"Great Scott!" he said huskily, "that's the man I turned out of the
Club last night."
Drury had the sense of humour to regard the matter as a joke on both
the newspaperman and himself.
The opening of the new Legislature was a spectacle. Dignitaries and
judges, professors and generals stood about the farmers--led by the
farmer-in-chief, morning-coated, carefully groomed, plainly nervous but
sustained by the dignity of it all. His voice was firm; his manner
that of a very circumspect bridegroom. The old smug strut and
case-hardened pomp of legislature inaugurals was lacking. An
undercurrent of deep sincerity stayed many a tremorous hand. Drury was
the least nervous of all. I imagine that in the morning he had sung to
himself some good old fortifying hymn, like "Rock of Ages."
Since that day the Premier has learned that practical politics is a
game that taxes all a man's technique in Christianity. Autocratic
Hydro and Mackenzie the loosening octopus; New Ontario preaching up the
old plaint of secession; better roads and prodigal Mr. Biggs; what to
do with Education that Cody had not started to do; how to stave off
commissions on reform of the school system; the constant queues of
moral reformers; the new menace of the movies and the censorship farce;
the timber stealers; disconcerting Dewart and redundant Ferguson;
returned soldiers and khaki members; the Reds and the plain clothes
men; blustering Morrison, and the tyrannical U.F.O.----
Until the Premier, plain, homespun gentleman that he is, longed for
Friday evening and the Crown Hill farm and the quiet little church in
the village, because one week at his desk took more out of him than a
month in overalls. And then to relieve his surcharged soul he made
that speech at Milverton in which he boldly proclaimed that he was
going to head, not a mere group called the U.F.O., but a People's
Party. For this "broadening out" speech he got clods thrown at him by
Morrison, and Burnaby put rails on the road to upset the Premier's
buggy, and the _Farmers' Sun_ tried to change the wheels on his rig so
that he would not be able to get home. Worse than any the _Onlooker_,
that virile organ of no advertising and of the Meighen Government, said:
"The U.F.O. chose this man and dragged him out of his rural obscurity.
In common gratitude he should have stuck to their colours. He should
have given fair warning of a change of heart, and indeed we think he
ought to have resigned. When a man joins a political party he agrees
to subordinate his ambitions and activities to the common good of that
party, and failing to do so honour demands that he should leave it."
In spite of the fact that the Premier of Ontario twice made an
appointment by request from the writer of this for the purpose of
getting a statement for the press as to what he meant to do about this
whole business of "broadening out," twice failed to keep the
appointment and later came out with the Milverton pronunciamento, we
have no hesitation in pointing out that:
Mr. Drury was not in rural obscurity. The U.F.O. had no colours which
Mr. Drury had not helped to paint, for he was the first President the
U.F.O. ever had. He had no change of heart, because when he made an
unstable coalition of the U.F.O. and the Labour party he entered into a
pact and covenant which the U.F.O. had never considered; he had already
"broadened out" to drive Labour and Agriculture as a team and had
pretty well succeeded in doing it. Mr. Drury did not join a political
party. The U.F.O. was not a real party because it went into the
election of 1919 without a leader, and in order to get its platform
translated into party it had to have Mr. Drury or somebody like him.
And if Mr. Drury should resign from the head of the two groups which he
alone has made into the semblance of a party, he would be recommended
by Mr. Crerar to let his guardian take him to a lunatic asylum.
Drury has done much better than his critics expected he would do. He
has been bold enough to keep Adam Beck from being the unelected Premier
of Ontario, which is more than Sir William Hearst ever could do. He
has made Government cost more than it ever did, though it is only
reasonable bookkeeping to believe that part of the cost was incurred by
a Government over which he had no control. He has begun to build
public highways which being originally a farmer's job should have been
done well, but up to the present has been on a smaller scale as bad a
case of wasting the public money as the railways of Canada ever
perpetrated. The cost of administration being a matter of either
experience or graft, it is probable that the Coalition will cut down
the cost when they get more experience. The Chippewa Canal is one
glaring instance of high labour cost which a Farmer Premier with Labour
colleagues did not presume to regulate. If anybody knows what a day's
work is it should be the farmer; but the farmer in this case was not
absolutely free to express his opinions, because he depends upon Labour
for his voting majority in the House.
In the matter of referendum Mr. Drury has been an advocate instead of a
judge. He and his--notably the church-ridden Mr. Raney, who does not
even smoke--are a dry lot. They wanted Ontario to be bone dry and
therefore preferred to have the people vote either foolishly for the
iniquitous O.T.A. or fanatically for absolute prohibition. Mr. Drury
should have taken the spark plug out of his Methodist car long enough
to reflect that what keeps a man contented is going to keep him from
stirring up trouble. If the Government of enlightened and moral
Ontario had brought in a measure to create a referendum on the
alternative of prohibition _vs._ effective government control of
reasonable liquors, it might have less cause to be panicky over
Bolshevism.
The legislation to exempt from taxation houses costing less than a
certain amount looks like a pretty straight play for the Labour vote,
and the propagation of a semi-Bolshevistic principle that unless
checked somewhere will exempt the many at the expense of the few.
But before Mr. Drury has the chance to be truly elected by the people
of Ontario to carry on his People's Party, he hopes perhaps that he may
have a chance to be called to Ottawa. It is freely rumoured that Mr.
Crerar has no intention of taking the Premiership which the liberated
people of Canada are going to bestow upon him by virtue of one more
group-coalition. In which case he may invite Mr. Drury, who has given
a sparring exhibition of being a Premier, to succeed him. Then we
shall have the undemocratic farce of an appointive Premier all over
again--for the third time in three years. And then--well, we shudder
to think what is going to become of Mr. Drury's hitherto unimpeachable
Christianity and of the economic welfare of a country which has as much
right to modern factories as the bush farmer ever had to saw-mills.