Canada was a big country, awkward and difficult to govern; the internal brokerage of it was in party and in Parliament. The seats in the House of Commons were distributed on the principle that Quebec had sixty-five seats (as she had had before 1867 in the old Canadian Assembly) and these, divided into her population, gave a specific ratio that was applied to the other provinces. As for the rules of franchise, each province continued to apply its own pre-Confederation criteria until 1885, when a single Dominion franchise was established. All the provincial franchises, and the Dominion one, were based on some property qualification. It was not always very high, but all provinces took the view that owning property was a necessary condition of the vote. Women had not always been excluded—in colonial days women in certain circumstances could vote in Nova Scotia and Lower Canada—but that right had died out before Confederation.
However judiciously the House of Commons seats were apportioned, one fundamental fact could not be avoided: the West had little political power. Even as late as the election of 1900, only 17 of the 213 seats in the House of Commons were from west of Lake Superior. This was not an eastern conspiracy: it was elementary demography. Before 1885 the vast majority of mps. Sir John A. Macdonald included, had never been west of Georgian Bay, on Lake Huron. Hector Langevin was unusual in that, as Minister of Public Works, he made an official trip to British Columbia in 1871 via the Union and Central Pacific.
In the general election of 1872 there were some difficult constituencies for the government of Macdonald and Cartier. Macdonald himself was probably safe in Kingston. Langevin in Dorchester was less certain; George-Etienne Gartier in Montreal East was definitely in danger. But it was not only personal seats that were in jeopardy; Macdonald, like the French-Canadian leaders, was also concerned about Many other constituencies. Across Ontario, Conservative MPs worried about the Riel issue; the effect of the murder of Scott had not died away, and the Ontario government in 1871 put up a $5,000 reward for his murderer(s). The Pacific railway was bothersome as well, with Ontario taxes being thrown into the trackless mountains to run a railway to a negligible white population. With a new total of 88 available seats in Ontario, up from 82 in 1867, Macdonald did not like the look of things. So he told his followers in any doubtful constituencies to “spend money” persuading the electors to vote for them. After all, Macdonald said, “Our friends have been liberal with contributions.” They had.
Most of the Conservative campaign money in 1872 came from Sir Hugh Allan, Montreal shipping magnate and president of the Canada Pacific Railway Company, who wanted the government contract to build the Pacific railway. His shipping line needed good railway connections that he could control. Allan needed the government, and the government needed Allan. A lot of money was dished out by Sir Hugh, about a third of a million to Macdonald, Cartier, and Langevin. (Multiply midcentury dollar figures by about twelve to get a contemporary equivalent.)
Macdonald did win the election of 1872 but not too comfortably, despite bribery of the electors. His 1867 lead had been substantially reduced. And he had been right about Ontario; of its 88 seats, the Liberal opposition won at least 46, perhaps more. His working majority in the House of Commons would depend on the nature of each particular issue.
After the election. Sir Hugh Allan was rewarded with the contract to build the Pacific railway, on the assumption that he would divest himself of American control on his board of directors. But since Allan, unknown to Macdonald, had used American money to persuade the government to award him the contract, this proved difficult, and finally resulted in blackmail. The Liberals broke the scandal on April 2, 1873. When, that same month, Macdonald, claiming that his hands were clean because he had not profited personally, moved for a committee to look into the scandal, his majority was 31. But party discipline was casual, and that majority certainly could not be counted on. It did not take long to whittle it down. Before long it was down to 8, in a House of 200. Macdonald may have hoped that Prince Edward Island’s 6 new mps would support him, but when they arrived in the autumn of 1873 the Pacific Scandal was in full swing. Macdonald’s letters and telegrams of 1872 to Sir Hugh Allan were stolen by the Liberals and published. They made damning, juicy reading. “Must have another ten thousand. Do not fail me.” These letters, printed in
Cartoonist J. W. Bengough (1851-1923) founded the satirical weekly Grip, which made its name by ridiculing Sir John A. Macdonald during the Pacific Scandal. The Liberal leader Alexander Mackenzie gazes skeptically up at Sir John A. Macdonald.
Liberal papers, forced even loyal Conservatives to wince or hope to heaven there wasn’t a word of truth in it. But there was. And Macdonald’s supporters were hardly mollified by his claim that he could simply not remember certain events and incidents. This may have been true—like many of his contemporaries, he was at times a heavy drinker—but that made things worse.
When Parliament met in October 1873, the new Prince Edward Island mps kept their skirts clear of Macdonald and went mainly to the Liberals, lured by the promise of a Cabinet seat. The government thought it might survive by one vote, but even that failed, and it resigned on November 5, 1873. Lord Dufferin, the Governor General, called on the Leader of the Opposition to form a government.
Alexander Mackenzie did just that. He was a short, brisk, Scottish contractor from Sarnia, Ontario, who had begun his working life at the age of fourteen as a stonemason. He was not the dour figure he has sometimes been portrayed as; he had a sense of humour, but with little education, having come up the hard way by work and rugged honesty, he lacked quickness and was apt to be stubborn and intractable. The Liberal party, too, was rather a mixed bag of Ontario Reformers, Maritime Liberals, and Quebec “Rouges.” As soon as Mackenzie got his feet under him, he called a General election for February 22, 1874, with the Pacific Scandal as the main item on the agenda. He and his Liberals proceeded to wipe the floor with the Tories. The Canadian electorate returned Mackenzie and the Liberals with a majority of 71 seats in a House of 206. It was devastating.
The House of Commons was not a place for the timid or the delicate. Charles Tupper, and others, were good at marshalling strong arguments for weak causes, but the House of Commons was apt to take its own debates with several grains of salt. It distrusted rhetoric or eloquence; emotion, if it did not grow out of the argument itself, was suspect. The new mp who tried to make a “memorable speech” frequently found the seats in the Commons emptying, and his fine periods and metaphors might become the joke of the smoking-rooms. It was a rough place, made more so perhaps by the two parliamentary bars. During night sittings in the 1870s, half the mps would
Be under the weather, so Wilfrid Laurier observed.
Tall, slim, soigne, Laurier looked like the poet he was. He first came to the House of Commons in 1874, became a minister briefly in 1877-78,
Elevating the Standard—the Young Wilfrid Laurier. In 1877 Laurier (1841-1919) was made a minister in the cabinet of Alexander Mackenzie. He was defeated when he returned to his constituency for the statutory by-election, but was then offered a seat in Quebec (City) East. Here he is on the city’s battlements, hoisting the Liberal flag in triumph, having won the new by-election. By Octave-Henri Julien, published in the Canadian Illustrated News (December 15, 1877).
And became Leader of the Opposition in 1887. Laurier had the grasp of Parliament from the start. He did not mind a good debate, for there was steel in him, but his natural fastidiousness abhorred dirt and wrangles and hurting people. He liked set occasions best, and seemed to manage those better than the casual cut and thrust across the floor of the House. Laurier was an actor really; he had a profound sense of theatre. It was sometimes said that the polish of his speeches came from their being well rehearsed.
Sir John A. Macdonald was in many ways the most intriguing figure of them all, always listened to in the House, though not a parliamentary orator in the usual sense. He rarely met argument with argument. His speeches were those of a man measuring his audience and his subject, feeling out his path, rather like a man working his way across the stones of a hrook. Macdonald could pitch into the Opposition when he chose to, but his attacks usually took the form of insinuating a story that would amuse his followers, drawn from his great store culled from novels, biography, and history. He was certainly no beauty; his once thick, curly hair was clustered mainly at the back now, and his large nose seemed to have acquired ripeness as he went through years and whisky. He also had a rich, soft voice, a little gravelly, one of the more amiable legacies of years of drinking. He had a marvellous memory for names and faces, a memory that was legendary in his own time. All this was the stuff that kept his followers loyal to the end. Macdonald knew it; he never forgot that popularity was power, but his liking for human beings was genuine. He could not be pushed around too much, but the truth was that he had endless patience with the vagaries of the human animal. Still, when as a member of Cabinet young Charles Tupper (his father’s son, indeed) wanted something from Macdonald in 1890, “Dear Charlie,” Macdonald scribbled on the obtrusive letter from his young and bumptious colleague, “skin your own skunks.”
Parliament was like that, too: abrupt, caustic, humorous, distinctly unrefined. Sometimes it could be tumultuous, and on certain occasions the throwing of blue books and papers across the House was authorized by tradition. Tupper once complained of being hit by some such formidable object; the Opposition replied that it was only the Supplementary Estimates! Mayhem also appeared in committee from time to time. During a standing vote the yeas would line up on one side and the nays on the other, the fun consisting of dragging or carrying an mp over to the opposite side. Alexander Mackenzie, although short, one day selected the larger Cartier as his prize, hut the victim struggled with such energy that he escaped having to vote for the wrong side. Parliament sometimes proceeded amid the singing of songs, the mimicking of cats and roosters. In 1878, after the great parliamentary drunk of
February that year, the Canadian Illustrated News recommended that a special edition of the Hansard reports of parliamentary proceedings should be prepared for cab-drivers to teach them a proper stock of invective.
Sir Richard Cartwright, finance minister from 1873 to 1878, could denounce his Conservative opponents with vicious fluency. Cartwright loved finding things wrong, especially during the eighteen years (1878-96) when the Conservatives were in power. The magazine Grip had a cartoon of him in 1890 as a mounted knight, his shield bearing the legend, “Blue Ruin.” Someone is asking him, “But can’t you let us see the other side of the shield. Sir Richard?” “It hasn’t any other side!” the Blue Knight replies.
World History
