The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (61 page)

“If I have no other bequest to make to my children after me, the proudest legacy I would desire to leave was the record that I was able to take an active part in the promotion of this great measure by which, I believe, Canada will receive an impetus that will make it a great and powerful country at no distant date.”

The following day was Blake’s. His speech was almost as long as Tupper’s – indeed, in that great debate any speech of less than two hours’ duration would be called short. It seemed much longer. It was a great effort, wrote Goldwin Smith, but “somewhat marred by a tendency which besets lawyers, and Chancery lawyers especially: he laboured all the points of the case, great and small, as he would be bound to do in pleading before an Equity Judge.” Though the galleries had been full and the House, too, at the outset, there was a dwindling as Blake droned on and on. Macdonald was not present; his illness kept him out of the House for most of the week. Mackenzie, whose own ailments would soon force him to his bed, seemed half asleep. It was an elaborate speech, designed to show that the contract would “prove disastrous to the future of this country” – but it was a little
too
elaborate. Blake’s speeches, as George Ross noted, were always too long. So were Tupper’s, but Tupper’s had some air in them. Tupper fired off a fact and let his listeners chew on it while he indulged in lively oratory. Blake’s speeches “contained more matter than even the House of Commons could assimilate, and to that extent his labours were lost.”

Blake got in some telling sallies, especially when he pointed out that one of the men Tupper was praising – Donald A. Smith – had been called a coward by that same Tupper and a liar by Macdonald.

“His name is not there,” called out one of the Government members.

“I know you do not see it, but it is there for all that, you know it well,” Blake retorted. But generally, most of what he said was indigestible.

In his speech Blake had hinted darkly at corruption. When Cartwright rose, he brought the hint out into the open in the most shameless fashion, twisting Tupper’s closing remarks in such a way as to cause a verbal Donnybrook. Of Tupper he said: “If I understand him aright, the fact of his being a permanent party in conducting this
negotiation would enable him to leave a substantial legacy to his children.”

Tupper, red-faced, jowls quivering, leaped to his feet; he had, he cried, insinuated nothing of the kind. Cartwright proceeded to read from Hansard, which did not carry the adjective “substantial.” He smoothly retracted his remark: if it was only a legacy of fame and not a substantial legacy, he was sorry for his mistake and also for the children. The Opposition burst into laughter, whereupon Cartwright could not resist adding that it was sometimes as hard to find out what Ministers meant as it was to ascertain what became of the memorable thirty-two thousand dollars in connection with the former contract. Langevin led the hissing from the Government benches. As soon as Cartwright could be heard over the uproar, he remarked that he did not wonder that Tupper did not like to be reminded of a contract that eight years before had hurled his party from power.

Cartwright’s speech was a mass of insinuations. He was a vengeful man, full of bitterness against Macdonald, as his memoirs show, unforgiving because he had once been passed over for Cabinet material in favour of Hincks, and permanently obsessed by the Pacific Scandal. In his speech he insinuated that Tupper had taken a bribe and hinted that as a result of arrangements with the present syndicate, Sir Hugh Allan would be reimbursed. He returned again and again to 1873. “We are not dealing with men whose characters and antecedents in managing Pacific Contracts are unknown to us,” he thundered. Tupper, he charged, was “an accomplice after the fact, and very nearly as guilty, in intention, as the man who was himself the criminal.”

When Cartwright was finished, Tupper rose to reply and the Members rushed to their seats. The Cumberland War Horse was beside himself. He peppered his retorts with such phrases as “lying,” “slander,” “most dishonourable” and “base and unmanly insinuations.” Before he was finished, Tupper turned to the press gallery and upbraided the editor of the
Globe
, Gordon Brown, the late founder’s brother, who was, he cried, “drawing venom from the depths of his own black heart.” An argument about who was the more un-parliamentary speaker was broken up only by the adjournment of the House.

Cartwright’s speech did not advance his party’s cause. The Montreal
Daily Witness
, a Grit paper, found it “objectionable in tone as well as in subject matter.” The Commons settled down after that and
the speeches were more moderate. One of the mildest and shortest was that of Wilfrid Laurier, who pointed out that “this is not a time for recrimination, it is a time … when every man should apply himself to discharging his duties to the best of his lights and conscience.” Laurier urged a go-slow policy. He suggested building the line through Sault Ste Marie and the United States, rather than through the Superior country, and declared that “to surrender unconditionally to the Syndicate” would be “a great calamity to the Dominion at large.”

By December 21, the Opposition was itching for a Christmas recess. It needed as much time as possible to take the case to the people through public meetings and to appeal, in Laurier’s phrase, to the best lights and conscience of Macdonald’s supporters through massive petitions from constituents opposed to the deal with the Syndicate. But Macdonald did not intend to give them any more time than necessary. In spite of strong agitation, he intended to keep the recess as short as possible.

On December 23, the unquenchable Cartwright was proposing a new bill before the House. The bill itself was an insinuation against the Syndicate and the Government. Its main clause provided that if any corporation that was granted a charter to construct the Canadian Pacific Railway was found to have contributed funds to any
M.P
. for campaign expenses, then that corporation would forfeit the charter. It was a pale attempt to revive the spectre of Sir Hugh Allan and the Conservative majority doomed it to failure.

With that, the House adjourned. As Timothy Anglin put it, whatever became of the Pacific goose they were now cooking, the Members would like to eat their Christmas goose at home (Canada was still British enough apparently to ignore the Yankee turkey).

For most of them it would be a busy Christmas season. Macdonald had called them back for January 5, the first Wednesday after the New Year. That left Blake with less than two weeks in which to rouse the nation.

5
The “avenging fury”

As the session closed, the Conservatives caucused again. Macdonald’s following, rallied a fortnight before by Tupper’s eloquence, had
grown alarmingly shaky. A new attempt was made to persuade Macdonald to modify the contract terms. The Manitobans were in open revolt over the monopoly clause in the contract. John Norquay, the Premier, had already written Macdonald of “grave apprehensions” in the province, even among the best friends of the Government. Resolutions were read in caucus from the Manitoba Tories and the Manitoba legislature urging that the clause be changed. Macdonald knew how impossible that was. Several other prominent members rose to press for the abandonment of the promised tax exemption on railway materials. Others pooh-poohed the idea of building the railway through the rock of Superior. Forty years later, an old
CPR
hand, William Pearce, recalled that “fully fifty percent of the … followers of Sir John never imagined that the road would be built between Sudbury Junction and Fort William nor that it would ever be built through the mountains.” The Quebec contingent offered to vote for the contract, but only if the Dominion government promised to purchase the province-owned white elephant – Q.M.O. & O. Railway along the north shore of the St. Lawrence, presumably at an inflated figure.

The Opposition newspapers had their pipelines into the caucus room. The
Free Press
in Ottawa reported that “the breach in the ranks of the ministerialists had widened considerably.… There was a hope the Government would pause and find some way out of the dilemma; now this hope has been taken away there is nothing left for those who cannot conscientiously support the Government but to vote against them.” This was a broad hint to the dissidents to follow the example of 1873. The
Daily Witness
reported “a general weakening of Government supporters all along the line before they left for home. They felt they were taking their political lives in their hands but had not the nerve of desperation to enable them to face their constituents with a show of confidence.”

Nonetheless, the party leadership stood firm, and Tupper, in a three-hour speech to the dissenters, held them, for the moment, in line.

Meanwhile, the Opposition was in full cry across the country. Blake’s five-hour speech in the House was printed as a pamphlet and the Liberals were smothering the nation with it. The Conservatives replied with a similar blizzard of tracts reprinting Tupper’s speech. Christmas or not, every Liberal member was under orders to call a series of public meetings, to attack the Syndicate and the contract and
to force through a series of resolutions to be forwarded to Ottawa. Coincident with this, petitions were to be circulated on the same theme so that hundreds of thousands of signatures would fall like a storm upon the capital by the time Parliament sat again.

The meetings, which were continued up to and past the reconvening of the House, were lengthy, raucous and often wicked. In London, John Charlton, a big-chested, full-bearded lumber merchant, warned his constituents to watch their representatives in Parliament closely, for it would pay the Syndicate well to spend a million dollars to secure the passage of the measure in the House. In Kingston, Cartwright, laden down with a formidable burden of maps, books and pamphlets, referred to the present arrangement as another Pacific Scandal and suggested that the Syndicate had no intention of building anything save a cheap and profitable prairie section. Up sprang a Tory plant and, before the Liberal chairman could forestall him, moved a resolution supporting the Government, which he proceeded to have carried by a vote of cheers. The chairman, who also happened to be the mayor, refused to accept the tactic and the meeting eventually broke up in confusion.

This had been the Conservative strategy, agreed to at the party caucus: they would initiate no meetings of their own but they would have a man of stature at every Grit gathering to challenge the speaker. The venerable and white-bearded Alfred Boultbee was detailed to appear at the first big meeting in Montreal’s St. Lawrence Hall, where Blake and Sir William Howland were both scheduled to speak. Boultbee forced his way in with difficulty and, all the time that the chairman, a grey-haired Liberal senator, was attacking the Syndicate, slowly squeezed his way through the Grit phalanx to the front. As soon as the chairman finished, Boultbee demanded to be heard. The chairman told him that he would have to wait for Blake to speak. Blake spoke for more than three hours while Boultbee, taunted continually by his opponents, held his ground. Immediately Blake finished, Boultbee again demanded to speak. The chairman said that the resolution attacking the Government would first have to be put. Following this, the intrepid Boultbee tried again, only to be informed that there were still more resolutions. Finally, around midnight, Boultbee was grudgingly given the floor but was hissed at and howled down until the meeting broke up in confusion.

The meetings were lengthy, well attended and often full of surprises. In East York, one meeting was convened at two in the afternoon
and continued until nine. The Liberal chairman tried to break it up for supper but the farmers insisted on hearing both sides of the question and agreed to forgo their evening meal and continue the discussion. The Liberal orators retired anyway, whereupon the farmers voted another man into the chair, a move that brought the Grits scurrying back, their suppers untasted.

The speaker most in demand was Edward Blake. The Ottawa
Free Press
compared his tour to Gladstone’s, previous to his British election victory, and saw him as “a Canadian statesman coming forward on behalf of the people at a great national crisis.” Tupper offered to attend Blake’s meetings if Blake would grant him half the time for speaking, an offer which the wordy Liberal leader rejected since, he said, he would require an entire evening for his own statement of the case. Blake’s meetings opened at 8 p.m. and were rarely finished until long after midnight.

Tupper determined on a change of tactics. He detailed a man to attend every Blake meeting to announce that he, Tupper, would reply to Blake, point by point, the following night and the dramatic spectacle occurred of “the Honourable Member for Duluth,” as James Colebrook Patterson, the Member for Essex, called Blake, “flying from city to city, pursued by the Honourable Minister of Railways as though he were an avenging fury.”

It made for exciting holiday fare in an era devoid of electronic entertainment and both Blake’s and Tupper’s meetings were jammed. The climax came at Blake’s second Montreal meeting held in the Queen’s Hall in early January. By the time Blake and Laurier appeared, hundreds had been turned away. After the Grit leader’s speech, the usual resolution was offered demanding that the matter of the contract be decided at the polls. The chairman was about to put the question when two Tories sprang up and proposed an amendment, which stated that – as Tupper was scheduled to follow Blake in the same hall that week – the whole question ought to be held over until both sides had been heard. The chairman tried to put the resolution, the crowd called for the amendment and an “indescribable uproar” followed, with the chairman ruling the resolution carried. Tupper’s meeting followed to scenes of similar anarchy. Tupper felt, however, that he had carried the day. Abbott, the lawyer, who was present, told him that he had never before realized the influence of the human tongue. The meeting, Abbott estimated, had opened one-third friendly, one-third neutral and one-third hostile to the Minister.
When Tupper finished, he said, one-third was friendlier than ever, one-third was converted and one-third had been silenced.