The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (5 page)

The Liberal opposition to Macdonald’s railway policy stemmed in part from the excesses of the railway boom of the fifties. The Clear Grits of Ontario, led by prudent Calvinists in the persons of George Brown and Alexander Mackenzie, became jaundiced over the avalanche of spending. They viewed the Conservative railway schemes as a device to stay in office. The Grits, who were to form the nucleus of the Liberal Party after Confederation, came mainly from the farming counties of western Ontario; they were zealous reformers -“all sand and no dirt, clear grit all the way through” – and they had reason to be outraged. Between 1854 and 1857 an estimated one hundred million dollars in foreign capital was pumped into Canada for the purpose of building railways. Much of it found its way into the pockets of promoters and contractors. The usual scheme was to form a company, keep control of it, float as much stock as possible and then award lush construction contracts to men on the inside. Thomas Keefer insisted that when the Speaker’s bell rang for a division, the vast majority of the members of the legislature from Canada West were to be found in the apartments of an influential railway contractor who dispensed champagne as freely as if it were sarsaparilla. Keefer told of cabinet ministers accepting fees from promoters, contractors and railway officials and making such men “their most intimate companions, their hosts and guests, their patrons and protégés.” One American contractor, he said, virtually ran the Upper Canadian government in the fifties.

The railways publicly wooed the politicians, carrying them free on the slightest excuse and planning luxurious excursions of which the Grand Trunk’s three-week junket to the Maritimes in 1864 was perhaps the most memorable. Sixty-five politicians and forty newspapermen, many of them accompanied by their wives and children, accepted the railway’s largesse and set off through Detroit, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, Portland and Saint John on an odyssey which had a dual purpose: it popularized both the railway and the concept of a confederated Canada.

In such an atmosphere, it was inevitable that Allan Macdonell would eventually get his way. After his three rebuffs, he tried for a
fourth time and was granted, in 1858, a charter to construct a railway linking the navigable waters to the North West. His board of directors included two former premiers, a chief justice and a future lieutenant-governor. In spite of this glittering display of political muscle, the enterprise was short lived. The promoter’s ambitious plan to combine steamers, barges, locomotives and even wagons into one multi-faceted transportation system was blocked by his old adversary, the Hudson’s Bay Company. Macdonell managed to put a single boat on the lakes but did not drive a foot of steel. By 1860 the scheme had collapsed.

In spite of such frustrations it had become fashionable by this time to talk of a Pacific railway. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the English novelist and politician, Samuel Cunard, the Canadian shipbuilder, and Edward Watkin, the future president of the Grand Trunk, all followed Joseph Howe in paying lip-service to the principle. Both the British and the Canadian governments began to take an active interest in examining the North West with an eye to possible railway routes and a series of expeditions was launched at the end of the 1850’s to explore all the country between Lake Superior and the Rockies – land still under the control of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Then, in 1862, Sandford Fleming entered the picture and placed before the government the first carefully worked out plan for building a railroad to the Pacific. Fleming was already a respected railroad engineer; he had just laid out the Northern, from Toronto to Collingwood. He had read Carmichael Smyth’s pamphlet and it was this work that convinced him a railway across the continent was practical. Fleming, however, was not a man to lay a ruler across a map and call it a right of way. As a surveyor he knew that the ultimate location would depend upon the travail and, in some cases, the lives of hundreds of men toiling for years with aneroid and spirit-level, clawing their way up mountain slopes, struggling through impossible mires, clambering mile after bone-weary mile across acres of deadfalls. He had, after all, done it himself. What Fleming drew up was a combined work and cost sheet, together with a step-by-step scheme for development.

Of all the men connected with the active planning and construction of the great railway, only Fleming (apart from the politicians) was present at both the beginning and the end. His massive figure is to be seen in that most famous of all Canadian photographs, gazing down at Donald Smith hammering in the last spike – a mountain of
a man in a stovepipe hat, his vast beard trimmed in the shape of an executioner’s axe. It is surely no accident that Fleming is the only man in that historic picture dressed in formal clothes. If he had a sense of occasion it was because he had begun his involvement with the railroad a good seventeen years before any of the others who posed that day at Craigellachie in the mountains.

When Fleming wrote his “Observations and Practical Suggestions on the Subject of a Railway through British North America,” he was only thirty-five and most of his awesome accomplishments (including the invention of standard time) lay ahead of him. Typically, his outline for a “highway to the Pacific” was carefully thought out, measured and detailed. It was to be built in gradual stages: a territorial road first, then a telegraph line, then a railway laid directly on the original roadbed. It would cost, he figured (with remarkable accuracy, as it turned out), about one hundred million dollars and it would take at least twenty-five years to build.

It was the cautious and meticulous plan of a cautious and meticulous Scot, for Fleming, in spite of his inventive record (he had designed the first postage stamp in Canada and founded the Canadian Institute), was nothing if not deliberate. He worked out every detail down to the last horse, cross-tie and telegraph pole, and, of course, to the last dollar. His gradualness, he conceded, would not “satisfy the precipitate or impatient,” but he included in his memorandum a reminder of Aesop’s hare and tortoise, pointing out that the line of the railway extended over forty-five degrees of longitude, which was “equal to one-eighth of a circle of latitude passing entirely around the globe.” After all, wrote Fleming, “half a continent has to be redeemed and parted at least from a wild state of nature.”

It was an impressive memorandum and it undoubtedly did a great deal to advance Fleming’s considerable ambitions. Eight years later, when Canada’s pledge to British Columbia passed the Commons, the Prime Minister appointed Fleming Engineer-in-Chief of the Canadian Pacific Railway in addition to his previous appointment to the same capacity with the government-owned Intercolonial, then being built to link the Maritime provinces with central Canada. Being a politician, though a Scot, Macdonald
was
both “precipitate and impatient” by Fleming’s standards. George Etienne Cartier had, on his behalf, promised British Columbia that the railway would be commenced within two years and finished in ten. Certainly ten years had a more attractive ring than twenty-five; and the Prime Minister
could reassure himself that he had Joseph Trutch’s promise that the Pacific province would not hold him too firmly to that reckless schedule.

3
“Canada is a corpse”

The Canada of 1871 was a pioneer nation without an accessible frontier. The Canadian Shield was uninhabitable, the North West virtually unreachable. The real frontier was the American frontier, the real West the American West. As the decade opened, a quarter of all Canadians in North America were living south of the border.

Some went for adventure. These included the father of Buffalo Bill Cody, who had once kept a tavern in Toronto Township, and, significantly, two Minnesota steamboat men from Rockwood, Ontario, and Sorel, Quebec – James J. Hill and Norman W. Kittson – who would, a few years later, help launch the Canadian Pacific Railway. Some went for greater opportunity. These would soon include the frustrated composer of
O Canada
, Calixte Lavallée. But most went for land. The good land ran out in Upper Canada in the 1850’s and over the next generation the country began to feel a sense of limitation as farmers’ sons trekked off to Iowa and Minnesota never to return. The nation’s life-blood was being drained away.

A moving frontier is essential to the vitality of a burgeoning nation. It tends to draw to it the boldest and most independent spirits in the country and they in turn, stimulated and tempered by its challenge, become a regenerating force. Canada, by its geography, was being denied this kind of transfusion.

The call of the land was far stronger than the call of country. “The young Canadian leaving his native country to seek his fortune in the United States feels no greater wrench than a young Englishman would feel in leaving his county to seek his fortune in London,” the novelist Anthony Trollope noted during a voyage to North America. Nationalism, in the seventies, was a sickly plant. Even W. A. Foster, the founder of “Canada First,” the one authentic attempt at a nationalism of sorts, admitted that many Canadians were devoid of national feeling. In his famous address on the subject he quoted an English visitor who said that “to the Canadian it is of small concern what you think of his country. He has little patriotic pride in it himself.
Whatever pride of country a Canadian has, its object, for the most part, is outside Canada.”

Indeed, the very utterance of the phrase “Canadian Nation” was denounced in some quarters. “Canada,” said the
Globe
, “except by a mere play on words, is not a nation.” The newspaper helped destroy the Canada First movement by attacking it as disloyal and anti-British. The whole idea of a national spirit or “national sentiment,” to use the phrase of the day, was under suspicion as being slightly treasonous. William Canniff, who traced the growth of national feeling in a book published in 1875, wrote that after Confederation “there was hope that … the petty warfare of faction would be entirely submerged in a common Canadian sentiment. But this hope was short-lived.” And Goldwin Smith, the Regius professor from Oxford who made his home in The Grange at Toronto, wrote sadly that “the province, the sect, Orangism, Fenianism, Free Masonry, Oddfellowship, are more to the ordinary Canadian than Canada.”

If far off fields looked greener to many Canadians, it was because life at home often seemed drab and unrewarding. Trollope confessed that in passing from the United States into Canada one moved “from a richer country into one that is poorer, from a greater country into one that is less.” An Irishman who had spent a brief period in Canada before succumbing to the lure of the United States set down, in 1870, his feelings about the land he had left behind: “There is no galvanizing a corpse! Canada is dead – dead church, dead commerce, dead people. A poor, priest-ridden, politician-ridden, doctor-ridden, lawyer-ridden land. No energy, no enterprise, no snap.”

It was a harsh indictment but there was some truth in it. The country was controlled by the land-owning classes – the merchants, the professional people and the farm owners. In the United States manhood suffrage was universal; in Canada, the propertyless had no vote. An examination of the Parliament of 1871 shows clearly where the political power lay. Seventy-four Members were merchants or businessmen; eighty-seven belonged to the professions (half of these were lawyers); only fourteen were farmers.

The new dominion was not yet a cohesive nation but rather a bundle of isolated village communities connected by tenuous threads. Three-quarters of the population lived in comparative isolation on farms where, of necessity, most activity ceased at dusk and where, at certain times of the year, the condition of the concession roads made extended travel nearly impossible. There was scarcely a city
worthy of the name “metropolis.” Montreal with a population of one hundred thousand was really two cities – one French speaking, one English. Toronto, with half that population, was still largely an oversized village dominated by men of narrow views – Methodists, Tories and Orangemen; it reeked, as most cities did, of fresh manure, discarded garbage and the stench of ten thousand outdoor toilets. Ottawa was beyond the pale. For a newly elected Member of Parliament, it was, in the words of George Rose, the British humorist, “simple banishment.” Rose, who passed briefly through the new dominion after touring the United States, thought of Canada as “at best the Siberia of Great Britain.” As for the new capital, he was baffled that anyone, especially a peer of the realm, would choose to spend time there at all: “One doesn’t know what can induce a man to accept the post of Governor-General unless he should be a misanthrope or have hosts of relations at home whom he is anxious to make distant.”

For the industrial worker, life in Canada was harsh and colourless: he toiled for longer hours and for lower pay than his counterpart across the border. (In Quebec the
annual
wage in industry was $185; in Ontario, $245.) But there was not much industry; in all of Canada it employed fewer than two hundred thousand people. Thus there was little opportunity for those who wanted to escape the drudgery of the farms.

In those days of dawn to dusk labour, there were three major spare-time activities: for the land holders, there was politics; for the women, there was religion; for the labourers on farms and in factories, there was strong drink. A man applying for a job was generally asked two questions, his politics and his religion. His chance of acceptance depended upon how he replied. Political animosities were bitter and party allegiance generally unyielding. Most of the space in the newspapers was given over to political comment, almost all of it shrill and carping. As for the church, it was a welcome respite for those women who enjoyed no other real reprieve from the desolation and travail of farm life. The church was the hub of every small community, providing a platform for visiting lecturers and thespians and a meeting place where an unattached young lady might encounter a prospective husband. A sermon was as good as a stage show and, for many, the only entertainment they knew.