The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (20 page)

When the McMullen thunderbolt was first launched, Dufferin had just reached Prince Edward Island. He at once called in the two leading Maritime politicians, Leonard Tilley of New Brunswick and Charles Tupper of Nova Scotia, who were in his entourage. Both men were astounded by the revelations “and seemed half inclined to throw in the sponge.” Tupper’s explanation was that “during the excitement of the election Sir John being on the drink must have written and telegraphed these strange things, a whisper of which he himself had never hitherto heard.…” Tupper, of course,
had
heard from Hincks the previous February that Allan had made large contributions to the election “simply because the Opposition … were publicly avowed enemies of the scheme, determined to upset it.” Now, he recovered himself sufficiently to tell Dufferin that matters could be satisfactorily explained. The troubled Governor General grasped at this, though not without misgivings: he was beginning to sense that if he prorogued Parliament his cherished popularity would suffer a severe wrench. He wrote to Macdonald that the next session could not be put off until the following February. If prorogued, it must meet again as swiftly as possible. He added a word of encouragement: “I do not for a moment doubt the result.”

By August 9, Macdonald had pulled himself together. He wrote Lord Dufferin in Halifax that he might as well continue his tour and not bother attending in Ottawa; he had no intention of prolonging the session in spite of the rising public outcry. But Dufferin was of a different mind: “At such a critical state of affairs it is not fair to my ministers to remain at a distance and so I go,” he answered. His intentions were misinterpreted by the public; the news that the Governor General was coming to Ottawa strengthened the belief that the session would be more than a mere formality.

Dufferin arrived in the capital on the very day of the session – “the memorable 13th of August” as it came to be called. He saw his shaky Prime Minister who submitted the Government’s unanimous advice that Parliament should conduct no business. The Governor General
did not feel justified in withdrawing his confidence from his ministers on the basis of newspaper reports, but he extracted a price for his assent: Parliament must meet again within eight weeks. Macdonald agreed. With Dufferin’s acquiescence, the Cabinet later lengthened the interval to ten.

The city itself was in an unprecedented state of excitement. No one could guess the Governor General’s intentions but it was obvious that, if prorogation were planned, the Opposition intended to do its best to frustrate it. Already the Liberals were chipping away at Macdonald’s majority. Thirteen members who normally supported the ministry had joined the ranks of the enemy. These were numbered among the ninety-two who signed a memorial to His Excellency. A delegation, headed by Richard Cartwright, a one-time Conservative with a great beak of a nose and prodigious side whiskers, waited upon Lord Dufferin that morning to read it. The honour of the country, said the memorial, required that there be no further delay. Four months had elapsed; nothing had happened. Parliament must remain in session until an investigation was forced. Cartwright had broken with Macdonald when the latter had made Hincks, and not himself, Minister of Finance. Since then he had pursued an independent course in Parliament. Now the Pacific Scandal was helping to turn him into a die-hard Grit; for the remainder of his long life the memory of these days would continue to haunt and embitter him; and he would never forgive Macdonald. Years later, when Parliament discussed the erection of a statue to Canada’s first prime minister, Cartwright kept insisting that the details of the Pacific Scandal should be engraved upon the base; it took all the powers of persuasion his colleagues could summon up to talk him out of it.

Dufferin, listening to Cartwright’s delegation, realized that he would be damned if he prorogued Parliament and damned if he did not; but he had made up his mind: to act against the advice of his ministers would be “an act of personal interference on my part.” What guarantee could the delegation give him that Parliament would endorse it?

“What right has the Governor-General, on his personal responsibility, to proclaim to Canada-nay, not only to Canada, but to America and Europe, as such a proceeding on his part must necessarily do, that he believes his Ministers guilty of the crimes alleged against them?” he asked. The bellicose Cartwright and his delegation retired with bad grace.

By noon that day the Ottawa streets were crowded and the corridors of the Parliament Buildings swarming with people. The city was like a furnace but the public ignored the heat and debated the question:
What would the Governor General do?
At one o’clock the word spread that the entourage had been called out; prorogation was certain; once again, investigation had been stifled.

The spectacle that took place in the House of Commons that afternoon was one of the strangest the country had known. Both the Government and the Opposition were braced for it. On each side the tacticians had planned every move, all of them based on the hoary British pageantry and make-believe that accompanied the official end of a parliamentary session. Alexander Mackenzie, the solemn Sarnia stonemason who would become Liberal prime minister if Macdonald’s ministry fell, knew exactly what he had to do. He must leap to his feet and start talking the moment the Speaker took the chair and before the Speaker could answer the traditional summons of the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod. For as soon as Black Rod knocked three times on the Commons door, inviolable custom decreed that all debate must give way.

But there was more than this: it was usual for a House assembling to proceed with routine business – the reading of formal communications, the receiving of committee reports, the introduction of new members. The gaunt Mackenzie could not afford to wait for this; he must seize the floor and hold it the instant the House was organized. Even then he could be stopped unless he rose on a question of privilege, which, by the rules of Parliament, did not require the usual two days’ notice.

That, then, was Mackenzie’s plan: the instant the ample rump of the handsome and burly James Cockburn grazed the velvet of the Speaker’s chair, he must be on his feet and in full voice.

It was the Government’s intention to frustrate this tactic by a counter-gambit that required equally delicate timing: the Speaker must reach his seat and Black Rod must hammer on the door of the House almost simultaneously. Such was the mood of the House that the strategists were prepared for the most far-fetched eventuality. Black Rod would be guarded by a detective en route to the Commons to make sure he was not kidnapped by the Grits; and, in defiance of all custom, police would be stationed at every door.

In the Commons, the tension began to mount. Three o’clock came and went but there was no sign of the Speaker. The members,
like spectators at a tennis match, switched their eyes back and forth between the door of the House and the parliamentary clock. Macdonald’s seat was empty; he was at the entrance to Parliament waiting to greet the Governor General. Across the floor, facing the empty seat, was the spare figure of Mackenzie, wound tight as a spring, nervously gripping his glasses in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other. The clock ticked away; still no Speaker. Then, at 3.20, a ripple of movement could be discerned behind the doors. It was the diminutive figure of René Edward Kimber, the Gentleman Usher in person, mace in hand, detective in tow, peeping through the glass of the central doorway. The Government’s strategy was plain.

Another five minutes ticked by. Finally the Speaker made his entrance and mounted to the dais. He was scarcely seated before Mackenzie was on his feet, talking at top speed in his heavy Scots brogue:

“I propose to address you and the House on a very important question
(Hear, hear)
. In the present grave phase of the history of our country and the extraordinary circumstances under which we are called together, I think it incumbent upon me to place the following motion in your hands.”

Pandemonium!
The Speaker had tried to interrupt Mackenzie and the Opposition, in full throat, was baying: “Go on! Go on!” But Mackenzie, in his eagerness to seize the floor, had moved too soon. The doors of the Commons were not yet open and thus, technically, the House was not in session. The Opposition leader stood his ground, fearful of losing his advantage, while the Sergeant-at-arms pushed the cumbersome doors aside. Now, reading swiftly and in his loudest voice, Mackenzie plunged into his motion: Parliament itself must investigate the charges of corruption. “Any tribunal created by the Executive would be a flagrant violation of the principles of this House.”

The House remained in an uproar as Mackenzie kept on. The Speaker’s handsome, heavy face was a picture of confusion. Black Rod, nonplussed by the stormy scene around him, was hammering with his mace the three knocks that tradition required. These could scarcely be heard, but the Government’s supporters, relief on their faces, began to cry that the messenger had arrived from the Senate. The Opposition maintained its chant of “Privilege! Privilege!” Mackenzie continued to talk. “No messenger shall interrupt me in the discharge of my duty,” he roared in a cracked voice.

A little pantomime now took place. The Speaker, unable to make himself heard above the uproar, engaged in dumb show with the Sergeant-at-arms, who dutifully admitted Black Rod. The messenger advanced to the Speaker’s Table, as custom decreed, and vainly tried to shout his summons. Mackenzie, barely stopping for breath, continued to talk while the Speaker, again in dumb show, persuaded the Sergeant-at-arms to pick up the great mace. By now even the galleries were in an uproar; but the charade continued with Black Rod doing his best to maintain some grace, bowing his customary three bows and retreating backward towards the doors. The Speaker followed from his dais; some of the Government’s supporters trooped out behind him. But the Opposition members remained in their seats and so did some Tories. In the Senate chamber, its galleries bright once more with millinery and silks, the rites of prorogation limped to their formal close.

Tactically, Macdonald had won every parliamentary skirmish since Huntington had risen in his place the previous April. He had managed to squelch a parliamentary investigation and he could now proceed with the kind of royal commission he had always wanted. But at what a cost! He had lost the sympathy of the public and, indeed, of some of his own followers. “I fear we cannot expect people to believe that the money he got was applied to any other purpose than bribery,” Dufferin recorded. “Here, as in most other places, to do the thing is a lesser sin than to be found out, and although I believe as much bribery went on on the other side; that fact, however patent – will not go far to help Macdonald even here where the standard of public morality is much lower than in England.”

On Parliament Hill, the uproar continued. The Opposition moved out of the Commons in a body and reconvened in the railway committee room where a marathon indignation meeting was mounted. Hour after hour, until ten-thirty that night, the heavy guns of the Liberal Party assailed the Government and the Governor General. Luther Holton, the Lincolnesque leader of the Quebec wing, attacked Lord Dufferin for “acting upon the advice of men who were themselves under impeachment for crimes which almost amounted to treason.” Mackenzie, his voice almost gone from his verbal exertions in the House, croaked that “a cry would go out from end to end of the land against the indignity which had been put upon [Parliament].” Blake, who was at his best on such occasions, called, amid cheers, for an investigation “not by men chosen by the accused, not by men
named by the gentlemen in the dock-but by those chosen by Parliament.” After the meeting broke up, the discussion continued in the streets. Little knots of people gathered under lamp posts all over town to argue that, had the Ministers of the Crown been innocent of the charges against them, they would have hastened the inquiry instead of delaying it. “It looks very black,” people kept saying to each other as the arguments continued, far into the humid Ottawa night.

By the following day, the Governor General felt he had “pulled through this abominable business better than I had expected.” But he had to suffer the slings and arrows of the Liberal press, which charged he had interfered with the freedom and privilege of debate. History books were scoured to find fittingly heinous parallels and the embattled Governor General found himself likened to King John, James II and even Charles I. In Montreal, the
Herald
called his action “the greatest outrage on the constitution since Oliver Cromwell ordered ‘that bauble’ to be taken away.” On August 15, the
Globe
, perturbed at the spectacle of the Crown being dragged into politics, drew back a little and confessed that, though His Excellency had committed an error, it was not one of intention. Bit by bit, the press cooled off.

As for Macdonald, he was, in Dufferin’s phrase, “in a terrible state.” He was very shaky and “it seems to me his political supporters are very shaky, too.” For the first time, the Governor General was pessimistic about the future of his ministry. “I don’t think,” he wrote, “the regime can last much longer.”

4
The least satisfactory Royal Commission

The three Royal Commissioners appointed under the great seal of Canada on August 14 began to take evidence at noon, on September 4, in the same railway committee room that three weeks before had echoed with the angry cries of the Opposition. On this very day, the general public was treated to an additional peek at the political morality of the period. In Montreal, the Grits had stolen another letter; or, at least, somebody had found the letter in the wrong postal box and turned it over to the Grits, who, ignoring the post office, turned it over to the Montreal
Herald
. The letter itself provided a
fascinating glimpse behind the political scenery. It was from John A. Macdonald to John Henry Pope, the square-jawed minister of agriculture; it dealt with Macdonald’s scheme to pressure the resignation of John Young, a Liberal member for Montreal West, by threatening to deny him the post of flour inspector, which he had held for nine years. Macdonald proposed to invoke a new act (from which Young later insisted he had been promised immunity) which prohibited Members of Parliament from receiving an outside salary. In the subsequent by-election Macdonald hoped to run William Workman, an extremely well-heeled Montreal businessman, whose person and pocketbook would be tempted into the fold by offering him the bribe of an early Senate appointment. The letter ordered Pope to hold up Young’s appointment until all of Macdonald’s plans were laid. The cold-blooded political manoeuvring exposed in this letter was to a large extent cancelled out by the Liberals’ act of tampering with the mails; but it added to the public’s general sense of outrage at the outset of the Commission’s deliberations.