Trains of Recollection / Drawn from Fifty Years of Railway Service in Scotland and Canada, and told to Arthur Hawkes

by D. B. Hanna

Premier Greenway was a farmer, and not given to verbal rapiering. Otherwise, instead of allowing the fiery Joe to collide with a fait accompli, he might have emulated Lord North, who, when King George had at his request dismissed Charles James Fox not long before the signing of the American declaration of independence, wrote to Fox: “Sir,—His Majesty has thought proper to order a new Commission of the Treasury to be made out, in which I do not see your name.”

Clifford Sifton was the subject of political prophecy from his first appearance in public life. He had come West from Middlesex as a boy of fourteen. His father had been Speaker of the Assembly. He chose Brandon as the first field for his legal talents, and quickly became solicitor of the town. As such he appeared at the private car of the Deputy Minister of the Interior, who was waited upon by the Town Council with a request for some improvement in their relationships with the great Department. The discussion fell naturally into the hands of the youngest man in the party, whom the deputy felt it his duty to snub somewhat obviously.

Some years later the deputy saw this young man hang up his hat in the Minister of the Interior’s room in the Langevin Block. Unwritten history has it that the deputy found it expedient to become a full-fledged minister of the exterior after a reasonable period of meditation had elapsed. On memory’s tablets one does not read his name.

Twenty-seven years old, Clifford Sifton had come to Winnipeg as member for Brandon after the general election of 1888, which followed the Greenway Government’s accession during the preceding winter. Even if he had had to be pushed into the attorney-generalship, he would have been the logical, indeed, the only, successor of the excessively mercurial Martin. It is not critical of the merits of his colleagues to remark that he was by far the ablest man in the Cabinet. As he was the first member of a Dominion Government who made an outstanding success of immigration—it is not difficult to recognize his hand in the Manitoba administration’s efforts to secure immigration for the Dauphin country, out of which the Canadian Northern was evolved.

The retirement of the C.P.R. from Fort Whyte, and the abandonment of its monopolistic privilege, had brought the Northern Pacific into Manitoba, and promised, for a while, to give the province the railway expansion it was believed to need. The Northern Pacific, or its subsidiaries, obtained a charter that allowed it to go almost anywhere. It was understood that it would enter the country west of Lake Manitoba and north of Gladstone, thirty-six miles out from Portage. But the depression culminating in the panic of 1893—which caused six hundred banks in the United States to suspend, and of which a sequel was the march of Coxey’s army of unemployed on Washington from Masillon, Ohio, in April, 1894—threw the Northern Pacific into a receivership; and there was no prospect of it building more lines in Manitoba, even with the Government’s guarantee to pay the interest on its bonds for twenty years. It has always been understood that the inducement of interest guarantees originated within the Government. Some day, the story of its inception may be intimately told.

That, as far as I know, was the introduction to Canada of the practice of Governments guaranteeing bonds of railway enterprises, as distinct from cash and land subsidies and the cession of railways already built, but all-but financially derelict, as had happened in the case of the C.P.R. The arrangement with the Northern Pacific had broken down, but it pointed the way of advance to one shrewd man; and the former contractor of the North Western, the Regina and Long Lake, and the Calgary and Edmonton, saw in the situation enough encouragement to take the stalled Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company off the Davises’ hands.

Mr. Mann went to his bankers for assistance. They told him the job was too big for a lone hand, and counselled that he secure the co-operation of his old associates. It was that advice which brought a new orientation to the relationship between Mackenzie and Mann. There was an idea of asking the Manitoba Government for guarantees of principal and interest up to sixteen thousand dollars a mile; but the bankers preferred that the contractors should obligate themselves.

They said, unanswerably, that Governments change in party and personnel; that the construction of a line in the Dauphin country was not an assuredly profitable undertaking; and that it was better, instead of relying too much on political fortune, that the builders of the line should be vitally concerned in its prosperity.

So, in the end, the guarantee was fixed at eight thousand dollars per mile, for a hundred and twenty-five miles, with freedom from interest liability for the company during two years after the completion of construction.

Under these terms with the Manitoba Government, in the spring of 1896, the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company began construction from Gladstone, on the Manitoba North Western, thirty-six-miles from Portage, to Lake Winnipegosis. I was made the first superintendent of the infant, and on the fifteenth of December, 1896, we began operation, and issued our first time-table on January 1, 1897, a copy of which hangs in my office in the Dominion Bank Building, Toronto. It began for me, indeed, a long avoidance of calm repose.