The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (6 page)

The oil that lubricated the Sifton machine in the West was patronage. Party stalwarts and political cronies expected to be rewarded with fat contracts and good jobs. If anybody wanted to do business with the government he must be seen to be a party wheelhorse. In his first month in office, Sifton discovered that the North West Mounted Police were buying their harness, saddles, and leather goods from E.F. Hutchings of Winnipeg. Hutchings, he told Laurier, was “the most uncompromising and violent opponent of the Government, and perhaps the most offensive to our Liberal friends of any Conservative in the City of Winnipeg.” The contract should go to Sifton’s friends and supporters, the Adams brothers of Brandon, one of whom sat as a Liberal in the Manitoba legislature.

The
NWMP
had been formed under the Conservative administration of John A. Macdonald; thus its leadership was Conservative. Now it found itself dominated by an aggressive politician from the opposing party. Laurier apparently did not realize the extent to which Sifton controlled the police. In 1902, he told Lord Minto that the force was totally in his own hands under its comptroller, Fred White. “I did not think it advisable to contradict him,” Minto wrote in a memorandum
of the conversation, “but Fred White has assured me on more than one occasion most positively that the manipulation of the N.W.M.P. is absolutely in Sifton’s hands-that Sifton takes no advice whatever – and that he himself has almost despaired of being able to carry on control of the Force. In fact Fred White has expressed to me his utter despondence at the consequences of Sifton’s unjustifiable interference.…”

Sifton had a short list of Brandon and Winnipeg supporters who were to receive departmental patronage. These were the key men who had organized his torchlight procession in Brandon and who ran his campaigns. The largess did not stop at the Department of the Interior. When, for instance, Sifton discovered that an Ottawa firm “not a friend of ours” had done business with the Militia Department, he wrote to the Minister and again urged that all further leather business be directed to his friends, the Adams brothers.

The biggest supporter of the Conservative party was, of course, the Canadian Pacific Railway, John A. Macdonald’s creation. The company poured money into Tory election campaigns, persuaded its employees to vote Tory, and on occasion trucked them into town on election day with clear instructions on how to cast their ballots. When Sifton discovered that the company was giving contracts to a Tory supporter to supply beef for the navvies building the
CPR
line through the Crow’s Nest Pass, he struck hard at its president, Thomas Shaughnessy. “No better way could be devised,” he wrote, “of making the Liberals in Manitoba hostile to the Railway Company, to the contract and to anybody who has anything to do with it myself included.” The threat was naked: if the
CPR
wanted any further government aid it had better toe the line. And Sifton would tell the company exactly which Liberal would benefit. “If there is any beef to be supplied, I would rather see the contract go to Mr. J.D. McGregor of Brandon than to anybody else. He is a practical stock man and perfectly competent to handle it satisfactorily.”

McGregor – “Big Jim” as he was sometimes called – was Sifton’s campaign manager. He headed Sifton’s list of Brandon cronies, which also included A.C. Fraser, who had replaced Sifton as provincial member for North Brandon (dry goods), J. W. Fleming, an old Brandon Liberal and unswerving Sifton supporter (drugs), and, of course, the Adams brothers (harness and leather goods).

Sifton preferred to dispense patronage himself or else through James Smart, his deputy, but sometimes also on the advice of the local
Member of Parliament. When he learned that Bill McCreary had bought uniforms for his immigration officials in Winnipeg without consulting Richard Jamieson, the local Member, he rapped the commissioner’s knuckles: “The rule is perfectly explicit that in purchasing any goods or supplies of this kind you must either purchase from the persons to whom you are directed by myself or Mr. Smart, or when you have no such directions and have not the time to write … you must consult the member. This is a rule that cannot in any case be overlooked or neglected.…”

But Sifton’s real patronage problems centred around jobs, not contracts. Once the party gained power it seemed that every minion who had toiled in the Liberal vineyards wanted a job for himself, his brother, or his sons. Sifton had no intention of hiring incompetent party members, no matter how fierce the pressure.

“I understand,” he wrote to the Minister of Customs early in 1897, “that the Collector of Customs is pressing for the appointment of a man named Jones. The Collector of Customs at Winnipeg is a drunken reprobate. He is a disgrace to the Government service and his opinion in regard to the matter is of no value whatsoever, in fact I would myself consider it sufficient to indicate that a man was unfit for a position if the Collector recommended him.…”

“I cannot take every active Grit in the West on my immigration staff,” he wrote in exasperation to Obed Smith in 1901. To another colleague, he tried to explain that “if we are going to accomplish anything in immigration we will have to make use of men who know how to do the work and they are not always the men we would like to give political rewards to.”

This attitude got him into trouble in Winnipeg. “I am a good deal put out by the kicking that has taken place about the appointments,” he told his friend and former colleague Isaac Campbell, a Liberal lawyer in Winnipeg, in August 1897. “I have done everything I possibly could to meet everybody’s wishes, but I only had five loaves and two fishes and what are they among so many?”

Nonetheless, the Winnipeg situation didn’t calm down, and within a year the anti-Siftonites, led by R.L. Richardson, M.P., the ambitious, cranky editor of the
Winnipeg Daily Tribune
, gained control of the annual meeting of the party. “They are unfriendly to me because, to put it shortly, they are all for boodling and they do not see any chance for success so long as I am here,” Sifton explained to John Willison, editor of the
Globe
, Toronto. That was certainly one of the reasons for the anti-Sifton dissent among Manitoba Liberals. Sifton was a man
who liked to run his own show. He did not brook disagreement; he did not always listen to advice; he was never one of the boys. But there was another reason for the disaffection of Richardson, a fellow Liberal (for Lisgar) and one-time Sifton supporter. The Member for Lisgar was also proprietor and editor of a Winnipeg newspaper. When it dawned on him that Clifford Sifton had for some time been the secret proprietor of the rival
Manitoba Free Press
, he felt he had been stabbed in the back. From then on, he became one of Sifton’s bitterest enemies.

5
The
Free Press
changes hands

On October 14, 1898, the
Manitoba Free Press
in a lavish editorial showered praises upon the Sifton record: “There is not a man in public life on the continent who would not be envious of such a record, but Mr. Sifton, with a modesty that is new in the political life of Canada, has not even claimed that credit for himself to which he is justly entitled.… No man could have worked harder or thought more of his duties and responsibilities than Clifford Sifton.”

Since the
Free Press
was widely believed to be under the control of the pro-Tory
CPR
, this seemed high praise indeed. The paper had not always been so complimentary. It had once called Sifton “the most slippery customer Manitoba politics has yet developed” and “the greatest of all ministerial hypocrites.” Why this startling change of heart?

What was not known was that the paper was no longer a
CPR
organ. It was, in fact, under the direct control of Sifton. He had bought it the previous January from Sir William Van Horne, the
CPR
’s chairman, and Donald Smith (Lord Strathcona), one of the railway’s major shareholders.

For all of that year Sifton categorically denied, publicly and privately, that he had any control over the newspaper – quite the contrary. Even his close friend Campbell was kept in the dark. “My own judgement,” Sifton wrote to him on November 9, “is that it is an extremely injudicious thing for any man in public life to own a newspaper. I do not own the Free Press or any interest in it directly or indirectly … I have … no financial interest whatever in the paper, it is in perfectly independent hands.”

This was, of course, a bald lie, but Sifton kept it up: to a correspondent
on November 14, “At the present time as in the past I have no interest or control over the Free Press”; to a friend on November 16, “I have … no interest whatever in the paper …”; and in another letter on January 19, as the news began to leak out, “The statement that I was the owner of a controlling interest in the Free Press of Winnipeg was made by interested persons for the purpose of injuring me politically. There is no truth whatever in the statement. I have no control over the editorial utterances of the Winnipeg Free Press.…”

The “interested persons” were R.L. Richardson and the dissident Liberals. The week before, Richardson’s
Tribune
had challenged its rival to “withdraw the veil of mystery from its ownership.” If the
CPR
didn’t control the paper, Richardson wrote, “then the control is in the hands of the minister of the interior.”

Sifton bought the paper partly because he needed to neutralize Richardson, the defecting Liberal, partly because he needed a strong government organ in Winnipeg, and partly because he thought it was a good business proposition. The previous August he had stripped the
Tribune
of all patronage under his control and shifted this lucrative government advertising to his own paper. In November he further pulled Richardson’s political teeth by ordering that the Member for Lisgar no longer be consulted in matters of local patronage.

In Richardson, Sifton had a tough and uncompromising opponent. R.L., as he was called, was a big, ruggedly handsome man, raised on a pioneer Ontario farm – an ex-boxer and wrestler and an enthusiastic and indefatigable outdoorsman. He had an enviable reputation. As a reporter, one colleague recalled, he was “one of the ablest in Winnipeg’s history.” He had worked for the
Montreal Star
, the Toronto
Globe
, and as city editor of the Winnipeg
Sun
until its absorption by the
Free Press
. After three weeks on the latter paper he decided to buy the old
Sun
equipment and start a paper of his own, the
Tribune
. An independent Liberal (the worst kind!), a populist, a believer in public ownership and government by referendum, an enemy of the political spoils system, he was everything that Sifton was not. Impetuous, quirky, a lover of the classics, a student of history, a political gadfly ever in hot water, he gave as good as he got in the pages of his personal organ.

In those days there was no such thing in Canada as an objective press. Most of the major dailies were controlled by active politicians or by the railways. Of seventeen city dailies in the West in the early days of the century, twelve were owned, edited, or controlled by sitting members
of Parliament or the legislature. If they supported the government they expected to get government advertising, knowing that they would lose it if the government fell. In their news columns and headlines they made no pretense at objectivity. News stories, when they dealt with political issues, read like editorials. Reporters thought nothing of inserting their own opinions (or, more realistically, their employer’s opinions) into reports of political meetings. And it was not difficult to buy an editor. Smaller papers could easily be persuaded to change their political thrust under the promise of government patronage. Sifton, it was said, controlled nineteen or twenty papers in Manitoba alone through the judicious dispensation of advertising.

A headline on a news story from the rabidly Conservative Calgary
Herald
reporting one of Clifford Sifton’s political speeches in the 1904 campaign gives the flavour of Western journalism during the period:

OIL THE MACHINE THAT HAS GROUND OUT
A COLD MILLION FOR ME – CLIFFORD SIFTON

It was the
Herald’s
regular device to employ a dollar sign whenever Sifton’s name appeared above a major news story. This kind of headline, which would cause a scandal today, was accepted by newspaper readers as part of the game.

In today’s context, reports of political meetings at the turn of the century are hilarious, and it is difficult to believe that anybody but the faithful took them seriously, if, in fact, they read them at all. The newspaper’s candidate – who was so often its publisher – was praised to the heavens. He invariably spoke to a large and deliriously enthusiastic crowd, who, it was reported, greeted his every statement with prolonged cheers. Incisive, clear headed, totally convincing, he demolished his opponent, who was portrayed as a pathetic puppet, dancing to the tune of his party’s machine. The day before the election each paper announced unreservedly that the candidate of its choice would sweep the polls and decimate the opposition. If he lost, the paper would explain that he had never had a chance because of rampant bribery on the part of the winner. Name calling was part of the game. In the provincial election of 1910, the
Tribune
was able to point out that of ninety candidates only seven had not been called liars, boodlers, or crooks. Scores of elections were challenged because of election day irregularities (Richardson was one who lost his seat). If bribery was proved – and it often was – the election was declared null and void. As a result, each party would challenge a number of elections on the
thinnest of evidence in order to arrange a saw-off with the opposition, who were chary of expensive and long-drawn-out court cases.

The amount of newspaper space devoted to politics was awesome. Speeches were reported verbatim and often ran to several columns. Banner headlines, otherwise reserved for an earthquake or a railway disaster, trumpeted each candidate’s qualities and his opponent’s shortcomings. A newcomer reading the Regina
Leader
, the Winnipeg
Telegram
, or the
Edmonton Bulletin
might easily have concluded that politics was a game that obsessed every man, woman, and child on the prairies.