The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (5 page)

Sifton, in his lifetime and after, was called abrasive, exacting, distant, abrupt, and impatient. He did not suffer fools. He was ambitious and outwardly self-assured. He made enemies easily but did not deign to recognize them. He never complained, never explained. One suspects there were more facets to this icily formal politician than deafness can account for. Did he ever suffer from self-doubt or unfulfilled yearnings? Did he ever acknowledge his weaknesses or his regrets to an intimate? We have no record of it. Was he ever the victim of unbridled passion, jealousy, or infatuation? Here the curtain parts
momentarily, on the eve of his resignation – he is caught in a dalliance – and then closes tantalizingly. It is not possible to feel the kind of familiarity with Sifton that we sense when we study some of his contemporaries – John A. Macdonald, for example, or William Cornelius Van Horne, or George Stephen, who poured out his heart in his letters. But Sifton, even when he wrote to his father, was chillingly formal. He did not sign his correspondence with the elder Sifton “Affectionately, Cliff” or “Love, Clifford” or even “Your loving son, Clifford.” It was always “Yours faithfully, Clifford Sifton,” as if he were addressing a chance acquaintance or a constituent seeking favours.

Yet he was his father’s son, the younger of two boys. (His easy-going brother, Arthur, would eventually become Premier of Alberta.) Like his father, he was a political animal and a staunch Methodist who passed the plate on Sundays in Brandon and for all of his life took part in the ritual of family prayers. As a Methodist he was a fervent advocate of temperance. Strong drink never sullied his lips, though he did not shrink from passing out gallons to the faithful at election time.

He had a deep-seated suspicion of Roman Catholics and French Canadians. He did not employ Quebeckers in his department, nor did he mingle with his French-Canadian colleagues. There was no love lost between Sifton and Israel Tarte, the Minister of Public Works from Quebec, and there was a real dislike for Charles Fitzpatrick, the pious Irish-Catholic Solicitor General and later Justice Minister, with whom he would publicly tangle in 1905.

These attitudes sprang out of the traditional Methodist Clear Grit tradition of southern Ontario in which the Siftons had been nurtured. Clifford’s father had been a neighbour and close political ally of Alexander Mackenzie, the dour Liberal M.P. from Lambton who later became Prime Minister. Like every other successful officeholder, Mackenzie rewarded his friends. In 1874, J.W. Sifton managed to wangle a $100,000 government contract to build a telegraph line out of Fort Garry, in spite of the fact that there were lower bidders and that his tender was so ambiguous nobody could understand it. He was paid an inflated price for the work, constructed the poles out of cheap poplar, allowed them to rot away in spite of his contractual obligation to maintain the line for five years, and pocketed a substantial profit, to which a subsequent royal commission said he wasn’t entitled.

None of this had the least effect on the elder Sifton’s political career. He soon became a leading Manitoba politician, rising to Speaker of the legislature. His son Clifford graduated in 1880, a gold medallist from Victoria College, a Methodist institution in Cobourg, Ontario. Unlike so many of his political colleagues, Clifford Sifton had the advantage of a classical education. A serious student who exhibited none of the frivolity or bonhomie of his brother, Arthur, he was for all of his life an omnivorous reader. His interest in newspapers also went back to his days at Cobourg, where he had helped to found and edit the college paper.

With his brother, Clifford hung out his lawyer’s shingle in Brandon. Later he liked to boast that he made $428 that first year and lived on it. But his father’s political connections, and before long his own contacts, brought him business and, undoubtedly, inside information that aided his considerable speculation in prairie lands.

He learned the political ropes working on his father’s election campaigns in 1883 and 1886. In 1887 he himself ran successfully for office. Three years later he was Attorney General of Manitoba. He quickly established a reputation as a skilled political organizer and a hard and tenacious campaigner who loved politics for the joy of the battle. They called him the Young Napoleon of the West.

The title fitted, for Sifton ran his campaigns like a field marshal. His generals were the key civil servants in the Immigration and Indian departments. Below them were the field officers: the local Members, the constituency workers, the friendly journalists, all kept in line by the glue of patronage. And like any great military strategist, Sifton had his own intelligence and espionage departments. He planted spies in the opposition camp to report back on the enemy’s tactics, especially if those tactics were seen to be illegal or improper. Later he could use them to unseat a successful opponent or, perhaps, defend himself from similar charges, thus preventing the Conservatives from taking a successful Liberal to court for bribery or ballot-box stuffing. In addition, he sent watchdogs to Conservative meetings to take down statements that could later be nailed as lies or produce subsequent libel actions.

These tactics paid off. After the 1896 campaign, for example, Sifton was able to gather enough evidence to unseat two Conservative winners including John A.’s son, the powerful Hugh John Macdonald. It turned out that the Tories were giving their people courses in the fine art of ballot-box stuffing, even to the extent of introducing their rural supporters to a professional gambler and card sharp from Winnipeg, a master at the kind of sleight-of-hand required for such sure-thing
games as three-card monte. In the by-elections that followed, the Sifton forces were victorious.

In the political donnybrooks of prairie elections, Sifton’s early training as a Methodist lay preacher served him well. His platform style was an extension of his personality – crisp, logical, forceful. He did not engage in rhetoric or bombast; instead, he mastered his subject and attacked his audience with clear, direct prose, “delivering his arguments in such continuous and aggressive sequence that they seemed to batter down all opposition.”

But he wasn’t content to batter the Opposition only at election time. The battering continued in Parliament, when a more conciliatory attitude might have been more effective. In the course of a debate, when he himself was not speaking, Sifton was in the habit of passing belligerent notes across the floor of the House: “How do you like that?” or “Take your medicine!”

He made enemies, not only among the Tories but also among members of his own party. By 1899, when he was firmly ensconced in the federal cabinet, there were in Winnipeg twenty members of his own party who he said “hate me … like the devil hates holy water.” He seemed to rejoice in this acrimony and had his own explanation for it: “I suppose I might size it up by saying that … I occasionally wear a silk hat and a dress coat and do not drink whiskey in the bar of a third class hotel.…” There was something of the patrician about Sifton. One could not describe him as a hail-fellow-well-met. One cannot imagine a ward heeler daring to put his arm around Sifton’s shoulder any more than one could imagine Sifton slapping a fellow Liberal on the back.

Sifton’s wealth, his lifestyle, and his personal ostentation were a source of criticism throughout his career. The young lawyer who had started life on a pittance arrived in Ottawa with two suitcases and a trunk crammed with securities, including a batch of first mortgages worth $100,000. He never attempted to conceal his wealth; indeed, he flaunted it. The Calgary
Herald
, which hated him, gleefully described his appearance during a campaign rally in the Lyric Theatre in 1904: “A great diamond flashed on his left hand, a handsome pin of precious stones peeped out from his natty tie and a massive gold watch chain was looped high on his vest from which dangled a big locket and a charm.”

The veteran Grit Sir Richard Cartwright, who blamed Sifton for the loss of a cabinet post in the Laurier government, watched the young Napoleon step from his carriage and warned him, “Young man do you
note this display of affluence on the part of a minister so new and young? Do you note those spirited horses, that silver mounted harness and the magnificent chariot behind? Shall I tell you what Sir John Macdonald would have said to one of his ministers if he’d appeared thus? Sir John would have said: ‘My dear fellow, it is bad enough to do it, but for Heaven’s sake, don’t advertise it!’”

But Sifton
did
advertise it. Opposition members and opposition newspapers harped on his vast wealth and hinted darkly at crooked dealings within his department. It is certainly true that several of his key people, including James Smart, enriched themselves as a result of their positions. It is equally true that his closest political cronies in Brandon profited by their friendship with the Minister and that Sifton handed out timber leases on a platter to his brother-in-law, Theodore Burrows. If he had personal tracks to cover, he covered them carefully, for there is no direct evidence suggesting that he shared in any of the booty. Yet, given the loose morality of the times, it is difficult to believe that he did not profit financially from his position. The Governor General himself was suspicious. In 1902, Lord Minto told Laurier that “Mr. Sifton’s reputation was not above reproach” and added, “the opinion of the man on the street was certainly not favourable to Mr. Sifton in respect to his apparent wealth, his yacht on the Lakes, etc. etc.”

Sifton didn’t give a hoot. The
Winnipeg Daily Tribune
, whose editor, R.L. Richardson, was an anti-Sifton fanatic, loved to point out that the Minister never travelled anywhere “whether on public or private business, without a couple of private secretaries, a retinue of servants, refreshments for the boys, all stowed away in a luxuriantly furnished private car paid for out of the pockets of the people.”

Sifton’s salary as minister was $7,000 a year plus a sessional indemnity of $1,500; yet, as
Le Journal
of Montreal reported in 1902, he lived on a scale that would require twice that income, “a scale which none of his colleagues can imitate; indeed there are few millionaires who live as well as he.” The paper listed some of Sifton’s assets: a house assessed at $23,000 and maintained at a cost of $90,000; shares in the Bank of Ottawa valued at $42,000; a steam yacht worth at least $25,000; and a “magnificent villa in the west,” value unknown.
Le Journal
clearly underestimated Sifton’s wealth. He was then in the process of building one of the finest racing stables in the country. He entertained lavishly at private dinners and society balls. In his top hat and hunting pinks, he was a figure of ducal opulence.

He revelled in it, made no apologies, and never replied to his critics, some of whom accused him of outright theft. When he died in 1929, his will was probated at $3 million, a sum equal to almost $20 million in 1984 values. How did he get it? Through shrewd investment, wild speculation, inside knowledge, political manipulation, or a combination of all these? No one will ever really know.

4
The spoils system

In the words of Beecham Trotter, a Brandon pioneer and a chronicler of his times, Sifton was “the greatest combination of cold blooded businessman, machine politician and statesman our country has produced.” He was more than a mere cabinet minister; he was the political monarch of the West, in charge of the Liberal machine in Manitoba and the North West Territories. From the Ontario border to the Rockies, from the forty-ninth parallel to the Arctic coast, Sifton was boss – totally in control of party propaganda, party patronage, and election tactics. The key members of his department were also his political vassals. One of their tasks was to make sure the European immigrants voted the right way at election time. The Liberal government had brought them to Canada; the Liberal government expected gratitude.

The Doukhobors must be brought alongside, and who better to do the job than another Liberal stalwart, J. Obed Smith, Sifton’s new commissioner of immigration in Winnipeg? (The overworked but popular ex-mayor McCreary, his predecessor, had been promoted to Member of Parliament.) “I think the Doukhobours should all take out naturalization papers, get their names on the voters list and vote,” Sifton wrote to Smith in 1903. “There is no necessity for anyone except themselves to know what is going to be done. It will be enough for the opposition to find out they are going to vote after they have voted.” The vision of Conservative candidates suddenly faced with long queues of unbribable Doukhobors at the polling booths must surely have caused a brief smile to play over that sober countenance.

Sifton left nothing to chance, watched over every detail where matters of political tactics were involved. He virtually dictated the text of political pamphlets designed to convince newcomers to vote Liberal: “In the Galician pamphlet … it should set out that a few of the
Galician people who were brought in before the change in ’96 were neglected and in a miserable condition and that immediately after I took office they were looked after and work found for them.… Point out that they were neglected and deprived of the franchise and indicate that the Party which has deliberately broken all political traditions by depriving them of the franchise would be equally ready to deprive them of a right to homestead, in fact their rights of any kind would not be safe.…”

In 1903, one Immigration Department employee, J.B. Harkin, was ordered to devote himself almost entirely “to attending to the Galician business.” And when the anti-Sifton
Winnipeg Daily Tribune
attacked the government for making the West “a dumping ground for immigrants,” Sifton made sure that fact was brought to the attention of all foreign voters.

Even the smallest ethnic groups received his personal attention. There were about forty Icelandic voters in Manitoba in 1900, but Sifton went after all of them, bringing in speakers of Icelandic descent to spread the Liberal gospel and even putting one Icelandic youth in the local post office after learning that the incumbent clerk, unable to tell one Icelander from another, had been blindly handing out Liberal campaign literature to Conservatives.