The Masques of Ottawa Part 21

A man who knew Calder twenty-two years ago gave, not long ago, some impressions of the Minister in connections with the liquor administration.

"About two weeks after Saskatchewan went dry," he said, "I was spending a night in one of the larger towns in the Province. Among the other guests at the hotel was a member of the Government. In the lobby an interesting argument waged throughout the evening, the Minister of course, defending the action of the Government in closing the bars.

Among other things he told us about the relief work carried on by the Dominion and Provincial Governments in certain districts where there had been crop failures, in order that the dest.i.tute settlers might earn or borrow enough to keep themselves and their families through the winter. He emphasized one mistake the Government had made in not first closing every bar in the districts affected, because there were many instances where every dollar that had been earned or borrowed had been spent in the bars on the very day that it was received, by the men whose families it was intended to save from freezing and starvation.

"I was telling this afterwards to one of the leading social reformers of Saskatchewan, and a smile played over his face as I was speaking.

When I had finished he said:

"'He didn't tell you the whole story. We recognized the necessity of closing those bars before that relief work was started, and urged it so strongly on the Government that they agreed to do it. The Orders-in-Council were drawn up and ready to be signed when Calder, who had been absent from the Province on business, returned and immediately it was all off.'"

Calder has a sister who is one of the leading social workers in Regina.

She has a profound regard for her talented brother Jim.

The liquor did more than even Separate Schools to disrupt Government forces in Saskatchewan. Calder was no hypocrite to weep over the moral issues in prohibition. He was not a profound governmentarian or a champion of enforced morality. A Government might own and operate telephones, but not so well consciences. The liquor administration turned out to be a mess in Saskatchewan, largely because the administration did not unanimously believe in the thing that the majority seemed to want. Calder was no more to blame than anybody else, except that he was highest in the Government when the Premier was away.

The reformers said that Calder was pro-liquor in the administration.

He seemed to have no opinions about that--at least for publication.

Ideals often run away with communities. If he had only spouted a little now and then he would have given people a chance to bring something home to him, and himself a chance to get near the people.

Two or three scandals came up in departments over which he had control.

Commissions were appointed to investigate; they always exonerated Calder. Even in the search-light on liquor--as many as four, one after another--no technical blame attached to the silent Minister. Calder may have had a contempt for either commissions or public opinion. A Sphinx is as a rule not much of a burning avenger of wrongs to the community. Besides Scott was continually running into emotional trouble. The Premier _de facto_ had the balance to keep. He must work while other people talked.

A German-born but thoroughly loyal detective engaged by the Borden Government to report upon seditious activities of the German element who were so badly disgruntled over the Wartime Elections Act, repeated to the writer more than once with great vehemence that Mr. Calder had a special interest in the _Regina Leader_, which was used to get votes for the Administration, particularly among the German element.

Governments had been known to own newspapers before Calder ever began.

_The Leader_ was naturally a Government organ and may have needed pap.

This is a form of patronage hard to uproot.

When Scott finally retired the chief administrator did not succeed him.

Martin was picked, a safe, genial and popular man. The Sphinx, it is said, might have had the post; but he preferred to stay behind the scenes. Before that he had been much talked about as a possible successor to Laurier--but with not much hope of succeeding. There are probably a number of reasons why Mr. Calder did not take the Provincial Premiership. Dig them out of Calder if you may. He has never explained. He leaves it to his commentators.

We are privileged therefore to conjecture that:

Mr. Calder was pretty well sick of Saskatchewan politics and was looking hard in almost any direction for a good way out;

Mr. Calder could see far enough into the near future of prairie politics to know that Liberalism was becoming a label for something else; and he was not disposed to come out as an Agrarian Liberal;

Mr. Calder wanted a chance to begin politics all over again, because with all his practical success he felt that he had travelled some wrong trails.

Possibly all of these had something to do with the case. At the Winnipeg Liberal Convention in 1917 he was a coalition-conscription Liberal. He worked against the Liberal machine that captured the Convention by a fluke for Laurier. Before that he was known to believe in Union Government. It was only common sense to make him one of the Prairie triumvirate--Calder, Sifton, Crerar, who carried the West into the Union. Cloudy as his career has been, for no reason that anyone specially cared to name, he might in Ottawa be a big force for the Government. He was a behind-the-scenes actor. He knew something about the art of winning elections and converting immigrants into voters. He was practical. He would be needed in Ottawa--more than he could see any use for his talent in Saskatchewan with its farmer-dominated Cabinets.

Alberta has gone Agrarian. All Saskatchewan needs is a change of label. Some psychological morning Premier Martin will get up and rub out "Liberal" after his name, buy a big farm and set up as a National Progressive. Provincial Legislatures are things to be captured. The old parties shrewdly used them in the Ottawa game. The new ones are just as apt. Too long these Western elective bodies have been on the switch. It is time to shunt them, once more, on to the main line that leads to Ottawa--with a different company label on the cars.

By no exercise of the imagination can one behold Jim Calder becoming a Grain-Grower Progressive. The thing is anomalous.

On the other side of the Sphinx he is credited by those also who know him well in Regina with going to Ottawa purely as a patriotic duty. He wanted some work to do for the whole country bigger than any he had done in Regina. The authority formerly quoted in this article had this to say about Calder in 1917 when Calder took office in Ottawa:

"About the time of the Winnipeg Convention I was talking with the same man whom I have already quoted, and we were discussing the enigma which Calder's character and public record seemed to present. I knew that my friend was not especially a friend of Calder's, so his words seemed to carry greater weight.

"'There is no person in Canadian public life,' he said, 'who has been trying more conscientiously and consistently to be good than Calder. I will not say that his motive may be higher than that of political expediency; but he has been and is more scrupulously careful to do nothing that may reflect in any way upon his honour and integrity. I believe that he has set before him the highest possible ideal of public service and that he is doing everything he can to live up to it.'"

A prominent citizen of Regina who has seen a good deal of Calder, both in his home city and in Ottawa, has the same opinion; adding that Calder never bamboozles a deputation with suave words or false hopes; what the Cabinet thinks about any particular programme of a deputation he already knows and suggests that a typed memo, which he will present, will be as good as waiting days for a personal appeal. In 1919 he informed the writer that he proposed to enact much-needed reforms in immigrating Canada, especially as to the quality of new-comers.

Why has Mr. Calder never made a big study of this absorbing question?

When the Premier went to the Imperial Conference, with his mind pretty well made up on the Anglo-j.a.panese Alliance, why had he not in his grip, to show the Conference, one common sense, powerful little book signed by Hon. J. A. Calder, Minister of Immigration, giving a complete exposition of j.a.panese life in Canada? When we are all talking about the good _entente_ with the United States why can't we get from the Immigration Department in Ottawa a hand-book giving a complete picture of what Americans have done in the West?

However, the Sphinx may have the best of reasons for not doing these simple things. But there is scarcely a Department of administration that does not regard itself as a machine for winning elections as much as for serving the people who pay for it. Apart from all he has not told us, I have no doubt Mr. Calder is doing a big reforming work on immigration in Ottawa.

The Immigration Minister should be our leading sociologist. He should be able to diagnose communities. He might easily begin upon Ottawa.

What a study a cross section of the Smart Set would be, especially upon the arrival of a new king at Rideau Hall! There's nothing in other democracies quite like that. Washington has a White House, but the inmate is merely an elected servant of the State. Rideau Hall is an endowment, a gift of the G.o.ds. The 30,000 people of greater and lesser degree in Ottawa who normally or abnormally live by the Civil Service are profoundly affected by the arrival, sojourn and departure of the Governor-General. They are vitally influenced and entertained by the Parliamentary restaurant, even without the bar. The social show provided by Ministers' and members' wives and their visiting friends is itself a subtle study in the art of getting on in the new world, which is at the root of all immigration. Bridge for money and dining out with your friend's wife are within the reach of any ambitious immigrant. The Smart Set in Ottawa is an exotic colony all by itself.

Montreal and Toronto and Winnipeg can merely copy it. Some of the farmers have their eye on the Set; no, not to abolish it. Women must have their share in the Government. Petticoats and politics are affinities. Farmers are no more necessarily immune from what is said to have corrupted the Roman Empire than Tories or Grits. Farmers in fact, as Mr. Calder knows, are not the hope of the world; neither are lawyers nor manufacturers.

Suppose we ask the Sphinx about this. Listen in imagination to this once Liberal, as with an astounding burst of candour he says:

"My friend, your description of my make-up may be as right or as foolish as anybody feels disposed to think. None of it bothers me.

What does bother me is the law of compensation. Agree with me that the manufacturer had his drastic innings with Canadian governments; that tariffs and protected industries are the result; that lawyers--yes, I'm a lawyer--have had a big day in our affairs because they had the talent for schemes and speeches. Admit that and conclude--that the very human farmer thinks his turn is coming, and rather soon. But--somebody who was never educated as a Tory has got to help the National-Liberal-Conservative Government to get an even chance to administer this nation after the upheavals of war. Somebody who moves silently while others are talking their tongues loose may be needed to manipulate----"

Before the Sphinx could complete his statement of the case he was politely asked if he would care to inter his talents in the Canadian Senate, and he suavely answered that such a thing might be a good way to solve the conundrum, even though it would make a thoroughly stupid last act in the play.

A TRUE VOICE OF LABOUR

MR. TOM MOORE

Many years ago an Irish poet visiting Canada and voyaging down the Ottawa wrote a poem of which may people recall only the lines--

"Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast, The rapids are near, the daylight's past."

The Tom Moore about whom this article is sketched is not a poet. He is, in fact, one of the prosiest public men in Canada. But we may leave it to any of those who have known him during the past three years when he has been President of the Trades and Labour Congress, if many and many a time he has not felt some such sentiment as--

"Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast, The rapids are near, the daylight's past."

Since Mr. Charles Draper first became Secretary of that Congress he has never known a period when so much was expected of a President by way of limitless patience, statesmanship and self-control as has been shown by Tom Moore. The rapids were always close to this man, and there were rocks under the rapids. It took steady piloting by the captain to keep the crew of the labour ship from getting holes in her bottom and going down.

So far as one has been able to follow the career of Moore at the head of the Congress, and as reported in the public press, he stands now and always for adherence to the principle of Union in evolution. He believes in labour getting ahead; but not by the method of upturning everything that is established just to see what kinds of crawling things there may be underneath.

When we reflect that Canada is not primarily an industrial so much as an agricultural country, it is startling to remember that two years ago it was the home of the only organized attempt ever made in America on a scale of efficiency to establish something closely resembling a Soviet government. The big Winnipeg Strike was a lurid menace to the solidarity of labour in Canada. West of Winnipeg, once the Red River Soviet had been set up, there was a chain of inflammable centres to link up with the revolution. Calgary was the scene of one convention which had sent a cable of sympathy to Moscow. British Columbia was full of seething susceptible elements, regarded by some of the Reds across the border as the real centre rather than Winnipeg, of the One Big Union idea. The mines of Alberta were dominated by swaggering foreigners who owed no allegiance to the British or any other flag except the Red emblem. Long ago under the influence of the clergy and the Archbishop of Montreal, Quebec had created a Canadian Labour movement intended to cut Canadian labour away from the American Federation. This was a phase of the Nationalism that had its headquarters in Quebec, but had spread in various strange guises to other parts of the country, when none of the clergy or intellectuals behind the movement dreamed that the One Big Union insurgent against the A.F.L. would be the most theatrical result. Once get the O.B.U.

idea rampant in Quebec with its scores of big industries and its thousands of poorly educated workers, and the Red movement was due to spread faster than the United Farmers' programme had ever done.

In the propagation of the Red programme Ontario, and especially industrial Toronto, was regarded as the buffer state. But if the Soviet had succeeded in Winnipeg and further West, then the whole weight of that success marching upon Ontario, with Quebec bringing up the eastern end, would form a sort of nutcracker device from which Ontario would have had a hard time to escape.

This was the dazzling formula propounded at a time when every nation in the world was in a state of ferment, and when the vast loose-jointed nation known as Canada was in a condition of instability unknown since it became a Confederation. The apostles of the Red programme had all the advantages of being able to sling the paint on to the canvas of the future without caring overmuch about the drawing. Men in large numbers everywhere seemed ready to grasp at and embrace the unusual. People who for years had been ground down by high prices for the commonest necessities, considered seriously the question of the "salariat"

joining forces with organizing labour under a banner that might be red.

Civilization, physically shattered by the war and hysterically stampeded by the doctrine of self-determination of peoples--a high form of Bolshevism--stood ready to inquire whether the theories being tried in Russia were not, after all, right, no matter what butchery might be perpetrated in working them out.

Revolutionary ideas were everywhere.

Everything prepared the public mind.