Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 730
For a moment the election was a triumph and a jubilee, a new mandate of power. But with Macdonald’s death the Fates began to cut the threads of Conservative destiny. Already the first ominous signs showed commercial depression approaching. Canada as an export country imports its hard times. We have no choice. The break of the European market brings to our North-West disaster that spreads throughout the Dominion. It was this peculiar dependence on the outside world that brought to Canada the hard times of the opening nineties. Taking the country by itself it should not have been so. For this was the beginning of the new electrical age which expanded and intensified the life and activity of the cities. Electric light, that was first seen in London, 1878, began now to illuminate Canada. Its unsightly cedar poles added a new touch of ugliness to the streets. But life received a new wakefulness from the arc lamp and the electric bulb. The uphill agony of the street-car horse ended in euthanasia. Electric cars ran in Montreal in 1892 and in the same year in Toronto. The telephone appeared in Montreal in 1879. It had 282 subscribers in 1879 and soon a myriad. Now appears the commuter, a half-urban, half-rural being, whirled in and out in his suburban train. Here begins the passing of the single city house with its back garden and garden wall, its one plum tree, its square of grass, a little rus in urbe. In place of it appears the apartment house with its new cliff-dwellers and its fountain hall with a rubber tree and goldfish, art compensating for vanished nature. The visible sign of the age is the growth of Montreal from its 100,000 people at Confederation to its 328,000 of the opening century; of Toronto, similarly, from a little more than 50,000 to more than 200,000. At Confederation 80 per cent of the Canadian people lived in the country or in country villages, but by 1901 the rural population was only 62 per cent, that had fallen to 50 per cent when the Great War ended. Already, at the time referred to here, the rural sections of the country began to be invaded with a skirmish line of golf clubs, summer cottages and, later, overrun and obliterated by the motor-car and the radio. These last changes came later but the beginning was already there, the handwriting on the wall — of the farmer’s barn — in the early nineties.
HAL ROSS PERRIGARD, A.R.C.A., MONTREAL, P.Q., 1941
“Life received a new wakefulness from the arc lamp and the electric bulb . . .” — page 193
But it did not need the oncoming of hard times to destroy the Conservative régime. The Manitoba School Question had J. S. Ewart, “Manitoba School Question,” 1894 doomed it already. Read by an outsider in a book, the Manitoba School Question sounds like a lawyer’s lullaby, about as interesting as a Privy Council decision on the sanitary authority of the City of London. The reality was very different. The question was bitter in its intensity. The political life of Canada, then and to-day, moves on ground beneath which are the ashes of the fires of two centuries ago, of French against English, of Roman Catholic against Protestant. They can still be fanned to a flame; they might still precipitate a conflagration. Hence arises our ever-familiar warning to one another not to “raise the race cry.” This to us is like “raising the devil” in the Middle Ages. The devil of race and the devil of language and the devil of religion all appear in the smoke together. The Conservative party in an evil hour raised the devil. It happened thus: Manitoba had started life in 1870 as a bilingual province. It had of its own authority set up J. S. Willison, “Sir Wilfrid Laurier and the Liberal Party,” 1903 bilingual schools, and separate schools for Roman Catholics. But the influx of English-speaking and non-Catholic settlers into Manitoba in the twenty years 1870-1890 had entirely altered the environment. French was practically gone. Manitoba spoke what it understood to be English. The Roman Catholics were only 20,000 in a population of 150,000. The province undertook to pass a new School Act, abolishing the separate schools. At once 1890 the fat was in the fire, or rather in the law courts, when a Mr. Barrett entered suit against the City of Winnipeg for taxing him for non-Catholic schools.
The separate school system had been instituted in the former Province of Canada, and passed on in 1867 to Ontario and Quebec, where it still exists. The British North America Act guarantees it for Ontario and Quebec against provincial interference. Whether this guarantee extended to Manitoba under the terms of the (Canadian) Manitoba Act of 1870, and the Imperial Act of 1871 which validated it, was a complicated matter of legal interpretation. But the further question rose as to whether the people of Manitoba would stand for interference from the courts or from the Dominion, whether their new School Act of 1890 was valid or not. The cry arose, “Hands off Manitoba,” and all over Canada the ashes of old angers broke into flame. The government was in a dilemma. To oppose Manitoba would lose the Protestant vote, at least the Orange part of it, but it would gain the Catholic blue and the Irish green. The only hope was that the flood of argument would spread from court to court, from appeal to appeal, to die away at last in the Privy Council as a desert river runs to nothing in the sand. The opposite happened. Public interest grew with each appeal; the torrent ran to a tidal wave.
The party began to waver. The death of Sir John Thompson, the Roman Catholic prime minister, had followed close on that of Macdonald. His successor, Sir Mackenzie Bowell, a Protestant, carried on as best he might. Then came the Pickwickian decision of the Privy Council, namely, that Manitoba had full power to Feb., 1895 make the Act, and the Dominion Government full power to unmake it. This last was under what was called the ‘remedial power,’ and rests, for the curious, on Section 93, Clause 4, of the British North America Act. On the strength of this the Dominion Government first ordered Manitoba to alter its law Feb., 1896 of 1890 and, on refusal, introduced a remedial bill to coerce the Province. This was too much. The party was breaking on the Sir Charles Tupper, “Recollections of Sixty Years in Canada,” 1914 issue. Bowell was forced to resign. Sir Charles Tupper, brought from his High Commissionership in London to be Prime Minister, tried in vain to carry the bill. The Conservative majority had melted away. An appeal to the country brought Sir Wilfrid Laurier and the Liberals triumphantly to power. June 23, 1896 The inquisitive might well ask what happened to the Manitoba School Question. Few people could answer. Those most feverish about it forgot it most easily. In reality it was all settled by compromise within a year, inasmuch as compromise was possible. Though impossible as between Conservatives at Ottawa and Liberals in Winnipeg, it was easy as soon as a Liberal government in Winnipeg faced a Liberal government in Ottawa. Laurier indeed as leader had not needed to do anything, except do nothing. He called this “the lines of Torres Vedras,” a doubtful compliment to Wellington’s memory. The new act allowed teaching in French — or in any other language — for a school of so many pupils, and Roman Catholic teaching, or any Christian teaching, after hours, without cost. Everybody lived happily, not ever after, but at least till all sorts of odd languages multiplied like prairie chickens in Manitoba and presently had to go.
The incoming of Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s ministry dates as from Sir Wilfrid, 1897 1896. But it belongs really with the new century, for the first eleven years of which it ruled over the smiling prosperity of Canada. Its opening years ran parallel with the growing troubles in South Africa and witnessed the episode of the South African War. That tragic struggle needs no extended record here for its terrible reality lay far away and outside the path of our history. Canadian participation in it was on a wholly voluntary, indeed on a competitive basis. For most who went, the war was a glad adventure. Its cost was paid elsewhere. Canada knew little of the fierce opposition to the war that was evinced by a large section of the British people. Goldwin Smith and Mr. Henri Bourassa fearlessly denounced the war. But for most Canadians the general principle of support to the mother country outweighed the argument in a particular case. At any rate the generosity of the treatment of the conquered, the gift of free government and the final union of two races on an equal footing in South Africa, was altogether congenial to Canadian sympathy. Nor can it be doubted that comradeship in arms in South Africa was to aid towards the union of hearts in the life-and-death struggle of later conflicts, still behind the veil.
MEMORABLE DATES
1869
Red River Rebellion
1870
Manitoba Enters the Dominion
1871
Treaty of Washington
1871
British Columbia enters the Dominion
1873
Liberal Government of Alexander Mackenzie
1873
Prince Edward Island enters the Dominion
1878
Conservative Government
1885
North-West Rebellion
1886
Canadian Pacific Railway opened across Canada
1896
Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Prime Minister
ORIGINAL PAINTING BY T. M. SCHINTZ, HIGH RIVER, ALTA., 1941
“Many came in caravans of prairie schooners — children, chattels and all” — page 207
CHAPTER VIII. THE OPENING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY — 1896-1914
THE LOST WORLD of International Peace — Halcyon Days in Canada: the Invasion of the West: the New Provinces — Oriental Immigration — Intellectual Life, Letters and Art — The Empire Question — Federation vs. Alliance — The United States, Alaska and Reciprocity — Election of 1911 — The Conservative Government — The German Peril — The Great War.
Those who can remember the opening of the present century will recall the discussion as to whether it began in 1900 or in 1901. The discussion will be renewed in the year 2000. But for Canada the century more properly began in 1896 with the turn of the tide of prosperity, the advent of the Liberal Government and the great influx of population into the North-West.
Sir Wilfrid Laurier was fortunate in his accession to power. He was fortunate in the first place in his colleagues — in William Sir William, 1902 Mulock, a man combining intellectual eminence with long political experience; and in Clifford Sifton a right-arm of energy Sir Clifford, 1915 in the North-West. He was fortunate also in the moment of his success. It came just as the clouds of hard times gave way to the sunshine of reviving prosperity. It occurred just as the gold discoveries on the Yukon and the new mines in British Columbia opened the era of mineral production which has since altered the face and the future of Canada. The Yukon gold brought with it the romance and danger of the Edmonton Trail and the White Pass, the attempted project of a Yukon railway, the expectation of El Dorado, the rise of Dawson City and the morning song of W. Ogilvie, “Early Days on the Yukon,” 1913 sourdough poetry. Even as it all subsided it left a dawning realization that beneath the acres of snow of Canada might still lie buried treasure. With this came also the imperial stimulus of the great Diamond Jubilee in 1897, with its London Canadian Arch that announced, Free Homes for Millions. There was a feeling that a new era had begun.
Indeed it had. The earlier years of the century were to become halcyon days for the Liberal Party. Apart from any special excellence in their administration, they fell heir to the good fortune of the hour. After the close of the Boer War, the greater part of the world was at peace. There was indeed the war between Japan and Russia of 1904-5 but it was far away, did not disturb the intercourse of nations, while the fact that it was ended by a treaty made at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, seemed to give a foretaste of world solidarity. Not only was there peace but with it a background such as the generation born with the Great War can neither recall nor imagine, such as cannot conceivably come again within present lifetime. There was everywhere unimpeded trade and travel, and a flood of cosmopolitan migration. Two million people left Europe each year for the new world. Travellers moved without let or hindrance, with little even of formality, through what is now the stricken war area of Central Europe. Every city was as wide open as London. The gold standard of money supplied a universal medium of exchange, either direct or by simple and fixed conversion to local currencies. Finance and investment were international; the G. S. Lee, “Inspired Millionaires” 1911 stock exchanges, as it were, a new brotherhood. The reign of the financial saints seemed close at hand. The business man inherited the earth and ‘inspired millionaires’ atoned for their sins by their benefactions. A book called The Great Illusion, of which 1908 millions of copies were sold in dozens of languages, explained the anachronism and fruitlessness of war and stated that “the majority of adult Germans have never seen a battle and never will.” If the author was in error he had uncounted millions of us to share it with him.
Such an international environment reacted on all the new countries and most of all on Canada. “The new century,” said Sir Wilfrid, “is Canada’s.” It was, till the Devil took it away. Bountiful harvests and good prices drew a flood of immigrants towards the West, utterly different from any movement seen before. The new Minister of the Interior, Mr. Clifford Sifton, inaugurated a vigorous advertising campaign for immigration. Lecturers spoke at the fall fairs of the United States and visited the British Isles. Leaflets and maps were sent all over Europe; agencies opened at the ports. Imperial Germany became alarmed. J. Culliton, “Assisted Emigration and Land Settlement in Western Canada,” 1928 “The attempt to lure our fellow countrymen to this desolate, sub-arctic region,” so complained Wilhelm’s Street, Berlin, to Downing Street, London, “is to be denounced as criminal.” But Main Street, Winnipeg, won out. Immigrants began to move in a flood. As many as 75,000 came to the Western Provinces in 1905, 90,000 in 1906 and in the last four years before the Great War an average of 120,000 a year. The year 1913 brought 400,870 immigrants to Canada, of whom 151,000 went to the West. So rapid a growth has seldom been seen. Winnipeg had 26,000 people in 1891, and 163,000 in 1916. Calgary was non-existent G. Ham, “Reminiscences of a Raconteur,” 1921 at Confederation. When the Canadian Pacific was built it was just a poor place, a few shacks. They moved it a mile or so, on ropes, rather than move the railway line. It had 4,000 people in 1901 and 56,000 in 1916. Lethbridge rose from nothing to 10,000; Saskatoon changed its 113 people to 21,000, and Edmonton’s 4,000 increased to 54,000 in the same period.
Not only did numbers increase but at the same time the complexion of the population of the North-West and even of the Dominion; the proportion of alien races in its population was seriously altered. At Confederation 61 per cent of the people of Canada (the Canada of that day) were British in origin; 31 per cent were French. Inasmuch as 5.8 per cent were of German origin, the remaining aliens were only a little over 2 per cent, a quite negligible quota. The census of 1871 knows nothing of Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, nor of eastern Europe in general. J. M. Gibbon, “Canadian Mosaic,” 1938 But the census of 1921 shows a population in its origin British 55.4 per cent, French 27.9 per cent, and hence nearly 17 per cent of alien races. Overwhelmingly this aspect appears in the Prairie Provinces. Part of this new element had come in even before the great invasion. Between 1887 and 1890, 10,000 Mormons had settled in what is now Southern Alberta. In 1899 a grant of 320,000 acres was set aside for a settlement of Doukhobors, or spirit-wrestlers, from Russia. About 4,000 of them settled in Alberta in that year, and in all as many as 7,500 — excellent people except that their habit of periodically wrestling the spirit with very few clothes on was too metropolitan for prairie society. Early arrivals also were the 10,000 Icelanders whose presence was a compliment to the genial warmth of our North-West. Beyond this there were in the Prairie Provinces in F. Yeigh, “Through the Heart of Canada,” 1911 1916, 135,000 Austro-Hungarians, 63,000 Russians, 27,000 Poles, 36,000 Ukrainians — in all a British population of less than a million in a total of one million seven hundred thousand. In Alberta 40 per cent of the people were non-British. It must be remembered, too, that the bulk of these people were no longer refugees, loyalists or pilgrims. They were people on the make and on the move, exchanging European poverty for a new chance. Their new home they knew by advertisement only, and they faced no more danger in the transit than the doubtful coffee of an immigration shed. Yet we have to remember that their energy and their industry and their new patriotism towards their new home played a large part in the making of our Western Dominion.
It is only by recalling the spirit of the times that we can imagine a country exerting itself to attract so varied a population — Doukhobors running naked, Germans founding New Prussia in Saskatchewan, everybody talking everything, schools available for all languages, and people singing Home Sweet Home in all the tongues of Europe. There were more foreign-language newspapers in the Canadian West than anywhere else in the world. But these were still the ‘melting pot’ days, when a mixed population seemed as excellent as a mixed drink; days of a world in which world wars had been unknown a hundred years, and seemed gone for ever.
The only incoming element that worked the other way, and helped to keep unity of language in the Canadian West, was supplied by the Americans. In 1897 only 712 American citizens migrated to western Canada. In 1908, over 58,000 Americans migrated to Canada as a whole, the bulk of these going to the West. The number of people in the West of United States birth represented in 1916 almost twelve per cent, in Alberta over eighteen; to these, of course, must be added the rapid growth of young ‘Americans’ born in Canada. These immigrants were not like the paupers of the ‘hungry forties’ but substantial people, moving from old farms to new. Many came in caravans of prairie schooners — children, chattels and all. They brought, so the government said, at least a thousand dollars per person. Outside capital followed them as a fox follows a hen.
The larger part of the new settlement was rural. The homestead system put the people on the land. The system had been instituted in imitation of the United States and the huge rectangular survey on which it was based had already begun in 1869. The base used was the international boundary of 49° north, and a north-and-south line (principal meridian) close to Winnipeg (long. 97° 3′). Successive tiers of townships of 36 square miles (6 x 6) piled up like children’s blocks, one on top of the other towards the North Pole. Each of the square miles was a section. A quarter of a section (160 acres) was a homestead lot. Two W. W. Swanson, “Wheat,” 1930 sections of each township were reserved for the benefit of schools, a part represented the railway grant, and the land reserved for the Hudson’s Bay Company, one twentieth of each township. By 1912 as much as 183,918,171 acres had been surveyed, practically the whole available land of the provinces. Few people realized at the time that the system was suited only for one kind of farming, done in one way, in one kind of country. It shuts out all the old neighbourliness of the river group. Its application in a country of hills and dales like the Peace River seems utterly out of place. It means dependence on one or two kinds, principally on one kind, of grain crop, and on the export market and foreign trade. All this is its epitaph, written in the dust bowl of Kansas. In 1900 it was all bright with the colours of the morning. At least it served its day.
