The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (72 page)

Stephen lost little time in passing all this treasonous talk on to Macdonald. Meanwhile, the
CPR’S
secretary, Charles Drinkwater, diplomatically suggested that the bank would undoubtedly take a different view of the proposed loan if the railway’s relief bill were actually placed before Parliament. Finally, the reluctant Prime Minister acted. He gave notice to the House on May 1 of the resolutions he proposed to submit. It came at a singularly dramatic moment. The press that day was proclaiming that Britain and Russia were on the eve of war. Stephen had just opened a telegram from the Imperial War Department: Was the
CPR
in a position to transport war matériel to the Pacific coast? The
CPR
president instantly wired an affirmative response. Then, on May 2, there was more bad news from Saskatchewan: Colonel Otter had suffered a defeat at the hands of Poundmaker and his Crees.

Still there was to be a delay. Macdonald was determined to postpone
the debate on the railway resolutions until he had forced his pet franchise bill through the House. This was a measure that would remove control of the terms of the federal franchise from provincial legislatures. To Stephen, desperately trying to “tide over matters,” it seemed as if the Prime Minister was putting a petty squabble with the provinces ahead of what he was prone to call “this great national undertaking.” Four years before, the railway had been given priority in Parliament. Macdonald had refused to allow any other matter to take precedence over the debate on the
CPR
contract. Now, with the company existing on nothing more than goodwill and promises, he was prepared to let it wait another month or more while the House wrangled its way through the franchise bill, phrase by phrase and sentence by sentence. Why? Was it because the spectre of the Pacific Scandal still haunted Parliament and the Prime Minister was fearful of being seen again to favour such a controversial private company? No doubt; yet he had favoured it before. More likely, Macdonald saw the
CPR
issue as politically divisive and the franchise issue as unifying. Yet this scarcely explains his astonishing remark to Charles Tupper: “I consider the passage of the Franchise Bill the greatest triumph of my life.” Plainly, in his seventy-first year, the Prime Minister was afflicted by a myopia that permitted national interests to give way to those of party.

Stephen was beside himself at this politicking. Abbott, the company’s lawyer, who was also a Member of Parliament, had “fairly scared” him with the news that it might be five or six weeks before the
CPR
resolutions became law. The railway could not hold out for anything like that time. Stephen felt that Macdonald had lost faith in him, that the imminent collapse of the company was no longer of much moment. Certainly the Prime Minister, harried by events in the North West and obsessed with his battle over the franchise bill, was weary of Stephen’s constant, injured carping. “I think I had a right to more considerate treatment,” Stephen had complained to Tupper at the end of April. Of one thing he was convinced; the company at all costs must get free of any connection with the government, and as swiftly as possible. It was the beginning of a breach with Macdonald (never an open one) which was probably a factor in his subsequent decision to leave Canada and return to his native Scotland.

The
CPR
still needed the government to guarantee a loan at the bank. Even a million dollars would help. Shaughnessy had a way of doling out small downpayments on expired credit notes, of stilling the more persistent creditors and keeping the loyal ones at arm’s length. A million dollars in Shaughnessy’s hands could give the company perhaps three weeks’ breathing space. On May 5, at the government’s request, the Bank of
Montreal advanced three-quarters of a million dollars. It was not much; but it was something.

The real problem was wages. The pay car with the March wages, due to leave from Montreal on April 15, had not been sent out. A month passed; by that time the April wages were also due. Still there was no sign of any payment. All along the line the grumblings began to be heard, mingled with reports of real privation.

“The distress among the men is keen,” the
Globe
reported in mid-May. “The boardinghouse keepers are looking hard at the young men whose board has not been paid for over two months, and they are doubtful if they will ever be able to collect from all when the long delayed car does come.…”

Grocers, bakers, butchers, dry goods and hardware merchants began to deny further credit to married employees of the railway. In the
CPR
shops at Parkdale a number of men disclosed that they had been forced to cut themselves down to one meal a day. They had been unable to get extensions from local shops because these, in turn, had been denied further supplies from wholesale houses that had advanced credit. Everybody from office clerk to dispatcher felt the pinch. One travelling passenger agent, it was reported, was forced to economize in the use of his razor, “and looks as if he had been out of the world for some weeks.” For the ordinary labourer, who received only a dollar a day and was therefore unable to save any money, the lack of pay was especially severe. “Some of them are said to be now suffering the extreme of want and poverty, and even though still keeping at their work, are daily fighting against the gnawing of hunger.”

A listlessness seemed to have seized the employees of the railway in Ontario. They continued to work because they had no recourse. Unlike the track gangs farther west, they were not essential to the survival of the
CPR
. When a group of mechanics at Perth told Van Horne that they would quit work unless the pay car came along, the general manager simply informed them that if that happened, he would close down the works. That message travelling up and down the line killed all talk of a general strike.

In Parliament, the debate on the franchise bill dragged on and on. Speeches lasted for seven hours; one sitting went on for three days without a break; there were ninety-three divisions of the House. It was clear that the
CPR
would have to have a government advance or another guarantee at the bank if it was to stay alive until the relief measure could pass the House and Senate. “It is very hard having to fight both enemies & friends,”
Stephen wrote in a bitter and urgent letter to Macdonald. Somehow the railway had to find money, not just for wages, but also for the interest payments on the bonds of the Ontario and Quebec Railway. It was the twelfth of May: the interest was due on the first of June. “If we default,” Stephen reminded the Prime Minister, “…  then goodbye to the
C.P.R.…”

The resolution of the
CPR’S
various financial crises was always theatrical, fraught with the same kind of tension that audiences had come to expect from the stage melodramas of the era, in which the heroine was saved at the last instant from the onrushing locomotive, the big saw, or the Fate Worse than Death. Such a moment came, again at the eleventh hour, less than a week before the interest on the O and Q bonds was due. Most of the directors of the company waited breathlessly outside of the Privy Council door while the Cabinet argued over whether or not the government could guarantee another bank loan. In later years, Van Horne liked to describe that scene to his friends:

“I guessed that sound would come best to me if I stood in the room opposite the glass door which would help to act as a resonator. But though I could hear each voice as it spoke, I was unable to make out clearly what anyone said. It was an awful time. Each one of us felt as if the railway was our own child and we were prepared to make any sacrifice for it, but things were at a dead-lock and it seemed impossible to raise any more money. We men ourselves had given up twenty per cent of our salaries and had willingly worked, not overtime but double-time, and as we waited in that room, we thought about these things and wondered whether all our toil was going to be wasted or not, and what would happen if Canada were ruined.… At last Joe Pope came with a yellow paper in his hand. He said that the Government was prepared to back the Bank of Montreal to the extent then required. I think we waited until he left the room. I believe we had that much sanity left us! And then we began. We tossed up chairs to the ceiling; we trampled on desks; I believe we danced on tables. I do not fancy that any of us knows now what occurred, and no one who was there can ever remember anything except loud yells of joy and the sound of things breaking!”

Van Horne raced immediately to the company’s office to telegraph the news to Shaughnessy. The operator seemed too slow and so the general manager pushed him aside and began ticking off the message himself. It had been a near thing. “The advance we are now making is quite illegal and we are incurring the gravest responsibility in doing so,” Macdonald wrote to Stephen.

The resolutions for the relief of the railway were still not before the House, and John Henry Pope was not able to present them until June 16. By that time the rebellion in Saskatchewan had been crushed. Riel and Poundmaker were both prisoners. Dumont, whose small band of sharpshooters had held off the militia for a surprisingly long period, had vanished over the border. Sam Steele was in hot pursuit of Big Bear. Schreiber had already informed Tupper (in England) that “the House and country are both in favour of the
CPR
and that should now be doubly the case when the fact is patent to the world [that] but for the rapid construction … Canada would have been involved in a frightful waste of blood and treasure quelling the rising in the North West.”

Tyler and Hickson of the Grand Trunk had both rushed to Ottawa on June 13 to see Macdonald and other members of Parliament, but they must have discovered what Schreiber already knew: that a good many Liberals were prepared, if not to support the measure, at least not to oppose it. As “a matter of policy,” the urbane Tyler decided to make a trip out west on the rival line and see it all for himself. Hickson was horrified at the idea, but Sir Henry, the old politician, knew something of the value of being graceful in defeat. Hickson reconciled himself to the inevitable.

Though the battle was clearly lost, Edward Blake, the leader of the Liberal opposition, had no intention of giving in without a fight. He was prepared to oppose the relief bill as he had opposed the whole concept of a privately owned transcontinental railway from the very beginning. His speeches were now lasting for six hours and wearying the House. To Stephen, however, they must have seemed extraordinarily effective, for they produced an apoplectic reaction: “The
meanest
thing of the kind that has ever come under my notice … an ill-conditioned, vindictive effort … I am so furious with Blake that I cannot at the moment write coherently about him or his speech. What a miserable creature he must be!” As always, to Stephen, any man who opposed his particular concept of the railway was a blackguard of the deepest dye.

The
CPR
president hoped that Macdonald would destroy “the evil effects of Blakes malicious speech” and “express the scorn & contempt which I am sure you must feel.…”

Macdonald was probably more amused by Blake than he was contemptuous – the Liberal leader’s speeches contained far too many indigestible facts and were, during that session, causing even his own supporters to snore. But the Prime Minister had his own problems. Tupper, the greatest of all parliamentary fighters, was out of the picture
in London. Pope was ill. Campbell, the Minister of Justice, was incapacitated by splitting headaches. Tilley, also ill, was off to Europe. Macdonald had remarked earlier that year that he could not be away for an hour without “some blunder taking place.” He had just come through a savage debate on the franchise bill; now he must gird himself up for another struggle. This time, however, he was in a stronger position. The railway had proved itself. No matter what Blake and his colleagues said, it had saved the country. He made that point when he rose to speak:

“Late events have shown us that we are made one people by that road, that that iron link has bound us together in such a way that we stand superior to most of the shafts of ill-fortune, that we can now assemble together, at every point which may be assailed, or may be in danger, the whole physical force of Canada by means of that great artery, against any foreign foe or any internal insurrection or outbreak.”

The debate that followed, as Joseph Pope recalled it, was “acrimonious and unpleasant.” It was a foregone conclusion that the measure would pass; what was less certain was the company’s ability to survive during the time it would take to turn the bill into law. If the Opposition kept on talking the
CPR
could collapse.

The loan from the bank ran out; the chances of another were slim. Stephen was so hard pressed that he was forced to delay his continuing visits to Ottawa. They were not productive anyway. There is a story told of him and Abbott sitting in the anteroom of the council chamber one hot afternoon, patiently awaiting the outcome of a final, desperate appeal for help, only to discover that the ministers, rather than face them, had vanished by another door.

“I feel like a ruined man,” said the dejected Stephen. Yet, in spite of all his dark predictions about imminent collapse, in spite of his sinister warnings about his own physical condition, in spite of his pledge never again to visit the capital, even in spite of his declarations that he would turn negotiations over to Van Horne, he somehow hung on and the company somehow hung on.

The melodrama continued literally until the very last hour. By July, the
CPR’S
credit had reached the snapping point. Even Frank Smith was disturbed; in giving the company aid he had allowed himself to become dangerously over-extended. One creditor would wait no longer. The company owed him four hundred thousand dollars and could not meet its obligations. On July 10, it is said, the debt was due. If it was not paid, the
CPR
was faced with all the confusion of a complicated receivership: a scramble of creditors all demanding payment, the total collapse of the
Company, a halt on all railroad construction, and a legal and financial tangle that could drag on for months before a new corporation with new government arrangements could be formed and the work commenced again.