The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (60 page)

Ottawa has grown since Lord Dufferin first saw it in 1872. Then it was “a very desolate place, consisting of a jumble of brand new houses and shops … and a wilderness of wooden shanties spread along either side of long, broad strips of mud.” Now the Russell

House is adding a new wing to keep up with its enterprising opponents, the Windsor and the Union House. The former has installed fire grates in many of the rooms and the entire structure is lighted by gas; only the early calling of the session has prevented the building from being equipped with steam pipes. The Union House is now five storeys high and it has an elevator which works by hydraulic power, as well as hot and cold running water throughout. Patent “enunciators” connect every room with the main office, making the Union House so grand that it will henceforth be known as the Grand Union. “It is safe to say,” declares the
Free Press,
“that Ottawa can now give as good hotel accommodation as any place on the continent.”

For lesser
M.P.S
there are rooms advertised with open grates on Albert Street opposite the Opera House, where Nicholas Flood Davin is about to lecture in aid of the St. Patrick’s Orphan Asylum under the distinguished patronage of John A. Macdonald. Davin is one of tens of thousands whose lives and careers will be totally changed by the construction of the railway. Far out on the darkling plains lies a pile of bleached buffalo bones, the site of a future city named Regina whose voice he is to become
.

It is the Christmas season. Yuletide fancies are on sale: papier mâché brackets, glove boxes, card plates and solitaire boards. On Sparks Street, Stitt and Company announce “novelties for the opening” — kid gloves in pale, opera shades and lace jersey collars. “The Speech from the Throne is speechless about our beautiful Countess Coal Stoves,” trumpets one enterprising emporium
.

The newspapers, as usual, are crammed with odd and revealing trivia: Princess Louise, whose boredom with the capital is a matter of public speculation, has whiled away the hours writing something called “The Doctor’s Galop.” Police are arresting all drivers who have no bells on their sleighs. “Reprehensible” people are throwing refuse into the streets and getting an editorial slapping for it. A local youth has just accomplished the astonishing feat of drinking thirteen glasses of whiskey in as many minutes
.

But the big story is the opening of Parliament and the coming debate, which all now realize is the most important in the history of the young Dominion
.

Macdonald had called the session two months in advance in order to dispose of the contract before the construction season began. That
may have been why the opening seemed a little short of the usual pomp. Not so many ladies attended in full dress and only Sir Alexander Campbell, the leader of the Senate, appeared in a Windsor uniform. A special gallery, set aside for ladies in “half-evening dress,” was crowded. Lady Macdonald was not among them nor, to everyone’s chagrin, was the Princess Louise, daughter of the Queen and wife to the new governor general. Lord Lorne, a short, handsome man of thirty-five with a cowlick and a wisp of a moustache, arrived slightly early to the usual salute of guns, but Macdonald was not there to greet him; on doctor’s orders he remained in the Commons, husbanding his strength for the ordeal to come.

In the Speech from the Throne, His Excellency explained the “extra session,” as some were calling it: “No action can be taken by the contractors to prosecute the work, and no permanent arrangement for the organization of a systematic emigration from Europe to the North West Territories, can be satisfactorily made until the policy in Parliament with respect to the Railway has been decided.”

As he spoke, a lady in the gallery leaned forward and a red bow dropped from her hair. A young man, described as a “beau,” rushed forward and pressed it close to his heart.

The pageantry was ended; it was time for the politics to begin. Macdonald was ill and so was Mackenzie, the latter an unhappy ghost in the bulky shadow of Edward Blake, who had, in effect, overthrown him as Liberal leader. Blake was full of fight; he was outraged by the contract, which he considered a national scandal, and he meant to oust the Government on the strength of it, as he had seven years before. Across from him sat the bulldog figure of Tupper, eager for the contest.

Blake’s strategy was to be delay. He was totally convinced that he held in his hands a political issue as explosive as the Pacific Scandal. What he lacked in parliamentary power he felt he could make up in rising public wrath over such a massive giveaway to private capitalists. The ghost of the Scandal, which had frozen attitudes for all of that decade, still hovered over the House. The Opposition press would hit as hard as it could, opening the old sores of 1873, whipping up anti-American sentiment and linking it to the present syndicate, hinting at bribery, corruption and shameless political handouts. The Opposition tactic was to talk forever, to speak at every stage of the debate, to propose amendments at all points, to divide the House at every opportunity and to portray themselves as the saviours of the
country. They would paper the nation with tracts, engulf it with oratory, arouse it with mass meetings and expose Macdonald’s attempt to ride rough-shod over Parliament with his steam-roller majority. Blake believed that history would repeat itself, that he could force an election and carry the issue of the contract to the country. If that happened he had no doubt that he would win.

He had some powerful speakers on his team. The aristocratic Cartwright (back in Parliament after a by-election), vigorous and trenchant, was an orator of the first rank, fairly itching to tear into his old foe, Charles Tupper. A physical giant with muscles of iron and nerves of steel, his invective was unequalled. In political warfare, said Sir John Willison, “he knew only the law of the jungle” and in the debate that followed he was to prove it. Timothy Warren Anglin, the Speaker of the House during Mackenzie’s regime, had made himself the tribune of the Irish-Catholics in New Brunswick through his newspaper the
Morning Freeman
. He had small, pinched eyes, a worried face, sensuous lips and tiny spectacles but he was the most eloquent Irishman in the Commons; he would pass on that histrionic ability to his four-year-old daughter, Margaret, whom Sarah Bernhardt was to call “one of the few dramatic geniuses of the day.” And then there was the 49-year-old former Minister of the Interior, David Mills, “the philosopher of Bothwell” as Macdonald called him, half in jest, half in admiration, for he was the best-read man in Parliament and so expert on constitutional law that even the Prime Minister deferred to him.

They were a sober-looking group, these parliamentarians of 1880, in their dark suits and waistcoats. They wore broad ties, bows or four-in-hands, with vast knots – so large they often entirely hid the shirt beneath. The predominant colour was black or grey, though here and there a checked trouser or spotted vest broke the pattern. Their coats were long, often with velvet collars, and in the fashion of the era they carried cane and gloves when stepping out.

They sought individuality not in colour but in whisker styles. In the Commons of 1880, every conceivable fashion was to be found and it seemed to bear little relation to age. Macdonald, who was sixty-five, and Laurier, who was thirty-nine, were totally clean shaven with manes of curly hair that almost touched their collars. The young and dapper James Domville wore a thin, jet-black anchor beard and matching moustache, while the elderly Langevin sported, beneath his underlip, an infinitesimal
mouche
. Pope and Blake each wore
chin curtains, the latter’s so tenuous that it could hardly be seen in photographs. Tilley wore long sideburns to the jaw line. Tupper sported handsome greying mutton chops. Mackenzie had a thin goatee. Anglin wore weeping sideburns that looked like squirrels’ tails. Cartwright and Edgar Dewdney both sported astonishing Dundrearies, named for the titled and popular character in Tom Taylor’s
Our American Cousin
, the play Lincoln was watching at the time of his assassination.

The beard styles were endless, ranging from Phillippe Baby Casgrain’s dashing Imperial to the immense pioneer beard of Alfred Boultbee of York East. There were spade beards, forked beards, Vandykes, goatees, ducktails, Hulihees and chin puffs. The moustache, however, was growing in popularity. David Mills had a handsome black waxed moustache, Josiah Burr Plumb of Niagara a shaggy, greying soup-strainer, Auguste Landry of Montmagny a wispy walrus. The whisker styles were as varied as the men who wore them and so were the devices that were advertised to keep them flourishing – the pomades and beeswaxes, the iron curling tongs, the patent moustache trainers, the special brushes of varying sizes and that magic lotion known as “Ayre’s Formula,” which was guaranteed to grow whiskers in just five weeks.

The great majority of this parliament of individualists belonged to Macdonald. Could he keep them all in line? The job of maintaining party discipline would not be easy; and, Macdonald knew, the debate would be exhausting. Stephen, who was already convinced that what was good for the
CPR
was good for the country, naively supposed that the business would be disposed of by Christmas, “otherwise a season may be lost.” Macdonald knew better. “Surely,” Stephen wrote, “the Opposition will not be foolish enough to take a line to damage us in the country, too.” But the Liberals’ whole strategy was to save the country from Stephen.

The debate, which began in early December and ran until the end of January, was the longest ever held until that time and one of the longest in all the history of the Canadian parliament. During that period, more than one million words were uttered in the House of Commons on the subject of the Canadian Pacific Railway contract – more words by far than there are in both the Old and the New Testaments. Though the proceedings were not immune from the kind of bitter, personal invective that marked the polemics of the period, there was a very real sense of the importance of the occasion. Tupper,
when he put the resolution to the House, called it “the most important question that has ever engaged the attention of this Parliament” and speaker after speaker on both sides echoed these words when it came his time to stand up and be counted. They realized, all of them, that once the contract was committed, the small, cramped Canada they knew could never again be the same. Some felt the nation would be beggared and ruined, others that it would blossom forth as a new entity. All understood that a turning point had been reached.

Goldwin Smith, who was opposed to any project which attempted to split the continent in two, understood one aspect of the coming debate. “Seldom has any country been summoned to deliberate upon an enterprise so vast in comparison with its resources, or so vitally connected with its fundamental policy,” he wrote in the
Bystander
. “What is truly momentous, and makes this a turning point in our destiny, is the choice which our people are now called upon to make between the continental and the anti-continental system, between the policy of antagonism to our neighbours on the south and that of partnership.”

Goldwin Smith was talking in extremes when he used words like “antagonism” but he managed to catch the sense of the issue. To Macdonald, “partnership” meant something perilously close to engulf ment; to the Liberals, it was not a danger but an economic asset. The echoes of that argument have yet to be stilled.

Meanwhile, the misgivings among Macdonald’s followers had to be met head-on. This became Tupper’s task. The party caucused in the railway committee room on Saturday, December 11, in a session that lasted all day. It was the first time the members had been able to examine the actual bill for, until that moment, everything published about the contract had been newspaper rumour. According to George Ross, “the caucus was so shocked and overwhelmed at the enormous concessions made by the Government that not a single member of the party expressed approval.” Tupper let them talk, and they talked all day. Then, in a forceful speech, in which he dealt with all their misgivings point by point, he brought them round. His most telling argument was not nationalistic but political: the construction of the railway would give the party such
éclat
throughout the nation that they would be rendered invincible in the next election. “They would all live to see the Canadian Pacific Railway contract become the strongest plank in the Conservative platform.” After this coldly pragmatic assessment, they gave him a unanimous vote of confidence.

In Parliament there were two days of minor in-fighting around the Speech from the Throne before Tupper put the resolutions regarding the subsidy and the land grant before the House. On the very first day, Blake came close to asking for a plebiscite on the contract, and though he did not use that word, the Opposition press immediately took up the cry. This Macdonald rejected: “It is contrary to the British constitution to submit any complicated measure for the discussion of the whole people.” It was up to the representatives of the people to argue it out, clause by clause; that was what they had been elected for. Mackenzie tried to get the details of all the other offers tabled but Macdonald rejected that, too; it would scarcely be fair, in a business sense, to state that “these persons failed in being strong enough to undertake the work.” All Macdonald would say was that the present offer was the most favourable one the Government had received. In this, he was correct; in point of fact, it was the only one.

Blake tried another gambit. When Tupper moved that the House go into Committee of the Whole to consider the contract on Tuesday, December 14, he tried to get the matter postponed until January 5. The Government majority, of course, beat him down, but it gave him a debating point to take to the public during the Christmas recess: the Government was trying to rush the charter through without giving the country a chance to consider it.

Tupper rose that Tuesday, heavy-jowled and solemn-eyed, and launched into an exhausting speech, one of the best of his career. Like a good general, he anticipated enemy attacks by embarking on a detailed history of the entire transaction, pinning down the Liberals by enumerating their own acts and declarations, showing that the policies of both governments had been, in practice, nearly identical and quoting exhaustive figures to prove that under the present contract, the people of Canada were getting a railway for thirty million dollars less than Mackenzie’s Railway Act of 1874 had promised (he conveniently forgot the free gift of seven hundred miles of finished government-built line). He dealt with the Syndicate and pointed to the successful launching of the St. Paul railway. He dealt with the duty-free clause and pointed out that the United States government had made similar concessions to its railway builders. He dealt with the tax-free land and called attention to the fact that as soon as it was sold – and the Syndicate was anxious to sell it – the new owners must pay taxes like anybody else. On and on he went, hour after hour, pausing for the dinner period and then taking up the
cause again until he had spoken for almost six hours. He wound up passionately: