The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (62 page)

This series of meetings in Blake’s wake convinced Tupper that the Government could stand fast and exert party discipline on its followers. It was slowly becoming apparent that the great wave of public opprobrium, which Blake had so confidently expected, was largely non-existent. Though there were misgivings about certain clauses in the contract, the people manifestly wanted the railway question settled. The feeling had been evident in Montreal earlier that fall when Macdonald arrived with what was almost universally accepted as good news. Canadians had been hearing about the railway now for almost a decade. In 1871 it had been a new and frightening idea. Ten years later they had come to accept it as a probability.

Nor were they put off by the cries of scandal. The shrill press had made them cynical of such red herrings. If there was scandal, the people wanted proof and there was no proof. The Syndicate might be controversial but anyone could see that it was possessed of the kind of boldness that, after a decade of vacillation, could only be refreshing. In vain the
Globe
called for the people to rise up and smother Ottawa with their signatures; the
Globe
had cried wolf too often. A total of 266 petitions arrived at Ottawa, of which 256 came from Ontario. They contained 29,913 signatures, scarcely the avalanche that Blake and his followers had envisioned. Moreover, a suspicious number seemed to be in the same handwriting and one signature, at least, in Sir Richard Cartwright’s riding, belonged to a corpse. “Generally speaking,” the
Bystander
reported, “the attempts of the Opposition leaders to fire the heart of the people were not very successful.… The petitions for which the
Globe
, assuming the leadership of the party, called were almost a fiasco.”

But Blake and Cartwright had no intention of giving up. They had almost a month left to fight and one more major card to play.

6
Macdonald versus Blake again

Early in January, as the session began, there was a kind of insistent buzzing in Liberal circles in Ottawa and Toronto that something big was being planned: the Syndicate, the contract and the Government were about to be challenged in a dramatic and decisive fashion. In
the House, the big guns of the party continued to fire volleys at “these infamous propositions” (Hector Cameron) “fraught with mischief” (David Mills). On Friday, January 7, Macdonald, over Opposition protests, ruled that the contract debate would have precedence over everything save routine proceedings: “I believe that the settlement of the North West will be greatly retarded by delay … it ought to be discussed to the exclusion of all other matters until it is finally settled, and the policy of the Government either adopted or rejected by Parliament.”

That day the House sat until after midnight but such was the duration of the speeches that only five members were accommodated. They were not very illuminating. Half a continent, said John Charlton, was about to be “handed over to a soulless monopoly and ground down by their exactions.” The Government, said C. I. Rinfret from Lotbinière, was about to “bury millions of money in the mountains of British Columbia, in the deserts that border Lake Superior.” The members on both sides were starting to repeat themselves.

The Opposition could take heart for by the end of the week the news of the coming surprise was known, at least in part, to the rank and file. George Ross – “that little devil Ross” as Macdonald called him – let out a hint of it on Monday. “How do we know that this is the best bargain?” he asked. “How do we know that we may not have, within a few days, even though no tenders were asked for, better propositions?” By refusing to call for tenders, Ross declared, the Government had violated the general rule of the public works department. At this, several Conservatives, recalling the disastrous system installed by Mackenzie, cried “Hear! Hear!”

Ross retorted, darkly: “Well, they may ‘Hear, Hear’ in a few days something that will not gratify them very much.”

Though the House sat until three-thirty in the morning, there were only four speeches that day. Ross’s alone took four and three-quarter hours – “a feat I never attempted again.” Years later he admitted in his memoirs that he had spoken at “unpardonable length.”

Macdonald had a reasonably clear idea of what his adversaries were planning but he was more concerned with the troubles he faced from his own supporters.

Two days before he had received a letter from John Haggart, Member for South Lanark, regretting that he could not vote for the Government on the Pacific Railway resolutions. “I have tried to view them in as favourable a light as my friends but cannot. As it will be
the first vote I ever gave against the party, it causes me considerable uneasiness.” (It was a temporary defection and Macdonald, who believed that no politician could afford to hold lifelong grudges, put Haggart into his Cabinet later in the decade.)

From Halifax came word that some of his leading supporters there, prominent businessmen, were expressing grave doubts about the Government’s policy as a result of the debate in the House. They felt the party would be crushed under the financial load it was imposing on the country.

The Premier of Quebec, Joseph Adolphe Chapleau, had been in town for a week trying to sell the votes of his federal followers in exchange for a fancy price for the Quebec-owned railway. Macdonald, who could not commit the new company in advance, had to put him off with evasions. As a result Chapleau’s paper,
La Minerve
, turned against him on the issue.

The Manitoba members had an interview with both Macdonald and Tupper intimating that they could not support the bill unless it were modified; Macdonald did not yield. He was sixty-seven years old and he was ill with a complaint the doctors eventually diagnosed as “catarrh of the stomach” (“catarrh” was a fashionable medical term in the seventies); the Opposition papers were slyly insinuating that he was drunk again; some of his friends feared that he had cancer. But ill or not, on this issue Macdonald intended to stand firm as a rock. There would be no modification of the contract and no compromise. When the vote came he meant to regard it as a vote of confidence. Let his supporters betray him at their peril! If the bill failed to pass, he intended to resign.

On the night of January 11, when the resolution was finally taken out of committee, the Government whips were busy and at 1.30 a.m. Macdonald’s supporters trooped in, filling all the ministerial benches. The Opposition, so the
Mail
reported, was startled by this “sudden display of spontaneous force.”

The following day the ailing Mackenzie, absent from his seat for all of that session, made his first speech as the bill was read for the first time. He referred to “public reports that eminent men on both sides of politics are, at this moment, preparing offers to the Government of a much more favourable character than those that are now before it.” Mackenzie did not need to get his information from public reports. He knew better than most what was afoot. This was the Opposition’s final tactic – to mount a rival syndicate, which would
offer the Government a much better proposition divested of all the objectionable clauses in the original contract and at a cheaper price. If the Government refused this offer, the Opposition believed, it would be shown to be in league with the “monstrous monopoly,” as Cartwright called it. On the face of it the gambit was irresistible.

Even as Mackenzie spoke, the new syndicate was meeting at the Queen’s Hotel in Toronto to draw up a tender to be sent post-haste to Ottawa. The chairman and president was Sir William Howland, a one-time miller and wholesale merchant who had been Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario in 1873, and who had, since that time, been dancing on the periphery of Liberal politics. When he told the press he was not connected with any government, he was technically correct; no government had claimed him since 1867 when the Reform convention in Toronto rejected him. When he added that he was free from party prejudice, he was asking the country to strain its credulity; after all, he had appeared on the same platform with Blake a few weeks before. Howland was a distinguished-looking man, with black, candid eyes and a massive chin fringe, a little Lincolnesque of feature but without the hard resolution to be seen in the Lincoln portraits. He had been on the directorate of Allan Macdonell’s abortive transcontinental railway company in the 1850’s. His son was a director of Senator David Macpherson’s short-lived Interoceanic in 1872. Now he was trying again, in the belief that he was rescuing the country from the jaws of a ruinous monopoly. As chairman of the proposed venture, he was close to being a puppet. “The Telegram, coupling my name with the new Syndicate, was the first intimation I had that anything of the kind was in contemplation,” he naively told a reporter on January 11.

The Grit newspapers revealed the general terms of the new syndicate’s bid: they would ask only twenty-two million acres of land and twenty-two million dollars in cash. There would be no monopoly clause. They would ask no exemptions from the tariff on railway materials. They would ask no exemptions from taxation on either land or railway property. On the matter of the construction of the line, they were equally obliging. They would be willing to postpone the building of both the Lake Superior and the mountain sections and would cheerfully release the government from the liability of building the difficult Fraser River section from Emory’s Bar to Port Moody on salt water. They would also be willing to construct a line to Sault Ste Marie to connect with the U.S. railhead in return for a
bonus of twelve thousand dollars a mile. “The meeting was strictly a business one,” reported the Ottawa
Free Press
, “and there can be no question of the seriousness of the offer made.”

Such was the Opposition’s ploy – to paint the new syndicate as totally non-partisan and totally businesslike; to convince the country that all objectionable clauses in the contract were unnecessary. First, however, the tender had to reach the government; more delays would be needed.

Macdonald had determined to push the bill through its first reading and accordingly, on January 13, moved that the House waive the motions on the order paper and continue the discussion on the contract. The Liberals, of course, opposed him and the debate on this bit of procedure dragged on until 1.25 the following morning. The Opposition used every technique of filibuster, including lengthy readings from journals of the Ontario assembly of several years previous and, predictably, the terms of the contract with Sir Hugh Allan. In Ottawa, the
Free Press
had already begun the republication of all the infamous Pacific Scandal correspondence and was doing its best to depict Macdonald as a dictator overriding the rules of Parliament in a dangerous and tyrannical fashion “in terror that the new proposal will be in his hands before the resolutions are adopted.”

The following day Tupper revealed, on a question from Blake, that the new tender had reached him about an hour before the House sat. He had not had time to consider it. The atmosphere grew more acrimonious. Philippe Baby Casgrain, a scholarly looking Government supporter, began to speak in French. Cartwright pretended to sleep while his colleagues, to Casgrain’s discomfiture, engaged in badinage. There followed a vicious encounter between Tupper and Sir Albert J. Smith of New Brunswick, a former minister under Mackenzie. The two portly figures, each with huge grizzled sideburns, heavy jowls and grim eyes, hurled expletives at each other across the floor of the House. Smith had once been an independent. Tupper called him an office seeker, willing to sell out for a cabinet post. Smith called Tupper a slanderer: “There is no man in Canada who has done so much to degrade public life.” Tupper charged that a petition had been filed against Smith for “scandalous and wholesale bribery.” Smith retorted that no man in Canada was as corrupt as Tupper – “he is notorious for his bribery and corruption.”

Macdonald was too weak that day to attend but he knew what he must do. The talk about the new syndicate was having its effect.
It had raised the morale of the Opposition and it had caused new murmurings among his own followers in both House and Senate. Until now he had taken only a minor part in the debate, leaving the in-fighting to Tupper. He saw that he must kill the new syndicate – slay it so thoroughly that no man would ever dare to mention it again. He must lay bare its palpable weaknesses, expose the dangers that it posed to the country and then assassinate it with ridicule.

He rose on Monday, January 17, as soon as Tupper laid the new tender before the House. Blake, he knew, would follow the next day, with one of those earnest, perfectly constructed and brilliantly contrived orations for which he was so well known and for which he was preparing himself with his usual meticulous labour. There was a strange feeling of repertory about it all: the same chamber and the same adversaries of 1873, the same charges of scandal, corruption and dictatorship, the same feeling of age and infirmity (though not from drink this time) and the same subject – the railway. In a sense he was back where he had started, fighting on his feet for the contract as he had fought eight years before. But it was not quite the same; this time Macdonald had no apologies to make.

He had to be helped to his feet, but his words carried all the force of a pile driver: the road
would
be constructed. Period. “Notwithstanding all the wiles of the Opposition and the flimsy arrangement which it has concocted, the road is going to be built and proceeded with vigorously, continuously, systematically and successfully” – the adverbs fell like hammer blows – “until completion and the fate of Canada will then, as a Dominion, be sealed. Then will the fate of Canada as one great body be fixed beyond the possibility of honourable gentlemen to unsettle.”

Now the time had come for him to scupper that “flimsy arrangement”: “We have had tragedy, comedy and farce from the other side. Sir, it commenced with tragedy. The contract was declared oppressive … we were giving away whole lands of the North West.… The comedy was that when every one of the speeches of these honourable gentlemen were read to them, it was proved that last year, or the year before, and in previous years, they had thought one way, and that now they spoke in another way.…”