The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (21 page)

In his choice of commissioners, Macdonald was not able to escape the shrill charge of collusion. Oddly, Judge Day, the chairman, who had at the time of his appointment come down so firmly on Macdonald’s side, was not attacked by the press. The aging jurist with the big, luminous eyes and domed head was generally felt to be above politics, perhaps by virtue of his position as Chancellor of McGill; Mackenzie himself felt he could be relied upon to do his duty without fear or favour. The other two choices were greeted with more scepticism. The
Globe
dismissed Judge Antoine Polette, another ex-politician and retired Superior Court judge from Lower Canada, as “a bitter, prejudiced French Conservative and … a very dull man.” It reserved its heaviest ammunition, however, for the Honourable James Robert Gowan, a cadaverous-looking county court judge from Simcoe, Ontario, known to have been Macdonald’s close friend for twenty-five years, whom the newspaper saw as a hack political appointee and party follower: “The bailiffs and clerks in his county have always been strong John A. men – the most active electioneering agents of the Conservative Government in all the countryside.” Lord Dufferin, on his part, felt that “the length of time all three have been removed from politics frees them from the suspicion of political partisanship.”

And so commenced “the least satisfactory of all Royal Commissions.” It was unsatisfactory on several counts. There was no commission
counsel to cross-examine witnesses. Huntington had been expected to assume that role but Huntington, along with all members of the Opposition, was boycotting the entire proceedings on principle; the matter, he continued to insist, ought to be in the hands of a parliamentary committee. The commission had Huntington’s list of witnesses but the commissioners did not really know what to ask them. Their opening query was generally vague: “Have you any knowledge relating to an agreement between Sir Hugh Allan and Mr. G. W. McMullen, representing certain American capitalists, for the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway with American funds?” Apart from the three elderly judges no one else, save the Government in the person of Macdonald, was allowed the right of cross-examination. Several of the other principals would not be heard from. Cartier, who might have told so much, was in his grave. McMullen ignored the subpoena. Senator Asa B. Foster found it inconvenient to attend. George Norris, the clerk who had rifled Abbott’s safe, replied through his lawyer that he was too ill to appear. Of the thirty-six witnesses called, fifteen contributed nothing whatsoever to the proceedings, nor were they pressed to contribute more. They only knew, as the saying goes, what they had read in the papers.

It was obvious from the beginning why Macdonald had preferred a royal commission to a parliamentary inquiry. As Dufferin summed it up in his colourful way, “…  elderly judges have hardly the disembowelling powers which are rife in a young cross-examining counsel.” Dufferin added that the commission’s determination to allow the Government, through Macdonald, to question all witnesses “gave an unavoidable, one-sided aspect to the conduct of the case.” Judge Day took the casual attitude that it was the other side’s fault if they refused to claim a similar advantage. No wonder then, that Macdonald had “no fear but that the report must be a satisfactory one.”

Day after day, for all of September, the public was treated to the spectacle of powerful business figures and important politicians, by nature and training supposedly men of precision, fumbling about on the stand, delivering fuzzy or evasive answers, testifying to receipts that were “lost” or missing, prefacing their remarks with such phrases as “I cannot remember,” or “It is not very likely.…”

The first witness was Henry Starnes, the president of Allan’s Merchants’ Bank, and the chairman of Cartier’s election fund. Starnes
was shrewd of feature, with lidded lizard’s eyes and a beaked nose but he was a mountain of uncertainty when asked about contributions to the Cartier campaign: “I cannot say how all the money came but it was deposited with me, and by what means I do not exactly know.”

This was the city’s leading banker talking! Starnes, a lieutenant-colonel in the militia and a former mayor of Montreal, came empty-handed to the witness stand; he had no financial statement for the fund, no record of receipts or disbursements and, apparently, no memory of them. “When the receipt was published in the Montreal newspapers, I was astonished as I had forgotten all about it. I was surprised, for I had signed it I suppose in the hurry of the election; I might have signed more than one.”

Starnes could not name the exact amount the committee had received, or how much of that money Allan had supplied, nor was he asked by the commission to file any account.

Sir Francis Hincks was the second witness. He had arrived from Montreal, according to the
Globe
, “much put out by things as they are and consequently in a very bad humour.” Small wonder: he was approaching the twilight of a long career in business and politics (he was the only one of five brothers who did not enter the Church) and once again there was a cloud across his name. Where railways were concerned, Hincks the politician never seemed to let his public position interfere with the interests of Hincks the speculator. In 1854 a series of irregularities, all involving railways, had brought about his downfall as joint premier of the united Canadas. He had been accused of corruption for accepting one thousand shares of Grand Trunk stock while actively pushing for the railway. He was further charged before a special committee of the legislature with having speculated in another railway stock after getting inside information that it would be sold to the Grand Trunk. And he was also accused of spending public money to re-route a short line of railroad through some property he had purchased. For fifteen years after that Hincks exiled himself to the Caribbean where he served as governor, first of Barbados and then of British Guiana.

Now this shrivelled old man with the sharp features and the stooped shoulders once again saw his name connected with shady political manoeuvring. Because of his fierceness in debate he was known as “the Hyena,” but he was positively calflike on the witness stand. He did not “think it at all likely” that he had discussed Cartier’s alleged antipathy towards the
CPR
with McMullen. He professed ignorance
that Allan had been “a liberal contributor to the election funds.” Yet he must have known the money was coming from somewhere; he had got some himself. No commissioner thought to question him about that. Nor was he asked about the indefinite loan of ten thousand dollars that McMullen claimed Allan told him he had advanced. He denied everything and was excused.

Louis Beaubien,
M.P
., a provisional director of Allan’s company, had got seven thousand dollars from Allan as a “loan” to cover his own election expenses. Ill at ease on the stand, nervously correcting himself over and over again, he swore that he could not locate the receipt for the money, although he had seen it a month earlier. Who was to repay the loan? Beaubien started to say that he supposed the Government would, then corrected himself and said he meant “the friends of the Government.” Had he asked Allan for help? Again the evasive reply: “I suppose I must have said a word for myself at that time.”

When the managers of the Ottawa and Montreal telegraph companies took the stand, it developed that copies of the telegrams of the previous year had been destroyed under new rules which had “nothing to do with the elections” but which provided that originals could only be kept for six months. Thus all copies of telegrams for the period under investigation were gone. The reasons given were lack of storage space and to prevent “our operators being dragged up to Court.” The ubiquitous Allan, it turned out, was also president of the telegraph company.

Hector Louis Langevin, a bulky man with pouchy eyes, a page-boy hair style and a tiny
mouche
beneath his lower lip, was another public figure who destroyed most of his mail. Macdonald’s Minister of Public Works testified; “I don’t keep any of these letters, nor any letters that are mere formal letters. It has always been a rule with me as soon as I have finished with a letter to destroy it, unless it is an official letter to be filed in the Department. But my own letters I destroy, and I think, from what I have seen since, that I was perfectly right in this.”

Langevin admitted getting election funds from Allan but “as far as I can recollect” there were no conditions attached to them. When he had pointed out to Abbott that he needed help, Abbott had remarked “that it would not be fair that the burden should all fall on my shoulders but that certainly I should be helped by my friends.” In the end, Allan, through the ever-present Abbott, turned over $32,600 to Langevin. This was an enormous sum to receive from a single
source; in modern terms it would be equivalent to some two hundred thousand dollars. But nobody thought to ask Langevin what his feelings were when he received such a purse, or whether he felt indebted to Allan or suspicious of him. Nor was he asked to tell where the money went. Did he favour some candidates over others? Did he leave some out in the cold? What was it used for, exactly? Since Langevin kept no records, the record did not say. Eighteen years later another scandal would abruptly end Langevin’s career.

The tendency of the commissioners to take statements at their face value without further searching inquiry did not go unremarked. The manager of the Merchants’ Bank gave no useful testimony at all; but he might have been asked to furnish a list of payments made by drafts on Allan’s account during the period in question. He was not. Joseph Hamel spoke of several thousand dollars subscribed for the election in Kamouraska riding. Did it come in small sums or was a large portion subscribed by some one friend of the Government? He was not asked to break the figure down. Peter Murphy, a member of Cartier’s election committee, took the stand to testify that forty thousand dollars had been given by Allan to the Montreal fund but there was no attempt made by the commission to tie up the series of payments referred to and the dates of the alleged agreements between Allan and the Government. In the
Globe
, George Brown and his editorial writers pounded these points home daily. Brown had just returned from England, where he had been sent for health reasons immediately following his publication of the McMullen revelations. The Scandal had worn
him
down, too. Once across the water, Macdonald’s old adversary dined with one of
The Times’s
chief editorial writers, supplied him with documents dealing with the Scandal and then went after the lesser dailies and periodicals. “Putting the press men right,” he called it. The result was that when Macdonald testified before the commission, the major British papers were ready to pounce.

It was Macdonald’s testimony that the country was waiting for. The Prime Minister, who had attended every session of the commission, delivered himself of a long narrative, starting with his first meeting with Alfred Waddington and taking the story down past the election of 1872. He denied or qualified many of the statements in the McMullen account and he denied that Allan’s election contributions had influenced the Government in any way. He also made it clear that the Government had never had any intention of allowing the Americans to control the railway. But there were two damning
accusations that he could not and did not deny. He had asked Allan for election funds and he had promised Allan the presidency of the company. Macdonald strove to put these awkward truths in the best possible light; Allan was the obvious man for the job: his business experience, his financial standing in the community, his ability to command confidence among English financiers, all these qualified him above any others. It was natural that he should supply the Conservative Party with election funds; it was in his own interest to support the one party that had promised to push the railway through to completion.

Macdonald swore that he had not used one cent of Allan’s money for his own election; but he was forced to make one other damaging admission: Allan’s money had been spent in a manner “contrary to statute,” in bringing voters to the polls and in “dinners and things of that kind.” The Prime Minister’s euphemisms and deliberate vagueness could not cover up in the public mind the obvious deduction that the money had been used to bribe the voters. In his second capacity of Minister of Justice, he had knowingly broken the law.

Even Lord Dufferin, who had been leaning over backwards on Macdonald’s behalf, thought his testimony had “a very bad appearance.” Though he still did not believe his chief minister intended to sacrifice the interests of the country to Allan, “he cannot very well escape from the imputation of such an act, except by admitting that he was bleeding Allan very severely at the very time he was preparing to hedge him out from a participation in the benefits Allan was anticipating.”

The British press came down very hard on the Prime Minister.
The Times
declared that his testimony had confirmed the McMullen revelations. The
Pall Mall Gazette
followed: “If even we were to know no more than the admission made by Sir John Macdonald himself, we should be compelled to say that the scandal of his conduct is without precedent … it will be the business of the honest people of Canada to take care that none of the persons who are concerned in the proceedings of which Sir George Cartier was the agent shall ever again obtain power in Canada.” These opinions, originating with supposedly disinterested papers, and reprinted in the Opposition press, did incalculable damage to the Government cause. George Brown’s spade-work had paid off for the Liberal Party.

Two days later, Allan took the stand. The tiger of the Notman photograph was now a chastened witness; and, like so many who had preceded him, a forgetful one. He even forgot that he had signed a supplementary contract with his American backers on March 28, 1872, in which he was authorized to accept, if necessary, a smaller land grant for the railway than that originally proposed.

“I had no recollection of this contract until the last few days,” the laird of Ravenscrag declared. “And if I had been asked would have said I had never seen it.” But there was no question that the contract existed and that the most astute business leader in Canada, who insisted that everything be in writing, had put his signature to it.