Part 9

Had he expected the Liberal leadership, the close of the war and almost the end of Laurier should have found the member for Prince ready for action or advice. But there is no record that, at this time, his counsels were sought by the Liberal party, or that he thrust himself into the limelight. Three months after the Armistice, Laurier was dead. Even then King was not mentioned as his successor. Four months later he was chosen, when not even he quite understood how it was done. King did nothing to reform his party along new lines, or publicly to state what he considered its reasonable position to be as between the Union party and the Agrarians. A broad manifesto from the new leader at such a time would have been useful. Never had a political leader in Canada such a duty of broad revision within his party. King neglected the opportunity. The Toronto Globe realizes what a squeezed lemon the Liberal party has become between the other two groups and calls for a working alliance between the Liberals and Agrarians to upset the Government. The Mail and Empire paternally points out that it is the duty of Liberals to enlist, Quebec included, under the hegemony of the party which has already incorporated Liberals and is ready to save that party from obliteration by the free-trade group.

Beneath the conventional assurance displayed in each of these organs of public opinion one detects an under-current of uneasiness, by no means mitigated by the farmer victory for the Commons in Medicine Hat, which the Globe construed as a triumph on parade, and the Agrarian turnover in Alberta which the Mail and Empire with all its sturdy protestations cannot honestly interpret as other than a calamity. Each of the historic parties feels itself confronted by a new sort of menace comparable to nothing in the history of Canadian politics. Two parties which ten years ago were in opposition are now flung together by the fear of a common danger and refuse to admit it. The Globe's hope is that Farmerism will become the new Liberalism. The Globe is right. But the captains may not be of The Globe's choosing and the planks in its platform are not those which The Globe in its days of sanity would have accepted for the good of the people. It is the intention of Farmerism to absorb all there is of Liberalism. Mackenzie King knows it. He knows that the Liberals will suffer more than the Government from the plough movement. Yet he is invited by The Globe to try the trick of the bird swallowing the snake!

The essence of Liberalism has always been liberation; emancipation. But the farmers are out to smite all the shackles from all of us. They intend to stop short only of Bolshevism. An ex-Cabinet Minister of Alberta predicts that the farmers will sweep the country at the next election and steer it down the rapids of economic ruin. He cites Drury and Co. as examples of a certain sort of cunning whereby they did not at first show their real hand, in order to get people to feel that Agrarianism is not half so bad as painted and then--the broadening out into the People's party. The farmers are not notorious for sheer cunning; neither for stupidity. They are naturally hesitant about being as radical in office as they were on the stump. As an economic group they are no different from the old Free Trade Liberals, except that they seek to govern as a class on behalf of that particular group. Meanwhile the nation more or less opposed to farmerism is disintegrating itself into more groups. Labour is out for a species of self-determination; a Labour Party. A veteran Liberal statesman recently asked me this question:

"Suppose that in industrial centres like Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton and Winnipeg, Labour puts a candidate into every constituency; that in smaller factory centres which dominate essentially rural ridings they do the same. In each of these more or less labour-dominated fields suppose we have the possible four candidates. Is the Labour-Unionist in doubt over his own candidate going to vote Liberal, Liberal-Conservative, or Farmer?"

"As a man of long experience in elections--suppose you answer that?" I suggested.

He did not, but went on:

"I know what I should say to a labour elector under such circumstances. I should say to him: 'You had better not touch the farmer candidate with a ten-foot pole because--the farmer wants dear food and you want cheap food; he wants long hours and you want short hours; he wants imported manufactures and you want employment in your home town; he wants free trade and you depend upon a measure of protection.'"

Nobody has ever more pithily stated the case. There is no basic mutuality between the farm and the labour union. The farmer is as much a capitalist as he is a labourer.

I asked the Liberal statesman bluntly:

"Don't you think that in order to avoid political devastation by splitting the vote into three opposition groups each fighting the other, it is the immediate business of the two historic parties to unite against all parties of experiment, especially against the emancipating fanner?"

He gave this evasive but shrewd reply:

"I am a lifelong Liberal. I have been in the habit of reading newspapers on both sides of politics. I am now driven to take the Conservative organ for my daily political food."

I commend that answer to Hon. Mackenzie King. If the Liberal leader is now as anxious to serve the nation of his birth as he was when he twice refused large salaries and comparative ease for the sake of continuing to do Canada's work, would it be high treason either to himself or to his party to call a Liberal convention out of which he would father a resolution of federation of historic parties based upon such a compromise as Macdonald created in the federation of provinces?

The answer is obvious: "Fantastic! Absurd! Impossible!"

Mackenzie King will put up a smoke screen to hide the defection of the West from historic Liberalism. He will insist that the Liberals want only a reasonable tariff for revenue while the Government want protection--when Heaven knows each of them wants substantially the same thing in opposition to the farmer who wants everything. He will point with confident pride to the solid Liberal bloc Quebec, when he knows Quebec is dominated by Lapointe who can demand from him just what he wants as the price of Quebec's solidarity; and he knows equally well that Quebec is as much opposed to continentalism as the Liberal-Conservative Government can ever be. The man who wears the mantle of Laurier without his Orphean magic cannot lead Quebec.

However, Mackenzie King was put where he is to lead, and he intends to keep on doing it. If he can regulate a few of his enthusiasms and so adjust his personality as to make Liberalism as led by him powerful enough to be the dog that wags the Agrarian tail, he should be set down as one of the most remarkable men in the history of Canadian politics. He legitimately chuckles over Quebec. One can fancy him matching that race-group against the Agrarian bloc and the Government industrial centres group, and saying to himself:

"Labour may lop a few from the Government; Michael Clark a few from the farmers--enough to make my friend Mr. Crerar a most excellent colleague in my Coalition. Excellent fellow, Crerar!"

A low-tariff group, of whom 75 per cent. are Quebeckers, amalgamated with a no-tariff group who are near-Continentalists, is at least entitled to serious regard as a fantastic experiment in administration. But we may trust Hon. Mackenzie King to simulate a vast moving-picture smile of high benevolence and great sagacity as he contemplates such a fantasia--with himself as the chief tight-rope performer and Niagara roaring below.

NUMBER ONE HARD

HON. T. A. CRERAR

Some Frank Norris such as wrote "The Pit" and "The Octopus" should arise in Canada and write a Wheat-Politics novel about T. A. Crerar. This man's photograph was once published squatting Big-Chief-wise in the front row of 300 farmers on a raid to Ottawa--I think early in the war about prices. It was a second to the last delegation which the farmers intend to send to Ottawa. The next one was in 1918, when the farmers went to protest against conscription. If you ask T. A. Crerar to-day, he will predict that in days not far to come manufacturers will petition a farmer government in Ottawa. Because the farmers in the West regard Crerar as almost a geological process, which sometimes results in a volcano.

Crerar was projected into public affairs by 50-cent wheat, monopolistic elevator companies, discriminating railways and protected manufacturers; all of which, while he was still a young man who should have been going to dances and arguing about the genesis of sin, he concluded were into a dark conspiracy to make a downtrodden helot of the prairie farmer. To-day Crerar is at the apex of a movement. He embodies the politically and commercially organized campaign of the biggest interest in Canada against all other merely "big" interests. He is willing to let himself be talked about as the next Premier of industrial and agricultural Canada on behalf of all the farmers whom he can persuade to elect him a majority minority in the next Parliament. And the prospect does not even dazzle him, or awe his colleagues of the coonskin coats and the truculent whiskers.

Crerar began responsible life as a farm boy in Manitoba, taught school, and managed a small elevator company; he became President of the United Grain Growers and of the Canadian Council of Agriculture--and the next obvious thing to say is that he entered politics as Minister of Agriculture in the Union Government. But T. A. Crerar had been in politics a long while before that, though he had never even run for Parliament or legislature. Unusual, unprofessional politics. Hear what the present Secretary of the Canadian Council of Agriculture has to say about the parliaments of the Grain-Growers in 1916:

"Their annual conventions are parliaments of the Middle Western Provinces. Resolutions and recommendations of all sorts and description are debated and decided upon. Questions of far-reaching influence, socially and morally, have their beginning, so far as Western Canada is concerned, in the Grain Growers' Conventions. Records of these Associations show that besides recommending the establishment of co-operative elevators, co-operative banks, co-operative dairies, free trade, single tax and a dozen other economics reform, the Grain Growers in convention fathered Prohibition long before it was adopted, advised and urged woman suffrage many years before that measure was generally favoured, and were the first sponsors of the idea of direct legislation. The Grain Growers' Association and their annual conventions are the source and inspiration of all the commercial activities, and social and political reforms with which one finds the name of Grain Grower connected so often in Western Canada!"

This is the reforming political school that has trained the man now openly discussed as the next Premier of Canada. And for the benefit of any Canadian Norris who dreams of writing a problem novel about Crerar, it may be said that he is the most drab and unpicturesque personality that ever stood in line for any such office in this country. In the triangle of leaders at Ottawa he is the angle of lowest personal, though by no means lowest human, interest. Meighen is impressive; King brilliant. Crerar--is business. He would be a hard nut for a novelist to crack. A man like Smillie impresses the imagination. Crerar, who is to the Canadian farmer what Smillie was to the British miner, invites only judgment.

The first time I met Crerar--at lunch in a small eastern club--he impressed me as a man enormously capable in business, tersely direct in his judgments, somewhat satirical and inordinately sensitive. He seemed wary, almost cryptic in his remarks. Recently sworn in as Unionist Minister of Agriculture, he had turned his back on Winnipeg, where he was a sort of agrarian king, and taken his first dip into the cynical waters of Ottawa, where he was but one of a Ministerial group some of whom were abler and more interesting than himself. He had not yet appeared in Parliament. He dreaded the ordeal. He had no knowledge of just to what programme he would be expected to adhere, except the general one of winning the war. He had little enthusiasm for the Premier, probably less for most of his colleagues. So far as he had been able to survey Ottawa, he considered it an administrative mess. His direct ways of doing business were menaced by a sense of muddle and officialdom. He missed the breezy, open ways of "the Peg" and the sensation of being general manager of the biggest commercial concern west of the lakes, the Grain Growers' Grain Co. Crerar could not business-manage Ottawa. When he opened his Agriculture door he saw no box cars trailing in from the elevator pyramids on the skyline; he smelled no wheat; he saw no "horny-handed" farmers writing checks to cover their speculative investments in grain which they had not yet sown. No wheat-mining comrade motoring in from the plains came to thrust his boots up on the general manager's desk and say, "Believe me, Tom, I paid thirteen-ninety for those protected articles. What a shame!"

Crerar complained of indigestion. I think his nerves were on edge. I asked him if he expected to co-relate Agriculture with Food Control and Trade and Commerce. "Oh, I suppose so," he said wearily. "Nobody in Union Government knows what he will do yet. I don't like Ottawa. Its whole atmosphere is foreign to me."

He seemed almost contemptuous. He had made the patriotic plunge in order to put his particular brand of radical Liberalism at the service of a Tory-Unionist Government. He did not like it. Of all the Liberals who entered the Union Cabinet he was the sworn Radical. Both Calder and Sifton were machine men from governments that still had Liberal labels on their luggage. Crerar represented the great inter-prairie group of no compromise and of economic enmity to the Tories. He was rather looking for trouble; thinking rather hard of how he could get through with such an uncomfortable job, do it well and get back uncontaminated to his own dear land of the wheat and his fine office in the most handsome suite of offices in the Grain Exchange at Winnipeg. The Ottawa that he hated was the Capital that old line politicians had created. He was looking forward to some Ottawa of the future which like Canberra, the new dream Capital of Australia, might be vacuum-cleaned and disinfected of all the old partisan microbes.