Part 30

The Cardinal's attitude on conscription made Gouin's position still more difficult. His letter to the press bluntly put the Roman Catholic Church above temporal law. One heard of no rebuke from the Premier of Quebec to the Cardinal. A Cardinal may be above politics.

Sir Lomer was playing the game of safety, when from his own temperament and position and unbacked by other leaders he could do little more. He stood for the law and did not hinder its operation. But if there was a chief executive in Canada who wished the war were righteously over, it was Sir Lomer Gouin. No Premier had such a predicament; so much at the end to lose; so much at first to have gained--if only he could have foreseen, as nobody did, that conscription was coming and that law would be more awkward than liberty.

The Premier of Quebec had experience in keeping his Government immune from agitators. It was not alone the Nationalists who had made him uneasy. On the other extreme there had been for some time one Godefroi Langlois, former editor of La Patrie, and later founder and editor of Le Pays, whose platform was compulsory State education away from control of the clergy and in defiance of the Archbishops. Gouin did not endorse Langlois. How could he? Le Pays, when it condemned clerical schools, attacked the Administration. Politically Gouin was right in opposing Langlois. Nationally he was playing provincial. Langlois had a mission, in line with a broader, nationalized Canada; the same mission which is now being reflected in the National Council of Education.

So, between the reactionism of Bourassa and the radicalism of Langlois, Gouin was the compromise; and Langlois was conveniently given an official post in Europe.

Gouin has compromised his whole political career. With the leverage of enormous success in elections and administration, he never had the vision to declare himself in favour of a bigger Quebec than could be got by extending its boundaries to Ungava.

He was too old to begin. Quebec to him was a vast prefecture to be administered; not a vision to be realized. Ontario--except politically--was almost as far away as British Columbia. He was seldom in Toronto. Montreal was as a rule the last west for this voyageur. He seldom or never went to the Maritimes. He knew the people down there regarded the bloc Quebec as a denationalizer. He had little or no desire to see the prairies. He wanted Quebec to prosper. He delighted to see pulp mills and cotton factories and power plants and railways and trolleys vibrating along the St. Lawrence. He loved to dream of the great unpeopled hinterland--all Quebec; of the other hinterland--all the rest of Canada; of the transcontinentals converging at Montreal; of the steamship lines terminating there; of a land where there are few empty cradles or idle factories or wasting farms.

All these things Gouin, growing stout and somewhat heavy of face, loved to behold; and out of that grew all the vision he seemed to have. In this enormous prefecture within the Empire he beheld a far more comfortable State than the Nationalist dream of a separative Quebec; glad when he could find time to motor grandly and amiably out among the villages and be greeted as le grand seigneur of politics, even when he lacked the grand manners of the eminent patrician.

At any conference of Premiers in Ottawa he held himself somewhat aloof, studying the lot, respecting them all, cordial with all, anxious to do all that constitutionally in him lay to further co-ordination. But Gouin always sagaciously knew that there was no Premier in the pack who already had so much, with so little to ask, from Federalism as he. His was the pivotal province of Confederation, the grand compromise of Old Macdonald with Cartier; the basic sixty-five members of Parliament, unchangeable except by ripping up the B.N.A. Act, an instrument of Empire. He could wink the other eye and reflect that from the political concessions of the Act in official bilingualism and a fixed representation, in the outlet of the St. Lawrence, in the possession of the historic city, in the control of ocean navigation, in a solid clergy, in fundamental virtues of thrift and an established peasantry--he and his had more than any of the others could ever ask.

"Ah!" he said eloquently, with a fine twinkle of his eyes to the interviewer at Quebec, "you have not seen our Province? Then you must come down again, when I am not busy, and let me take you to see--all we have down here!"

A POLITICAL MATTAWA OF THE WEST

JOHN WESLEY DAFOE

First impressions are always tyrants. The first time I heard John Wesley Dafoe talk he was in his large sanctum of the Manitoba Free Press, in the summer of 1916. He was without a collar, his shirt loose at the neck, and his hair like a windrow of hay. He reminded me of some superb blacksmith hammering out irons of thought, never done mending the political waggons of other people, and from his many talks to the waggoners knowing more about all the roads than any of them. The wheat on a thousand fields was baking that day, and the 'Peg was roasting alive. Since that I have always pictured Dafoe sweltering, terribly in earnest, whittling the legs of the Round Table and telling somebody how it is that west of the lakes neither of the old Ottawa parties has now any grip on the people.

Dafoe talked that way in 1916. He was beginning to lisp a little along that restless line of thought in 1910. And in 1940 he may be sitting in that same sanctum with walls of heavy books on two sides of him, telling somebody just how it came to be that an economic cyclone on the prairies once caught up all the Grits and Tories and nothing was ever heard or seen of them again.

When Kipling wrote, "Oh, east is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet," he had never met Dafoe. Some directive angel planted him at Winnipeg shortly after Clifford Sifton crowded the gate there with people going in that they might choke it again with wheat coming out; and while people went in and wheat came out through this spout of the great prairie hopper, Dafoe dug himself a little ship canal which as it grew bigger sluiced the political rivers of the West into his sanctum before he lifted the lock and let them on down to the sea at Ottawa. The West as he saw it was a place of coming mighty changes. His own party was pushing the transformations. The prairies were due to become the mother of great forces. You could not be always herding people into a land like that from south, east and west and not come within an ace of fostering some revolution.

And of all cities west of the lakes, Winnipeg was the clearing-house, as much for policies and programmes as for wheat and money and people. No political cloud ever gathered on the prairies that did not get blown into Winnipeg before it burst. Dafoe stood ready for them all. He believed that no change had happened yet to the Liberal party comparable with the changes yet to come. He saw that party chaining itself to tariffs and big interests and he said:

"Believe me, that won't forever do. There's something just short of a revolution going to happen to this party before the West gets done with it; and if the party isn't ready for the West, so much the worse for the party."

Just to get ahead of mere chronology, the bane of many a good man's life. In 1919 the most complete imitation of a little Moscow ever seen on this continent was set up in Winnipeg. For many weeks it looked to some hopefuls as though the Wheat City would reconstruct the whole economic structure of the nation to suit the ideas of a violent minority. The main recorded issue was "collective bargaining". The real issue was direct action in the form of the sympathetic strike. By its expected control of urban centres the Soviet organization aimed to throttle big utilities, finance, shipping, railroads, telegraphs. The United Grain Growers were to be but a helpless giant in the hands of Jack Proletariat. Parliament was to be superseded by Direct Action. The A.F.L. was to become obsolete. Trades Unions were to be taken over and painted red. Citizens in starched collars were to become comrades in shirt sleeves, or enemies. Political parties would be reconstructed. The "workers" would own the country. The British Empire would be shaken into Soviets. The Army and the Navy would be internationalized. The real Capital of Canada outside of Winnipeg would be, not London, but Moscow. The International would supplant national anthems. Public opinion would be exterminated except as revised by the Red leaders on the Red River at its junction with the Assiniboine.

In the unfolding of this Great Adventure we pause here to observe that it was a newspaper which behind the Citizens' Committee administered a black eye to this attempt to make Winnipeg the Soviet headquarters of North America and 120 millions of people. The name of the paper was the Manitoba Free Press.

And the Free Press was seeing Red. What business had the Red Flag in a city like Winnipeg at all? If anywhere in Canada, why not in the industrial, big-interest East--in Montreal or Toronto?

"One revolution at a time, please," we almost hear the Free Press saying. "Now the war is done the West has to settle the fate of Government at Ottawa in its own way. And the way of the West is not with the Red Flag; not with Direct Action. This city is a headquarters of evolutionaries, not of outlaws. You people of the Strike Committee are trying to get the spot-light when you've no business anywhere except right at back stage."

A perfectly straight argument, though not couched in those words. Dafoe and his associates were profoundly busy with what to them was a ten times greater issue than any form of Soviet anywhere in Canada. As a matter of record the paper did admit that the metal workers had a right to strike for collective bargaining.

"But no other Union here or elsewhere," it thundered "has any right to a sympathetic strike to help the metal workers. This city is not going to be throttled by a thug minority, who want to exercise governing power as a revolutionary usurpation of authority."

A minority always leads. Majorities follow. The position of the Free Press was, that it is only a minority able to command a majority that should rule; and the Soviet was no such minority--while the Free Press was.

A clear grasp of this is necessary in the business of judging Mr. Dafoe and his coming influence upon Canadian affairs. What Dafoe enunciated about the strike will have a strong bearing in the case upon what he thinks about the Agrarians. The judge must get a fair judgment. But of this later.

Dafoe was, so far as we know, the first editor in Canada to advocate from the beginning of the war a Coalition Government. This was natural. The Free Press had no faith in the Borden administration of Bob Rogers, owner of the Winnipeg Telegram. By the summer of 1916 it was into a Coalition campaign. A year later when the Premier came back from England declaring for conscription and inviting Laurier to join in a Coalition, the Free Press supported him.

Why this anxiety? We must pull off a bit of the makeup to find out. The Free Press was a Liberal paper. It supported Laurier in the West. But the older it grew the more clearly Dafoe and his associates saw that the man who had created the two new Western Provinces could not hold them. Other gods were now arising. Their organ was the Grain Growers' Guide; their parliaments were in grain growers' conventions; their policy was radical Liberalism. The Liberal organ of a Wheat City could not consistently antagonize this radical movement. The farmers must be studied. So far as they could strengthen Liberalism by becoming a Radical wing, they must be encouraged. At the point where they developed an extreme left away from the party they must be checked. The Free Press which was yet to fight an economic revolution must not itself be revolutionary.

This leads up to policy in Empire. The paper had gone against Borden in 1911. It was against the taxation Navy of Borden even though it could see the danger of war ahead. It was opposed to the whole super-Tory idea of a centralized British commonwealth of nations. It "hung the hide" of Lionel Curtis and his Round Table propaganda clubs to the Canadian National fence. It argued for "a progressive development in Canadian self-government to the point of the attainment of sovereign power to be followed by an alliance with the other British nations", who it was assumed would do likewise. For years before the war the Free Press had talked of this evolutionary Empire, deeply regretting that Mr. Bourassa had coined the word "Nationalist" and made it obnoxious.

Winnipeg seldom does things one half at a time. In the summer of 1917 J. W. Dafoe was one of the most astounded men in Canada. The other one was Sir Wilfrid Laurier. That was the year of the famous Liberal Convention. Had such a Convention happened in Chicago with such a man as Roosevelt as the centre-piece, its doings would have been cabled the world over. In its small way the Winnipeg Convention was more sensational than the Big Strike two years later. Mr. Dafoe was in Ottawa that summer. He was needed there. The Premier had come back from England primed with a policy of conscription to be enforced by a possible Coalition Government, an offer of which was made to the Opposition leader. Since early in the war the Free Press had argued for coalition, but opposed conscription until after the United States entered the struggle because of the inevitable exodus of slackers across the border.