Construction was going on in the West, where the accountant, P. C. Andrews, was on the ground all summer. His winter quarters were in Toronto, where he produced his balance sheets from the field records. In 1899, with the move to Toronto, and with work proceeding rapidly east and west of Winnipeg, a young fellow was brought in to take charge of the Mackenzie and Mann accounts. He so continued, with increasing responsibilities during all the strenuous period of Canadian Northern expansion. For a combination of natural capacity in accounting, and experience in the finance of modern Canadian railway construction, I do not think his equal exists. When the Canadian National name superseded the Canadian Northern, A. J. Mitchell was appointed vice-president in charge of finance and accounts, and remained as such until he retired with the president.
After a year the whole top floor of the Toronto Railway Building was occupied by the railway constructors. To desk room here I came at the end of 1902, when it was decided that the Canadian Northern head office must be in Toronto and that somebody familiar with all the details of the operation of completed lines should carry a general responsibility. The title of superintendent was changed to that of third vice-president; and so continued for nearly sixteen years.
In this reference to an office convenience some hyper-critic may discover solid confirmation of the suspicion which has occasionally been formed and fanned in sections of the press which often impugn motives, and seldom examine aspersions. The Canadian Northern, it has been professed, was created as the milch cow for a couple of railway contractors, was forced into an excessive flow of nourishment, and was turned over to the people of Canada after having been drained into an almost fatal exhaustion. When we come to discuss some financial aspects of the railway situation in Canada, this matter may be recurred to. Meantime, it is enough to say that there’s only a mare’s nest in it.
The Canadian Northern did not long remain with desk accommodation on a friendly floor. Negotiations were concluding for the purchase of the building at the corner of King and Toronto streets. Early in 1903, as renters from the Rice Lewis estate, we began to take possession—a process that continued without cessation for all but twenty years. Always somebody was moving. Half the time it was a shift for a whole department, because another department as well as itself required more room.
At the beginning, for instance, the legal department—but there was no legal department of the railway in the generally accepted sense. There was, of course, a great deal of legal business, much of it local in scope, and an increasing amount that was fundamental to the railway’s growth. Such questions as the acquisition of right of way in the West and the adjustment of damage claims were handled by our solicitors in Winnipeg. But important matters like the agreements covering acquisition of charter rights and the physical assets of existing companies, and the creation of new joint stock entities—when we came to require an express company of our own, for example—were dealt with in Toronto, first by Mr. Z. A. Lash alone, and later by a department of which he was the head.
Mr. Lash was a great general counsel. He had no Canadian superior, perhaps no equal, in drafting legal documents. So exquisite was his appreciation of word values that, though others might embody an intention in a series of paragraphs apparently beyond criticism, his mastery of precision and shade was such that he could clothe it in language which had the exactitude of a multiplication table and the clarity of a mirror. His knowledge of the law—especially company law—was wide and profound, as became Edward Blake’s Deputy Minister of Justice in the eighteen-seventies. To rare professional acumen was allied a high individual sense of honour, and a capacity for finance which very fittingly made him vice-president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce.
When the Canadian Northern legal work became altogether beyond the physical capacity of one general counsel, in 1904, there was brought to Toronto from the Department of Railways and Canals at Ottawa, as general solicitor, Mr. Gerard N. Ruel, now vice-president and general counsel of the Canadian National Railways. To work with Mr. Ruel is to enjoy an uncommon experience. Everything that is meant by the phrase “counsel learned in the law” applies to him, as it does to many another practitioner of the baffling science. But no gentleman of the robe of my acquaintance is Mr. Ruel’s peer in an uncanny capacity for absorbing multitudes of facts about territory he has never seen, and in a weird facility as a reader of blue prints. He absorbs topography from maps and plans as a sponge absorbs water. A blue print upside down is instantly as plain to him as it is to other skilled observers who have carefully studied it right side up.
For several years Mr. Lash and Mr. Ruel had rooms near to the President and Vice-president. About 1908 they required more space and had to move to the corner of Toronto and Court Streets, where, indeed, several departments were located. They occupied about half a floor, and gradually encroached on the space of smaller departments which had to find lodgment elsewhere.
Few people have any idea of the magnitude and complication of the legal business of a railway, even when it has settled down into a staid, unexpanding enterprise, from the territorial side of things. But where, almost in a night, an enterprise develops the faculties of a steel magnet operated by an electric crane, and draws all sorts of material to it, lawyers become a very hard-worked section of the organization. A farmer whose land is required for right of way—everybody, in fact, to whom the railway stands in the attitude of a purchaser of an indispensable commodity, at once gets into big business. The moral and intellectual damages involved in cutting a corner off a ten-acre field are simply incalculable; and only a well-fortified legal mind can begin to reduce them to humane proportions.
Possibly the most striking features, from a documentary point of view, of the earlier, and, indeed, the later, years of the Canadian Northern domiciliation at Toronto were the acquisition of charters, and the reception of requests for new railways in every Canadian province except Prince Edward Island. Perhaps, instead of likening the expanding process of the Canadian Northern to a magnet attracting filings, it is better to say that it was very like what movie fans frequently see when they are about to observe some event which has recently taken place in a distant part of the world. The feature is heralded by the appearance of what looks like several sticks thrown into the air—all, seemingly, without direction or intention, but presently falling into an ordered announcement which he who sits may read. That is how the Canadian Northern transcontinental system took shape. From a series of disconnected and apparently unconnectable projections of steel, hanging in suspense, a continuous track was formed, trains ran upon it, and all the organs of a great commerce began to function.