Some Frank Norris such as wrote "The Pit" and "The Octopus" should arise
in Canada and write a Wheat-Politics novel about T. A. Crerar. This
man's photograph was once published squatting Big-Chief-wise in the front
row of 300 farmers on a raid to Ottawa--I think early in the war about
prices. It was a second to the last delegation which the farmers intend
to send to Ottawa. The next one was in 1918, when the farmers went to
protest against conscription. If you ask T. A. Crerar to-day, he will
predict that in days not far to come manufacturers will petition a farmer
government in Ottawa. Because the farmers in the West regard Crerar as
almost a geological process, which sometimes results in a volcano.
Crerar was projected into public affairs by 50-cent wheat, monopolistic
elevator companies, discriminating railways and protected manufacturers;
all of which, while he was still a young man who should have been going
to dances and arguing about the genesis of sin, he concluded were into a
dark conspiracy to make a downtrodden helot of the prairie farmer.
To-day Crerar is at the apex of a movement. He embodies the politically
and commercially organized campaign of the biggest interest in Canada
against all other merely "big" interests. He is willing to let himself
be talked about as the next Premier of industrial and agricultural Canada
on behalf of all the farmers whom he can persuade to elect him a majority
minority in the next Parliament. And the prospect does not even dazzle
him, or awe his colleagues of the coonskin coats and the truculent
whiskers.
Crerar began responsible life as a farm boy in Manitoba, taught school,
and managed a small elevator company; he became President of the United
Grain Growers and of the Canadian Council of Agriculture--and the next
obvious thing to say is that he entered politics as Minister of
Agriculture in the Union Government. But T. A. Crerar had been in
politics a long while before that, though he had never even run for
Parliament or legislature. Unusual, unprofessional politics. Hear what
the present Secretary of the Canadian Council of Agriculture has to say
about the parliaments of the Grain-Growers in 1916:
"Their annual conventions are parliaments of the Middle Western
Provinces. Resolutions and recommendations of all sorts and description
are debated and decided upon. Questions of far-reaching influence,
socially and morally, have their beginning, so far as Western Canada is
concerned, in the Grain Growers' Conventions. Records of these
Associations show that besides recommending the establishment of
co-operative elevators, co-operative banks, co-operative dairies, free
trade, single tax and a dozen other economics reform, the Grain Growers
in convention fathered Prohibition long before it was adopted, advised
and urged woman suffrage many years before that measure was generally
favoured, and were the first sponsors of the idea of direct legislation.
The Grain Growers' Association and their annual conventions are the
source and inspiration of all the commercial activities, and social and
political reforms with which one finds the name of Grain Grower connected
so often in Western Canada!"
This is the reforming political school that has trained the man now
openly discussed as the next Premier of Canada. And for the benefit of
any Canadian Norris who dreams of writing a problem novel about Crerar,
it may be said that he is the most drab and unpicturesque personality
that ever stood in line for any such office in this country. In the
triangle of leaders at Ottawa he is the angle of lowest personal, though
by no means lowest human, interest. Meighen is impressive; King
brilliant. Crerar--is business. He would be a hard nut for a novelist
to crack. A man like Smillie impresses the imagination. Crerar, who is
to the Canadian farmer what Smillie was to the British miner, invites
only judgment.
The first time I met Crerar--at lunch in a small eastern club--he
impressed me as a man enormously capable in business, tersely direct in
his judgments, somewhat satirical and inordinately sensitive. He seemed
wary, almost cryptic in his remarks. Recently sworn in as Unionist
Minister of Agriculture, he had turned his back on Winnipeg, where he was
a sort of agrarian king, and taken his first dip into the cynical waters
of Ottawa, where he was but one of a Ministerial group some of whom were
abler and more interesting than himself. He had not yet appeared in
Parliament. He dreaded the ordeal. He had no knowledge of just to what
programme he would be expected to adhere, except the general one of
winning the war. He had little enthusiasm for the Premier, probably less
for most of his colleagues. So far as he had been able to survey Ottawa,
he considered it an administrative mess. His direct ways of doing
business were menaced by a sense of muddle and officialdom. He missed
the breezy, open ways of "the Peg" and the sensation of being general
manager of the biggest commercial concern west of the lakes, the Grain
Growers' Grain Co. Crerar could not business-manage Ottawa. When he
opened his Agriculture door he saw no box cars trailing in from the
elevator pyramids on the skyline; he smelled no wheat; he saw no
"horny-handed" farmers writing checks to cover their speculative
investments in grain which they had not yet sown. No wheat-mining
comrade motoring in from the plains came to thrust his boots up on the
general manager's desk and say, "Believe me, Tom, I paid thirteen-ninety
for those protected articles. What a shame!"
Crerar complained of indigestion. I think his nerves were on edge. I
asked him if he expected to co-relate Agriculture with Food Control and
Trade and Commerce. "Oh, I suppose so," he said wearily. "Nobody in
Union Government knows what he will do yet. I don't like Ottawa. Its
whole atmosphere is foreign to me."
He seemed almost contemptuous. He had made the patriotic plunge in order
to put his particular brand of radical Liberalism at the service of a
Tory-Unionist Government. He did not like it. Of all the Liberals who
entered the Union Cabinet he was the sworn Radical. Both Calder and
Sifton were machine men from governments that still had Liberal labels on
their luggage. Crerar represented the great inter-prairie group of no
compromise and of economic enmity to the Tories. He was rather looking
for trouble; thinking rather hard of how he could get through with such
an uncomfortable job, do it well and get back uncontaminated to his own
dear land of the wheat and his fine office in the most handsome suite of
offices in the Grain Exchange at Winnipeg. The Ottawa that he hated was
the Capital that old line politicians had created. He was looking
forward to some Ottawa of the future which like Canberra, the new dream
Capital of Australia, might be vacuum-cleaned and disinfected of all the
old partisan microbes.
Crerar made his success in a country where the visible signs of getting
on in the world are a bigger factor than anywhere else in Canada. The
prairies are mysterious and sublime. The West is plain big business.
Crerar represents the West rather than the prairies. He is
temperamentally a man of Ontario, where he was born; solidly businesslike
and persistent. He glorifies hard work. And he went West at a time when
the law of hard work was just coming to replace the old-timer's creed of
hanging on and waiting for something--usually a railway--to turn up. He
came up with the farmer of 60-cent wheat in a part of the country where
everything that the farmer had to buy in order to produce that kind of
wheat was high in cost. Cheap wheat and dear wherewithals have been to
T. A. Crerar and his kind Number One Hard experience. His axioms began
with the plough made under a high tariff. His code of ethics was evolved
from the self-binder, railroaded the long haul by systems that thrive on
the tariff. His community religion--not his personal, which one believes
has been pretty devoutly established--is embodied in the emotions of the
skyline elevator following the trail of the steel and the twist of the
box car.
One cannot mention these rudimentary western things without a species of
enthusiasm for the Westerner, and a consequent precarious sympathy with
the views of Mr. Crerar. Transplant yourself even for a year, as the
writer did twenty years ago, to the far northwest, and you begin in spite
of all your previously inrooted sentiments, to share the beliefs and talk
the language that lie at the basis of even so arrogant an organization as
the Grain Growers' Association and so inordinate an oligarchy as the
Canadian Council of Agriculture. A man cannot fight the paralyzing
combination of drouth, wet, early frost, rust, weevil, grasshoppers,
eastern manufacturers, high tariffs, centralized banks and bankrupt
octopean railways in the production of under-dollar wheat, without losing
much of his faith in the smug laws of economy laid down by men who buy
and sell close to the centres of production.
Now begins the work of the novelist, making _precis_ notes for his Crerar
masterpiece; investigating the prairie farm of 1900, anywhere between the
main line and the skyline. For the sake of space we copy his notes,
hastily sketched:
Low hill--General aspect, poplar bluffs, billowy landscape--Log and
mudchink shack; pole and sod roof--stable and shed ditto--Three or four
cattle and lashions of grass--Broncho team and new high-painted wagon--No
family--Dash churn--Lucky to have a wife--Some hens--Sod-breaking plough,
long snout, breaks odd fields twixt bluffs--Coal-black loam,
strong--Wheat and oats, wonderful early growth--Drouth first year--Second
year, pole fences, more fields, and wet season--More crops but half
spoiled by wet--Sacks on trail to cars, toiling across prairie to
elevator--Smudge of train, bit of a town and a tank--No cars to load
grain--Must sell to elevator--Monopoly--Low price--Grading wheat to No. 2
Northern--55 cents, used to be 40--Lien note to pay on wagon and
binder--Goes to indignation meeting--Lots of that--Farmer
revolutionaries--Want Gov't. to pass acts compelling Rys. to supply
farmers cars to break low-price monopoly of elevators--Act passed, but
roads in league with elevators--Same old trouble--Rise of radical
leaders--Organization of farmers into group to fight interests--Helots on
prairies--Helpless unless organized--Only partial relief from Gov't.--Two
new provinces in 1905--Grits make great splash, promising Utopia along
with newer trunk lines and big towns, etc.--Farmer grins, goes on
organizing, in each province association of grain growers (G.G.)--Every
few towns some fiery evangel--Great on conventions, regular convenanters,
old style--Schools of debate and Utopian legislation--Gov'ts. wear
goggles and organize elections--Farmer organizes group ideas, to oppose
old line politics--Say Eastern old parties effete in West--Townsmen
league with farmers, common interest; low price wheat means lean
purchases and laggard towns--By this time young man Crerar in Wpg., taken
from managing small elevator company to be general manager G.G. Grain
Co.--Co-op. movement develops in all associations, for buying and
selling--G.G.G. Co. give farmer equal rights with city man in speculation
on what farmer grows--Horn into Grain Exchange, little office--Under
Crerar Co. grows to much the biggest corporation in Exchange; whole
ground floor offices of G.G.G. Co. which as commercial organization
focuses the buying and selling end of whole agrarian movement--Head of
this, naturally chief of movement--All remedial and legislative
programmes merged in economics of G.G.G. Co.--Crerar wiry, quiet
executive, now fuse plug to a real agrarian party with a programme which
through Canadian Council of Agriculture, members from all over Canada,
constitutes itself a parliament of farmers telling old parties to go to
the devil--Liberal gov'ts in prairie province mere annexes of new radical
group which is now bigger nationalist force than Quebec ever was, ready
to march upon Ottawa----
On this basis the novelist builds his political fabric of Crerar, who
began life as a Laurier Liberal, became a Free Trader of the Michael
Clark school, and ten years ago gave symptoms of pushing the economic
side of the agrarian movement to a point where it aimed to become the new
Liberalism of the prairies. He was the business head of a revolutionary
movement of which other men became the ardent, flaming crusaders, both in
and out of Ottawa. Crerar calmly evolved his practical evangelism out of
the ledger of exports and imports. Nothing excited him so deeply as
comparative statistics. He never trusted to the moral or emotional side
of the case. His crusade was in the national ledger. His church was the
elevator; his economic Bible the Grain Growers' Guide.
Since 1914 or thereabouts this man has kept his balance at the head of a
movement that split again and again into local factions only to come
together again in the head offices of the Grain Growers' Grain Co. and
the Canadian Council of Agriculture. He represented multi-millions of
investment in land, agriculture, co-operative commercial enterprises and
speculation. On the ground floor of the Grain Exchange he was at the
head of the greatest organization in the world speculating in visible
supply wheat. The grain that Crerar's cohorts bought and sold was either
just sown, or heading out, or being threshed, or it was crawling to
Winnipeg in miles of box cars on its way to Fort William. In wheat he
put his trust; in railways and steamships never; in centralized banks and
eastern manufacturers not at all; in old parties at Ottawa still less--if
possible.
Crerarism was becoming power to act. Behind Crerar was a sullen but
optimistic reformation of such varied emotional character that none but a
quiet, steady man could have controlled it in Winnipeg. The novelist's
prairie farm was now a power in the land. It was Agrarianism; that had
bolted like an ostrich both old parties in the West, and now offered a
new one supposed to contain as a new National Policy a general and
itemized contradiction of the old N.P. of 1878--The National Progressive
Party.
No economic crusade had ever been so rapid, gigantic and revolutionary.
Trades unionism had taken decades to make head where the Agrarian
movement took years. The One Big Union of the Reds, anarching against
all Government as it is, merely applied the principle of direct action
which the farmers had taught them by suggestion in the unofficial
parliaments of the prairie. The Agrarian is himself a One-Big-Unionist.
His concern is not with wages and hours, but with exports, imports and
elections. The Agrarian will not strike. Crerar knows that. He must
not tie up communities and stop trade. He must work through Parliament.
His aim is to establish farmerism as the basis of the nation. His creed
is, that no matter what use we make of raw material, cheap power,
manufacturing experience and capital, Canada's greatest revenue and
export production must be in the farm; and that therefore national
legislation must gravitate about the farmer's garage.
This thing came to a head in a part of the country which contains less
than one-sixth of Canada's total population, and more than half of them
Canadians only by immigration. The one biggest man in the whole
movement, besides Mr. Crerar, the man who practically elected the new
farmer Premier of Alberta by appointment, is an American born. H. W.
Wood, the Czar of Alberta, came as a farmer in search of cheaper land
from the Western States. He is a good citizen, and as much entitled to
play strong-arm in our politics as any native Canadian is to enter the
Cabinet of the United States. But as a rule a free people resent men
from other countries agitating for revolution on behalf of an original
small minority in a part of the country where industrialism can never
become more than a sideshow in the business of production. A people of
national consciousness do not relish the idea of a minority group
organized to the last man and the last acre, trying to organize a
nation-wide group in provinces where the factory and the mine and the
fishery are at least as important as the farm.
The whole plan smacks too much of engineering. It is a case of complete,
almost Teutonic, organization masquerading as a sort of democracy, but in
reality a controlled tyranny whose aim so far as at present defined, is
to establish group government under a camouflage of the National
Progressive Party, and by means of the power so obtained or by alliances
with some other group, to upset the whole economic structure which it has
taken fifty years to build up. No true citizen will object to farmers in
Parliament and many of them. None but a slave will consent to a
Parliament dominated by any group, whether farmers, manufacturers,
lawyers or labourites. Democracy means free government on behalf of the
people; not on behalf of a great group which arrogates by organized
majorities the right to represent the people. Agrarianism is not a
nation-wide interest. Quebec has more to hope from the Government now in
power than from the farmers. Ontario cannot elect a clear working
majority of farmers. It is the West and the West only, which has become
Agrarianism rampant. And according to the new officialdom of the West
the farmer must save us all. Elect him to Administration and he will
open the golden gates of real prosperity by establishing a maximum of
free trade, on the assumption that our present protective investment in
great railways (two of them bankrupt), in banks, industries and
speculative land is all wrong.
The prospect glitters. Mr. Crerar is not dazzled. He sees with a calm
and collective gaze into the future. He contemplates with profound
elation the scrapping of our present system built by experience, and the
setting up of another which makes theories a substitute. Nothing is
difficult to a revolutionist. Crerar's success in building Agrarian
grand opera is a mere augury in his mind to still greater success in
rebuilding a nation, which he thinks is the same thing because the farmer
is the nation; and a nation is the easiest thing in the world to
revolutionize so long as you do not obliterate its institutions. We are
not expected to abolish Commons, or Cabinets, or even the poor old
Senate--until further notice. Mr. Crerar may need them all in his
business. "For this relief much thanks!" Mr. Crerar is not to be
nicknamed Cromwell.
The repeal of the Underwood Tariff and the Agrarian majority in Medicine
Hat gave him great joy. The prospect for a farmer victory in the general
election is to him almost certain by some form of coalition--perhaps with
the Liberals; possibly with Labourites. In 1920 a man very close to
Crerar estimated a return of 75 National Progressives in a total of 235
had the election been held at that time. Since then farmer prospects
have bulled on the market. Alberta has gone Agrarian, following Medicine
Hat. Organization has been extended. The old Liberalism on the prairies
has been absorbed. Dafoe, of the _Free Press_, has swung into line with
Crerar. There is prospect of the Government winning some seats in the
West, as there is of the Liberals fielding candidates who will not be
elected. Ontario is already a loose-jointed but effective part of the
movement. Business is not good. A time of trade depression has always
been a good time for a change of government, even along orthodox lines.
The present economic aftermath of destructive war and a large element of
I-Won't-Work labour along with high wages no matter what else falls, must
look to Crerar like a good time to make us all believe that we shall all
get through to Canaan if we follow his Ark of the Covenant. He is able
to assure us of cheap clothes and furniture and machinery, because the
farmer needs these things in the production of food, which must not
become too cheap or the advantage will be lost. What is to become of our
industries is not clearly stated; but if living is to be so cheap we
shall probably not need employment except on the farms; though under free
trade we are told that industry, free to flow, is sure to locate itself
at the point of advantage in material, power, transportation, and getting
to market. In fact some free traders blithely tell us that once you get
rid of tariffs, living becomes so cheap that people naturally flock to
the free trade country, and industry is bound to follow the people;
therefore free trade will give us factories as we need them.
There is no end of the mirage for your head and morass for your feet once
you begin to consider the possibilities of a revolution. We had somewhat
the same experience forty odd years ago in the forests of smokestacks
supposed to spring up in the wake of the National Policy. It took a long
while and much hard patient work to get those smokestacks. Now we have
got them as part of our national equipment, along with great water powers
and long-haul railways and centralized banks and a number of trusts and
an undeniable number of dear manufactures under a tariff--and Mr. Crerar
purposes to abolish the whole thing, to begin all over again as it was in
the beginning, except that even then if the farmer had lost his market
town on Saturday he would have been in a very bad way for his Sunday
clothes.
In short, Crerar proposes one more revolution, whether by one fell swoop
or by a slow process of getting us used to here a little and there a
little more--we do not know yet. What we do know is that he proposes to
govern this country by a huge economic group that used to go to Ottawa as
delegations; that in his opinion the real Capital of Canada is not
economically Ottawa, but the ground floor of the Grain Exchange Building
in Winnipeg.
We may not all have been reared on the farm, but be it known to all of
us, our natural gravitation is back to the land.
Not many years ago also it was said that one large nation would Boss the
world; later that Soviets would do it. Both the Boss nation and the
Soviets seem to be reconsidering the contract. The world is a perversely
complicated technicality.
Meanwhile Crerar smiles when the Premier (by appointment) calls the
Agrarians "a dilapidated annex" to the Liberals. He thinks he knows
better. He smiles even more sarcastically when he sees Mackenzie King
chortle over that amusing fiction. He may have some use for King. If
the Liberal leader will be reasonable he may permit him to merge his
party with the Agrarians. If not he may threaten to rob him of Mr.
Lapointe and Quebec, and let him see how he will like that.
Last winter I met Crerar in a Toronto hotel. He had just been down east
proclaiming for United Farmers in the Maritimes. An ardent Crerarite who
spends his life watching Ottawa closely said as the leader came up:
"Tom, your one best bet is to make an alliance with Lapointe. That
combination could upset any other confederacy in Parliament."
Crerar smiled--warmly. He said nothing. At lunch no doubt he discussed
this with his supporter. The old ace of Quebec! When will that home of
race Nationalism ever get into the hand of cards held by Crerar who would
inundate Quebec with reciprocity? Perhaps one E. C. Drury can tell. He
is talked about as the man whom Crerar may call to the Premiership in a
Cabinet of fourteen Ministers of Agriculture and one Minister of Justice.