Nobody could have predicted in those days that the great editor of the Globe would live to become first an Independent, next a Tory, and at the last a Liberal-Unionist. And perhaps none of these transformations would have been necessary if Sir George Ross had not tried the trick of "32 years in the saddle" from the days of Mowat; to do which and to remain politically virtuous was an impossible feat, even though the Premier of Ontario was a director of the Globe. Ross remained director, and also Premier. But it seems that Mr. Willison saw in such a dual role a greater inconsistency than even he deemed to be worthy of so brilliant a man. As he could not remove the director, he took what seemed to be a providential opportunity to remove the Premier.
The reconstructed Toronto News was the opportunity. The elimination of Ross was the first result. The removal of Laurier was the necessary sequel. The first was a pleasure. The second must have been a pang. Because of the first, in place of Sir George Ross, Willison had as frequent visitor to his sanctum James Pliny Whitney, the new Premier of Ontario, "honest enough to be bold and bold enough to be honest." From that to Toryism was merely opening a door. It took the new Tory editor eight years to remove his old idol Laurier, the result of which was a sort of intense and bigoted animosity to the Province of Quebec which Sir John is now learning to overcome. When the Tory News became a Northcliffe Imperialist organ it was inevitable that Sir John should convert his common hostility to the western Laurier-Liberals into a polite suspicion of the Radicals who were becoming Agrarians.
When finally, weary of mere politics in which he was our greatest journalistic expert by instinct and experience Sir John left the News, he was free to engage in work of a more practical character than writing, and to become Chairman of the Government's most important branch of active agenda outside of professional politics.
In all these Protean changes of makeup, if not of character, Sir John Willison has never abandoned two early habits; lawn bowling and reading the Globe. He is an expert in both. Bowling vexes him least, because its rules never change. The Globe gives him pangs because alas! it is now engaged in the unpardonable effort to merge the Liberals with the National Progressives as a greater Liberal Party.
Inconsistency may be the evolution of greatness. Inconstancy never. The Globe of a certain date in June, 1921, contained a front page display of the Agrarian bye-election victory in Medicine Hat. On another date there was an editorial once again advising the Agrarians to make common cause with Liberals against the common enemy, Meighenism, or as it might be said, Willisonism.
Perusing the Globe in his Reconstruction office, Sir John glances up—leisurely at a spot on the wall, next to the portrait of Sir John A. Macdonald. Like Macbeth's dagger, he sees a cold, organizing face smiling like Mona Lisa, fair at Sir John; the face of T. A. Crerar.
The Levite of Reconstruction shakes his fist.
"Down with you," he mutters. "Avaunt! I'll have none of you. There's nothing under Medicine Hat—except what Kipling said, 'all hell for a basement,' Natural gas, Crerar, not a test case at all. Oh, no. Too near the border."
Sir John yawns and peruses a proof of the 745th pamphlet issued from Reconstruction, total of nearly seven million copies paid for not by taxation of the people, but inferentially by tariffs. Probably a very patriotic minority read these Willison bulletins aiming to reconstruct the country by putting a crimp in the exportation of the Canadian dollar, looking after welfare work in factories, women and children, grappling with unemployment, helping to change over industry from war to peace, aiming to "stabilize" the nation, to curb that team of wild horses, Bolshevism and Agrarianism, and generally to keep Canada from going to perdition.
In spite of Sir John, in 1919 and 1920, people bought Canada almost bankrupt on the exchanges. Hence among the items in the cheapening list may be placed the Canadian dollar which is now worth about 89 cents in New York. That is what happens to the dollar when it goes away from home and plays prodigal son. What Sir John works to see is Canadian commodities crossing the border and the Yankee dollars coming back in exchange.