The Hon. J. A. Calder has never seen the Sphinx. But he has a looking
glass. He has never been in Egypt. But he has lived a long while in
Saskatchewan. A man who can continue to know as much as he knows about
the confessional side of government, and who can say so little, has
some claim to be considered--Canada's political Sphinx.
Such a reputation is sometimes enviable. The average public man
babbles. Often he talks to conceal thought or as a substitute for
action. The mental energy needed to turn end for end what some of
these garrulous people say, in order to decipher just what they mean,
is usually more than the wisdom is worth. Calder spares us. He tells
us nothing. His silence may be golden, or it may be just a habit; but
from the known character of Calder it is never the omniscience of
stupidity.
A Sphinx in action may sometimes give himself away. It is not usual
for a Sphinx to do anything except to conceal the riddle. Calder has
all his life been a busy man. He is still in middle age. All but
fourteen years of his life up till 1917 he spent in the West, most of
it in the part now known as Saskatchewan. Ten years ago he was
furtively discussed as successor to Laurier. He is now a
Unionist-Liberal. To give him work in the administration commensurate
with his ability--or somewhere near it--a new department was created in
Immigration. Now he is slated for the Senate!
Little was heard about Calder's department. He had a publicity bureau
which did not spend vast amounts of money on diffusing information.
The department is said to contain a moving picture section, some of
whose films probably creep into Canadian movie houses. But nobody ever
saw a picture of J. A. Calder on a screen. He had a Canadian novelist
as chief of publicity. That novelist might have yearned for the chance
to immortalize his chief in a story, but so long as he is in the pay of
Mr. Calder's department he will continue to yearn. And not even he has
been given to understand why when a reconstructed Liberal like Mr.
Rowell left the Cabinet at the appointment of Premier Meighen, the
Minister of Immigration stayed on. One might surmise that the man who,
a decade ago, looked to some people like an Elisha to Laurier, would
run again in Moosejaw as a National Liberal Conservative with the
expectation of re-entering the Cabinet, probably as Minister of the
Interior. But he was suddenly and humdrumly designated for the Senate.
Apparently the Sphinx is not a great deal concerned over the fact that
his action in the case would throw some light on the sort of government
we may expect, and the kind of man we are privileged to conjecture Mr.
Calder to be. He seems to take very little interest in what any one
thinks about him. He accompanied the Premier on his Western trip. Now
and then he made a speech. He was heckled. He was in the land of his
critics, where he was unofficially known as "Jim". What did he mean by
staying in a Government which was supposed to have finished its work in
1919? Was he coming back as a Liberal? Had he no longer any
fellow-feeling for the farmers among whom he had lived for so long?
The Sphinx did not directly say. He was publicly and conventionally
endorsing the Premier, who was well able to speak for himself on behalf
of the administration.
Calder was headmaster of Moosejaw High School when he was twenty-three,
in the year 1891. He must have learned reticence then. Up in
Edmonton, a few years later one heard considerably of Goggin, the
speechmaking educationist of the prairie; rarely or never of Calder,
who about that time was Inspector of Schools for the Territories, not
yet provinces. The silent young inspector must have looked like the
reincarnation of Socrates as he drove--sometimes a four-horse team on a
buckboard--through the sloughs of the Northwest. No prairie doctor
with a radius of fifty miles, none but a pioneer missionary like
McDougall or Robertson, ever had so glorious a chance to study what the
life of a new country was going to be, as this inspector toiling
hundreds of miles over a land, where, if he stopped at three
school-houses a week, he was doing a good average in bad weather.
Regina had no party politics then. All it had was the mounted police
and a leg-boot legislature. Every man was then a trailsman. In
Calder's time as Inspector, there were only 400 miles of railway north
of the C.P.R. main line--the two branches to Prince Albert and to
Edmonton. It was only in the last year or two of this buckboard and
broncho inspectorate that there were even any Doukhobors in that part
of the world to bring back the days of Adam and Eve. He saw all the
"nationals" beginning to arrive. He could put his finger on a gaunt
anemic map of the Territories and point out just where there was
beginning to be some nucleus of a foreign settlement. He could talk a
little Cree and he learned the jargon of several countries in Europe.
He saw the farmers arise, and railways begin, and little villages dot
the skyline, and here and there an elevator, when a box car was looked
at by a trailsman as a small boy gapes at a circus parade.
Calder lived in Regina when politics was born. He shares with Frank
Oliver the memory of the day when Nicholas Flood Davin was the wonder
orator of the West, and when freight-carters from Winnipeg to Edmonton
via Saskatoon, which was then a temperance colony, carried demijohns of
whisky on traders' permits to make everybody at home ingloriously
drunk, including the mounted police. He recalls the day when the first
lieutenant-governor was inaugurated in Regina and what Frank Oliver
said about it. Four years he was Deputy Commissioner of Education for
the Territories up till the inauguration of two new Provinces when,
travelling on a thousand miles of new railway and over the old main
line of the C.P.R., Laurier paid his first visit to the Great West and
discovered as one of its greatest potentialities J. A. Calder, who
under Premier Scott became Provincial Treasurer and Commissioner of
Education.
To people outside Saskatchewan--even in Alberta, he was very little
known--Calder has always been a somewhat nebulous figure; to some
critics, a rather suspicious character; but always--clever. Being a
Sphinx he never courted popularity and seldom got it. Scott was
brilliant, popular and impulsive. His chief executive in Education,
Railways and Telephones and Premier _de facto_ during more than half of
Scott's term, was cold and calculating. The West prefers warm-blooded
politicians. Calder succeeded in spite of his manner, or his mask, or
whatever it may have been; and he did it by a penetrating knowledge of
the country, a superb capacity as administrator and a talent for
keeping out of trouble. He was no man for prima donna scenes. Even
the Education Department, a witch's cauldron of troubles over the
Separate School question in the new provinces, never entangled him in
theatricals. He was unpopular with the Opposition as soon as the new
Government began, because he was regarded as a Civil Service
interloper. What business had a school inspector in politics, and in a
Cabinet?
Calder demonstrated that best when he handed over the educational
cauldron to Scott and became Minister of Railways and Telephones. Here
was a department of utility administration in which he shone. He had
great political executive ability. When Scott was absent more than
half his time through illness, Calder was Premier. There was no other
man to choose. The liquor problem was more his to handle than the
Premier's. Calder did not share the popular enthusiasm for
Government-dispensed liquor. He knew the weaknesses of officials and
the historic thirst of the prairie. The Opposition constantly accused
him of being in league with the liquor men. Calder made no denial or
affirmation. He was Mephisto enough to let people wonder whether he
was one thing or the opposite.
A man who knew Calder twenty-two years ago gave, not long ago, some
impressions of the Minister in connections with the liquor
administration.
"About two weeks after Saskatchewan went dry," he said, "I was spending
a night in one of the larger towns in the Province. Among the other
guests at the hotel was a member of the Government. In the lobby an
interesting argument waged throughout the evening, the Minister of
course, defending the action of the Government in closing the bars.
Among other things he told us about the relief work carried on by the
Dominion and Provincial Governments in certain districts where there
had been crop failures, in order that the destitute settlers might earn
or borrow enough to keep themselves and their families through the
winter. He emphasized one mistake the Government had made in not first
closing every bar in the districts affected, because there were many
instances where every dollar that had been earned or borrowed had been
spent in the bars on the very day that it was received, by the men
whose families it was intended to save from freezing and starvation.
"I was telling this afterwards to one of the leading social reformers
of Saskatchewan, and a smile played over his face as I was speaking.
When I had finished he said:
"'He didn't tell you the whole story. We recognized the necessity of
closing those bars before that relief work was started, and urged it so
strongly on the Government that they agreed to do it. The
Orders-in-Council were drawn up and ready to be signed when Calder, who
had been absent from the Province on business, returned and immediately
it was all off.'"
Calder has a sister who is one of the leading social workers in Regina.
She has a profound regard for her talented brother Jim.
The liquor did more than even Separate Schools to disrupt Government
forces in Saskatchewan. Calder was no hypocrite to weep over the moral
issues in prohibition. He was not a profound governmentarian or a
champion of enforced morality. A Government might own and operate
telephones, but not so well consciences. The liquor administration
turned out to be a mess in Saskatchewan, largely because the
administration did not unanimously believe in the thing that the
majority seemed to want. Calder was no more to blame than anybody
else, except that he was highest in the Government when the Premier was
away.
The reformers said that Calder was pro-liquor in the administration.
He seemed to have no opinions about that--at least for publication.
Ideals often run away with communities. If he had only spouted a
little now and then he would have given people a chance to bring
something home to him, and himself a chance to get near the people.
Two or three scandals came up in departments over which he had control.
Commissions were appointed to investigate; they always exonerated
Calder. Even in the search-light on liquor--as many as four, one after
another--no technical blame attached to the silent Minister. Calder
may have had a contempt for either commissions or public opinion. A
Sphinx is as a rule not much of a burning avenger of wrongs to the
community. Besides Scott was continually running into emotional
trouble. The Premier _de facto_ had the balance to keep. He must work
while other people talked.
A German-born but thoroughly loyal detective engaged by the Borden
Government to report upon seditious activities of the German element
who were so badly disgruntled over the Wartime Elections Act, repeated
to the writer more than once with great vehemence that Mr. Calder had a
special interest in the _Regina Leader_, which was used to get votes
for the Administration, particularly among the German element.
Governments had been known to own newspapers before Calder ever began.
_The Leader_ was naturally a Government organ and may have needed pap.
This is a form of patronage hard to uproot.
When Scott finally retired the chief administrator did not succeed him.
Martin was picked, a safe, genial and popular man. The Sphinx, it is
said, might have had the post; but he preferred to stay behind the
scenes. Before that he had been much talked about as a possible
successor to Laurier--but with not much hope of succeeding. There are
probably a number of reasons why Mr. Calder did not take the Provincial
Premiership. Dig them out of Calder if you may. He has never
explained. He leaves it to his commentators.
We are privileged therefore to conjecture that:
Mr. Calder was pretty well sick of Saskatchewan politics and was
looking hard in almost any direction for a good way out;
Mr. Calder could see far enough into the near future of prairie
politics to know that Liberalism was becoming a label for something
else; and he was not disposed to come out as an Agrarian Liberal;
Mr. Calder wanted a chance to begin politics all over again, because
with all his practical success he felt that he had travelled some wrong
trails.
Possibly all of these had something to do with the case. At the
Winnipeg Liberal Convention in 1917 he was a coalition-conscription
Liberal. He worked against the Liberal machine that captured the
Convention by a fluke for Laurier. Before that he was known to believe
in Union Government. It was only common sense to make him one of the
Prairie triumvirate--Calder, Sifton, Crerar, who carried the West into
the Union. Cloudy as his career has been, for no reason that anyone
specially cared to name, he might in Ottawa be a big force for the
Government. He was a behind-the-scenes actor. He knew something about
the art of winning elections and converting immigrants into voters. He
was practical. He would be needed in Ottawa--more than he could see
any use for his talent in Saskatchewan with its farmer-dominated
Cabinets.
Alberta has gone Agrarian. All Saskatchewan needs is a change of
label. Some psychological morning Premier Martin will get up and rub
out "Liberal" after his name, buy a big farm and set up as a National
Progressive. Provincial Legislatures are things to be captured. The
old parties shrewdly used them in the Ottawa game. The new ones are
just as apt. Too long these Western elective bodies have been on the
switch. It is time to shunt them, once more, on to the main line that
leads to Ottawa--with a different company label on the cars.
By no exercise of the imagination can one behold Jim Calder becoming a
Grain-Grower Progressive. The thing is anomalous.
On the other side of the Sphinx he is credited by those also who know
him well in Regina with going to Ottawa purely as a patriotic duty. He
wanted some work to do for the whole country bigger than any he had
done in Regina. The authority formerly quoted in this article had this
to say about Calder in 1917 when Calder took office in Ottawa:
"About the time of the Winnipeg Convention I was talking with the same
man whom I have already quoted, and we were discussing the enigma which
Calder's character and public record seemed to present. I knew that my
friend was not especially a friend of Calder's, so his words seemed to
carry greater weight.
"'There is no person in Canadian public life,' he said, 'who has been
trying more conscientiously and consistently to be good than Calder. I
will not say that his motive may be higher than that of political
expediency; but he has been and is more scrupulously careful to do
nothing that may reflect in any way upon his honour and integrity. I
believe that he has set before him the highest possible ideal of public
service and that he is doing everything he can to live up to it.'"
A prominent citizen of Regina who has seen a good deal of Calder, both
in his home city and in Ottawa, has the same opinion; adding that
Calder never bamboozles a deputation with suave words or false hopes;
what the Cabinet thinks about any particular programme of a deputation
he already knows and suggests that a typed memo, which he will present,
will be as good as waiting days for a personal appeal. In 1919 he
informed the writer that he proposed to enact much-needed reforms in
immigrating Canada, especially as to the quality of new-comers.
Why has Mr. Calder never made a big study of this absorbing question?
When the Premier went to the Imperial Conference, with his mind pretty
well made up on the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, why had he not in his
grip, to show the Conference, one common sense, powerful little book
signed by Hon. J. A. Calder, Minister of Immigration, giving a complete
exposition of Japanese life in Canada? When we are all talking about
the good _entente_ with the United States why can't we get from the
Immigration Department in Ottawa a hand-book giving a complete picture
of what Americans have done in the West?
However, the Sphinx may have the best of reasons for not doing these
simple things. But there is scarcely a Department of administration
that does not regard itself as a machine for winning elections as much
as for serving the people who pay for it. Apart from all he has not
told us, I have no doubt Mr. Calder is doing a big reforming work on
immigration in Ottawa.
The Immigration Minister should be our leading sociologist. He should
be able to diagnose communities. He might easily begin upon Ottawa.
What a study a cross section of the Smart Set would be, especially upon
the arrival of a new king at Rideau Hall! There's nothing in other
democracies quite like that. Washington has a White House, but the
inmate is merely an elected servant of the State. Rideau Hall is an
endowment, a gift of the gods. The 30,000 people of greater and lesser
degree in Ottawa who normally or abnormally live by the Civil Service
are profoundly affected by the arrival, sojourn and departure of the
Governor-General. They are vitally influenced and entertained by the
Parliamentary restaurant, even without the bar. The social show
provided by Ministers' and members' wives and their visiting friends is
itself a subtle study in the art of getting on in the new world, which
is at the root of all immigration. Bridge for money and dining out
with your friend's wife are within the reach of any ambitious
immigrant. The Smart Set in Ottawa is an exotic colony all by itself.
Montreal and Toronto and Winnipeg can merely copy it. Some of the
farmers have their eye on the Set; no, not to abolish it. Women must
have their share in the Government. Petticoats and politics are
affinities. Farmers are no more necessarily immune from what is said
to have corrupted the Roman Empire than Tories or Grits. Farmers in
fact, as Mr. Calder knows, are not the hope of the world; neither are
lawyers nor manufacturers.
Suppose we ask the Sphinx about this. Listen in imagination to this
once Liberal, as with an astounding burst of candour he says:
"My friend, your description of my make-up may be as right or as
foolish as anybody feels disposed to think. None of it bothers me.
What does bother me is the law of compensation. Agree with me that the
manufacturer had his drastic innings with Canadian governments; that
tariffs and protected industries are the result; that lawyers--yes, I'm
a lawyer--have had a big day in our affairs because they had the talent
for schemes and speeches. Admit that and conclude--that the very human
farmer thinks his turn is coming, and rather soon. But--somebody who
was never educated as a Tory has got to help the
National-Liberal-Conservative Government to get an even chance to
administer this nation after the upheavals of war. Somebody who moves
silently while others are talking their tongues loose may be needed to
manipulate----"
Before the Sphinx could complete his statement of the case he was
politely asked if he would care to inter his talents in the Canadian
Senate, and he suavely answered that such a thing might be a good way
to solve the conundrum, even though it would make a thoroughly stupid
last act in the play.