The Masques of Ottawa Part 19

"Ah!" he said eloquently, with a fine twinkle of his eyes to the interviewer at Quebec, "you have not seen our Province? Then you must come down again, when I am not busy, and let me take you to see--all we have down here!"

A POLITICAL MATTAWA OF THE WEST

JOHN WESLEY DAFOE

First impressions are always tyrants. The first time I heard John Wesley Dafoe talk he was in his large sanctum of the _Manitoba Free Press_, in the summer of 1916. He was without a collar, his shirt loose at the neck, and his hair like a windrow of hay. He reminded me of some superb blacksmith hammering out irons of thought, never done mending the political waggons of other people, and from his many talks to the waggoners knowing more about all the roads than any of them.

The wheat on a thousand fields was baking that day, and the 'Peg was roasting alive. Since that I have always pictured Dafoe sweltering, terribly in earnest, whittling the legs of the Round Table and telling somebody how it is that west of the lakes neither of the old Ottawa parties has now any grip on the people.

Dafoe talked that way in 1916. He was beginning to lisp a little along that restless line of thought in 1910. And in 1940 he may be sitting in that same sanctum with walls of heavy books on two sides of him, telling somebody just how it came to be that an economic cyclone on the prairies once caught up all the Grits and Tories and nothing was ever heard or seen of them again.

When Kipling wrote, "Oh, east is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet," he had never met Dafoe. Some directive angel planted him at Winnipeg shortly after Clifford Sifton crowded the gate there with people going in that they might choke it again with wheat coming out; and while people went in and wheat came out through this spout of the great prairie hopper, Dafoe dug himself a little ship ca.n.a.l which as it grew bigger sluiced the political rivers of the West into his sanctum before he lifted the lock and let them on down to the sea at Ottawa. The West as he saw it was a place of coming mighty changes. His own party was pushing the transformations. The prairies were due to become the mother of great forces. You could not be always herding people into a land like that from south, east and west and not come within an ace of fostering some revolution.

And of all cities west of the lakes, Winnipeg was the clearing-house, as much for policies and programmes as for wheat and money and people.

No political cloud ever gathered on the prairies that did not get blown into Winnipeg before it burst. Dafoe stood ready for them all. He believed that no change had happened yet to the Liberal party comparable with the changes yet to come. He saw that party chaining itself to tariffs and big interests and he said:

"Believe me, that won't forever do. There's something just short of a revolution going to happen to this party before the West gets done with it; and if the party isn't ready for the West, so much the worse for the party."

Just to get ahead of mere chronology, the bane of many a good man's life. In 1919 the most complete imitation of a little Moscow ever seen on this continent was set up in Winnipeg. For many weeks it looked to some hopefuls as though the Wheat City would reconstruct the whole economic structure of the nation to suit the ideas of a violent minority. The main recorded issue was "collective bargaining". The real issue was direct action in the form of the sympathetic strike. By its expected control of urban centres the Soviet organization aimed to throttle big utilities, finance, shipping, railroads, telegraphs. The United Grain Growers were to be but a helpless giant in the hands of Jack Proletariat. Parliament was to be superseded by Direct Action.

The A.F.L. was to become obsolete. Trades Unions were to be taken over and painted red. Citizens in starched collars were to become comrades in shirt sleeves, or enemies. Political parties would be reconstructed. The "workers" would own the country. The British Empire would be shaken into Soviets. The Army and the Navy would be internationalized. The real Capital of Canada outside of Winnipeg would be, not London, but Moscow. The International would supplant national anthems. Public opinion would be exterminated except as revised by the Red leaders on the Red River at its junction with the a.s.siniboine.

In the unfolding of this Great Adventure we pause here to observe that it was a newspaper which behind the Citizens' Committee administered a black eye to this attempt to make Winnipeg the Soviet headquarters of North America and 120 millions of people. The name of the paper was the _Manitoba Free Press_.

And the _Free Press_ was seeing Red. What business had the Red Flag in a city like Winnipeg at all? If anywhere in Canada, why not in the industrial, big-interest East--in Montreal or Toronto?

"One revolution at a time, please," we almost hear the _Free Press_ saying. "Now the war is done the West has to settle the fate of Government at Ottawa in its own way. And the way of the West is not with the Red Flag; not with Direct Action. This city is a headquarters of evolutionaries, not of outlaws. You people of the Strike Committee are trying to get the spot-light when you've no business anywhere except right at back stage."

A perfectly straight argument, though not couched in those words.

Dafoe and his a.s.sociates were profoundly busy with what to them was a ten times greater issue than any form of Soviet anywhere in Canada. As a matter of record the paper did admit that the metal workers had a right to strike for collective bargaining.

"But no other Union here or elsewhere," it thundered "has any right to a sympathetic strike to help the metal workers. This city is not going to be throttled by a thug minority, who want to exercise governing power as a revolutionary usurpation of authority."

A minority always leads. Majorities follow. The position of the _Free Press_ was, that it is only a minority able to command a majority that should rule; and the Soviet was no such minority--while the _Free Press_ was.

A clear grasp of this is necessary in the business of judging Mr. Dafoe and his coming influence upon Canadian affairs. What Dafoe enunciated about the strike will have a strong bearing in the case upon what he thinks about the Agrarians. The judge must get a fair judgment. But of this later.

Dafoe was, so far as we know, the first editor in Canada to advocate from the beginning of the war a Coalition Government. This was natural. The _Free Press_ had no faith in the Borden administration of Bob Rogers, owner of the _Winnipeg Telegram_. By the summer of 1916 it was into a Coalition campaign. A year later when the Premier came back from England declaring for conscription and inviting Laurier to join in a Coalition, the _Free Press_ supported him.

Why this anxiety? We must pull off a bit of the makeup to find out.

The _Free Press_ was a Liberal paper. It supported Laurier in the West. But the older it grew the more clearly Dafoe and his a.s.sociates saw that the man who had created the two new Western Provinces could not hold them. Other G.o.ds were now arising. Their organ was the _Grain Growers' Guide_; their parliaments were in grain growers'

conventions; their policy was radical Liberalism. The Liberal organ of a Wheat City could not consistently antagonize this radical movement.

The farmers must be studied. So far as they could strengthen Liberalism by becoming a Radical wing, they must be encouraged. At the point where they developed an extreme left away from the party they must be checked. The _Free Press_ which was yet to fight an economic revolution must not itself be revolutionary.

This leads up to policy in Empire. The paper had gone against Borden in 1911. It was against the taxation Navy of Borden even though it could see the danger of war ahead. It was opposed to the whole super-Tory idea of a centralized British commonwealth of nations. It "hung the hide" of Lionel Curtis and his Round Table propaganda clubs to the Canadian National fence. It argued for "a progressive development in Canadian self-government to the point of the attainment of sovereign power to be followed by an alliance with the other British nations", who it was a.s.sumed would do likewise. For years before the war the _Free Press_ had talked of this evolutionary Empire, deeply regretting that Mr. Boura.s.sa had coined the word "Nationalist" and made it obnoxious.

Winnipeg seldom does things one half at a time. In the summer of 1917 J. W. Dafoe was one of the most astounded men in Canada. The other one was Sir Wilfrid Laurier. That was the year of the famous Liberal Convention. Had such a Convention happened in Chicago with such a man as Roosevelt as the centre-piece, its doings would have been cabled the world over. In its small way the Winnipeg Convention was more sensational than the Big Strike two years later. Mr. Dafoe was in Ottawa that summer. He was needed there. The Premier had come back from England primed with a policy of conscription to be enforced by a possible Coalition Government, an offer of which was made to the Opposition leader. Since early in the war the _Free Press_ had argued for coalition, but opposed conscription until after the United States entered the struggle because of the inevitable exodus of slackers across the border.

There was a strong conscriptionist group of Liberals in Ottawa. We must a.s.sume that Mr. Dafoe, though not a member of Parliament, was strongly behind them; his presence in Ottawa indicates that his counsels were needed in view of the att.i.tude to be taken by Western Liberals. It was the conscriptionist group of Liberals in Ottawa that decided upon the Convention, whether on the advice of Mr. Dafoe is not generally known. The intention was to create a Western Liberal group free from Laurier control, prepared to consider coalition--involving conscription--on its merits. So far, the policy of the Convention was in line with the previous programme of Mr. Dafoe. But the Liberal machine in the West--which was not Mr. Dafoe's party at all, because for some time he had been working on the principle that both the old parties as such had lost their grip on the West--went out and captured the delegates. The Convention was suddenly stampeded for Laurier, a result which Mr. Dafoe never expected but against which he had strongly urged, the Liberal Unionist leaders. The _Free Press_ thereafter thundered against the Convention as entirely misrepresenting Western Liberalism. The subsequent South Winnipeg convention shewed that the _Free Press_ was right. Almost the entire strength of Western Liberalism swung into the Union movement and the Coalition, and the _Free Press_ became a temporary, though independent, supporter of the Union Government for the purpose of winning the war.

Now for the larger front stage view; how does Mr. Dafoe's att.i.tude in the defeat of the Winnipeg Soviet idea of government and his former campaign against Laurier Liberals match with his att.i.tude towards the Farmer Movement as embodied by Mr. Crerar? The leader of the Agrarian movement is a friend of the _Free Press_ for much the same reason that the strike leaders in 1919 were a foe to it. Crerarism in the West looks for the support of that paper in its drive upon Ottawa. From his experience outwardly to the public, and intimately behind the scenes, always concerned with building up a new Liberalism on the wreck of the old, Dafoe endorses Crerar and his movement. When Crerar went into the Government the _Free Press_ favoured his going. Mr. Dafoe clearly states that, "if the Union movement could retain its Liberal elements and produce an economic and taxation policy acceptable to Western opinion, we could continue to support it." In contemplating such a miracle, did he expect that the ultra-Tories would lop away from the Union, making a "rump" party to match the Laurier Liberals, and leaving the Union Government free to make an alliance with the Farmer Group?

This we do not profess to know. In a political age like this almost any sort of alliance may be made for the purpose of capturing Parliament. But a permanent alliance between Western Liberalism represented by Mr. Crerar and the Government by Coalition looks now as fantastic as a Coalition between Lloyd George and de Valera. Mr. Dafoe probably knew that the Government and Mr. Crerar would lock horns over the tariff--since any species of protection and free trade never could sleep together. When Mr. Crerar left the Government on the budget issue, the _Free Press_ ceased its active support of the Government and moved its guns to a detached position. When Meighen became Premier and in his programme speech at Stirling outlined his policy, Dafoe definitely declared himself as no longer in support of the Union Government. As he could not support the Laurier Liberal party, which he had formerly opposed, the only thing left was to make an active and open alliance with Mr. Crerar.

Such a mobile course of action is incomprehensible unless we keep in mind the fact that Mr. Dafoe has long found it impossible to support either of the old parties. The Coalition was a new one which he consistently supported on its merits and up to a point. The point was reached. Unionism and Agrarianism were incompatible. Therefore Unionism was a Tory inst.i.tution; and the only Liberal programme left for the _Free Press_ was to form an alliance with Mr. Crerar and his great group of cla.s.s-conscious Agrarians.

By this time, if he reads this, Mr. Dafoe will have observed that we are trying to corner him on the question:

If you were opposed to a Labor Soviet which aimed at making a little Moscow of Winnipeg, what are you going to do about a Farmer Soviet that aims to capture Ottawa?

Already he has begun to answer. He uses a label for the party led by Mr. Crerar and evolved with the aid of Mr. Dafoe:

The National Progressive Party.

A good name, even if not new. What is behind the label? That the party so named has now taken over all the Liberal economic traditions in the West and after the next general election will become the real Liberal Party of Canada. In the opinion of Dafoe, Mackenzie King should keep out of the West in the coming election in order to let Mr.

Crerar romp home with three-fourths of the entire representation in Parliament. He alleges that Laurier destroyed the old Western Liberal party in 1917; that King has not revived it--though Mr. Fielding might have done so; that Western Liberals have become Progressive except in the cities, where some have become Unionists. In making this statement he probably reckoned on Michael Clark becoming a Progressive. But Michael Clark has turned out to be one species of even Free Trade Liberal which Crerarism cannot absorb.

Let us concede that here is one of the most absorbing problems in Canada. If Dafoe backs Crerar in the effort to get that preponderant majority away from Meighen and King, then he is afterwards committed to Crerarism. Dafoe cannot afford to take Crerar and abandon the traditions of the _Free Press_. If he is so keen about real "nationalism" in this country as to regret that Boura.s.sa made the word obnoxious, he has surely decided that the policy of the N.P.P. must be to build up a true national life in Canada. And the man who was Canada's press representative at the Peace Conference, with such exceptional facilities for focussing Canadian national sentiment among other nations, will not dare to countenance in Mr. Crerar and his followers any policy that will open the gates for the United States to walk in and walk over this nation as twenty years ago his _Free Press_ a.s.sociate, Clifford Sifton, opened the doors to let Europe inundate us with a polyglot, un-national flood.

No Canadian journalist has shouldered so perilous a responsibility.

Dafoe knows what a struggle it is to preserve national ident.i.ty on a basis of one to twelve against us. Born in Ontario and experienced in the East as few editors have ever been, he surely knows the value of not surrendering our national birthright for a mess of free-trade pottage.

If he knows this as well as we think he should, will he uphold the _Free Press_ as the constant critic of Mr. Crerar if he attempts to denationalize this country; or will he accept a portfolio of Minister of the Interior in the Cabinet dominated by Messrs. Crerar and Drury, and in his haste to establish the new Liberalism of the National Progressive Party help to strike out the meaning of the word "National"

in the label?

Can a man who fought a Direct Action Strike because it aimed at revolution, consistently endorse, lock, stock and barrel, a movement which aims at a revolution by Indirect Action through Parliament?

Is government by a "National Progressive Party" Agrarian Group with a business-farmer Premier and a farmer-dominated Cabinet any less of a group government in principle than the One Big Union, even though it does not tie up the nerve centres of the country by a minority general strike, but merely throttles Parliament, which is supposed to be the national brain, by the use of the group minority in voting?

Mr. Dafoe has already begun to answer. Again we see him sweltering in his sanctum, his hair like a windrow of hay, as he dictates something like this to his stenographer:

"Your logic is good except that your major premiss is a case of being off to a bad start. The National Progressive Party is not a group; it is a business majority. It contains the people who produce the majority of the nation's wealth for consumption and export and therefore enable the nation to pay its bills. It is Liberal because it advocates free-trade and is opposed to big monopolies, and there is no other Liberalism in Canada left worthy the name. The N.P.P. is the new Liberalism, not for the West alone, but for the whole country. It depends upon the franchise of the people, not upon the strike action of revolutionary groups. Agriculture, not industry, is the basis of Canada's economics. Even labour as embodied in the Trade Unions does not aim at revolution: Only the Reds want that. And the Reds are a hopeless minority. The farmers are not as yet a popular, though they are an economic, majority; but the future of this nation depends upon a voting as well as a producing majority of farmers."

This may not be the exact way in which Mr. Dafoe would state the case, but it expresses the fact that sound economics are at the root of all ideas which have to do with fair government. And it suggests that J.

W. Dafoe with his _Free Press_ has more to do than the _Grain Growers'

Guide_ with what the people think about the N.P.P.

For this reason we hope that Mr. Dafoe, the judge and the advocate as well, will always stay "behind the scenes" to keep Mr. Crerar on the right track if ever he gets the right of way.

HEADMASTER OF THE MANCHESTER SCHOOL

MICHAEL CLARK, M.P.

The eminent headmaster of the Manchester School in Canada is one of the few M.P.'s who know how to build a wheat stack. He farms in the spot north of Calgary where the poplar bluffs begin to mark that you are in the black loam of wonderful crops at a maximum distance from Liverpool.

It is an art to build a wheat stack. Michael Clark--so we believe--knows exactly how many tiers to lay before he begins the "belly"; how to fill up the middle so that the b.u.t.ts of the sheaves droop to run off the rain; and how high to go with the bulge before he begins to draw in with the roof. All day long as he worked on his knees, not in prayer, he had mental leisure to think about one vast, fructifying theme; which of course is Free-Trade as they had it in England; unrestricted trade according to the Manchester School. And when he got his stack done he could tell to a ten-dollar bill how much tariff the railways and steamships would levy on that stack by the time the wheat got to Liverpool.