The Masques of Ottawa

by Augustus Bridle

The suggestion was that the solicitor for the railway who had made a special study of the Board of Trade's argument for the sake of demolishing it, should himself present that side of the argument in the clear, concise English of which he is a master; that wherever necessary the French counsel should correct the statement; and that afterwards Mr. Beatty should proceed to demolish the argument which he himself had put up. The counsel was agreeable. Mr. Beatty rose to the occasion. His statement of the case was so satisfactory to the counsel for Trois Rivieres that he afterwards wondered how Beatty was ever able to demolish it and win the case.

Beatty has no hobbies. He cares for no art, collects no curios, has no great house, drives no big cars; cares not at all for society; thinks more of the Amateur Athletic Association and the Navy League and the boys of the Y.M.C.A., the athletic equipment of Queen's University and the success of Sir Arthur Currie as President of McGill. He never travels for pleasure. When he goes over the C.P.R., expect results. The average Montrealer does not even know where he lives. He is said to spend forty minutes a day, indoor weather, at basketball. In summer he camps. Snapshotted in a sweater he looks like a compromise between Babe Ruth batting a home run and Hofmann playing the piano.

When Beatty was first a young lawyer in Montreal he was so lonesome for the city he came from that he used to go down to the station to see the Toronto train pull in. He did not dream then that some day he would be the man that pulls all the trains in; that from his desk he should have a periscope on the world—every day—the greatest intelligence department in America. When he was a school lad in Thorold, afterwards at the Upper Canada "Prep." (where he got so bad a report that his father was advised to take him out of school), he had no idea that he would be Chancellor of Queen's University.

The system and the man. Determining which most affects the other is like the old problem of the hen and the egg. But here, anyhow, is a great system. No man venerates it more than Beatty. He does not even consent to call it a corporation; prefers to think of it as an association, imbued with enthusiasm and loyalty. Now and then he publicly discusses national ownership; none can do it better. He did it at Thorold soon after he was appointed. He argued it in Ottawa with Cabinet Ministers. He did it in Winnipeg. One suspects that Beatty's ability to do this was one of his qualifications for the presidency.

A year before Beatty became president a man high up in the system predicted that the C.P.R. would spend a million dollars to campaign against Bolshevism. He failed to foresee that the stolid old bulwark of things as they are would never need to do any such thing. All it needed to spend was Beatty who, within six months of the time he changed the sign on his door, had convinced the system that a sort of new optimistic vitality had got hold of it. There was once a cynical proverb around those offices: "It's cheaper to buy editors than newspapers." One hears very little of it now. The annual meeting of the Directors may be fine copy for the Montreal Gazette, but the yearly banquet of the officials is a matter of real public interest, especially to the young President. There is a psychology in this—"association"—that is not a corporation. How does he gauge it? From the officials. He does not visit the Angus shops; though if he did he would be welcome. It was an old axiom of Van Horne that what the head is, so also will the system be. Beatty extends the axiom—to include the officials. He would have them radiate optimism, not particularly caring that they get it from him.

For the past two years optimism has been needed. C.P. reports are not what they used to be. Even the stock exchanges tell the tale. But in comparison with American lines, with other Canadian systems—ah! here is always some comfort. Trust Beatty to miss no chance of intimating that he would much prefer to have real competition from Government roads. He fervently hopes for Government ownership to succeed. C.P. cannot thrive on weak competition. He has no fear that any sane Government will try absorbing the C.P.R. Even farmers, he thinks, would soon settle down to a sense of responsibility. The old pioneer is a hard organization to make into a tail that does not wag the dog. Steadily he has advertised to the public that the system is still the handbook of efficiency; let Government roads imitate. National ownership, being impersonal, somewhat Bolshevistic, and very vague, cannot develop the intensive "super-loyalty" of the big private system vested in a board of directors, and the chief.

Since ever he became chief Beatty has made this clear; for a purpose. Did I omit to say that he is the first C.P.R. president without whiskers; the first with a college degree; the first Canadian born, the first lawyer, the first bachelor and the first man from Toronto who had occupied that position; the youngest of all the presidents; that he used to be an expert at college Rugby; that at Upper Canada "Prep." he was much addicted to pugilism; not to mention the discarded tilt of his Fedora? If so it is because the man himself sets no value on these things. His faith is in the collective personality, called the Canadian Pacific, built up on the Personal Equation.

But Ottawa—what of that? Almost ever since Ottawa was, the C.P.R. has been said to own it. Governments of either party have never been inhospitable to the benign octopus—centipede it became—that had its origin in the Parliament of Canada and wrecked one Tory Government. The penalty of transcontinental railways is that they require to have mortgages on governments. Presently the worm turns. But that usually costs more money than the mortgage. We are now paying off the mortgages of two great systems. The C.P.R. mortgage was paid long ago. The President of the C.P.R. is usually regarded as second only to the Premier in point of national management. But Premiers and governments come and go; the President stays on. Suppose that in the year 19— there should be a Cabinet mainly of farmers. Alberta has a farmer government. Saskatchewan with a "Liberal" government has a Cabinet mainly of farmers. Manitoba sometimes has to remind herself that Premier Norris is a kind of farmer. Ontario has a farmer Premier and more than half a Cabinet of farmers.

This is the age of the farmers' innings. Suppose that a Cabinet of super-Agriculturists at the Capital some day should not agree with Mr. Beatty that farmers when they get responsibilities measure up and settle down to conservatism. Such a Cabinet might not remember that the C.P.R. had really done so very much for the prairies in comparison with what it has got from the West. It might decree that a lawyer President should be called upon to elucidate why he judges that so efficient a Personal Equation as the C.P.R. should not be "nationalized", if not government-owned, for the good of the whole people, and especially of the people whose traffic creates most of the revenues?

This is merely supposing. In any case Mr. Beatty would be master of the occasion. The lawyer who argued against himself and won at Three Rivers might be able to put up a more convincing argument to Ottawa Farmers than Lord Shaughnessy did to the Union Government when he offered to amalgamate the C.P.R. with the Government roads providing the management should be C.P.R. and the dividends guaranteed.