Delphi complete works of.., p.732
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 732
The episode was forgotten. The Americans filled the West, and apart from muttered thunders caught by only a few apprehensive ears, the world seemed quiet to the Canada of 1911. Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s government was obviously to last forever, along with the gold standard and international law and the freedom of the seas and western civilization. All this moved gently to the sound of the Vienna waltz called the Concert of Europe. The first break came in Canada itself. In a rash moment Sir Wilfrid Laurier L. E. Ellis, “Reciprocity 1911,” 1939 saw the will-o’-the-wisp of Reciprocity dancing beyond the frontier. This was to be effected by parallel legislation, like knocking out the boards of the boundary fence. It was to let western steers run through and keep heavy manufactured imports out. It was so good that some American enthusiasts said it would mean the annexation of Canada. That ruined it. The Conservative Party woke from apathy to hope and looked round for Sir John A.’s flag on a stick. Even the farmers got doubtful; the ‘home market’ of rising cities looked large compared with 1891. Manufacturers, though not immediately affected, thought that they knew what happens to a fence when you start knocking boards off. The winds of opposition rose to a gale. When the storm of election died down, it appeared that the Liberal Party had gone down to disaster.
Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s career ended.
The new Conservative government of Sir Robert Borden had hardly entered office when the sunshine atmosphere began to Oct. 10, 1911 darken. Immigration into Canada was still at its height — the year 1913 with 402,000 marking the all-time record. But already financial wisdom was shaking its head. The storm signals were up on Wall Street and without doubt a new fall into world depression was imminent.
Indeed worse apprehensions were abroad than those which agitated the stock exchanges. The new German peril had gradually risen from the horizon to the sky. Ever since the century began, Canadians had been trying not to see it. Germany was still supposed to be the land of tobacco smoke, fairy stories, pipe dreams, and philosophy. Vienna was a waltz, Hungary a dance, the Kaiser only a strutting figure, half comic, half mystifying, and a submarine an illegal contrivance, contrary to international law. That gradually changed. After 1897 huge naval votes built a threatening navy. The project of the Kiel Canal made a Baltic back door. Count Zeppelin’s floating sausages began to look dangerous, except that here again international law forbade them to drop anything on anybody. What were whispers and rumours for the public were presently plain, if confidential, truths for the Borden Government. The Empire was in danger. Forthwith the Dominion House of Commons voted four battleships, and all England applauded. Punch, the mirror of opinion, presented Canada as the Viking’s Daughter hauling four battleships on a string. Then it turned out that everybody had forgotten the Canadian Senate. The Senate emerged like the forgotten old fairy out of the cupboard and put a spell on the ships. The jubilation was over. The Viking’s Daughter couldn’t swim. Yet even this passed as an episode, the world at large and Canada in particular still preoccupied with a thousand happier and better things.
Then came the war. The older generation recalls its strange, its seeming impossibility. For Canada it came out of a clear sky — the clear sky of vacation time, of the glory of Canadian midsummer, of summer cottages, of bush camps, and for the city population the soft evening sky, the canopy of stars over the merry-go-round resorts in the cool of the summer evening.
It is not the privilege of the present record to recount the story of the participation of Canada in the Great War. To those of us now in middle age and beyond, it still all seems yesterday. We recall the unbelievable outbreak of the war; the almost universal expectation that it would be over in a few months, stopped dead by the collapse of finance or by the power of finance to avoid collapse. We still recall the initial horror felt at the German methods of brutality and barbarity. There followed the long years of combat, deadlocked in the trenches in France and searching the world for battlefields. We recall the valour of Canadian soldiers, the military genius of our Canadian captains and our realization with pride that such names as those of Arthur Currie and Andrew McNaughton would rank second to none in the history of the war. Even the anguish of war, and its unending harvest of death helped to elevate Canadians to the consciousness of their full status as a nation. Then came the tumultuous joy of the Armistice, bringing peace to a people who asked nothing else, neither revenge nor gain. As the war closed in Europe the sun seemed to rise in Canada on a boundless and unclouded horizon.
ORIGINAL PAINTING BY HAL ROSS PERRIGARD, A.R.C.A., MONTREAL, P.Q., 1941
“. . . the war closed . . . bringing peace to a people who asked nothing else, neither revenge nor gain” — page 222
CHAPTER IX. CANADA AS A NATION
AFTER THE GREAT War — Canada and the European Settlement — Reorganization of the Empire: the Statute of Westminster — Migration and Empire Settlement — The Ottawa Conference and Empire Tariffs — Collapse and Depression — Finance — Unemployment — Transportation — Dust and Social Credit in the West — The Brighter Side — Reciprocity with the United States: El Dorado: Panama — War.
Almost twenty-one years went by between the close of the Great War in 1918 and the opening of the war in 1939. In these years the peace and safety of the world might have been guaranteed by armed force in the hands of decent nations. In Winston Churchill, “The Aftermath,” 1929 place of that it was guaranteed by pledges of criminals and by the sanction of a League of Nations with no more cohesion than a pyramid of billiard balls, no bond of more than a rope of sand. What should have been merely a clearing house of information, a broker’s office for bargains, took on a mock sovereignty and spread an illusive security over a world all too willing to fall Winston Churchill, “Step by Step,” 1939 asleep. We can see it all in retrospect now, plain to the simplest. We were blind then and fast asleep. Nor anywhere more than in Canada. We have no right to blame our leaders; each and every one, we shared in the same sleep and the same blindness.
The close of the Great War made Canada not only a nation in its own consciousness but even in the acknowledged sense of the term, as a signatory of the Treaty of Versailles and a member of the League of Nations. But as a matter of fact, Canada and Canadian public opinion turned gladly away from everything international. Canada rightly refused to accept a ‘mandate’ of anything. The Government of 1922 refused Mr. Lloyd George’s The Chanak Incident, See Stephen King-Hall, “Our Own Times,” 1915-34 invitation to participate in a new war of Turkey and Greece. We decided to let them run it out between themselves. The decision was natural to the hour. The Conservative war government of Sir Robert Borden, succeeded by Mr. Arthur Meighen, who had played a notable part in wartime as first lieutenant to Sir Robert, had gone down in the elections of 1921. Mr. Mackenzie King was in office at the head of reviving liberalism. The traditional imperial forward policy of a Conservative administration was changed for the equally traditional Liberal policy of minding one’s own business. Without doubt, practically all people in Canada heartily endorsed Mr. King’s refusal to interfere, and the subsequent British decision to let things alone. Yet, in the light of what we know now, we may wonder if it was not a first step in that failure to control Europe by military power while still controllable, which has proved so fatal.
For the moment the world went on. It had been understood in the War Conferences and in public discussions generally, that the Empire would be reorganized after the war. The general subject was discussed in the Conference of 1921 and a committee finally drafted a plan in 1926, accepted by the Conference of 1930, which, with becoming delay, became a British Statute in five years and received complete Dominion ratification within 22 Geo. V, c. 4 the next seven. This is the famous Westminster Statute of 1931, which is generally now regarded as a sort of constitution of the British Empire. In reality it does little more than kick a dead mule and recognize a living truth. Such a dead mule, for example, is the Colonial Laws Validity Act which is expressly denounced and repudiated. But in 1931 hardly anybody, in Canada at least, had ever heard of this Act, and those who had, were foggy about what it meant. When adopted (1865) it extended colonial freedom by making any colonial law a valid one unless British legislation overruled it. But this once broad cloak of colonial liberty had shrunk to a little shirt beyond use. The Statute of 1931 took it off the line. The Statute is based on “the free association of the members of the Commonwealth of Nations . . . united by a common allegiance to the Crown.” But it is as much a riddle of the Sphinx, a Delphic Oracle, as was the American Constitution of 1789 till the Civil War interpreted it with a sword. The Statute of Westminster, like its American predecessor, A. B. Keith, “Governments of the British Empire,” 1935 seems to create a permanent union with full right of secession. The Crown becomes as many crowns as there are Commonwealth members. Edward VIII ruled a day longer in Eire than he did in London, and in South Africa a day less. But the real meaning of the Act is that Canada and Australia and the other Dominions are admitted to have the full status that we all admit they have, though it defies definition in words. The understanding is suitably British. But an unfortunate oversight is that in disclaiming sovereignty over Canada the Statute failed to supply a means of our own for amending our constitution, such as Australia possesses. Failing that, as already said, we can only amend it by pretending that the British Parliament is still supreme, that is, by putting on again the shrunken little shirt of 1865.
Equally inconclusive have been the attempts to reconstruct the economic life and the economic connection of the Empire. The close of the war was expected to open a new era of British migration overseas, to join in a common prosperity the unused resources of the Dominions with the surplus labour and accumulated capital of Britain. The Empire Settlement Act of 1922 was framed in this intention. The British Government offered to spend $15,000,000 a year from 1922 to 1927, to co-operate in any Dominion scheme of assisted migration. Australia and Australian States joined heartily in. The Commonwealth planned for 450,000 immigrants in ten years. The Act proved a failure. Each Western Australian farm family cost $7,500 to establish. Moreover, the event showed that the general attitude towards migration had altered. An immigrant was no longer a blessing, but a burden. Organized labour was now everywhere a power. Labour sees its own interest clearly, in the sharp light of necessity, but it sees with a special focus. It must not look too far ahead — a thing natural enough to people hard put to it to provide for the present. An immigrant seemed to mean a competitor to cut down wages. Hence Canada made no response to the Empire Settlement Act except to offer improved farms for families with something to start from, and to invite immigrants for jobs that no one else wanted — those of the house-servant and the hired man. Later, when unemployment set in, all immigrants without money seemed extra mouths to feed and all were shut out. Thus bad went to worse. With labour shut out capital stayed out. Presently migration began to drift the other way — from Canada and the other Dominions to the Mother Country, back to the little lighted streets and the corner pubs, where misery at least has company. Out of these vast errors of the past we must learn the wisdom of the future.
It was expected also that the new life of the Empire would include a new unity of trade, something approaching to the open “The British Empire,” Oxford Press, 1931 door all round — the dream of the statesman and the nightmare of the colonial manufacturer. The moment of the Imperial Conference of 1930 seemed ripe for a forward imperial step. In Canada the Liberal Party had gone to defeat in the general election of 1930 and the Conservatives, now led by Mr. R. B. Bennett, were in power. But Mr. Bennett’s overtures in London proved of little avail in a country still clinging, though with a loosening hold, to free trade, and unable to give preference to one customer without closing the door on the other. There was still also the lingering doubt whether Canadian preference preferred. The Dominions Secretary, Mr. J. H. Thomas, settled the discussion with the word ‘humbug’; British statesmen had been too polite for thirty-two years to use it.
The renewed attempt at Ottawa in the further Conference of 1932 bore fruit, of what final ripeness we cannot yet tell. It was based on the sound idea of duties regulated to represent differential costs only; hence trade, if not free, would be at least equal. In practice the difficulty is to delimitate cost and hence the friction is still there. Many of the bilateral agreements of Ottawa have lapsed. But a part still stands. The removal of the duty on British books brought the consumer feebly back to life, whispering his thanks. But presently Ottawa and all that went with it was overwhelmed in the great cloud of the depression.
JAMES CROCKART, A.R.I.B.A., MONTREAL, P.Q., 1941
“Perhaps the brightest page in these short inter-war annals . . . is the record of the discovery and exploitation of the incalculable mineral wealth . . .” — page 237
For the truth is that the whole economic life of Canada, as of other countries, was dislocated by the great industrial collapse of the years following 1930. This brought down the world’s currencies to ruin and intensified the economic separatism already commenced and now involving world trade in a common disaster. Great Britain abandoned the gold standard in 1931; currency, credit and banking collapsed in a heap in the United States in the opening of 1933. Canadian currency was already inconvertible. J. P. Day, “Introduction to World Economic History,” 1939 German currency, wilfully inflated, was multiplied by millions, by billions, by trillions, till it vanished in gas, leaving foreign bondholders holding an empty bag. All other European money followed suit till foreign exchange became a lottery and all foreign trade a gamble. In and out of the maze ran a new pernicious system of trade and exchange quotas that were strangling the remaining common life of Europe, when the war brought it to a quicker end.
Canada felt the effect of all this to the full. This was partly because it still depends greatly on exports from primary industry, but also, in a new way, by its growth to a country of vast investment of capital. It was estimated that by 1937 there was some $2,684,000,000 of British capital invested in Canada and $3,932,000,000 of American. The British was predominantly in fixed obligations and in railway shares, the American in common stocks, municipal bonds and investment in subsidiary companies. All in all it represented a volume of interest payments, much of it contracted in terms of foreign currency. The whole of Canada now shared the fate of the old-time farmer of the middle seventies, sleepless over the six-months’ interest on his mortgages ($17.50 on $500 at 7 per cent).
But the effect of the depression on capital and on those receiving dividends and interest, was only a part of its total industrial effect. It bore heavily on the whole class of industrial factory workers, on organized labour, and brought with it a widespread dislocation and unemployment unknown in the days of a simpler public economy. It has not been possible in this book to recount the changes which in Canada transformed the individual labour of the farm and forest to the organized labour of the factory and presently to the form of international federations covering all the field. The organized labour and trade unions in Canada, as late as 1911 included only 133,000 members, but in 1931 had reached a total of 310,000 members. As a consequence the whole industrial structure had acquired a sensitiveness unknown in the opening days of the Dominion. Hard times in those days were hard enough, for farmers holding out as best they could; but the new industry brought with it the new unemployment and the new public aid and relief, total or partial, extended to 870,000 persons in 1938. Just now the war is wiping the slate clean, but after the war we shall need a new slate.
Of necessity the decline of foreign trade and the cessation of migration reacted on the internal economy of Canada. In particular it helped to bring down into one vast wreckage the railway transportation system of the country. The trouble dated far back. With the opening century began the dream, and then the plan, of a second transcontinental railway. Part of it was to run in a great sweep from Quebec to Winnipeg and never hit a house. No traffic would get in its way. The other part, wisely enough, was meant to cross the prairies through a better country and by a better mountain pass than its great predecessor. Beside it grew up the adjacent enterprise of a Hudson Bay railway. The very activity of the hour launched a third transcontinental, the ‘Northern’ system of Messrs. Mackenzie and Mann, that put itself together in little pieces, a bit here and a bit there, passing the hat to municipalities.
The underlying impetus towards the great railway boom of 1903 to 1914 was the spirit of our people. Canadians ‘fall’ for public works as a farmer falls for peas under a thimble. We are all fascinated with our country. We’ll build anything, remove it, dam it or damn it. Hence no one ever really counted the cost of the railway vision. To this was added the fact that the honeymoon of the West and the Canadian Pacific Railway had waned. The first locomotive came into Winnipeg all bells and flowers and with girls riding on the cow-catcher. No girls rode thus in 1913 — not without paying. So the farmer began to call the railway an octopus and to look round for an octopus of his own. But more than all was the great revolution in traffic by which the motor car, the bus and the truck cut the track from under the railway. Till the roads are rebuilt there is no remedy. Meantime in Canada the great crash of 1930 completed the temporary downfall of all railway enterprise. Dividends stopped on the private line, and debt buried its subsidized competitor. This over-building of railways was to prove later on, when world war broke out, and called for transportation, a blessing in disguise. But for the time being not even the long experience of such a man as Sir Henry Thornton, nor the intellectual grasp and phenomenal industry of such a man as Sir Edward Beatty could stay disaster.
