The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (64 page)

It was not yet over. The Opposition had twenty-three more amendments and it proposed to move them all. The galleries were thin the following day; all the old habitués were asleep. The House reconvened at three and sat until eleven that night. Five more amendments were defeated.

The long nights and the gruelling verbal skirmishes were taking their toll. Macdonald, Mackenzie and Pope were all seriously ill. So was the indomitable Tupper, suffering from a complaint later diagnosed as “catarrh of the liver.” Amor de Cosmos was ill. Keeler of Northumberland East was ill. Bannerman of South Renfrew was ill. Others, the press reported, were breaking down under the strain. And still Macdonald drove them on. Illness of some sort seemed to be a permanent condition of the political leaders of the day; Macdonald’s letters and those of his cabinet colleagues are full of earnest inquiries about each other’s health, reports of doctors’ advice and descriptions of their own symptoms. Rheumatism, chest pains, bronchitis and catarrh-the all-purpose disease-were high on the list of complaints; and no wonder: the parliamentarians came in from the frigid atmosphere of the Ottawa winter to sit for long hours in the closeness of the House, swathed in sweaty flannel underwear and thick, layered suits of heavy wool. Germs and sanitation were not really understood – surgeons did not even sterilize scalpels let alone themselves – bathing was infrequent and medical knowledge rudimentary. On Government leaders, such as Macdonald, the work load was crushing. Although the business of government was relatively uncomplicated compared to that of a later century, there were few executive short cuts. One could not pick up a telephone to transact a piece of business with dispatch. A rudimentary typewriter had been invented but it was rarely used; Macdonald considered it almost an insult to employ it in a letter of any substance. Though he did have a single secretary, he wrote almost all of his vast personal correspondence himself – thousands and thousands of letters in a lazy, angular hand. The wonder was not that he was ill; the wonder was that he was alive. The secret lay in his ability to relax totally after a harrowing parliamentary session – to push the fevered events of the day out of his mind, for an hour, a day, or, as in the case of the Pacific Scandal, forever. One of his methods was to devour cheap yellowbacks, novels of blood-curdling horror that were the popular mass reading of the day.

Now, ill and exhausted, he was nevertheless determined that, though there be a thousand amendments, the first reading of the bill should be voted on before the next day’s sitting ended.

He kept his word. The House sat from three until six, recessed briefly for dinner, and then remained in session for twelve hours without a break while amendment after amendment was offered and voted down. It had become a game, nothing more, and because it had become a game, a kind of gay lunacy settled over the House of Commons. The bitterness drained away and, as each amendment was offered, it was greeted with cheers by both sides. The speeches were mercifully short but even these were interrupted by whistles, chirps and desk-pounding. Paper pellets were flung about and caps placed over the heads of slumbering members. As evening gave way to night and night to morning, a choir was organized and the members began plaintively to sing “Home, Sweet Home.” Josiah Burr Plumb, known as the poet laureate of the Tory party, led one group in singing “When John A. Comes Marching Home.” Dr. Pierre Fortin, from the Gaspé, led the French members in the traditional voyageur song,
“En Roulant, Ma Boule, Roulant.”
The dapper James Domville, from King’s, New Brunswick, arrived at 6 a.m. after an all-night dinner party and commenced what the
Globe
referred to delicately as “most unseemly interruptions.”

There were other diversions. While one French Canadian was speaking, a dummy telegram was thrust into his hand; he asked the indulgence of the House to pause and read the contents, which were unprintable. Auguste-Charles-Philippe-Robert Landry, a young gentleman farmer from Montmagny, devised an original jape. Landry, who was well known as the most mischievous member in the House, went to a hairdresser about midnight and had his hair and moustache powdered iron grey; then he donned an old pair of green goggles, turned up his coat collar and took his seat at the back of the ministerial benches. The deputy sergeant-at-arms, not recognizing him, tried to throw him out; Landry refused to go. When the votes were being recorded on the latest amendment, the strange figure, gesturing ludicrously, stood up to be counted amid cheers and laughter. The clerk, whose duty it was to name each member as he voted, did not recognize Landry, looked again, puzzled, hesitated and blushed, then looked again and again until at length he pierced the disguise.

Finally, the last amendment was voted down and the main divisions on the two resolutions – the first on the land and the second on the cash subsidy – were carried. In Tupper’s absence, Macdonald introduced the bill founded on these resolutions respecting the Canadian Pacific Railway. Not until it was read for the first time did he allow the weary, punch-drunk House to adjourn. By then it was eight in the morning.

The Ottawa social season, held back for some weeks by the dike of
the great debate, had already burst out like a flood. “Balls, dinners, routs of all kinds, extravagant dressing and fashionable follies, in which half a dozen ministers are the moving figures, and foolish civil service clerks the puppets, are the order of the night at Ottawa,” the Saint John
Globe’s
correspondent reported primly. “The social world is full of unhealthy excitement.”

Sir Leonard and Lady Tilley’s grand ball in the Geological Museum was “the social event of the season,” according to the Ottawa
Free Press
, which devoted four solid columns to a description in which every minuscule detail of décor, dress and deportment was lovingly detailed. The reception room was “simply oriental in its splendour and luxuriousness … the refreshment portion of the hall was conducted on entirely total abstinence principles, therefore some ‘gentlemen’ did not have a chance to ‘forget themselves’ … at either end of the table were oyster tureens of solid ice – great blocks of the frigid crystal with a square hole cut in the top in which were the bivalves in their natural condition.”

The paper devoted a full paragraph of description to each of the dresses of 123 ladies, ranging from that of Mrs. Collingwood Schreiber, wife of the new engineer-in-chief (“Black gros grain silk and garnet satin dress; ornaments, pearls”) to that of Mrs. St-Onge Chapleau, wife of the contractors’ paid informant in the public works department (“Dress en train of gros grain and brocaded white silks combined, trimmed with maroon silk and fringes of flowers and wild grass; ornaments, diamonds and gold”).

Such affairs called for a considerable wardrobe, especially for the wives of cabinet ministers, who were invited everywhere. In the course of five days, for example, Lady Tilley attended three major social functions and wore a different formal gown to each one: black silk trimmed with lace for the Governor General’s reception, ivory-coloured grosgrain silk with black lace train, garlands of roses and feathered headdress to her own, and a cream-coloured silk
à la princesse
with plush velvet bodice “richly trimmed with lace” to Senator David Macpherson’s reception. In each instance, the finance minister’s wife also wore a different set of jewellery – diamonds one night, pearls the next, gold ornaments the third.

It must have astonished and perplexed many a visitor from London or Washington to encounter such a glittering assembly within the make-believe palaces of what was, in many respects, still a brawling, backwoods village. From Senator Macpherson’s reception in the
Senate chamber, the strains of the overture to
The Bohemian Girl
drifted out across the snowswept Ottawa River where millions of board feet of lumber – the red and white pine of Canada – lay ready for shipment. Every midwinter the city was a battle ground for Irish lumberjacks who drank, fought with bare knuckles, roamed the streets in gangs, smashed entire saloons, toppled buggies and sometimes even blew up houses. Only, perhaps, in Canada could such a town become the federal capital – selected for no other reason than that it neatly straddled the boundary between the two founding cultures.

To one American lady visitor, reporting back to her home town paper, the Cleveland
Herald
, Ottawa, at the time of the great debate, was “a city of frightful contrasts.” As for the social pretensions of the citizenry, they were a little much:

“The cordiality of the welcome (if you have
letters)
is most delightful though the satisfied air of self superiority is funny to behold. Society is, in Ottawa, a trifle
shaky
. There are so many grades, and inter-grades, as to bewilder the uninitiated. The Governor-General is placed on the same footing as the President of the United States, with a feeling in the Canadian breast that the President is complimented thereby.”

Watching the events in the House she was as puzzled by them as she was by the contrasts within the capital. “Canadian politics are kaleidoscopic. You turn one way, and the French Canadian Conservative with his English ally meet the English Grit in deadly political combat. Again, you turn, and they separate to fight by nationality for their religion, again to divide as Ultramontane and Liberal, until the whole thing becomes a tangle of confused opinions.”

And, if the booted lumberjacks were hooligans who gave no quarter when they met in sodden combat, the parliamentarians, engaged in their own verbal Donnybrooks over the future of the nation, were little better: “To the fair-playing average American, it is shocking to hear the way the rampant party in Parliament heaps insult and blatant invective on the minority party. There seems to be not the slightest sense of honor towards the mighty fallen. I doubt if in all the annals of the American Congress such indignities were ever offered to the party out of power even by a Democrat.”

Yet the Donnybrooks would have to continue, for the game was not yet played out. There were two more readings to go through before the bill could become law. The first of these was a clause by
clause consideration of the full text and this was bound to take time. Even the Governor General’s fancy-dress ice carnival on January 31 could not lure Macdonald from his duties in the House. At 12.30 that night, while Lord Lorne and his costumed guests were skating under the glare of two locomotive headlights beneath flag-draped arches, festoons of evergreens and Chinese lanterns – “an overhanging panorama of grotesque and fanciful figures” – the bill passed its second reading.

The following day, February 1, just before midnight, the bill was given its final reading. The formality of Senate assent was still needed but it was now as good as law and the Canadian Pacific Railway Company was a reality.

Finally, it was over. It had been ten years, almost to the month, since the subject of a railway to the Pacific had first been broached to the House of Commons. For all concerned it had been a desperate, frustrating and often humiliating decade; yet it had also been exhilarating. Macdonald was ill with fatigue, stomach trouble and nervous tension – so ill, in fact, that it would take him six months to recover; but he was triumphant. The railway, which had hurled him into the abyss of despond, had now hoisted him to the pinnacle of victory. It had consumed many of the men who were closely allied with it. Mackenzie was a political has-been. Blake was in retreat. Sir Hugh Allan had never lived down the events of the Pacific Scandal. Fleming had been driven back to England. Moberly had quit his profession. Marcus Smith hung grimly on but in a minor post. Joseph Whitehead was out of business. In every instance, the railway had changed and twisted their future, as it had Macdonald’s, as it had the nation’s.

Far out beyond the Red River, the prairie land lay desolate under its blanket of shifting snow, still bereft of settlers. In just twelve months, as Macdonald knew, all that must change. Before the present parliament was dissolved, cities yet unnamed would have their birth out on those windswept plains, passes yet uncharted would ring to the sound of axe and sledge. Within one year an army of twelve thousand men would be marshalled to invade the North West. Other armies would follow: ten thousand along the Fraser, twelve thousand attacking the mountain crevices, fifteen thousand blackening the face of the Shield. Nothing would ever be the same again. The tight little Canada of Confederation was already obsolete; the new Canada of the railway was about to be born. There was not a single man, woman or child in the nation who would not in some way be affected, often drastically, by the tortured decision made in Ottawa that night.

The future would not be easy and all the cries of dismay that had echoed down the corridors of the seventies would return to haunt the eighties. The granite shield of Canada had to be cracked open to let the railway through. The mountain barrier must be breasted and broken. There would be grief aplenty in the years to come – frustration, pain, hard decisions and, as always, bitter opposition.

But the great adventure was launched. Tomorrow would take care of itself, as it always did. At last the dream was about to become a reality. The triumph lay just a few short years ahead.

Chronology