The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier: A Chronicle of Our Own Time

by Oscar D. Skelton

First came a struggle as to the western boundary of Ontario. The dividing line between the old province of Canada and the territories purchased from the Hudson's Bay Company had never been determined After ten years of negotiations a commission, consisting of one representative of the Dominion and one of Ontario together with the British ambassador at Washington, gave a unanimous award in 1878, an award which the Dominion refused to carry into effect. Other provinces were involved. The Dominion had presented Manitoba with much of the territory in dispute, and the conflict as to jurisdiction between that province and Ontario nearly led to bloodshed; while Quebec was stirred up to protest against the enlargement of Ontario, which would make Ontario, it was said, the preponderant power in the Dominion. Mr Laurier inveighed against what he termed the dishonourable course of the Dominion Government. When negotiating with the Hudson's Bay Company for its lands, it had contended that the old province of Canada extended far west and north, but now it took precisely the opposite stand. As for Quebec's interest, he continued: 'I do not fear the appeal that will be made against me in my own province. This award is binding on both parties and should be carried out in good faith. The consideration that the great province of Ontario may be made greater, I altogether lay aside as unfair, unfriendly, and unjust.' The Government, however, persisted in rejecting the award, and forced an appeal to the Privy Council, only to have Ontario's claim fully substantiated, and the total area of the province confirmed as more than double what Sir John Macdonald would have allowed it.

The next issue put to the test the power of the Dominion to veto provincial laws. It was, in form, merely a dispute between two lumbermen, M'Laren and Caldwell, as to whether the one higher up on the stream could use, upon paying tolls, timber-slides built by the other lower down. But, as Edward Blake declared in 1886, this was 'of all the controversies between the Dominion and the provinces, by far the most important from the constitutional point of view, for it involved the principle which must regulate the use by the Dominion Government of the power of disallowing provincial legislation.' When in 1881 a court of justice in Ontario held that the lumberman on the lower reaches could prevent the one higher up from floating down his logs, Mowat had an act passed providing that all persons possessed, and were thereby declared always to have possessed, the right denied by this judgment. This measure was at once disallowed by the Dominion Government. Then the Privy Council upheld the contention of the Ontario Government as to what the law had been even before the act was passed; and, when in 1884 the provincial legislature again passed the same act, the Dominion conceded the point. Thereafter the veto power has been used only when Dominion or Imperial interests were concerned, or when a statute was claimed to be beyond the power of the province to pass. The wisdom or justice of measures affecting only the local interests of the citizens of a province has been left to the judgment of its own people to determine.

The regulation of the liquor traffic provided the next battle-ground. In 1876 Ontario had passed the Crooks Act, which took the power of granting licences from the municipalities and gave it to provincial commissioners. Two years later the Dominion parliament passed the Scott Act, giving counties power to prohibit the sale of liquor within their limits. The constitutionality of this act was upheld in 1882 in the Russell case, and Sir John Macdonald concluded that if the Dominion had power to pass the Scott Act, the province had not the power to pass the Crooks Act. 'If I carry the country,' he declared at a public meeting in 1882, 'as I will do, I will tell Mr Mowat, that little tyrant who has attempted to control public opinion by getting hold of every office from that of a Division Court bailiff to a tavern-keeper, that I will get a bill passed at Ottawa returning to the municipalities the power taken from them by the Licence Act.' At the next session the M'Carthy Act was passed, providing, not for municipal control, but for control by federal commissioners. Here again the highest courts held in 1883 and 1884 that the Ontario measure was within the power of the province, but that the M'Carthy Act was beyond that of the Dominion. Once more 'the little tyrant' had scored!

The Dominion Franchise Act of 1885 was the last important measure which need be noted in this connection. By the British North America Act the Dominion was to adopt the provincial franchise lists for its elections until parliament should order otherwise. Sir John Macdonald decided, after eighteen years' use of the provincial lists and six half-hearted attempts to change this situation, that the Dominion should set up its own standard, in order both to secure uniformity and to preserve the property qualifications which Ontario and the other provinces were throwing overboard. The Opposition contended that this was an attack upon provincial rights. The argument was weak; there could be no doubt of the constitutional power of the Dominion in this matter. Better founded were the attacks of the Opposition upon specific clauses of the measure, such as the proposal to enfranchise Indians living upon government reserves and under government control, and the proposal to put the revision of the lists in the hands of partisan revising barristers rather than of judges. The 'Conservatives' proposed, but did not press the point, to give single women the franchise, and the 'Liberals' opposed it. After months of obstruction the proposal to enfranchise the western Indians was dropped,[[2]] an appeal to judges was provided for the revision of the lists, and the income and property standards were reduced. Inconsistently, in some provinces a variation from the general standards was permitted. The Franchise Act of 1885 remained in force until after the coming of the Liberals to power in 1896, when it was repealed without regret on either side.

Suddenly the scene shifted, and, instead of the dry and bloodless court battles of constitutional lawyers, the fire and passion of armed rebellion and bitter racial feud held the Canadian stage. The rebellion itself was an affair of but a few brief weeks, but the fires lighted on the Saskatchewan swept through the whole Dominion, and for years the smoke of Duck Lake and Batoche disturbed the public life of Canada.

Long years before the Great West was more than a name to any but a handful in older Canada, hardy French voyageurs and Scottish adventurers had pushed their canoes or driven their Red River carts to the foot of the Rockies and beyond. They had mated with Indian women, and when in 1870 the Dominion came into possession of the great hunting preserve of the Hudson's Bay Company, many of their half-breed children dwelt on the plains. The coming of the railway, the flocking in of settlers, and the rapid dwindling of the vast herds of buffalo which had provided the chief support of the half-breeds, made their nomadic life no longer possible. The economic difficulties of making the needed readjustment, of settling down to quiet farm activities, were heightened by the political difficulties due to the setting up of the new Dominion authority. Then it was on the banks of the Red River that these half-breeds, known as Métis, had risen under the firebrand Riel in armed revolt against the incoming régime. Now, in 1885, it was on the North and South Saskatchewan. There numerous groups of the Métis had made their settlements. And when the Canadian authorities came in to survey the land, to build railways, and to organize government, these people sought to have their rights and privileges accorded them. In Manitoba, after the insurrection of 1870, the dual claims of the old half-breed settlers had been recognized. As part Indian, they had been given scrip for 160 acres each, to extinguish the Indian title to the land, and as part white men, they were each allowed to homestead 160 acres like any other settler. The Métis in the North-West Territories now asked for the same privileges. They wanted also to have their holdings left as they were, long narrow strips of land facing the river front, like the settlements on the St Lawrence, with the houses sociably near in one long village street, rather than to have their land cut up into rectangular, isolated farms under the survey system which the Canadian Government had borrowed from the United States.

The requests were reasonable. Perhaps a narrow logic could have shown inconsistency in the demand to be considered both white and Indian at once, but the Manitoba Act had set a precedent. Only a few thousand acres were at stake, in a boundless land where the Government stood ready to set aside a hundred million acres for a railway. The expediency of winning the goodwill of the half-breeds was apparent to Canadians on the spot, especially now that the Indians, over whom the Métis had great influence, were also becoming restless because of the disappearance of the buffalo and the swarming in of settlers.

Yet the situation was never adequately faced. The Mackenzie Government, in 1877, on the petition of a hundred and fifty Scottish half-breeds at Prince Albert, agreed, where settlement had been effected on the narrow frontage system, to conform the surveys in harmony with this plan, and the Scottish holdings were so confirmed. Two years later the Macdonald Government passed an act authorizing the giving of scrip to the half-breeds of the North-West on the same terms as it had been given to those in Manitoba. So far so good. Then came year upon year of neglect, of clerkly procrastination, and of half-concessions. The French half-breeds passed resolution after resolution, sent to Ottawa petition after petition and delegation after delegation, but in vain. The Government forgot the act which it had itself passed in 1879. Nor were the half-breeds themselves the only petitioners. Time and again Father André and other missionaries urged their claims. Some of the Government's own land agents on the spot urged them. Charles Mair of Prince Albert, one of the first of Ontario's settlers in the West, appeared at Ottawa four times before the outbreak, to try to waken the Government to the seriousness of the situation.[[3]] The North-West Council sent strong memorials backing the requests of the Métis. And still, though some of the grievances were redressed, in piecemeal fashion, no attempt was made to grapple adequately with the difficult questions presented by the meeting of two stages of civilization, to understand the disputes, the real wrongs, the baseless fears. When in 1883 Blake in the House of Commons called for papers, none were brought down for two years; when in 1884 Cameron called for a committee of investigation, the reply was that there was nothing to investigate.

What was the cause of this neglect? At bottom, the Government's ignorance of the West. There was not in the Cabinet a man who knew its conditions and needs. The Métis were two thousand miles away, and they had no votes, for the North-West Territories were not then represented at Ottawa. For five years Sir John Macdonald himself had acted as minister of the Interior. In taking over the cares of a busy department, added to the office of prime minister, he made the mistake that Mackenzie had made. But while Mackenzie put in ten to fourteen hours a day at departmental routine, at the expense of his duties as leader, Macdonald did his work as leader at the expense of his department. 'Old To-Morrow' solved many a problem wisely by leaving it to time to solve, but some problems proved the more serious for every year's delay. Late in 1883 Sir John gave up the portfolio, but his successor, Sir David Macpherson, effected little change. Late in 1885 Thomas White, an energetic and sympathetic administrator, became minister, but the mischief was then already done.

In its defence the Government urged that no half-breed had actually been dispossessed of his river-front claim, and that many who were demanding scrip had already received land in Manitoba. It contended further that the agitation of the half-breeds was fanned by white settlers in Prince Albert, eager to speculate in scrip, and hinted darkly at mysterious forces and personages in the background, in Canada and elsewhere. No attempt was made, however, to prove the truth of these latter charges or to bring the guilty to justice. Doubtless the grievances were not so great as to justify rebellion; the less excuse, then, for not curing what was curable. Doubtless, also, this was not the first time nor the last that a government lacked energy or vision, and had it not been for the other factor in the situation, Louis Riel, no heavy penalty might have followed. But unfortunately, luck or Nemesis, the other factor was very much to the fore.