The Canadian Dominion: A Chronicle of Our Northern Neighbor

by Oscar D. Skelton

* See "The Railroad Builders", by John Moody (in "The
Chronicles of America").

The new company was rich in potential resources but weak in available cash. Neither in New York nor in London could purse strings be loosened for the purpose of building a road through what the world considered a barren and Arctic wilderness. But in the faith and vision of the president, George Stephen, and the ruthless energy of the general manager, William Van Horne, American born and trained, the Canadian Pacific had priceless assets. Aided in critical times by further government loans, they carried the project through, and by 1886, five years before the time fixed by their contract, trains were running from Montreal to Port Moody, opposite Vancouver.

A sudden burst of prosperity followed the building of the road. Settlers poured into the West by tens of thousands, eastern investors promoted colonization companies, land values soared, and speculation gave a fillip to every line of trade. The middle eighties were years of achievement, of prosperity, and of confident hope. Then prosperity fled as quickly as it had come. The West failed to hold its settlers. Farm and factory found neither markets nor profits. The country was bled white by emigration. Parliamentary contest and racial feud threatened the hard-won unity. Canada was passing through its darkest hours.

During this period, political friction was incessant. Canada was striving to solve in the eighties the difficult question which besets all federations—the limits between federal and provincial power. Ontario was the chief champion of provincial rights. The struggle was intensified by the fact that a Liberal Government reigned at Toronto and a Conservative Government at Ottawa, as well as by the keen personal rivalry between Mowat and Macdonald. In nearly every constitutional duel Mowat triumphed. The accepted range of the legislative power of the provinces was widened by the decisions of the courts, particularly of the highest court of appeal, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in England. The successful resistance of Ontario and Manitoba to Macdonald's attempt to disallow provincial laws proved this power, though conferred by the Constitution, to be an unwieldy weapon. By the middle nineties the veto had been virtually abandoned.

More serious than these political differences was the racial feud that followed the second Riel Rebellion. For a second time the Canadian Government failed to show the foresight and the sympathy required in dealing with an isolated and backward people. The valley of the Saskatchewan, far northwest of the Red River, was the scene of the new difficulty. Here thousands of metis, or French half-breeds, had settled. The passing of the buffalo, which had been their chief subsistence, and the arrival of settlers from the East caused them intense alarm. They pressed the Government for certain grants of land and for the retention of the old French custom of surveying the land along the river front in deep narrow strips, rather than according to the chessboard pattern taken over by Canada from the United States. Red tape, indifference, procrastination, rather than any illwill, delayed the redress of the grievances of the half-breeds. In despair they called Louis Riel back from his exile in Montana. With his arrival the agitation acquired a new and dangerous force. Claiming to be the prophet of a new religion, he put himself at the head of his people and, in the spring of 1885, raised the flag of revolt. His military adviser, Gabriel Dumont, an old buffalo hunter, was a natural-born general, and the half-breeds were good shots and brave fighters. An expedition of Canadian volunteers was rushed west, and the rebellion was put down quickly, but not without some hard fighting and gallant strokes and counterstrokes.

The racial passions roused by this conflict, however, did not pass so quickly. The fate to be meted out to Riel was the burning question. Ontario saw in him the murderer of Scott and an ambitious plotter who had twice stirred up armed rebellion. Quebec saw in him a man of French blood, persecuted because he had stood up manfully for the undoubted rights of his kinsmen. Today experts agree that Riel was insane and should have been spared the gallows on this if on no other account. But at the moment the plea of insanity was rejected. The Government made up for its laxity before the rebellion by severity after it; and in November, 1885, Riel was sent to the scaffold. Bitterness rankled in many a French-Canadian heart for long years after; and in Ontario, where the Orange order was strongly entrenched, a faction threatened "to smash Confederation into its original fragments" rather than submit to "French domination."

Racial and religious passions, once aroused, soon found new fuel to feed upon. Honore Mercier, a brilliant but unscrupulous leader who had ridden to power in the province of Quebec on the Riel issue, roused Protestant ire by restoring estates which had been confiscated at the conquest in 1763 to the Jesuits and other Roman Catholic authorities, in proportions which the act provided were to be determined by "Our Holy Father the Pope." In Ontario restrictions began to be imposed on the freedom of French-Canadian communities on the border to make French the sole or dominant tongue in the schoolroom. A little later the controversy was echoed in Manitoba in the repeal by a determined Protestant majority of the denominational school privileges hitherto enjoyed by the Roman Catholic minority.

Economic discontent was widespread. It was a time of low and falling prices. Farmers found the American market barred, the British market flooded, the home market stagnant. The factories stimulated by the "N. P." lacked the growing market they had hoped for. In the West climatic conditions not yet understood, the monopoly of the Canadian Pacific, and the competition of the States to the south, which still had millions of acres of free land, brought settlement to a standstill. From all parts of Canada the "exodus" to the United States continued until by 1890 there were in that country more than one-third as many people of Canadian birth or descent as in Canada itself.

It was not surprising that in these extremities men were prepared to make trial of drastic remedies. Nor was it surprising that it was beyond the borders of Canada itself that they sought the unity and the prosperity they had not found at home. Many looked to Washington, some for unrestricted trade, a few for political union. Others looked to London, hoping for a revival of the old imperial tariff preferences or for some closer political union which would bring commercial advantages in its train.

The decade from 1885 to 1895 stands out in the record of the relations of the English-speaking peoples as a time of constant friction, of petty pin pricks, of bluster and retaliation. The United States was not in a neighborly mood. The memories of 1776, of 1812, and of 1861 had been kept green by exuberant comment in school textbooks and by "spread-eagle" oratory. The absence of any other rivalry concentrated American opposition on Great Britain, and isolation from Old World interests encouraged a provincial lack of responsibility. The sins of England in Ireland had been kept to the fore by the agitation of Parnell and Davitt and Dillon; and the failure of Home Rule measures, twice in this decade, stirred Irish-American antagonism. The accession to power of Lord Salisbury, reputed to hold the United States in contempt, and later the foolish indiscretion of Sir Lionel Sackville-West, British Ambassador at Washington, in intervening in a guileless way in the presidential election of 1888, did as much to nourish ill-will in the United States as the dominance of Blaine and other politicians who cultivated the gentle art of twisting the tail of the British lion.