The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (3 page)

Here Sifton is greeted by an old political crony, the Mayor of Brandon, James Smart, bulky and balding. A reporter for the local
Sun
scribbles away in his notebook. “Never was a homecoming more cheerful,” he will write. “Never was a citizen received with such heartiness.” The hyperbole will surprise no one, since Sifton and his friend the Mayor both own a piece of the paper. According to the Toronto
Mail,
Sifton himself writes half the editorials, which have recently been eulogizing the Young Napoleon of the West
.

In the flickering light of the bonfire, we all enter the city hall, whose chambers have been decorated for the occasion by the young Liberals. Smart, as chairman, praises Sifton in what the
Sun
will call “a masterly manner.” Then the man of the hour rises to his feet to address the cheering throng
.

He is a strapping figure, six feet tall, glowing with health and energy, his cheeks plump with good living. But there is something forbidding about Sifton, even at thirty-five, something about his mien that says: Do not approach too close. A sparse moustache droops downward over his lips; but it is the eyes that are his most notable feature. They are small, close set, and chillingly cold. Not an easy man to know, one would say; not an easy man to cross
.

Tonight, however, he is all warmth. These are his friends, his neighbours, his political supporters. There isn’t a Tory in the hall
.

Sifton speaks modestly about his Brandon connections and the greeting he has been tendered. “I had not the slightest idea when I left Ottawa for home that I would receive such a royal welcome and warm homecoming,” he declares
.

Cheers punctuate these remarks, even though everyone must know
that the details of the welcome have been public knowledge for several days and that Sifton himself if he has acted true to form, had a hand in the planning. But now he is all humility. “I will not forget the people who sent me down,” he says. Nor will he. Dozens of old comrades in this audience will benefit from the new minister’s personal orchestration of the political spoils system
.

A modest promise follows: “When I go I will do my work just as a plain Brandon boy would do his on Rosser avenue.” And then a boast: “The magnitude and prospect of the work before me does not disturb me.” Nor does it. There isn’t a lazy bone in Clifford Sifton’s body. He is prepared to work throughout the night if necessary to clear the two-year backlog in his new department
.

Finally Sifton turns, as he must, to “the troublesome question – the school question – no speech in Manitoba would be complete without it.” He reveals that he has reached a compromise with Wilfrid Laurier: there will be no separate schools in the province, but in the predominantly Roman Catholic areas the Prime Minister has agreed to half an hour of religious teaching by Catholic teachers at the day’s end. At that there are more cheers: it has taken several weeks for Sifton to reach this accommodation with his leader. Now the way is cleared for his acclamation. It will be nearly a decade before the school question, like an unwanted relative, again lands on his doorstep
.

Eight days later, Sifton returned to Ottawa to do battle with the most powerful bureaucrat in the government service, A.M. Burgess, the deputy minister he had inherited from the previous administration. Sifton was determined to shake up the department, on whose officials, he said, “the pall of death seemed to have fallen.” He would start at the top. Burgess, a haughty Scot and former newspaperman, had been having his way with a series of weak ministers since 1882. But Sifton was no weakling. Somebody once said of him that he had a mind like a steel trap, the memory of an elephant, and the hide of a rhinoceros. Sifton made it clear that “instead of the deputy running the minister, the minister would run the deputy.” Burgess would have to go.

Sifton’s elephant-like memory went back a long way to a day in 1884 when, as a young Brandon lawyer, just twenty-three, he had sought an audience with Burgess on behalf of the newly formed Manitoba and North West Farmers’ Union, an organization concerned with the handling of public lands. The arrogant Burgess had kept him waiting
for seven hours while he remained closeted with his Tory friends, and then dismissed him and a colleague contemptuously as self-serving Liberal hacks who knew less about the West than he did. Sifton did not forget the insult. And now he was Burgess’s boss.

For a cabinet minister to dislodge a veteran deputy was unthinkable in the bureaucracy of that day (and almost unthinkable in this). But Sifton wanted to fire
two
: not only Burgess but also Hayter Reed, the Deputy Superintendent General of Indian affairs. In Sifton’s view both men were incompetent – Easterners who didn’t understand the West, masters of red tape and bureaucracy who made any sensible dealings with the department impossible. It was, Sifton found, “a department of delay, a department of circumlocution … a department which tired men to death who undertook to get any business transacted with it.”

The two civil servants fought back. They had powerful political connections; but Laurier had promised Sifton a free hand, and he meant to use it. In addition, he had the support of the West. Even the arch-Conservative Calgary
Herald
wanted to see Burgess ousted. The paper reflected the general impression in the West that Burgess considered settlers a nuisance and even a menace. “Whenever the opportunity occurred to give it to the settler in the neck … the deputy minister did not fail to deliver the blow.”

The battle dragged on into February. The civil service was aghast. Joseph Pope, the very proper Under Secretary of State, who had once served John A. Macdonald, thought it “a bad business [which] creates general disquietude.” In Pope’s eyes, this act of surgery by a bumptious Westerner destroyed “the feeling of permanence and stability, which attached to the office in the past.”

But Sifton was less interested in stability than he was in action. He wanted his own men in the department, men he could trust and with whom he had worked before – Liberals, of course. In the end he won. Reed and Burgess were brushed aside, and one man assumed the duties of two – the same Jim Smart who had greeted Sifton on his return to Brandon, twice mayor of that city, a former member of the Manitoba cabinet, and an old friend of the Minister.

Smart, noted the Governor General, Lord Minto, was Sifton’s alter ego. The two men were contemporaries – Smart was just a year older – and had grown up in Brandon politics together. In 1885, when Smart was president of the local reform association, Sifton was vice-president. The ex-mayor was known as an able administrator; even
T. Mayne Daly, Sifton’s Tory predecessor, had a good word for him: “A man of integrity and worth and of great personal character.” It would be some twenty years before a Tory investigation was to undermine that assessment.

That same month, March, 1897, Sifton wrote to a correspondent in British Columbia about the evils of the spoils system in the department during the Conservative regime. “The most guilty and rascally officials have been kept in place by political influence,” he reported. But Sifton himself was not averse to hiring political rascals if they did the job. In the months that followed, he fired twenty-three members of the staff, six for “active political partisanship,” but the men who replaced them were just as partisan for the Liberal cause. In fact, those who worked for Sifton really had two jobs: to push immigration, of course, but also to organize and canvass for the party.

That was the practice of the time. Like his colleagues, the Minister filled the key jobs in his department with close friends and political supporters. These included W.F. McCreary, the Mayor of Winnipeg, who became Commissioner of Immigration, resident in that city; William J. White, editor of the Brandon
Sun
, who was put in charge of press relations in the United States; and C. Wesley Speers, who was made general colonization agent. Speers had been put up as a dummy opponent to Sifton at the Liberal nominating meeting in Brandon the previous fall and had gone through the charade of graciously stepping aside in favour of his future employer.

There was of course no possibility that Sifton could have hired a Tory had he wanted to. Even the appointment of Mayor McCreary, a johnny-come-lately in the eyes of veteran ward heelers, was controversial. Sifton was forced to disappoint hordes of loyal party men who expected jobs in his department and complained when he overlooked them. The Minister ignored their pleas. He certainly wanted Liberals, but he wanted Liberals who were efficient, hard working, and personally loyal. These conditions did not apply, however, to Canadian immigration officials serving in the United States. In the Outside Service, as it was called, defeated candidates, former Liberal members, relatives of cabinet ministers, and friends of Sifton and Smart had no difficulty finding jobs. Scarcely one had any immigration experience. But Sifton defended the practice, declaring in the House that any man who was regarded as valuable to the Liberal party must also be valuable as a public servant.

In Ottawa he was determined to run an efficient department. Salaries
would be raised on merit, not on seniority, and commissions rather than straight salaries would be paid in the field. He wanted to get the most out of his people.

Sifton’s goal was clear. He intended to fill up the West with farmers. To do that he must force the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Canadian Pacific Railway to place on the market the lands that had originally been reserved for them. Since these lands were not taxed until patented, neither of the two historic companies was in any rush to claim or to sell them, preferring to wait until prices rose with the demand. By 1896, the railways alone had been granted 24 million acres but had held off obtaining title to most of them. Sifton was determined there would be no more land grants, and he was equally determined that the railway lands be opened for settlement. It took him most of his term of office to achieve these results, but by 1905, 22.5 million acres of railway land were on the market and the Western land boom was gathering speed.

2
The hard sell

John Wesley Dafoe, Sifton’s biographer as well as his employee, purported to believe that the various hard-sell methods used by the department to settle the West originated with the Minister of the Interior. This wasn’t true. Almost every technique had been developed some years before by American railroads, land companies, and the
CPR
. Sifton borrowed these techniques, improved on some of them, and through superior organization and efficiency made them work.

But they would not have worked had the times been different. Dafoe and others credited the Liberal government with filling up the plains. But the Liberals were lucky, as they have been in more recent times. They rode into power just as the great depression of the nineties was ending.

In fact, 1896 was a turning-point year. The crippling droughts of 1892, 1893, and 1894 were over. After 1895 grain prices began to rise. The cost of rail and steam transportation dropped. Red Fife wheat with its superior milling and baking properties came into its own – by 1900 it had replaced some fifty lesser varieties. Steel reduction rollers transformed the milling process. The chilled steel plough was ideal for turning the tough sod of the Canadian prairie. The chain ownership of
elevators changed the face of the prairie landscape. Improvements in binder twine accelerated the automation of farming.

Yet none of these technological and agricultural advances fully explains the rush to the Canadian West that took place during the Sifton period. Far more significant was the growing scarcity of free land – especially humid land – in the United States and indeed in Canada. Experiments in the techniques of dryland farming had already proven the efficiency of summer fallowing. But dry-farming methods had to await the end of the depression. Once Canada was seen to contain the last frost-free, sub-humid areas of the continent, it required only an educational program to bring in the farmers.

The Liberal government’s plan for Western Canada was simple and specific. The prairies were to be settled by practical farmers; nobody else was wanted from overseas. City people, clerks, shopkeepers, and artisans were not to be considered.

“We do not want anything but agricultural laborers and farmers or people who are coming for the purpose of engaging in agriculture, whether as farmers or farm laborers,” Sifton told his deputy. The Liberals, in short, had espoused John A. Macdonald’s National Policy and made it their own. The West would be a gigantic granary, tied to Central Canada by a ribbon of steel. The wheat would move east in ever-increasing quantities; the manufactured goods required by Western farmers would fill up the empty freight cars on the return journey. The concept of an industrialized West had no place in this scheme.

Sifton was convinced that certain races had the character to become farmers while others did not. “Northernness” was the key. The Scots, Scandinavians, Germans, and British would make excellent citizens. Even the northern English, in Sifton’s view, were preferable to the southern English; in fact, a higher bonus was paid to steamship agents for those who emigrated from northern England.

The northern Slavs were welcomed. Mediterranean people were not. Italians, especially southern Italians, and Jews were taboo. “I don’t want anything done to facilitate Italian immigration,” Sifton told his people. He feared the infusion of “undesirable persons.” When in May, 1898, the
CPR
hired a carload of Italians from New York to work on the construction of the Crow’s Nest Pass line, Sifton sent them all back. At one point the department had looked favourably on a plan to bring in a small number of Rumanian Jewish farmers. Laurier put a stop to it. “I do not favour this movement,” he told Sifton, who, in redrafting the department’s memo, declared that “experience
shows that the Jewish people do not become agriculturalists.” Given the anti-Semitism of the time, this attitude caused scarcely a raised eyebrow.