The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 (17 page)

Then, on March 31, the Opposition’s intentions were revealed when, at the opening of the day’s proceedings, Lucius Seth Huntington rose to give notice that before the House went into Committee of Ways and Means, he would move that a committee be appointed to inquire into matters generally affecting the Canadian Pacific railway. Huntington sat down amid Opposition cries of “Hear! Hear!”

A tingle of excitement rippled through the House. “Tomorrow is looked forward to as a grand field day in the Commons,” the
Globe’s
Ottawa correspondent reported. That tomorrow came but Huntington did not get his motion before the House and the tension continued to rise. On April 2, the
Globe
reported that Huntington’s notice “seems to have struck alarm through the ministerial camp.” The newspaper said there were rumours that Huntington would charge that three hundred thousand dollars was handed over by the American promoters of the railway to pay Government members to corrupt the voters. But the
Globe
had in the past printed so many false political rumours that the general public scarcely gave it a passing thought.

All the same, when Huntington prepared to make his motion on the evening of April 2, the corridors of the House were filled to suffocation, the galleries were crowded, the Treasury benches were full and every Opposition seat was occupied. The Commons was silent and expectant. Seldom had any member faced such an attentive audience.

Huntington rose. At forty-six, he was a man of commanding presence, big-chested and handsome, with a classic head that a sculptor might covet – aquiline nose, poetic eyes, thick shock of light, wavy hair. He was a lawyer of long experience who had served as solicitor-general under Sandfield Macdonald for Canada East. He had opposed Confederation and had briefly worked for Canadian independence from the Crown. He was interested in railway matters and had had some dealings with Jay Cooke. One day, with his parliamentary career behind him, the eloquent Huntington would retire to New York and publish a political novel.

Huntington began to read from a paper in his hand. He was a polished speaker, resonant and melodious, though better at delivering carefully laboured set-piece addresses than in the cut and thrust of spontaneous debate. Now there was a tremor in his voice and he spoke so softly that the back-benchers had to lean forward to catch his words. He had every reason to be nervous for he was putting his career on the line. If he could not prove his charges, he would certainly be forced to resign his seat; but if he
could
prove them, his name would go down in history.

His speech was astonishingly brief; it ran to no more than seven short paragraphs and was supported by no documentary evidence. As he spoke, he paused occasionally and glanced uneasily about him as if to weigh the effect of his words: the reaction from the Government benches was one of stolid indifference. Huntington charged that the Allan company was secretly financed by American capital and that the Government was aware of that fact, that Allan had advanced large sums of money, some of it paid by the Americans, to aid the Government in the elections and that he had been offered the railway contract in return for this support. Lord Dufferin, who was a descendant of Richard Sheridan and had some of the eloquence of that great playwright, put the case more forcefully in his report to the Colonial Secretary. Huntington, he said, had charged that the Government had “trafficked with foreigners in Canada’s most precious interests in order to debauch the constituencies of the Dominion with the gold obtained at the price of their treachery.”

Dufferin did not believe a word of this. In spite of his official pose of strict impartiality he had been seduced by the Prime Minister’s considerable charm. He thought the scene in the House, which he could not witness, “a very absurd one” and Huntington himself “a man of no great political capacity.”

But it was not absurd, as events were to prove. Huntington called for a parliamentary committee of seven members to inquire into every circumstance connected with the railway negotiations with power to subpoena papers, records and witnesses. Then he sat down, “full of suppressed emotion,” as an historian of the day recorded.

An oppressive silence hung over the House – a silence so deathly that some who were present recalled years later the solemn ticks of the parliamentary clock falling like hammer blows. James Edgar, the Liberal whip, thought he saw guilty looks on the faces of some of the Conservatives, but this may have been wishful thinking. Every eye had turned to the lean, sprawled figure of Macdonald. The Prime Minister, one hand toying with a pencil, remained “inscrutable as stone.” There were those who said he was stunned by the charges but this is scarcely credible; he had been expecting them since Huntington gave his notice. More likely he was bothered by their lack of substance. Why was Huntington holding back? Why hadn’t he read the evidence into the record? What was the Opposition plotting?

The silence was broken at last by the Speaker, asking in a calm, impersonal voice for the question. There was a spatter of nervous echoes from both sides of the House: “Question! Question!” The voting proceeded. The motion was lost by a majority of thirty-one – one of the largest the Government had enjoyed that session – and the House moved on to other business; but the oppressive atmosphere remained. “The feel of a hurricane was in the air,” as the crowd in the gallery drifted uneasily into the corridors.

In “Number Nine,” the smoking room reserved for Opposition members, excitement was mingled with outrage. James Young, the popular journalist from Galt, declared the country wouldn’t stand for it; Macdonald must go. There were cheers of approval. Joseph Rymal, the caustic member from Wentworth South filled his pipe, uttered an oath and called Macdonald “the greatest corruptionist that America had produced.” David Stirton, a pioneer farmer from Guelph, said Macdonald was a scoundrel “and ought to have been hanged long ago.”

This was all very well but Huntington’s motion, unsubstantiated by any evidence, had produced no result. The
Globe
, the following
day, referred to the Pacific Railway Scandal (the title was eventually shortened to Pacific Scandal), and, as might be expected, laced into the Prime Minister for his silence in the face of Huntington’s charges; but it confessed itself surprised “at the equally silent policy of Mr. Huntington.” Surely, the Grit organ said, “the gravity and momentous importance of the motion should have been explained and urged upon the House before the vote was taken.” The Governor General thought that Huntington was on a mere fishing expedition, hoping that a parliamentary inquiry would sniff out documents that he did not possess. “The House at large, including some of his own friends, thought he had got hold of a mare’s nest,” Dufferin later recorded. Macdonald himself thought Huntington had blundered by allowing the Government to shut off debate so subtly and treat the whole matter as a vote of non-confidence. The Government press took the view that the motion was nothing more than a device to needle the ministry.

As far as the public was concerned, the cry of bare-faced corruption had lost its potency from overuse by the newspapers. There was no such thing as an objective daily newspaper in the Canada of the seventies. The major papers were party organs, owned or subsidized by the Liberals or the Conservatives; their editors – men like White of the
Gazette
or Brown of the
Globe –
were up to their starched collars in politics, often sitting as members in House or legislature. The “news” stories emanating from Ottawa were no more impartial than the editorials and were not expected to be. Opinion, personal comment, prejudice and shrill invective enlivened every page and the charge of corruption, especially at election time, was made so often and so recklessly that the public had long since come to expect it and ignore it. Most people probably agreed with the Governor General himself who saw in the vote over the Huntington motion a great victory for the Government which “establishes them for the Session.”

Macdonald, however, was having second thoughts. He had faced a rebellion from his own followers between sittings. Many felt that the Government had given the appearance of riding roughshod over its opponents and that its silence in the face of charges so serious could be taken as an admission of guilt. Accordingly, the Prime Minister rose a week later to announce the appointment of a select committee of five to investigate the Huntington charges. Edward Blake was one of the two Opposition members on the committee. The chairman was John Hillyard Cameron, a corpulent Scot who had long been a power
within the Conservative Party – the ideal man, from Macdonald’s point of view, to guide the committee in its deliberations.

Now Macdonald proceeded to set in motion a series of tactics of the kind that would eventually earn him the sobriquet – an affectionate one – of “Old Tomorrow.” His was to be a policy of delay. When Mackenzie, the Opposition leader, urged that the evidence before the committee be taken under oath, Macdonald obligingly agreed. It sounded like a concession to the Opposition since Huntington’s motion had not gone that far.

But before the witnesses could be sworn, a bill had to be introduced into the House providing for evidence to be taken under oath. That could occupy almost a month. Macdonald was reasonably confident that such a bill would be
ultra vires
and that Mother England, if prompted, would disallow it. Such a disallowance would pave the way for a royal commission, which could, of course, examine witnesses under oath. From Macdonald’s point of view, a royal commission composed of aging jurists of his own choosing was far preferable to a parliamentary committee with men of Blake’s calibre ready to tear into the Allans, the Abbotts and the Langevins.

On April 18, Cameron introduced the Oaths Bill in the House and Macdonald chose that moment to demur. Before the second reading of the bill, he said, the matter should be carefully investigated and, if it were found that Canada did not have the necessary power to pass such a bill, then a royal commission could be obtained. On April 21, Cameron moved a second reading of the bill, explaining that he was satisfied the House could and should pass it. Macdonald made a point of disagreeing with his old crony but he added that he thought the bill should go through anyway. Macdonald had thus neatly covered himself. As Dufferin put it rather testily to Lord Kimberley, three days later: “Sir John’s real object I imagine to be delay, but he did not like the odium of appearing to throw any impediment in the way of this enquiry but prefers to shelter himself behind my throne.”

It was May 3 before the Oaths Bill received the Governor General’s signature. The delay, frustrating to the Opposition, drove the
Globe
to a fury. “Every contemptible difficulty that an imagination frightened into creative activity could devise was thrown in its way,” the newspaper cried. It thought the whole affair could have been accomplished in a single day.

On May 5, the committee met for the first time – but not for long. Again, Macdonald engineered a delay. He had by this time seen
Huntington’s list of thirty-six witnesses and he saw at once that the Government faced something far more searching and exhaustive than a mere fishing expedition. Huntington was preparing to call McMullen, Allan, Abbott, Cartier, Hincks, the proprietors of the newspapers Allan said he bought, members of the Cartier election committee and even the managers of the Montreal and Ottawa telegraph offices who might have copies of compromising messages in their files. With Allan in England trying to raise funds for the railway (an increasingly difficult task in view of the disquieting news from Ottawa), the Prime Minister realized that, if the committee began its proceedings, he himself would have to take the witness stand before the absentee. That was a danger that must be avoided. He had no idea what the erratic Allan might blurt out on the stand. Their stories must dovetail and that could not be achieved until Allan and Abbott, who was with him, returned.

Macdonald determined to use the two men’s absence, and that of Cartier, to force another delay. Here were the most important witnesses of all, he pointed out; would it be fair or just to proceed without them – to try them, in effect, in their absence? He got his way with the help of the Tories on the committee and his own parliamentary majority. The hearings were postponed until July 2.

Macdonald had successfully prevented the committee from sitting until midsummer and, if the Oaths Bill were disallowed, perhaps forever. The Opposition had not been able to get a shred of evidence on the record. Though the Liberal newspapers were screaming “scandal” (the ministerial press dubbed the affair “the Pacific Slander”), the public, numbed by a succession of spurious scandals and slanders, was not aroused.

The delay was more than frustrating: it was dangerous to the Opposition cause. Telegrams could be destroyed in the interval; originals of documents and letters could disappear, and, indeed, did. The Liberal leadership belatedly realized that it had made a tactical error in not placing some of the evidence on the record when Huntington first made his charges in early April. It is clear that he had seen copies of the Allan-McMullen correspondence and knew where the originals were stored. The evidence was to indicate that the Liberal party had purchased Allan’s indiscreet correspondence from McMullen for twenty-five thousand dollars, using the aggrieved Senator Asa B. Foster as a go-between.

On May 13, Huntington tried to rectify his error, rising on a
question of privilege to say that he knew of documentary evidence which was in the hands of a trustee and, because of the postponement, might be “beyond the reach of the Committee.” He tried to read one of Allan’s letters but Macdonald rose immediately to protest, in a soft, earnest voice, the impropriety of such disclosures being made in the House. The Speaker ruled Huntington out of order but in the course of his speech he did manage to get a good deal of titillating information on the record. If he only
could
read the letters, Huntington said, the House would see that they established that Allan had made a bargain for a sum of $360,000 which he wanted repaid. Amid cries of encouragement from his own party, Huntington went on to charge that Allan had manipulated priests and press for his own ends and that the letters – if he were only allowed to read them – would prove it. He moved that the committee subpoena the trustee and take over the documents, and to that the House agreed. The Liberal Party had cause to be jubilant. “They are done for,” the Grit whip, J. D. Edgar, wrote to his wife that night.