"Ha!" he exclaimed, stretching his legs with a yawn. "And the concert
will conclude with that amiable farce, 'O Canada,' followed by 'God
Save the King.'"
This Nationalist interview is given at some length because it
illustrates much of what Sir Lomer Gouin is not, and if he were would
not openly say so, because he stands for a majority the watchword of
which is "Stop, Look, Listen". I went at once to see the Premier. He
was closeted with confiding--perhaps confederate--priests, and with
simple habitant folk who stood, not in awe but in affection, of the
Premier. He might have been himself a father confessor.
Talking to him I found Gouin peculiarly on his guard; broad-faced,
heavy-jawed, slow of speech, almost devoid of gesticulation, he was as
unamiably dispassionate as a bank manager. There was no militant
passion of the minority in this man; no heroic tilting against
windmills; no expression of ideals; no suggestion of a delightful
outlaw. He was amazingly practical, with no inclination to discuss
freely the native peculiarities of either race. He understood
Ontario--as a politician only; England as a democracy and a form of
government. He had no absorbing idiosyncracies and made no attempt to
pose or even to be interesting. After the bounce of the young
Nationalist he was as tame as a grandfather's clock.
I felt that Sir Lomer was asking himself--what did the stranger want?
He would have been infinitely more at ease discussing with a bishop how
to prevent a strike in a cotton mill; or with a political outposter
what to do to keep some seat for the Administration. If I had made to
him such a statement as once I had made with such volcanic results to
Bourassa, that nine-tenths of the population in a village like Nicolet
could speak no Anglais, he would have been eloquent. Had I observed
that 70 per cent of the operatives in a great Quebec industry cannot
read and write French, that Ontario has a policy of good roads
comparable to that of Quebec, that Orangemen do not dominate Toronto,
that the Ontario farmer is a better producer than the habitant, or that
Protestant clerics do not interfere in politics, he would have bristled
with information to set me profoundly right. But he created no
atmosphere of free discussion with a stranger. He was coldly aloof,
yet earnestly endeavouring to say something worth while.
What I really wanted to tell Gouin was that he was personally very much
like the late great Tory, Sir James Whitney. But he did not warm up to
personal comment. The bilingual question was too complicated. The
atmosphere of the Bonne Entente was lacking. Gouin and myself were in
different envelopes. He was the Premier.
From what is said of him I am sure most of the fault was my own. I did
not understand him. He was too much the Premier; the master executive.
The Nationalist was almost right; Gouin suggested the dividend and the
census. He was the chief executive of a Province larger than almost
any country in Europe but Russia, and with a population about half that
of Roumania, of whom about one-sixth are the Anglo-Saxon minority. He
seemed to know Quebec from Montreal to the edge of Labrador almost by
telegraph poles. You recall that the French in Canada evolved the
modern census with its intimate penetration into the affairs of the
people, some time before the Germans did it. The Premier of Quebec was
a handbook encyclopaedia of Quebec. He knew the precise location by
the roads of almost any white village, pulp-mill, water-power, mine,
timber limit; knew as much as a man can about the number of horses and
cattle and cradles to a township; could talk with enthusiasm about the
pioneer arts of the habitant--the rugs, the baskets, the furniture, the
hand-made churns, the open-air bake-ovens. He could give the address
and the full name of many and many a priest.
But beyond this there is a Quebec which Sir Lomer Gouin did not know,
because he himself with his _bourgeois_ excellences and his great good
citizenship has not the Gallic sparkle in his mentality. He never
deeply knew the soul of Quebec. He was too much concerned with its
practical and useful politics to be conscious of its passions. From
the shrug of his shoulder, and a certain twinkle in his eye when he
mentioned diplomacy with clerics, one surmised that among the clergy he
was the master among politicians who must walk warily. But he was too
stout, too thrifty, too much of a high type of budgeteer to be
spiritually informed of the crude but basically beautiful passions that
undercurrent all peasant communities. There was no poetry in Gouin.
No fire. Little imagination.
"Those Nationalists?" he repeated shrewdly, slowly. "Yes, I know their
talk. Oh, they are not so dangerous, but a troublesome minority. I
think--I know Quebec better than they do. You have, I daresay,
Nationalists in Ontario?"
What he perhaps expected was some statement about Orangemen, who of
course are nearly all Imperialists. Yet these very Orangemen represent
an intense phase of Canadian life; the backwoods era, the simple
industries, the old villages, the quaint settlements of the U.E.
Loyalists as picturesque on the Upper, as the dormer-windowed villages
of the French are on the Lower St. Lawrence. To these men the Empire
is as visual, as to the intense Quebecker it is nebulous. And as the
politician in Ontario has to regard carefully the Orange vote, so the
Premier of Quebec had to be wary of the franchises of his emotional
friends, the Nationalists. He was somewhat afraid of the minority as
all masters of majorities are. Clearly--it was Gouin's main business
to continue being elected. Had he gone out on behalf of enlistments,
to educate his people, even to speak for France, he would have been in
danger of converting Gouin Liberals into Nationalists.
Ontario cannot fail to make an asset of Gouin's anti-Nationalism. He
was never for any of the violent doctrines propounded by my friend on
the Terrace. He would not oppose Quebec going to war. I am sure he
God-speeded the 22nd who died at Courcellette. He was the Premier of a
free Province. Those men had freely gone. Others--the majority--had
freely stayed. But an election was coming; where everybody would be
free to vote.
Then there were the clergy; most of them friends of Gouin. The
Cardinal at Quebec had been interviewed by Sir Sam Hughes on aid to
enlistments. Gouin could have told Hughes that he would fail; that
Begin, though not a Nationalist, was a reactionary. The bilingual
controversy was still acute. Gouin could not have gone out or sent
emissaries out, to reason with French-Canadians about marching with a
Province which had denied the French language rights in contrast to the
Government's own claim that it had given rights to the Anglo minority
in Quebec.
Conscription was coming. It was a precarious time. The master of
Quebec had to move cautiously. His loyalty to Britain was never
questioned. His faith in a United Canada was never doubted. Had
Quebec been all for Gouin instead of Gouin all for Quebec, the
Premier's way would have been easier. Better let well enough alone;
encourage those to enlist who really wanted to go--because Quebec was a
free country.
Then there was the Laurier influence. Had the old man gone in with the
Premier to help the Ottawa Government--
Impossible. Neither of them was asked before Coalition came on the
heels of conscription. And when conscription came, the minority of
Nationalists opposed to the war became the majority of Quebeckers who
preferred not to comply with the law. From disregarding the law to
rebellion, to Nationalism was not far. Gouin had the balance to hold.
The Cardinal's attitude on conscription made Gouin's position still
more difficult. His letter to the press bluntly put the Roman Catholic
Church above temporal law. One heard of no rebuke from the Premier of
Quebec to the Cardinal. A Cardinal may be above politics.
Sir Lomer was playing the game of safety, when from his own temperament
and position and unbacked by other leaders he could do little more. He
stood for the law and did not hinder its operation. But if there was a
chief executive in Canada who wished the war were righteously over, it
was Sir Lomer Gouin. No Premier had such a predicament; so much at the
end to lose; so much at first to have gained--if only he could have
foreseen, as nobody did, that conscription was coming and that law
would be more awkward than liberty.
The Premier of Quebec had experience in keeping his Government immune
from agitators. It was not alone the Nationalists who had made him
uneasy. On the other extreme there had been for some time one Godefroi
Langlois, former editor of _La Patrie_, and later founder and editor of
_Le Pays_, whose platform was compulsory State education away from
control of the clergy and in defiance of the Archbishops. Gouin did
not endorse Langlois. How could he? _Le Pays_, when it condemned
clerical schools, attacked the Administration. Politically Gouin was
right in opposing Langlois. Nationally he was playing provincial.
Langlois had a mission, in line with a broader, nationalized Canada;
the same mission which is now being reflected in the National Council
of Education.
So, between the reactionism of Bourassa and the radicalism of Langlois,
Gouin was the compromise; and Langlois was conveniently given an
official post in Europe.
Gouin has compromised his whole political career. With the leverage of
enormous success in elections and administration, he never had the
vision to declare himself in favour of a bigger Quebec than could be
got by extending its boundaries to Ungava.
He was too old to begin. Quebec to him was a vast prefecture to be
administered; not a vision to be realized. Ontario--except
politically--was almost as far away as British Columbia. He was seldom
in Toronto. Montreal was as a rule the last west for this voyageur.
He seldom or never went to the Maritimes. He knew the people down
there regarded the _bloc_ Quebec as a denationalizer. He had little or
no desire to see the prairies. He wanted Quebec to prosper. He
delighted to see pulp mills and cotton factories and power plants and
railways and trolleys vibrating along the St. Lawrence. He loved to
dream of the great unpeopled hinterland--all Quebec; of the other
hinterland--all the rest of Canada; of the transcontinentals converging
at Montreal; of the steamship lines terminating there; of a land where
there are few empty cradles or idle factories or wasting farms.
All these things Gouin, growing stout and somewhat heavy of face, loved
to behold; and out of that grew all the vision he seemed to have. In
this enormous prefecture within the Empire he beheld a far more
comfortable State than the Nationalist dream of a separative Quebec;
glad when he could find time to motor grandly and amiably out among the
villages and be greeted as _le grand seigneur_ of politics, even when
he lacked the grand manners of the eminent patrician.
At any conference of Premiers in Ottawa he held himself somewhat aloof,
studying the lot, respecting them all, cordial with all, anxious to do
all that constitutionally in him lay to further co-ordination. But
Gouin always sagaciously knew that there was no Premier in the pack who
already had so much, with so little to ask, from Federalism as he. His
was the pivotal province of Confederation, the grand compromise of Old
Macdonald with Cartier; the basic sixty-five members of Parliament,
unchangeable except by ripping up the B.N.A. Act, an instrument of
Empire. He could wink the other eye and reflect that from the
political concessions of the Act in official bilingualism and a fixed
representation, in the outlet of the St. Lawrence, in the possession of
the historic city, in the control of ocean navigation, in a solid
clergy, in fundamental virtues of thrift and an established
peasantry--he and his had more than any of the others could ever ask.
"Ah!" he said eloquently, with a fine twinkle of his eyes to the
interviewer at Quebec, "you have not seen our Province? Then you must
come down again, when I am not busy, and let me take you to see--all we
have down here!"