The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (41 page)

Now Smart changed the rules. Instead of selling the lands by public auction, the government would sell them by private tender. Thus the matter passed out of David Laird’s hands; the sale would be controlled entirely by the department. Posters were prepared in early October, 1901, for distribution to post offices within one hundred miles of the reserve, outlining the form of tendering and payment and giving a deadline of November 15. But then Smart ordered changes in the posters that considerably cut down the time available to inspect the property and mail in the bids.

One change had to do with the value of the land. The department’s own man, William Underhill, a homestead inspector, had valued it at about $1.10 an acre. A later valuation by John B. Lash, Laird’s secretary, gave a more glowing assessment, with $2.12 as the average value. Smart ordered that the last appraisal not be advertised and that the various bidders be responsible for examining the land themselves. Thirteen years later, Smart perjured himself before the Ferguson Commission, saying he knew nothing of such a report.

Because the amended notice didn’t make its appearance until October 25, 1901, prospective purchasers had only about twenty days to scramble over the property, find the most suitable land clear of swamp or coulée, and get their bids to Ottawa. Smart, Pedley, and White had the field practically to themselves. The sale by tender was advertised in only three newspapers – two in Winnipeg, one in Moosomin – and some advertisements actually didn’t appear until
after
the November 15 deadline.

On November 8, 1901, after working hours, the three men, operating from Frank Pedley’s Ottawa office, typed up 313 tender forms for the Moose Mountain Reserve. On November 12, these tenders were delivered to the Toronto office of Pedley’s former law partner, A.C. Bedford-Jones. Here, Bedford-Jones filled out the forms with the names and signatures of three other Toronto lawyers and land speculators and shipped them back to Ottawa.

The tenders were opened on November 15. Predictably, Smart and his colleagues, hidden behind the three nominees, had managed to secure 298 of 308 quarter-sections, a total of more than forty-five thousand acres, for which they paid an average of $1.23 an acre. According to regulations, they were required to enclose with each tender a cheque for 25 per cent of their bid. They didn’t. That money wasn’t paid until April, 1902, two months after the trio had sold the lands for $112,500, or roughly $2.50 an acre – twice the price the Indians had received. The speculators who bought them out did even better. By 1904, the land was selling for $4.50 an acre, by 1906 for at least $6.75.

This was not the only profit that Smart and his friends made out of Indian lands. On the same day, November 15, 1901, the former Chacastapasis Reserve was put up for sale. Smart, at the last moment, had extended the deadline by one week, allowing himself and his two colleagues to bid through nominees. As a result of inside knowledge, they got the land and sold it at a profit of $8,155. On the sale of a third Indian reserve, they made a profit of $18,000.

So successful were these three civil servants that they incorporated themselves for the purpose of handling land deals. One of their circulars contained a telling phrase: “We also have exceptional facilities for dealing with Government lands and acting as Parliamentary agents for same.”

Pedley and White were still with the department when these revelations became public in 1915. No sooner did the evidence appear in the press than Pedley was forced to resign. White survived. Pedley, however, had no difficulty in finding a new post. The Liberal party, which always took care of its own, made him its organizer in northern Ontario.

6
Everybody’s doing it

To what extent was Clifford Sifton involved in these various scandals? Was he aware of them? And if he was aware, did he profit from them or merely condone them?

It strains common credulity to believe that Sifton did not know what was going on in his own department and also among his friends and in-laws. The Minister of the Interior liked to have a finger in every pie; he even made specific suggestions about details of the subject matter in the immigration pamphlets. Was he totally blind, then, to Preston’s manoeuvrings of the North Atlantic Trading Company? Was he so incurious that he didn’t ask for a shred of background detail on the mysterious company’s principals? Did he ask no questions, not raise an eyebrow, when he learned that his people had made a contract for tens of thousands of dollars with a group that had no corporate existence?

It could scarcely have escaped the Minister’s notice that his wife’s brother was getting every timber contract he bid for at suspicious prices, or that he was hiding behind the names of nominees to get them. Sifton himself had changed the regulations that increased the value of these limits. Was he so obtuse that he didn’t know the Imperial Pulp Company was just another name for Burrows? When Smart gave the job of opening tenders to Turriff, did Sifton not realize what was happening? Again, it beggars the imagination to believe that all these civil servants were acting without the Minister’s knowledge or direction. To believe otherwise is to believe that Sifton was an incompetent, but that is a charge that cannot be fairly levelled at him.

Did Sifton not know that his pal Big Jim McGregor of Brandon and his political allies were getting extraordinary favours from the department? Sifton’s law partner and dispenser of patronage, Philp, and his client, McGregor, were constantly meeting with the Minister in Ottawa. Philp and McGregor, in fact, formed a limited company to exploit grazing lands. Was Philp acting as Sifton’s nominee in this company? A remarkable handwritten letter, dated January 21, 1905, suggests it. In it, Philp reported to Sifton: “I found everything at the
ranch okay,” referred to an earlier trip the two friends had made to the same property, reported on the work that needed to be done, and explained that the bank had been paid off and an application made to grant a new lease to replace an old one. It is a remarkably cosy document; with it, Philp enclosed his application for incorporation, naming himself and McGregor but leaving the name of the company and its address blank. This is the same letter in which Philp asked Sifton to lift the two-year cancellation clause in grazing leases in southern Alberta, a suggestion that was immediately accepted, but only for a handful of Liberal friends.

Did Sifton not know that his three senior civil servants were using inside knowledge and manoeuvring to profit from the sale of Indian lands? The Minister may have been deaf, but he was not blind. After all, in 1903 the trio publicly boasted in their brochure of their influence with the department. The question is not whether Clifford Sifton knew of the unwarrantable actions of his staff. The question is, why did he wink at them? Was it because so many others in the government and the Liberal party were up to their armpits in graft? Possibly. The Conservatives during their term of office had been no better, as many a Liberal pointed out in the House when these charges were aired. Standards were still loose at the turn of the century. The phrase “conflict of interest” had not entered the political lexicon. It was accepted that men entered politics not for the pittance that was paid but for the profit that could be gleaned from patronage or simply from being on the inside. The public, of course, was kept in the dark because the public’s standards were far stricter than those of the politicians it put into office. Otherwise men like Burrows and McGregor would not have felt it necessary to conceal their manoeuvres.

But Sifton was human, too. All the old-time Liberals whom he had brought into the department – Smart, White, Pedley, Turriff, Preston – were making a good thing out of their positions. His closest friends and Liberal allies, including his own brother-in-law, were enriching themselves because of his political power. Everybody was doing it, including several of his fellow cabinet ministers. Was Sifton alone immune? He had started with nothing, yet he lived far beyond his salary in a style more splendid than did any of his colleagues. When he died, he left a fortune worth close to $20 million in 1984 dollars. Did he come by it honestly, through clever investments and perspicacious real estate transactions? There is nothing on the record to say that he didn’t, but, in the Duke of Wellington’s memorable phrase, anybody who would believe that would believe anything.

Chapter Nine
The Spirit of the West

1
West versus East

2
The common experience

3
The Western ethic

4
Bob Edwards and the
Eye Opener

5
Radicalism and populism

6
The un-Western Westerner

1
West versus East

When Alberta and Saskatchewan were finally given provincial status in 1905, the long, bitter campaign that the West had fought to attain autonomy was ended. The prairie country was no longer a colony of Canada. Or was it?

In making a new constitutional arrangement with the fledgling provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, Ottawa denied them the same kind of autonomy enjoyed by the older provinces. Instead, the federal government kept control of the forests, public lands, water power, and educational policy as it had in the case of Manitoba. In short, the three prairie provinces found themselves in an inferior position relative to the rest of Canada, a status
The Times
of London, in a prescient editorial, predicted would sow “the seeds of future mischief.”

The average immigrant didn’t care. In 1906, in Saskatchewan and Alberta, he voted with the government, which was bringing prosperity to the West through its immigration and railway policies. In both provinces, the Liberals were swept into power with healthy majorities. But the politicians cared, and these included a good many Western Liberals. Sifton had been applauded for resigning over the school question. Behind that question lay an older and more serious controversy over federal rule versus the principle of provincial rights.

Ottawa, in many Western eyes, was Laurier and his French-Canadian colleagues. If Ottawa controlled the prairies’ natural resources, then Ottawa controlled the patronage. And patronage could be used as a lever to prevent any of the prairie administrations from trying to evade those clauses in the new constitution that conferred certain educational privileges on religious minorities.

This suspicion of “Eastern” motives (for the East, in Western terms, meant Ottawa, Ontario, and Quebec) was one of the ingredients in the cement that was binding the West into a distinctive and, in many ways, a separate nation within a nation. Patrick Burns, the successful Calgary meat packer, put it into words in March, 1905: “I think the general feeling is that we should largely be left alone to manage our own affairs. There is a feeling of resentment against eastern interference in any shape more than is actually necessary. Western men fancy they understand the situation far better than it is possible for eastern people to do, and they would prefer having all matters in their own hands.”

The constant hammering by the press on Eastern perfidy became almost an article of faith in the West. The government’s immigration policy had been based on the concept of the West as a rural community feeding the East and enriching Eastern manufacturers by giving them a new domestic market. This “theoretical folly,” as the New York
Tribune
called it in 1904, did not sit well with the moulders of prairie opinion. More than one Westerner wondered why condensed milk had to be shipped three thousand miles from Nova Scotia to stores in Calgary!

The patronizing and sneering attacks in some Ontario papers before the turn of the century hadn’t helped. The Toronto papers were especially vitriolic. The
Star
attacked Manitoba as a “foot pad province” intent on having “its grasping desires gratified no matter how the rest of the Dominion feels about it” and in spite of the fact that the East had borne the burden of the railway and supplied the population that made Manitoba prosperous. As for the
News
, it claimed it would be cheaper for the East to give everybody in the North West a generous pension rather than to continue to subsidize the prairies. The Bobcaygeon
Independent
leaped at that suggestion:

“Let us do as The News suggests – buy them and have done with them.… Buy them … and hand them over to the Americans or the Phillipines [
sic
] or the Cubans … and get rid of the whole content.… What does the possession of the Northwest add to the comfort, pleasure, happiness or enjoyment of the people of Ontario? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Then toss it overboard for we have no use for it.…”

That item was widely publicized in the West as an example of the Eastern attitude. It was, the
Winnipeg Tribune
declared, “quite representative of what many eastern Canadians really believe.”

The most extreme utterances against the East came from Alberta and are to be found in the editorials of the Conservative Calgary
Herald
. The paper harped on three themes: total political autonomy for the Western provinces in general and Alberta in particular; freedom from exploitation by Eastern manufacturers; and the developing image of the Westerner as a distinct personality, implicitly superior to the more effete Easterner.

With a circulation of thirty-six hundred in 1904, the
Herald
was the largest daily newspaper in Alberta and certainly the most rambunctious. It was the kind of paper that kept a large vat of cold water in its press room into which printers were periodically dunked to sober
them up enough to run the linotypes. Its owner was John Jackson Young, who bought the paper in 1894 and, in the words of Bob Edwards, took hold of “a moribund fragment and nursed it into a thing of life.” Young had had a long and colourful career as a prairie newspaperman, beginning in Regina on Nicholas Flood Davin’s
Leader
, where he made his reputation through a long series of exclusive interviews with Louis Riel in the prisoner’s cell before his execution. A staunch Conservative and a member of the North West legislature, Young was also a consummate musician who could play any instrument. He acted as choirmaster and organist at the Central Methodist Church, was first president of the Calgary Operatic Society, and was also a good amateur artist and actor.