The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (33 page)

This is remarkable. Clifford Sifton was the Liberals’ strong man in the West; it was his personal fiefdom. Very little went on of which he was not fully aware and which he did not control. Why did Laurier not consult him on the details of the new educational clauses? Why didn’t he wait for Sifton’s return before placing them before the House? Sifton asked for a brief delay of Parliament, but Laurier declined. It was almost as if the Prime Minister considered that Sifton was irrelevant, expendable.

And why did Sifton choose the moment he did to leave Ottawa – the most significant period, surely, in the entire history of the North West Territories? Ever since the Liberal government had come into power, the Territories had been demanding autonomy; Sifton was their champion. He had fought hard in his provincial role during the Manitoba School Crisis. Why had he absented himself in the very month in which the educational policies of the new West were being drawn up? It is true that he had his leader’s assurance that the status quo would be maintained. But Sifton was a man who liked to dot every
i
and cross every
t
. Was his health so imperilled that he could not postpone his trip to the mud baths? He’d put off rest cures before, simply on the argument that he couldn’t afford to leave his work. Now he not only left town but he also delayed his return. The correspondence shows his staff expected him back much earlier. He didn’t come. Why?

Dafoe, who checked everything with Sifton and thought he knew his mind, was stunned by his resignation. It came to him, he said, like a bolt from the blue. His
Free Press
editorials had been supporting the 1875 legislation without any dissent from his employer. Now he had to find a way to make a right-about-face. It put him, as he told Sifton, “in a very difficult position.” But the ex-Minister helped him find a way
out by pointing to the hated new clause that would allow both public and separate schools to share proportionately in funds derived from the sale of public lands. Lawyers for both parties argued over the implications of this clause, which Sifton, in a later speech, claimed would put “a constitutional, irrevocable earmark on the public funds of the Northwest.” That gave Dafoe something to attack.

Sifton’s resignation made him a hero of the moment, “worshipped as a martyr from one end of the country to the other” in the sardonic words of a political opponent, William Northrup. Did he, then, resign purely on a point of principle? It’s more likely that he used his dispute with Laurier to effect an honourable retirement, which had for some time been rumoured in Ottawa. “Many rumours have drifted down to us in the past ten years,” Northrup said guardedly, “but I venture to say that none of them will be received with less credulity by the country than the statement he [Sifton]… made as to the causes of his resignation.”

Certainly Sifton’s deafness was a contributing factor. His own newspaper went so far as to say that his resignation was “not unconnected with the state of his health.” By this time Sifton was almost stone deaf. He could not engage in the cut and thrust of Parliamentary debate but was forced to wait for the Hansard reports to be published before he could respond to Opposition attacks. And, for the past year, as Dafoe noted, Sifton had seemed bored with his ministry – “there was an evident slackening of energy and interest in departmental detail.” One might have guessed, Dafoe wrote, that “Sifton had very little desire to continue much longer in the position he occupied.”

And then there were the rumours that Northrup had mentioned. Early in March, a few days after Sifton’s resignation, tantalizing references to dark manoeuvrings began to appear in the anti-Sifton papers. On March 1, Richardson’s
Tribune
revealed that “for several weeks reports have been current that Mr. Sifton was about to retire. Various reasons have been assigned from time to time.… It is suggested in some quarters that, if he was being forced out of the cabinet, or had any intention of retiring on other grounds, the present situation would give him an opportunity to withdraw on what he and his friends might easily say was a question of principle.”

On the same day the Calgary
Herald’s
Ottawa correspondent went a step further: “While it is declared that Mr. Sifton has resigned in order that he may have a free hand to discuss the school question, it is commonly understood here that other considerations of a very personal character are the chief factors in his retirement.

“This subject has been the talk of the capital for many days, and it is no secret that the difficulty was likely to make his resignation imperative, aside from any political questions.”

Clearly, all of political Ottawa was abuzz over
something
. What was it? On March 5 the irrepressible Bob Edwards published in the Calgary
Eye Opener
his own account of why Sifton had resigned:

“Clifford Sifton has resigned, ostensibly over the school question. This implies a conscience on the part of Clifford. The idea of Clifford resigning on the grounds of conscientious scruples is laughable in the extreme. What has really made him resign is the trouble he has gotten himself into over a married woman in Ottawa.…

“The story of Sifton’s escapade, wherein he seems to have been ministering to the interior in great shape, reads like some of the spicier cantos of Don Juan. The outraged husband is Walter Mackay, son of the late millionaire, William Mackay, the old lumber king of Ottawa. It appears that Mackay started for Montreal one night but for some reason turned back and spent the evening at the club instead. Returning to his residence about two o’clock in the morning, he tried to open the front door with his latchkey, but the latch was fixed on the inside so that he could not get in. So away he went round to the back door of the house to see if he could get in that way.

“Approaching his back door, what was his surprise to see it cautiously opened from the inside and a big, tall man issuing therefrom. ‘Burglar,’ thought Mackay.… It was pretty dark at the time and the two of them tussled and rolled all over the backyard. Finally, to Mackay’s astonishment, a ray from the moon revealed the sinister features of the Minister of the Interior.

“ ‘Hello, Sifton! What are you doing here this time of night?’

“ ‘Oh,’ quoth Clifford, panting, ‘your wife was in trouble over some legal matters and sent for me to discuss them.’

‘ “Well, that’s strange,’ said the husband scratching his neck dubiously. ‘I suppose it’s all right, though.’

“Next day, however, Mackay put on his thinking cap, and rather foolishly aired the story down town, telling all his friends about it. Their ill-concealed amusement showed him too plainly that they had for some time been alive to what he, husband like, had been blind. Then the row began.

“A private conference was held at the Mackay home, among those present as conciliators being Father Whalen, Archbishop Duhamel and Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Father Whalen next day took the lady to her former home in Quebec. Sifton just about this juncture left for the
west, this stirring incident having taken place shortly before the elections. Ye Gods, and we didn’t know about it!

“By the time he returned, the scandal had become the property of the politicians and the inner circles of society, though no newspaper dared breathe a word.

“What between the uproar in his own family and the demands for reparation on the part of the husband, Clifford thought it was up to him to duck out.… He left for parts unknown, and remained away from his seat in parliament, neglecting his duties and pretending that he was in a sanitarium somewhere for his health. His health must have been all right about this juncture if we know anything about this line of business.

“Sifton returned to Ottawa a discredited man and handed in his resignation. For the benefit of the public, it was arranged that he should retire with dignity under the benign wing of the school question.…

“In the meantime, we understand, hubby has filed for divorce. The Governor General, we presume, could not stand for his most important minister being co-respondent in a divorce case, though certain other cabinet ministers are not a whit more virtuous than Clifford. We are ruled over by a fine gang at Ottawa.…”

Edwards’s article was clearly libellous, particularly if untrue – dangerously so. Sifton, however, took no notice of it. That, of course, was part of his philosophy. “Ignore all whispering campaigns,” he advised a young man entering politics. “If you once show yourself affected by it, you are lost. The more you try to stamp it out, the more it spreads.” He did not believe in suing newspapers for libel, he said in 1899, because if you sued once and won and then didn’t sue again, every slanderous statement made by the same paper would be believed simply because you didn’t take action.

Yet this was no ordinary political attack. Copies of the
Eye Opener
were rushed to Ottawa and eventually became collectors’ items selling for upwards of twenty-five dollars. The New York
Telegraph
reprinted the article word for word. And Edwards’s report was particularly damaging. It was not just that Sifton was charged with being the principal in a seamy sex scandal (to the considerable embarrassment of his wife and children) but also that he had used the excuse of principle to cloak his retirement from the cabinet. Edwards had impugned his honour, his political integrity.

If the
Eye Opener
story had been a fabrication, Sifton could easily have destroyed Edwards, politically and financially, by putting a single witness – Walter Mackey (the name had been misspelled)-on the stand to refute the allegations, not to mention the two ecclesiastics and the Prime Minister himself. He did not do so.

In spite of the
Eye Opener’s
reputation in some quarters as a scandal sheet, Edwards himself was remarkably careful about what he published. It is true that he poked fun at the pompous and that he invented so-called news stories that were strictly satirical. This one did not fall into that category. Edwards checked his copy with his friend Paddy Nolan, Calgary’s best-known lawyer; he was caught out only once in twenty years. He must have been convinced the story was true and he must have had good sources, for he was dealing here with something more than defamation. If the story were false, Edwards could have been charged with criminal libel; the statute had been part of the Criminal Code since 1892. Arthur Sifton, Chief Justice of Alberta, was a power in the provincial Liberal government. He could have leaped to his brother’s defence and helped send Edwards to jail. He did not choose to do so.

Nor did the Siftons respond when, in April, the issue was raised again with screaming headlines on the front page of the Conservative Toronto
World
. The paper reported that Sifton’s cabinet rival, Charles Fitzpatrick, was the man behind the resignation. According to the
World
, Fitzpatrick had been conspiring against Sifton for some time, feeding the Tories ammunition regarding Western land scandals. When the Tories refused to bite, the
World
said, “Mr. Sifton’s enemies … laid another trap, one of a very delicate nature, and Mr. Sifton appears to have been an easy victim.

“Mr. Sifton became involved in a scandal. The incident was canvassed all over Ottawa. It spread westward where it was cultivated by the conspirators and embarrassed Mr. Sifton considerably in the Brandon election.

“When the scandal became general public property in Ottawa, Mr. Sifton’s colleagues interested themselves in it. They said a settlement of some kind must be arranged. Mr. Sifton was forced to make himself party to a formal settlement.… It was arranged that immediately after the elections Mr. Sifton would retire immediately from the cabinet on the plea of ill health. But Mr. Sifton did not retire. He went south for his health, and while he was away the autonomy bill was introduced in parliament.

“Mr. Sifton saw a more plausible excuse for getting out of politics,
an excuse right in line with his convictions. He hastened northward, and after a brief conference with Sir Wilfrid Laurier, in which the latter treated him very cavalierly, he handed in his resignation.…”

According to the
World
, the
Eye Opener
story and its reproduction in a New York daily were the first guns in a campaign to force Sifton to compromise on the educational clauses and support them in the House, which, as he told the Commons, he did “reluctantly and with no great enthusiasm.”

“The compromise, as a matter of fact, is worse than the bill in its original form,” the paper declared. “When Mr. Sifton says it is not, he speaks not as a public man but as a husband and father terrorized by unscrupulous conspirators who have his reputation at their mercy.”

It must be remembered that all these personal attacks on Sifton (including the
World’s
crocodile tears) were made by opposition papers. Scandal or no scandal, it was hardly in character for Clifford Sifton to bow to blackmail, especially from men like Fitzpatrick. The charge of dalliance by itself was scarcely enough to drive him from office; other cabinet ministers had weathered worse blows. One can only surmise that the constant gossip that had dogged him since the previous fall was the final straw. He had served his leader faithfully for almost a decade, yet he had been passed over for the promotion he surely deserved. Worse, the hated Fitzpatrick had been given the plum! His deafness was now almost total; his health had been undermined; the attacks on him, both personal and political, showed no signs of abating; and Laurier had treated him shamefully.

He went out with trumpets blowing and all flags flying. His differences with Laurier were easily patched up in the month following his resignation. They were, as his own newspaper said, “a matter of degree rather than a direct conflict of opinion.” Why could they not have been resolved in private? By forcing the issue publicly, Sifton made himself a hero in the West but at the expense of his own party and of his own leader, whose reputation was weakened by the perception that he had been pressured into a compromise by the Young Napoleon. And the shrill public argument had exacerbated the religious and regional tensions between Central and Western Canada.