomitable Railway Minister, Sir Charles
Tupper, was getting down to a new programme of railway building, and
British Columbia, in consequence, was becoming more contented and
hopeful. So no one asked any questions when the famous secession
resolution of the British Columbia legislature found oblivion in the
files of Downing Street.
All this does not mean that Mr. Mackenzie was inactive in the matter of
the transcontinental railway. Considering the facts we have mentioned
already, namely, that many of his chief supporters were lukewarm in
regard to the whole project, which they considered premature, and the
further fact that there was a cycle of lean years, he strove to get
things moving, but the chariot wheels dragged. There was no popular
enthusiasm over the undertaking, because the times were hard and there
was general failure on the part of the people to get a vision of the
illimitable possibilities that lay to westward. But some progress was
made. Extensive surveys were carried forward. And several contracts were
let for the easier portions of the route. The hard places, like the
North Shore of Lake Superior, and the mountains in British Columbia,
were not attempted. Lord and Lady Dufferin, at Emerson, Manitoba, in
1877, drove the first two spikes in the portion which started at the
international boundary-line, where the railways linked up with an
American line. This was later called the Emerson Branch, and ran from
the boundary east of the Red River through St. Boniface, across from
Winnipeg, to East Selkirk. From Selkirk a portion of the railway to
Thunder Bay, on Lake Superior, was begun. It was the plan of the
Mackenzie Government to cross the Red River at Selkirk, and strike
westward over the prairies, side-tracking Winnipeg, which was then
becoming a considerable centre of population. I recall a locomotive
round-house at East Selkirk built in Mackenzie’s time, but later
abandoned when the line was changed to run through Winnipeg. Budding
political orators made merry over this round-house, as being the only
assurance they had that a road which would require the stabling of iron
horses at a divisional point would some day be constructed.
The slow progress of transcontinental railway building afforded
ammunition to the opponents of the Mackenzie Government in the House of
Commons. And there is no record of an Opposition ever allowing an
opportunity to oppose to go by unused. In one year we find that
redoubtable fighter, Dr. (later Sir) Charles Tupper, moving a long
resolution urging the Government “to employ the available funds of the
Dominion to complete the road.” This was voted down. Next year that
unique, somewhat peculiar, but quite brilliantly versatile publicist,
Mr. Amor de Cosmos, of British Columbia, moved a vote of censure on the
Government for the slowness of their building of the road to the Coast.
This resolution did not get far in the House. The Coast was so far away
that the project of building all the way to the Pacific gave even the
Opposition a chill when it came squarely before them. Hon. George W.
Ross, a Mackenzie supporter, moved that only such progress should be
attempted as would “not increase the existing rates of taxation,” which
manifestly would mean not much progress. Dr. Tupper came back to the
attack in April, 1877, with a motion of censure, but this was negatived
also. During all this time that astute statesman, Sir John A. Macdonald,
was studying the political horoscope, and all of a sudden, in 1878, he
propounded a policy of protection and railway construction which caught
the popular imagination and he was swept into power again. There was a
swift revival of optimism, because there was a revival of trade, and the
wave carried the Canadian Pacific Railway enterprise on its crest to new
heights of success.