LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION, 1887-1896
Dark days--Sectional discontent--Railway monopoly--Exodus and stagnation
The outcome of the elections was an intense disappointment to Edward
Blake. His health, too, was failing, and this increased his
despondency. He decided to give over to other hands the leadership of
his party. Early in June 1887, two months after the new parliament
assembled, he definitely and firmly refused to hold the post longer.
Who was to succeed him? For the moment the leadership was put into
commission, a committee of eight being nominated to tide matters over.
The Ontario Liberals had always been the backbone of the party, and
among them Sir Richard Cartwright and David Mills stood pre-eminent in
experience and ability. Yet it was neither of these veterans whom Mr
Blake recommended to the party 'caucus' as his successor, but Wilfrid
Laurier; and on the motion of Sir Richard Cartwright, seconded by Mr
Mills, Mr Laurier was unanimously chosen as the new chieftain.
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It was with much difficulty that Mr Laurier was induced to accept the
leadership. On both personal and political grounds he hesitated. He
had his share of ambition, but he had never looked for more than
success in his profession and a place in politics below the highest.
It was not that he underestimated the greatness of the honour; on the
contrary, it was his high sense of the responsibilities of the post
that gave him pause. He was not of strong physique, and he knew that
the work meant ceaseless strain and pressure. Though his profession
now gave him an ample income, he was not a rich man, and much if not
most of his law practice would have to be abandoned if he became
leader;[1] and parliament had not yet awakened to the need of paying
the leader of the Opposition a salary.
On political grounds he was still more in doubt. Would Canada, would
the one-time party of George Brown, welcome a leader from the minority?
The fires of sectional passion were still raging. In Ontario he would
be opposed as a French Canadian and a Catholic, the resolute opponent
of the Government on the Riel question. And though it might be {93}
urged that the pendulum was swinging toward the Liberals in Quebec,
while in Ontario they were making little ground, the irony of the
situation was such that in Quebec he was regarded with suspicion, if
not with open hostility, by the most powerful and aggressive leaders of
the Church.
Yet the place he had won in parliament and in the party was undeniable.
His colleagues believed that he had the ability to lead them out of the
wilderness, and for their faith he accepted. At first he insisted that
his acceptance should be tentative, for the session only; but by the
time the session ended the party would not be denied, and his definite
succession to the leadership was announced.
The Canada of 1887, in which Wilfrid Laurier thus came to high and
responsible position, was a Canada very different from the land of
promise familiar to young Canadians of the present generation. It was
a Canada seething with restlessness and discontent. The high hopes of
the Fathers of Confederation had turned to ashes. On every hand men
were saying that federation had failed, that the new nation of their
dream had remained a dream.
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At Confederation men had hoped that the Dominion would take high place
in the Empire and among the nations of the world. Yet, twenty years
later, Canada remained unappreciated and unknown. In Great Britain she
was considered a colony which had ceased to fulfil the principal
functions of the traditional colony, and which would probably some day
go the way of all colonies: in the meantime the country was simply
ignored, alike in official and in private circles. In the United
States, in those quarters where Canada was given a thought at all,
curious misconceptions existed of her subordination to Great Britain,
of her hopelessly Arctic climate, and of her inevitable drift into the
arms of the Republic. Elsewhere abroad, Canada was an Ultima Thule, a
barren land of ice and snow, about as interesting and important as
Kamchatka and Tierra del Fuego, and other outlying odds and ends of the
earth which one came across in the atlas but never thought of otherwise.
Twenty years earlier glowing pictures had been painted of the new
heights of honour and of usefulness which the new Dominion would afford
its statesmen. The hard reality was the Canada of gerrymanders and
political {95} trickery, of Red Parlor funds and electoral bribery.
The canker affected not one party alone, as the fall of Mercier was
soon to show. The whole political life of the country to sank low and
stagnant levels, for it appeared that the people had openly condoned
corruption in high places, and that lavish promises and the 'glad hand'
were a surer road to success than honest and efficient administration.
Sectional discontent prevailed. That the federation would be smashed
'into its original fragments' seemed not beyond possibility. We have
seen that a racial and religious feud rent Ontario and Quebec. Nova
Scotia strained at the leash. Her people had never forgotten nor
forgiven the way in which they had been forced into Confederation.
'Better terms' had failed to bribe them into fellowship. A high tariff
restricted their liberty in buying, and the home markets promised in
compensation had not developed. In the preceding year the provincial
legislature had expressed the prevalent discontent by flatly demanding
the repeal of the union.
Manitoba chafed under a thirty-five per cent tariff on farm implements,
and complained of the retention by the Dominion of the vacant lands in
the province. And her {96} grievances in respect to transportation
would not down. The Canadian Pacific Railway had given the much
desired connection with the East and had brought tens of thousands of
settlers to the province, but it had not brought abiding prosperity or
content. The through rate on wheat from Winnipeg to Montreal was ten
cents a bushel more than from St Paul to New York, an equal distance;
and, from the farm to Liverpool, the Minnesota farmer had fifteen cents
a bushel the advantage of his Manitoba neighbour. Local rates were
still heavier. 'Coal and lumber and general merchandise cost from two
to four times as much to ship as for equal distances in the eastern
provinces.'[2]
Why not bring in competition? Because the Dominion Government blocked
the way by its veto power. In the contract with the Canadian Pacific
Syndicate a clause provided that for twenty years the Dominion would
not authorize a competing road between the company's main line and the
United States border running south or southeast or within fifteen miles
of the boundary; it was provided also that in the formation of any new
provinces to {97} the west such provinces should be required to observe
the same restriction. It was urged by the railway authorities that
foreign investors had demanded a monopoly as the price of capital, and
that without the assurance of such a monopoly the costly link to the
north of Lake Superior could never have been built. The terms of the
contract did not bar Manitoba from chartering railways: the Dominion
had indeed no power to forbid it in advance, and it was explicitly
stated by Sir John Macdonald at the time that Manitoba was not
affected. Yet when Manitoba sought to charter one railway after
another, the Dominion disallowed every act and repeatedly declared that
it would use its veto power to compel Manitoba to trade with the East
and by the Canadian Pacific Railway. A more effective means of
stirring up ill-feeling between East and West and of discouraging
immigration to the prairies could hardly have been devised.
Against these conditions Manitoba protested as one man. The Winnipeg
Board of Trade denounced the policy of 'crushing and trampling upon one
hundred thousand struggling pioneers of this prairie province to secure
a purely imaginary financial gain to one soulless corporation.' Every
Conservative candidate {98} for the House of Commons in the province
pledged himself to vote for a motion of want of confidence if the
Macdonald Government persisted in its course. The Conservative
administration of the province was overthrown because it did not go
fast or far enough in the fight. At last, in 1888, Ottawa gave way and
bought off the Canadian Pacific by a guarantee of bonds for new
extensions. After some further negotiations the Northern Pacific was
brought into Canada; and if this did not work all the miracles of cheap
rates that had been expected, Manitoba at least knew now that her ills
were those which had been imposed by nature and geography and not by
her sister provinces.
It was not only in Manitoba that economic depression prevailed, though
nowhere else were the grievances so concrete and so irritating.
Throughout the Dominion the brief gleam of prosperity which dawned with
the eighties had vanished. After the completion of the Canadian
Pacific Railway stagnation was everywhere the rule. Foreign trade,
which had reached a total of $217,000,000 in 1873, was only
$230,000,000 in 1883 and $247,000,000 in 1893; these were, however,
years of falling prices. Bank discounts, the {99} number of tons of
freight moved, and other records of general business activity showed
creeping progress and sometimes actual falling back. Homestead entries
had risen to nearly seventy-five hundred in 1882, when the construction
of the Canadian Pacific was bringing on the first western boom, but a
great part of these had been cancelled, and up to the middle nineties
entries averaged fewer than three thousand a year in the whole vast
West.
The movement of population bore the same melancholy witness. Even the
West, Manitoba and the North-West Territories, grew only from 180,000
in 1881 in 250,000 in 1891, whereas Dakota alone grew from 135,000 to
510,000 in the same period. The Dominion as a whole increased at less
than half the rate of the United States, and Sir Richard Cartwright had
little difficulty in establishing the alarming fact that in recent
years one out of every four of the native-born of Canada had been
compelled to seek a home in the Republic, and that three out of every
four immigrants to Canada had followed the same well-beaten trail.
There were in 1890 more than one-third as many people of Canadian birth
and descent in the United States as in Canada itself. Never in the
world's history, save in {100} the case of crowded, famine-stricken,
misgoverned Ireland, had there been such a leakage of the brain and
brawn of any country.
Perhaps no incident reveals more clearly the stagnation and lack of
constructive courage of this period than the break-down of the
negotiations carried on in 1895 for the entrance of Newfoundland, then
still more nearly bankrupt, into Confederation, because of the
unwillingness of the Canadian Government to meet the financial terms
Newfoundland demanded. For the sake of a difference of fifty thousand
dollars a year the chance to round out the Dominion was let slip,
perhaps never to recur. Ten years later fifty thousand a year looked
small. To each generation the defects of its qualities; in one
prudence degenerates into parsimony, in another courage runs wild in
extravagance.
[1] After 1887 he rarely, and after 1892 never, appeared in court.
[2] _Plain Facts regarding the Disallowance of Manitoba Railway
Charters_, by the Winnipeg Board of Trade.
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