The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (14 page)

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The downfall of Cartier

George Etienne Cartier, a fighting cock of a politician and a one-time rebel who had fought for Papineau in ’37, was one of the leading
architects of Canadian Confederation and, next to Macdonald, the most important politician in Canada. His opposition to Allan’s railway scheme could not be brooked; before Allan could succeed he must have Cartier with him; to achieve that end he was prepared to use brutal methods.

Cartier controlled the parliamentary action of forty-five Quebec members who voted in a solid phalanx. The Government needed this Quebec vote since its majority was considerably less than forty-five. The defection of half could, on a tightly fought issue, put it out of office. If Allan could win over a slice of Carrier’s following he would then control the means to manipulate their leader. The lever, he shrewdly decided, would be the Quebeckers’ hunger for a railroad along the north shore of the St. Lawrence from Quebec City, through Montreal to Ottawa. He himself headed the Northern Colonization Railway which planned to build the Montreal-Ottawa link of the coveted line. Cartier, with his Grand Trunk connections, could be presumed to oppose it. Allan began at once to spend the money provided by his American backers to stir up the French Canadians along the proposed route against Cartier.

He proudly reported to General Cass of the Northern Pacific the particulars of his successful campaign. He had, he said, paid several French-Canadian lawyers to write up the matter in the press. He had bought controlling stock in newspapers and subsidized others as well as their editors and proprietors. He had stumped the country through which his proposed railway would go, calling on the people, visiting the priests, making friends, sending paid agents among the more prominent citizens and making speech after speech himself, in French, to show the habitants “where their true interests lay.”

The scheme began to bear fruit. Allan won over twenty-seven of Cartier’s forty-five followers. He could now, in effect, control the Government, or at least he thought he could. An election was in the offing for the late summer of 1872 and Cartier, to his astonishment and dismay, woke up to the truth that he had lost his backing and much of his political power. According to Allan’s account, the electors of Cartier’s ward in Montreal told him bluntly that unless the contract for the Pacific railway was given in the interests of Lower Canada – which meant to Sir Hugh Allan – he need not present himself for re-election. Certainly Cartier’s surrender was total. On June 12, Allan wrote to McMullen that it would not be necessary for either of them to talk to the Government in Ottawa: “I believe I
have got the whole thing arranged through my French friends, by means you are aware of, and we now have the pledge of Sir G. that we will have a majority, and other things satisfactory. I have told you all along that this was the true basis of operations.…”

Meanwhile, Senator David Lewis Macpherson and his rival Interoceanic company were proving an embarrassment to Macdonald. Macpherson was an Inverness Highlander of heroic stature “in whose presence,” Macdonald’s astute secretary Joseph Pope recalled, “an ordinary mortal felt very small indeed.” He had a massive head, a huge brow, pouched, Oriental eyes and a fantastic tangle of side whiskers, which, with his immense soup-strainer moustache, effectively concealed the weakness of his chin. Somewhat pompous in manner, overdeliberate in method, but generally sound in judgement, he could not be pushed an inch. He remained utterly convinced, in spite of all disclaimers, that Allan was prepared to deliver the railway into the hands of Yankee freebooters.

Macpherson’s stubbornness posed a real dilemma for the Prime Minister, who was anxious to resolve the railway problem before the election; there was no doubt it would strengthen his hand politically in a tight contest. The Highlander was an old friend and a staunch Conservative who had, the previous winter, raised a testimonial fund of sixty thousand dollars to help free Macdonald from a crushing burden of political debt. Moreover, in the summer of 1871, Macdonald had actually pressed his friend to take up the question of the railroad in order to prevent the Americans from coming in. Now the Prime Minister was faced with an impossible choice: he could choose the Toronto group and alienate French Canada, or he could choose the Allan group and alienate Ontario. Once again, and not for the last time, the traditional Toronto-Montreal mercantile rivalry was bedevilling the country. Clearly an amalgamation of the two companies was indicated but here Macdonald came up against the stone wall of Macpherson’s intractability. Macdonald genuinely believed that Allan was the only possible choice to head the venture. Only a man of his established wealth and apparent business know-how could command the confidence of the international financial community. But Macpherson continued to insist stubbornly that Allan was a tool of the American railway; and not even his own associates, who were moved to throw in with the Montreal group, could shake this belief. He would welcome amalgamation, but not with Allan as president.

As it turned out, Macpherson was right. It ought to have been clear
to Allan by this time that the Government had no intention of allowing American control of the railway; and yet, while pretending publicly that his was an all-Canadian company, the imperious shipbuilder retained his secret ties with New York and Chicago. On August 7, he told General Cass that the Government was obliged to stipulate that no foreigner could appear as a shareholder in the company: “The shares taken by you and our other American friends, will therefore have to stand in my name for some time.” To McMullen he sent a reassuring letter: the Americans were to be excluded but “I fancy we can get over that some way or other.”

In vain Macdonald tried to effect a rapprochement between Macpherson and Allan. In July, with the election campaign underway, Macpherson suggested that the new directors – seven from his company and six from Allan’s – elect their own president; but to this Allan would not consent. The Tory party desperately wanted to place the
fait accompli
of a strong railway company before the electors; but the principals remained deadlocked.

By this time Allan was hard at work trying to restore the political fortunes of the badly battered Cartier, who had been transformed from enemy into ally by his machinations of the previous spring. It was Allan’s first and only entry into politics; indeed, he had rarely bothered to vote before this. But by August 9 he was so deeply involved in the campaign that he even appeared on the platform with Cartier at St. James Square. It was not a prepossessing beginning: both men had to duck a volley of stones and rotten eggs, and the taunts were so great that Cartier had difficulty being heard. Allan, it appeared, had done his work only too well.

It was this tortured alliance with Allan that was to cloud Cartier’s reputation. He remains, save for this one fall from grace, an attractive figure: a wiry, compact, totally dedicated Canadian patriot with all the vivacity of his race. In the familiar portrait of the Fathers of Confederation he occupies the front row centre, next to Macdonald – a robust, almost dapper man with a mane of white hair. His black, darting eyes were a sign of his inner vitality: he was quite capable of working fifteen hours a day. His value to Macdonald was inestimable – together they forged and maintained the uneasy alliance between the French and English nations in British North America. But in the election of 1872, Cartier was robust no longer: the telltale symptoms of Bright’s disease – the swollen feet, the impaired judgement – had already appeared. George Etienne Cartier had less than a year to live.

If Allan threw himself, heart, soul, and pocketbook, into the election, it was because he believed he had a pledge from the Government to give him the charter for the railway. The events of July 29 and 30, when promises were made by Cartier and Macdonald, and election funds were pledged by Allan, can only be understood against the background of the political morality and practice of the time.

Elections in post-Confederation Canada were fought with money and, often enough, it was the candidate who spent the most who cornered the votes. Dollars spoke louder than ideas and out-and-out bribery was not uncommon. At the end of the decade a contemporary historian wrote that “bribery at elections was scarcely regarded as an offense; both parties resorted to it freely and almost openly.” During the seventies so many elections were controverted because of bribery that a kind of gentleman’s agreement existed between the parties to keep them to a manageable number. As late as 1874, there were official charges of bribery before the courts in no less than twenty-nine constituencies in Ontario and Manitoba. Charles Clarke, who was clerk of the Legislature of Ontario, recalled that “for many years before Confederation, and after its creation, electoral corruption, gross intimidation, bludgeon arguments and brutal force had been employed at various elections to the detriment and loss of electoral strength by one or other of the opposing candidates.” Of the early seventies, Clarke wrote that “nearly every active politician who had experience in Canadian Parliamentary elections was aware of the existence of bribery and intimidation. So common was this experience that, although never seeing money actually exchanged for a vote, its use was as well known to me as was the existence, say, of the Queen of England, or the fact that she occupied the throne.”

In those days, before competing electronic pleasures, politics was
the
major pastime in city and village. The entire country was almost totally partisan which meant that, in the absence of any really burning issue, it was difficult to change a man’s mind unless, in the euphemism of the period, you “treated” him – to a drink, a bottle, a dinner or a five-dollar bill. (In one election wagonloads of voters were paid off in the unnegotiable five-dollar bills of a defunct bank.) Treating was against the law, as was the practice of driving or dragging reluctant voters to the polls, but these expensive customs, as Macdonald himself admitted, were common to both parties. And each charged the other with committing identical crimes. Goldwin Smith, at a political picnic, drew a farmer aside to ask him what was
the difference in principle between his party and the opposition. “He was a long time in answering but at last he replied: ‘We say the other fellows are corrupt.’ ”

There was still no secret ballot in the 1872 election; it did not make its appearance until 1874. This meant that bribery was extraordinarily effective since the party agents could check on the loyalty of their paid supporters. Other devices were also in use to influence the results: agents of the party in power would resort to trickery to prevent opponents from voting before the polls closed – forcing septuagenarians to swear they were over twenty-one and British subjects, or, on occasion, actually driving voters from the booths with broken heads if they thought their votes would affect the outcome. Clarke recalled that he had known men, sworn in as special constables, “use their authority to force back, again and again, from the polls, voters of an opposite party.” On another occasion, he heard twenty men, all Tories, sworn in as special constables, take an oath to keep the peace on election day towards all Her Majesty’s subjects “except the d—d Grits.” Frank “King” Cornish, the mayor of London, Ontario in the sixties, used to surround the polling booths on voting day with a private army armed with cudgels, batons, shillelaghs and brass knuckles, who effectively prevented the supporters of his perennial opponent, David Glass, from exercising their franchise. Glass finally became mayor by calling out the local militia to guard the booths before Cornish’s party policemen were in place.

The election of 1872 was particularly hard fought. “I don’t suppose,” John A. Macdonald recalled, “that there ever was a fiercer struggle for the mastery than that which took place between the two parties, especially in Ontario.” In that province, the Grits were on the rise: the Riel incident and, perhaps, the extravagant promises to British Columbia had hurt the Government. Macdonald thought that financially the Opposition had the best of it. On the other hand, George Brown, in a letter (later notorious) to the head of an Ontario bank, complained that the Liberals were having a hard struggle against “enormous sums” spent by Tory candidates : “A big push has to be made … if we are not to succumb to the cash of the Government.…” Certainly, money counted. When William Blumhart, who served on several Montreal election committees, was asked to give the reasons for the defeat of three candidates, he replied laconically that “they had not money enough.”

Macdonald himself was hard pressed for funds and was scraping
up every dollar he could find from reluctant friends. C. J. Campbell, the brother of the Postmaster General, Alexander Campbell, Macdonald’s old law partner, wrote a worried letter to his brother revealing that he and a friend had co-signed a note for ten thousand dollars, a huge sum in those days, for the Prime Minister, “to enable him to supply funds to the several constituencies he hopes to carry, the only security we have being Sir John’s undertaking in writing as a
member of the government to recoup us the amount loaned him.”
Campbell admitted that it was a foolish thing to do: “My object in writing is to make you aware of the circumstances so that steps may be taken for my protection when the subject comes up.”

Cartier was equally desperate for funds and this desperation was increased by the knowledge that he faced an uphill battle in his own constituency. His friends, Macdonald among them, had urged him to seek an easier contest but he had stubbornly refused. For him the moment of truth came at the close of July. Allan had conferred with him in Montreal on several occasions, urging him to procure the amalgamation of the two companies “upon such terms as I considered would be just to myself” (in short, the presidency for Allan). On the thirtieth, some six weeks after Allan had told McMullen that Cartier had been brought to heel, he and his lawyer, the ever-present Abbott, visited Cartier once again for a meeting that was to become memorable. Cartier had a telegram scribbled by Macdonald who, in the midst of fighting his own election battle in Kingston, had managed to crowd in another interview with Macpherson. Again Macpherson had insisted that the question of the presidency be left to a board of directors. Macdonald made his decision.