The Liberals, Western Settlement, and the Imperial Tie

As the 1890s began cracks began to appear in the armour of the Conservative government . Changes occurred within the party, and national issues caused a realignment in federal politics that resulted in the federal Liberal party, under the leadership of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, to gain power

The result was a power vacuum in the Cons. Party at a time when the country, again, was facing an important national issue. The Conservatives proved unable to deal with it effectively, and a series of public works scandals led the Liberals into power in 1896.

Laurier was a long serving prime minister, from 1896-1911. During his tenure he faced a Canada that was beginning to change in ways that were far more profound than Macdonald. First, English-French tensions increased starting with an educational issue, but soon broadening out to encompass larger imperial issues. It was during Laurier's tenure that Canada's west 

Manitoba Schools Question:

The prairies was a different place in 1891 compared to when Manitoba entered Confederation in 1870. Due mainly to new settlement and immigration from Ontario the French population of the west was shrinking relative to Anglophones. In Manitoba, in 1891, French accounted for 7% of the population, and 4-5% for the rest of the Northwest.

As the 19^th century ended, and the 20^th began, the French minority became involved in disputes and problems in the west, and French Quebeckers were drawn into these disputes, as the minorities looked to Quebec for help and support - not only to French MPs in Ottawa, but to Quebec directly (either the press or the people).

Of particular importance was the maintenance of the French language in French communities outside Quebec. One of the first manifestations of this was the Manitoba Schools Crisis which started in 1890s . It was a simple question:  Did separate school rights accorded to Catholic Manitobans in the Manitoba Act of 1870 (and the Northwest Territories Act of 1875) still exist? In essence, were constitutional rights permanent, or could they be abrogated by an act of parliament?

The question was being raised by the English Protestants such as D’Alton McCarthy, a fiery anti-Catholic and MP from Ontario, who made a speech at Portage La Prairie, Manitoba, in 1889 stating that sectarian schools were preventing Canada from achieving the greatness it could reach.

McCarthy’s problem with Catholicism was not over religion as such, but over its social and political ramifications . Specifically, he distrusted the influence it had over politics. He pledged his government’s support in abolishing the dual school system, as well as ending the status of the French language as an official language in Manitoba.

In 1890 the Manitoba government passed a Schools Act that established a provincial department of education and a system of non-sectarian public schools . Only these schools would receive provincial grants for education. Denominational schools could still exist, but without any government funding.

Archbishop Tache of St. Boniface, Manitoba, formerly asked the federal government to disallow the legislation. This, however, was an impossible tactic for the government as it would be political suicide, and would be opposed by many in the House for fear that it opened legislation from their own provinces to disallowance.

When a private citizen appealed the legislation to the Supreme Court the Court ruled that Manitoba’s Catholics did have pre-existing rights when the Manitoba Act was created and passed in 1870. Furthermore, it noted that the Dominion Parliament it was fully aware of the nature of Cath. schools in Manitoba when it created the Manitoba Act.

However, the highest court in Canada at this time was not the Supreme Court of Canada, but the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London. The Manitoba government appealed the Supreme Court decision, and the JCPC construed the word “practice”  as not being equivalent to “custom having the force of law.”

The Conservative party and government was in no shape to fight the school's question. With Macdonald dead, and the party faced with a slate of uninspiring leaders the government chose to avoid the issue. In the meanwhile Wilfrid Laurier remained ambiguous, confident that his party would win the next election and he did not want to be pinned down to something he said while in opposition.

The final solution would come from Laurier and Premier Greenway of Manitoba who was also tired of the divisive nature of the debate. The Laurier-Greenway Compromise was as follows:

The Settlement Experience in the West

In 1909, the Dominion of Canada published a pamphlet, Canada:  The Land of Opportunity, as a means of attracting settlers to the west. In it was the following quotation:

The Premier of Canada recently expressed the idea, which is that of all Canadians, that as the 19^th century was the century of the United States, the 20^th Century is the century of Canada…The United States is the America of achievement, but Canada is the America of opportunity

The changing nature of the world at the end of the nineteenth century meant a growing demand for food. Due mainly to increasing urbanization a larger and larger segment of the western world's population depended on imported food to sustain themselves. Such a situation worked in Canada's favour.

This growth also saw large numbers of people leave some urban areas in Britain and Europe for Canada. During this period Canada’s population grew in leaps and bounds:

Much of this growth occurred on the Canadian prairies. Between 1896-1921 the Prairies became the most dynamic element in the country’s economic growth. Part of this was due to the rising price of wheat. In 1896 a bushel of wheat sold for 84 cents in England - by 1913 it was $1.13. Higher prices meant that farming was becoming more attractive to people, and the desire (and economic necessity) to have large farms increased.

New developments in farming techniques allowed this to occur. New machines, such as seed drills and threshing equipment, made farming more effective. Perhaps most important, for Canada, was the development of new strains of wheat. This was Marquis Wheat (developed in 1908) - a cross between Red Fife and Red Calcutta. Developed at the Dominion Experimental Farms in Ottawa, this new wheat matured 8 days more quickly than other strains, and was seven bushels heavier in yield per acre. By the end of W.W. I it is estimated that the introduction of Marquis added some $100,000,000 annually to farm income.

One should not underestimate the importance of wheat to the rapid development of the prairie west. From 1896 until 1921 its production and export soared

It was an environment that created a great deal of optimism. In the very early twentieth century one speaker at the Canadian Club in Winnipeg said that some day Winnipeg would rival Toronto as the economic centre of Canada.

More important, however, was the rush of settlers into the open prairies. The completion of the railway did not bring out the flood of settlers that everyone had hoped for. Low wheat prices, and a desire of immigrants to settle in the US made Canada an unattractive proposition.

In this sense, the Laurier government succeeded due to circumstance. The man Laurier made responsible for immigration was Clifford Sifton, Minister of the Interior. He was a Manitoba MP, and an unashamed booster of the Canadian prairies.

To do this Sifton forced the CPR to start selling some of its 25 million acres of prime farm land in the west. He reasoned settlers would only come if the best land was available (and he may have been motivated by the Liberal feeling that the CPR had been given too sweet of a deal by the Conservatives).

He reorganized the Department of the Interior to make the immigration process faster, giving him as minister huge discretionary powers to approve blocks of immigrants for entry into Canada. He also made it easier for settlers already out west to acquire more land cheaply and quickly.

He also encouraged immigration from rural areas of Europe. He did not want urban immigrants who would state that they wanted to farm, but would end up populating Canada's cities. For this reason Ukrainian (200,000 arrived on the prairies between 1896 and 1914) and Polish immigrants were welcomed as there were parts of both countries that were very similar in terms of geography and climate to the prairies.

Immigrants from the US were highly desirable. They often came from south of the prairie boarder, and had a wide experience with farming in that climate and environment. Often a farmer’s sons would head north as land prices in the U.S. were increasing by circa 1896, and the only cheap land still available was in Canada. Advertisements in farm journals, newspapers, and pamphlets (e.g. The Last Best West) extolled the virtues of the west. Most of these  pamphlets gave fairly accurate descriptions of the west, as Sifton believed that overselling would only produce large numbers of disappointed settlers.

One group of Americans that were not welcome were Blacks. They were judged unsuited because of climate (i.e.: being a 'tropical' people they would not be able to adjust to Canadian winters) - although the real obstacle was colour and race. A number of proposals were made by Black spokesmen to Cdn. officials about setting up group settlement on the prairies, but these were consistently discouraged.

The liberality of Sifton changed when Frank Oliver became Minister of the Interior in 1905. He ended Sifton's "open door" policy. He reflected the unease that many Canadians felt about these immigrants in their "sheep skin coats." Stories of hordes of young, single men living in shanty towns in Winnipeg. They were seen as oversexed, and dangerous to peace and order. Other people worried that they could not be properly acculturated to Canada. By 1910 Canada's immigration laws were tightened.

Asian immigration in Vancouver was seen by many to be a real problem. Asians did not even have the 'advantage' of looking European. Many thought that acculturating them would be literally impossible because their languages, cultures and religions were so different from Britain or Europe. Even a future prime minister, R.B. Bennett, in a speech in Vancouver spoke of the "yellow peril" that threatened to swamp the west coast. By 1907 the Asiatic Exclusion league was formed.

These sentiments were not expressed by those on the fringe. One of the founders of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (the forerunner of the CCF), J.S. Woodsworth, expressed similar beliefs, as did J.W. Dafoe, the editor of the Winnipeg Free Press. 

Imperialism and Nationalism

In addition to dealing with a growing and expanding west, and the changing demographic nature of Canada's population, Laurier dealt with a far older problem: French-English relations. This time it centred on Canada's relationship with Britain. French Canadian nationalists, such as Henri Bourassa, wanted Canada to become more independent, and for the people to see themselves as Canadians and not British subjects. It was a sentiment shared by many in Quebec. English Canadians, however, cherished their ties with the British Empire, and want to maintain Canada's position in it. 

These conflicting sentiments would clash when several different events occurred between 1899 and 1910. These were.

The Alaska Boundary Dispute

This event served to strain relations between Laurier and the British government. The Alaska Boundary dispute emerged because of the discovery of gold in the Alaskan panhandle in 1898. The boundary itself had been 'set' in the ambiguous Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1825 which did not define the boundary very well. In 1898 the two points of contention were the Lynn Canal and Observatory Inlet - the two most important water access points to the gold fields in the panhandle

Canada believed that the Treaty gave them control of the headwaters of the Lynn Canal. But whatever the treaty said the US had de facto control over the area. What was at stake was the control of the enormous trade in goods and gold into and out of the Yukon.

Initially the matter looked as if it might be resolved. President McKinley was more willing to find a compromise. However, he was assassinated, and Theodore Roosevelt became president. A much rougher, gruffer individual Roosevelt was not willing to compromise on anything. He wanted quick resolution to the Alaska question - even members of his own cabinet sometimes though he went overboard in negotiations with other countries. Roosevelt told the British ambassador to the U.S. that he was “going to be ugly” on Alaska and send 800 troops to the area to make his point.

Roosevelt was so sure of himself he agreed to an arbitration panel to decide the issue. Laurier agreed, and a panel of 6 (3 members from each side with no neutral third party involved). One of Canada’s three, however, was a representative from Britain (at this time Canada could not engage in foreign relations on its own).

While the members of the panel were supposed to be 'neutral,' those chosen by the US were obviously partisan in their opinions. Laurier’s biographer, the writer O.D. Skeleton, later wrote that all three men were:

lawyers of eminence, men of outstanding capacity, honourable men, but to term them “impartial” was a wrench to the English language.

Matters were made worse when the British rep, Lord Alverstone, voted in favour of the American position in order to maintain good British-American relations. Laurier referred to this action as “nothing short of a slap in the face.”

U.S. Secretary of State, John Hay, wrote to his wife,  regarding the decision and Canada's reaction: 

I do not wonder that they are furious…But …serves ‘em right if they can’t take a joke

What was the Boer War?

On October 12, 1899, the Boers of that part of South Africa known as the Transvaal invaded British territory, thereby starting the Boer War. The Boers had settled in South Africa in the seventeenth century. They had migrated to the Transvaal and the Orange Free State in the Great Trek of the 1830s as a means of escaping British rule in the Cape. Britain was not overly concerned with the Boers - they controlled the Cape, a strategic location during an era of sea travel, and were not overly concerned with the Boers

This would change in the late nineteenth century. In 1870 diamonds were discovered in the Boer regions, and gold in 1886. This increased the value of the territory immensely.

As English prospectors flooded into the region the Boers and their local governments feared becoming minorities in their own areas. It led them, and their most prominent leader Paul Kruger, to pass laws denying Uitlanders ("outlanders") civic rights until they had resided in the area for at least  14 years

It was treatment of the Uitlanders that would justify military action. A series of events transpired, some deliberately staged by the British and the most prominent British financier and developer in south Africa, Cecil Rhodes, but at the centre was Britain’s desire to maintain control of location that was important for economic, and strategic reasons. The cause of the Uitlanders merely served to provide Britain with a more acceptable excuse for the war in the Transvaal

The Boer War in Canada.

The man most associated with the Nationalist movement in Quebec was Henri Bourassa. He was the grandson of Louis Joseph Papineau, the leader of the rebel movement in Lower Canada in 1837. He was also a Liberal MP when Laurier formed the government in 1896.

Bourassa resigned his seat over the Boer War. When war had broken out in the Transvaal, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain approached Canada to send troops to complement Britain’s own forced in South Africa. Bourassa was of the opinion that the British had forced the situation, particularly after evidence came to light that Chamberlain had secretly supported the ill fated Jameson Raid. 

Bourassa, and much of French Canada, supported the Boers. They saw a common cause with these people: a people with a different language, culture and religion surrounded by English. Laurier was also hesitant, but faced incredible pressure from English Canadians, particularly in Ontario. English newspapers, particularly in Toronto and Montreal demanded immediate Canadian participation. Colonel Sam Hughes (late Sir Sam Hughes in charge of war time production during World War I) offered to lead a brigade, and Major General Edward Hutton (in command of the Canadian militia) worked out a plan for sending Canadian forces without consulting Laurier.

Laurier, in true Laurier fashion, tried to find a compromise. It was a difficult decision that divided his cabinet along French-English lines. The solution they  reached was that a volunteer force of 1000 would be equipped and sent over by the Canadian government, but this was not to be construed as setting any precedent for future forces. Eventually 7300 men volunteered. Once in South Africa the Cdn. troops would become the responsibility of  Britain, and would be placed under British command

It was a decision that pleased no one. In English Canada people saw it as a half-hearted measure. Canada, in their minds, should have sent a 'real' army. In French Canada this policy was seen as too much. Canada should not jump into every imperial conflict that came along. Bourassa believed Laurier should have consulted Parliament before making such a commitment - instead it had been a Cabinet decision. He resigned his seat, but returned as an independent MP after winning the by-election.

In his speeches in the House he argued that Canada should assert and maintain its autonomy relative to Britain. Bourassa said that Canadians had their own history, and in order to develop their sense of themselves they had to remain their own masters. Bourassa ideas found little acceptance in English Canada.

Bourassa had some legitimate concerns. Joseph Chamberlain did try to create some common imperial military and naval ties between Britain and its overseas colonies. A conference was held in London in 1902 with this goal in mind. Laurier, however,  resisted this scheme - he realized too what it meant in terms of French English relations in Canada.

French Canadian Nationalism after the Boer War:

Bourassa’s struggle against Canadian involvement in the Boer War won him the admiration of Quebec’s youth. It would lead, in 1903, to a group of young French nationalists forming the Ligue Nationaliste Canadienne. They published a manifesto in 1903 that subsequently became its political program. Its main goal was achieving  “the widest possible political, commercial and military autonomy compatible with maintaining the colonial link." The Ligue also proposed more provincial autonomy in Canada to allow Quebec to preserve its language and culture.

  To spread this message Bourassa founded a weekly newspaper, Le Nationaliste. It was a forum in which both federal and provincial policies were criticized.

Losing his House of Commons' seat in 1908, Bourassa founded the newspaper (and became the editor of) Le Devoir in 1910. He felt that the best way of helping the nationalist movement was to educate the people - whose only source of information was a partisan press.

The Naval Bill Question

Bourassa founded his paper at just the right time to criticize the Laurier government over its next imperial question: the British navy. The British government was putting pressure on all the members of the Empire to give it money as a means of increasing the strength of its navy – particularly the building of Dreadnoughts. This was being done to counter the growing German naval threat. Laurier once again sought a compromise: giving money to the British would alienate French-Canada; not doing do would do the same to English Canada. His response was that Canada create a Canadian navy that would be available for Britain in times of war

Again, no one was happy. Bourassa thought this was too much. English Canadians referred to this proposed navy as a tin pot navy.

Conclusion

As the twentieth century began it was becoming obvious that Canada was beginning to change as a country. Western settlement was opening up an entirely different region of the west. It was a region based entirely on agriculture and resource development. Although not noted in the lecture coal and potash mining were large western industries. It also had a very different ethnic makeup: East European, German and American immigrants made up a large proportion of the population.

Canada's British connection was also changing. Obviously Canada's foreign interests did not always mesh with Britain's, and Laurier tried to find some way to smooth over these differences while taking the political situation in Canada into account. If he was successful is a matter of debate. He would loose the 1911 election over his government's desire for free trade with the US, and his policies regarding Britain cost him a lot of votes in English and French Canada. However, his successor (Conservative Robert Borden) would find that he faced similar problems.