The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (34 page)

Macdonald, as Mackenzie liked to remind the House, had made a similar pledge at the outset. But Macdonald’s plan at that time had been to build the line in one single effort and pay for it through the sale and subsidy of the prairie lands, which he believed would be quickly taken up. Mackenzie was forced to build the railroad piecemeal as a public work through a series of tendered contracts for which the government would foot the bill in cash. If this was to be done without raising taxes, the pace of construction was certain to be sluggish.

In March, 1875, Mackenzie introduced a bill to provide for the construction of the Esquimalt-Nanaimo line, making it clear that it was not an integral part of the
CPR
but a compensation for extending the time limit. The following month the Senate threw the measure out and the Carnarvon Terms lay in shreds. His opponents saw in this the fine hand of Edward Blake, two of whose supporters in the Senate had, in a close vote, opposed the bill. An alarmed Edgar informed Blake of the reaction from British Columbia: Dewdney had reported that “annexation to the U.S. is talked on all sides.”

Edgar was one of several prominent Liberals whom Mackenzie asked to reason with Blake. Finally, with the “no taxation” pledge made, the moody lawyer re-entered the Cabinet in May as Minister
of Justice. Together, he and the Prime Minister worked out a compromise offer to British Columbia. In lieu of the island railway, the government was prepared to pay the province $750,000. But the order-in-council was not worded that way. The money was to be advanced, it said, “for any delays which may take place in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway.” There was that word again –
delays!
British Columbia had had nothing but delays and now the government was practically promising more and offering hush money to boot. It was not money Victoria wanted: it would have to share that with the rest of the province. The island railway, on the other hand, would keep all the prosperity on the western side of the Strait of Georgia. The railway must be built. Early in 1876, the province rejected the offer and threatened secession.

Public opinion in the rest of Canada had by this time swung solidly behind Blake and Mackenzie. Dufferin wrote to London that “John Macdonald himself and his friends are of the same way of thinking.” The general attitude was best reflected later that year by J. W. Bengough’s cartoon in the
Canadian Illustrated News
, entitled “British Columbia in a Pet.” It showed Mackenzie (“Uncle Aleck”) promising a frowning lady (“Miss B. Columbia”) that “you’ll have your railway by and by,” to which the lady replies: “I want it now. You promised I should have it, and if I don’t, I’ll complain to Ma.”

An order-in-council, dated March 13, 1876, defended the Government’s position. Mackenzie could not refrain from adding a few intemperate phrases. The order contained references to “the appalling obligations” to which the country was committed and talked about “avoiding disaster from a premature announcement and a reckless prosecution of the Pacific Railway.” These inflammatory statements fed the fires of secession in British Columbia.

In April, Parliament embodied in its act of supply the taxation declaration that Blake insisted upon and it was a measure of its popularity that it passed by a vote of 149 to 10. Only the island members, headed by that “dogmatic dog,” De Cosmos, voted against it.

The Government of Canada had resolved to go its own way in the matter of the railway and to stop trying to conciliate British Columbia. If that meant separation, so be it.

2
“The horrid B.C. business”

Frederick Temple Blackwood, Viscount Clandeboye and Earl of Dufferin, was once again chafing with inactivity. Life in Ottawa he found so irksome that he filled his evenings reading his way through Plutarch’s
Lives
in the original tongue. He longed to get away, not on a fishing trip this time, but on a voyage of conciliation for which he felt his undoubted gifts as a diplomat superbly qualified him. In short, he wanted to go out to British Columbia to soothe ruffled feelings – and in a double capacity, as both a spokesman of the federal government and an agent for the Colonial Secretary.

Mackenzie, Blake and Cartwright, the Liberal Minister of Finance, greeted His Excellency’s proposal with something akin to terror – at least that was the word the Governor General used. The idea of the Queen’s representative, especially
this
Queen’s representative, plunging into the most delicate problem in Canadian dominion politics did not make them rest easily. The British Columbia government had already shown a propensity to grasp at straws. What straws would Dufferin unwittingly offer them? He loved making speeches; he made them on every possible occasion. He would undoubtedly make speeches all over British Columbia. His speeches were full of Irish blarney and could be calculated to butter up his listeners to the point of embarrassment. Macdonald, on first acquaintance, had found the new Governor General “rather too gushing for my taste.” He could, said Macdonald, stand a good deal of flattery, “but he lays it on rather too thick.” Would that flattery unwittingly inflate the expectations of the people to the point where a revival of understanding would be more impossible than ever? The three called on the Governor General on May 26 and “there ensued a long and very disagreeable discussion.” Finally, it was agreed that Dufferin would make a state visit to British Columbia but would maintain the traditional vice-regal attitude of strict neutrality.

The Governor General and his handsome countess went by rail to San Francisco and there embarked by naval vessel for the “nest of hornets.” Her Ladyship kept a journal, which was subsequently published, complete with sketches by her husband. They debarked from
H.M.S
.
Amethyst
at Esquimalt harbour on August 16, 1876, and drove through the streets of Victoria, cheered on by the entire populace – canoe-loads of Indians, Chinese in pigtails, Cariboo
miners, scores of little girls in private-school uniforms, old Hudson’s Bay hands and, most of all, hundreds of loyal English men and women – retired army officers, former civil servants, newly arrived immigrants. A company of archers, magnificently attired in green, rode out of an adjacent wood and acted as escort. They were shortly joined by a band of horsemen, red ribbons across their breasts, and then another company of green-clad soldiers and several bands and various detachments of militia and an army of small boys, each carrying a brightly coloured flag, and three hundred Indians selected from twelve tribes. All these and more accompanied the long train of carriages which conveyed the Governor General, his entourage and the leading citizens on a two and a half hour parade through the centre of town towards Government House, where one hundred young ladies were waiting to strew the ground with flowers.

The noble figure in the carriage, acknowledging the cheers that engulfed him, had just turned fifty and was still devilishly handsome. Such was his profile that, save for the short, dark beard on his chin, he might have posed, in a later era, for an Arrow Collar ad. There was a certain haughtiness to the tilt of his head for he was not without vanity. Long before the applause meter was invented he had devised a literary method of achieving the same effect: he used to send out verbatim reports of his speeches to the press, with bracketed phrases, such as “Prolonged applause,” “Great laughter,” “Cries of Hear! Hear!” inserted in the appropriate places. When reading a Dufferin speech, one gets an impression of near pandemonium. But they were good speeches for all of that, the sentences nicely turned, the local allusions graceful. Dufferin, after all, came from the best literary stock. His mother – hers was the Sheridan side of his family – wrote ballads; his aunt was a poet and singer. He himself had produced an amusing book of travel. A product of the British class system, Eton and Oxford educated, he knew all the titled families of England, but he also hobnobbed with Tennyson, Browning and Dickens.

Coming as a stranger to the new nation, he was able to see Canada whole and not as a loose collection of self-centred and often antagonistic communities. The petty provincialism of the Canadians bothered him and he tried, throughout his term and not unsuccessfully, to encourage in them a feeling of national pride. It is to Lord Dufferin that Canada owes two great national tourist attractions. Thanks to him, the city of Quebec was persuaded to retain its ancient walls; the terrace that bears his name is one result. And it was he who
made the first suggestion that the area around Niagara Falls be preserved as a national park and not a sideshow.

In Victoria, Dufferin, the instant nationalist, was dismayed to find no flicker of national feeling. The island town was in every sense a little bit of Old England, a condition that might one day be a tourist asset but was, in the situation of 1876, a threat to Confederation. Most of the residents had been born in Britain and “like all middle class Englishmen, have a vulgar contempt for everything that is not English.” The mentality was still that of a Crown Colony. The Victorians sent their wages home to the old country, referred to themselves as “English” and spoke of “Canadians” as if they came from a foreign land. Indeed, it had been their custom, at least until Confederation, to allude to Canadians as “white Chinamen” – aliens or adventurers. Dufferin discovered that officers of the Dominion sent across the mountains were seen in the same light as the carpetbaggers in the American South. The bitterness against the East was all-embracing: “The perfidy with which they consider themselves to have been treated has filled the entire community with a sentiment of genuine contempt for everything and everybody East of the Rocky Mountains,” the Governor General noted.

Not only did Victoria consider itself separate and distinct from Canada, but it also considered itself apart from the rest of the province. A secret society, the Carnarvon Club, was forming; one of its members was the son of Sir James Douglas, first governor of the colony. The club, in effect, advocated total separation from the mainland since the only alternative it would accept was the total fulfilment of the Carnarvon Terms. The mainland had no intention of consenting to those since it would mean adoption of the Bute Inlet route.

During Dufferin’s triumphal tour through the streets of Victoria, the vice-regal carriage approached an arch on which the motto “Carnarvon Terms or Separation” was inscribed. Dufferin would have preferred to ignore it but the handsome new lieutenant-governor, Albert Norton Richards, insisted on pointing it out, much to the Governor General’s dismay. Richards, an Upper Canadian, who had been only five years in British Columbia, was a strong nationalist and as such was reviled and execrated in the capital city. “An obscure wire puller” the
Daily Standard
had called him on his appointment the previous month. Dufferin was chagrined to discover that he had to struggle to get the townspeople to accord to Richards the precedence
his position demanded. “His appointment is bitterly resented as a social insult and he himself is denounced as a carpetbagger,” Dufferin remarked. He himself did not think too highly of the new lieutenant-governor, whose brother was Chief Justice of Canada. This man was “far inferior to him in every respect,” faulty in both his manner and his personal appearance. And now his gaucheries were about to force an embarrassing incident, on the very first day!

Dufferin, sighing inwardly, ordered the carriage to a halt, called for the reception committee and proceeded to make one of his ingenious little diplomatic speeches: “Gentlemen, I will go under your beautiful arch on one condition. I won’t ask you to do much; I beg but a trifling favour. I only ask that you allow me to suggest a slight change in the phrase you have set up. I merely ask you to alter one letter in your motto. Turn the S into an R – make it ‘Carnarvon Terms or Reparation’ and I’ll gladly pass under it.”

It was a measure of the popular feeling that the stubborn Victorians refused. There was, indeed, an attempt made to force the carriage forward under the arch but it wheeled around in the nick of time, whereupon, as Lady Dufferin confided to her journal, one man “jumped about as if he were mad, and when he met us above the arch he jumped again and shrieked, ‘Three groans for Mackenzie.’ ”

There were other arches – at least twenty in Victoria alone – for this was a period of arches and processions in Canada. There were Roman arches and Gothic arches and parabolic arches, arches made entirely of evergreens (Johnson Street was a veritable avenue of verdure) and arches of sturdy Douglas fir. The Chinese had erected three arches in the shape of pagodas, one of which bore the wistful legend “British Laws Are Just”; not far away another arch read “Chinese Must Go,” erected by those who wanted to ban all Orientals from the province, just laws or no. Under this arch, too, Dufferin refused to travel. But most of the arches on that sparkling August day dealt with the question of the moment: “Our Railway Iron Rusts” … “Confederated without Confederation” … “Railroad, the Bond of Union” … “The Iron Horse, the Civilizer of the World” … “Carnarvon Terms” … “United without Union.” The Governor General could scarcely avoid getting the message. One of the first things that met his eye was a huge inscription: “Welcome to Our Sea of Mountains.”
^*
Everywhere, the references to Blake were pointed and vituperative.

Dufferin’s preconceived notions about the greed of British Columbians (“we may take it for granted, I think, that the spending of money in their neighbourhood and not the Railway is the real thing to which the British Columbia people look”) were largely confirmed in the remarkable week that followed. Day after day, beginning at nine in the morning and continuing without interruption until seven that night, the representative of the Queen found himself receiving delegation after delegation to discuss the most controversial question in the country. There had never been anything quite like it before and there could never be anything like it again. He saw, in his own words, “every single soul in the place.” He saw the little ex-premier, Walkem, who had gone down to defeat (“he and all his family have a worldwide reputation for lying”); and he saw the new premier, A. C. Elliott, “a Dublin lawyer, respectable, but I should say of no more than respectable ability, a perfect gentleman, moderate and anxious to go as far as he dare in composing the dispute with Canada, but as he is member for Victoria he cannot afford to be behind his opponents in fighting for Victorian interests.”