The Masques of Ottawa Part 5

"Labour may lop a few from the Government; Michael Clark a few from the farmers--enough to make my friend Mr. Crerar a most excellent colleague in my Coalition. Excellent fellow, Crerar!"

A low-tariff group, of whom 75 per cent. are Quebeckers, amalgamated with a no-tariff group who are near-Continentalists, is at least ent.i.tled to serious regard as a fantastic experiment in administration.

But we may trust Hon. Mackenzie King to simulate a vast moving-picture smile of high benevolence and great sagacity as he contemplates such a fantasia--with himself as the chief tight-rope performer and Niagara roaring below.

NUMBER ONE HARD

HON. T. A. CRERAR

Some Frank Norris such as wrote "The Pit" and "The Octopus" should arise in Canada and write a Wheat-Politics novel about T. A. Crerar. This man's photograph was once published squatting Big-Chief-wise in the front row of 300 farmers on a raid to Ottawa--I think early in the war about prices. It was a second to the last delegation which the farmers intend to send to Ottawa. The next one was in 1918, when the farmers went to protest against conscription. If you ask T. A. Crerar to-day, he will predict that in days not far to come manufacturers will pet.i.tion a farmer government in Ottawa. Because the farmers in the West regard Crerar as almost a geological process, which sometimes results in a volcano.

Crerar was projected into public affairs by 50-cent wheat, monopolistic elevator companies, discriminating railways and protected manufacturers; all of which, while he was still a young man who should have been going to dances and arguing about the genesis of sin, he concluded were into a dark conspiracy to make a downtrodden helot of the prairie farmer.

To-day Crerar is at the apex of a movement. He embodies the politically and commercially organized campaign of the biggest interest in Canada against all other merely "big" interests. He is willing to let himself be talked about as the next Premier of industrial and agricultural Canada on behalf of all the farmers whom he can persuade to elect him a majority minority in the next Parliament. And the prospect does not even dazzle him, or awe his colleagues of the c.o.o.nskin coats and the truculent whiskers.

Crerar began responsible life as a farm boy in Manitoba, taught school, and managed a small elevator company; he became President of the United Grain Growers and of the Canadian Council of Agriculture--and the next obvious thing to say is that he entered politics as Minister of Agriculture in the Union Government. But T. A. Crerar had been in politics a long while before that, though he had never even run for Parliament or legislature. Unusual, unprofessional politics. Hear what the present Secretary of the Canadian Council of Agriculture has to say about the parliaments of the Grain-Growers in 1916:

"Their annual conventions are parliaments of the Middle Western Provinces. Resolutions and recommendations of all sorts and description are debated and decided upon. Questions of far-reaching influence, socially and morally, have their beginning, so far as Western Canada is concerned, in the Grain Growers' Conventions. Records of these a.s.sociations show that besides recommending the establishment of co-operative elevators, co-operative banks, co-operative dairies, free trade, single tax and a dozen other economics reform, the Grain Growers in convention fathered Prohibition long before it was adopted, advised and urged woman suffrage many years before that measure was generally favoured, and were the first sponsors of the idea of direct legislation.

The Grain Growers' a.s.sociation and their annual conventions are the source and inspiration of all the commercial activities, and social and political reforms with which one finds the name of Grain Grower connected so often in Western Canada!"

This is the reforming political school that has trained the man now openly discussed as the next Premier of Canada. And for the benefit of any Canadian Norris who dreams of writing a problem novel about Crerar, it may be said that he is the most drab and unpicturesque personality that ever stood in line for any such office in this country. In the triangle of leaders at Ottawa he is the angle of lowest personal, though by no means lowest human, interest. Meighen is impressive; King brilliant. Crerar--is business. He would be a hard nut for a novelist to crack. A man like Smillie impresses the imagination. Crerar, who is to the Canadian farmer what Smillie was to the British miner, invites only judgment.

The first time I met Crerar--at lunch in a small eastern club--he impressed me as a man enormously capable in business, tersely direct in his judgments, somewhat satirical and inordinately sensitive. He seemed wary, almost cryptic in his remarks. Recently sworn in as Unionist Minister of Agriculture, he had turned his back on Winnipeg, where he was a sort of agrarian king, and taken his first dip into the cynical waters of Ottawa, where he was but one of a Ministerial group some of whom were abler and more interesting than himself. He had not yet appeared in Parliament. He dreaded the ordeal. He had no knowledge of just to what programme he would be expected to adhere, except the general one of winning the war. He had little enthusiasm for the Premier, probably less for most of his colleagues. So far as he had been able to survey Ottawa, he considered it an administrative mess. His direct ways of doing business were menaced by a sense of muddle and officialdom. He missed the breezy, open ways of "the Peg" and the sensation of being general manager of the biggest commercial concern west of the lakes, the Grain Growers' Grain Co. Crerar could not business-manage Ottawa. When he opened his Agriculture door he saw no box cars trailing in from the elevator pyramids on the skyline; he smelled no wheat; he saw no "h.o.r.n.y-handed" farmers writing checks to cover their speculative investments in grain which they had not yet sown. No wheat-mining comrade motoring in from the plains came to thrust his boots up on the general manager's desk and say, "Believe me, Tom, I paid thirteen-ninety for those protected articles. What a shame!"

Crerar complained of indigestion. I think his nerves were on edge. I asked him if he expected to co-relate Agriculture with Food Control and Trade and Commerce. "Oh, I suppose so," he said wearily. "n.o.body in Union Government knows what he will do yet. I don't like Ottawa. Its whole atmosphere is foreign to me."

He seemed almost contemptuous. He had made the patriotic plunge in order to put his particular brand of radical Liberalism at the service of a Tory-Unionist Government. He did not like it. Of all the Liberals who entered the Union Cabinet he was the sworn Radical. Both Calder and Sifton were machine men from governments that still had Liberal labels on their luggage. Crerar represented the great inter-prairie group of no compromise and of economic enmity to the Tories. He was rather looking for trouble; thinking rather hard of how he could get through with such an uncomfortable job, do it well and get back uncontaminated to his own dear land of the wheat and his fine office in the most handsome suite of offices in the Grain Exchange at Winnipeg. The Ottawa that he hated was the Capital that old line politicians had created. He was looking forward to some Ottawa of the future which like Canberra, the new dream Capital of Australia, might be vacuum-cleaned and disinfected of all the old partisan microbes.

Crerar made his success in a country where the visible signs of getting on in the world are a bigger factor than anywhere else in Canada. The prairies are mysterious and sublime. The West is plain big business.

Crerar represents the West rather than the prairies. He is temperamentally a man of Ontario, where he was born; solidly businesslike and persistent. He glorifies hard work. And he went West at a time when the law of hard work was just coming to replace the old-timer's creed of hanging on and waiting for something--usually a railway--to turn up. He came up with the farmer of 60-cent wheat in a part of the country where everything that the farmer had to buy in order to produce that kind of wheat was high in cost. Cheap wheat and dear wherewithals have been to T. A. Crerar and his kind Number One Hard experience. His axioms began with the plough made under a high tariff. His code of ethics was evolved from the self-binder, railroaded the long haul by systems that thrive on the tariff. His community religion--not his personal, which one believes has been pretty devoutly established--is embodied in the emotions of the skyline elevator following the trail of the steel and the twist of the box car.

One cannot mention these rudimentary western things without a species of enthusiasm for the Westerner, and a consequent precarious sympathy with the views of Mr. Crerar. Transplant yourself even for a year, as the writer did twenty years ago, to the far northwest, and you begin in spite of all your previously inrooted sentiments, to share the beliefs and talk the language that lie at the basis of even so arrogant an organization as the Grain Growers' a.s.sociation and so inordinate an oligarchy as the Canadian Council of Agriculture. A man cannot fight the paralyzing combination of drouth, wet, early frost, rust, weevil, gra.s.shoppers, eastern manufacturers, high tariffs, centralized banks and bankrupt octopean railways in the production of under-dollar wheat, without losing much of his faith in the smug laws of economy laid down by men who buy and sell close to the centres of production.

Now begins the work of the novelist, making _precis_ notes for his Crerar masterpiece; investigating the prairie farm of 1900, anywhere between the main line and the skyline. For the sake of s.p.a.ce we copy his notes, hastily sketched:

Low hill--General aspect, poplar bluffs, billowy landscape--Log and mudc.h.i.n.k shack; pole and sod roof--stable and shed ditto--Three or four cattle and lashions of gra.s.s--Broncho team and new high-painted wagon--No family--Dash churn--Lucky to have a wife--Some hens--Sod-breaking plough, long snout, breaks odd fields twixt bluffs--Coal-black loam, strong--Wheat and oats, wonderful early growth--Drouth first year--Second year, pole fences, more fields, and wet season--More crops but half spoiled by wet--Sacks on trail to cars, toiling across prairie to elevator--Smudge of train, bit of a town and a tank--No cars to load grain--Must sell to elevator--Monopoly--Low price--Grading wheat to No. 2 Northern--55 cents, used to be 40--Lien note to pay on wagon and binder--Goes to indignation meeting--Lots of that--Farmer revolutionaries--Want Gov't. to pa.s.s acts compelling Rys. to supply farmers cars to break low-price monopoly of elevators--Act pa.s.sed, but roads in league with elevators--Same old trouble--Rise of radical leaders--Organization of farmers into group to fight interests--Helots on prairies--Helpless unless organized--Only partial relief from Gov't.--Two new provinces in 1905--Grits make great splash, promising Utopia along with newer trunk lines and big towns, etc.--Farmer grins, goes on organizing, in each province a.s.sociation of grain growers (G.G.)--Every few towns some fiery evangel--Great on conventions, regular convenanters, old style--Schools of debate and Utopian legislation--Gov'ts. wear goggles and organize elections--Farmer organizes group ideas, to oppose old line politics--Say Eastern old parties effete in West--Townsmen league with farmers, common interest; low price wheat means lean purchases and laggard towns--By this time young man Crerar in Wpg., taken from managing small elevator company to be general manager G.G. Grain Co.--Co-op. movement develops in all a.s.sociations, for buying and selling--G.G.G. Co. give farmer equal rights with city man in speculation on what farmer grows--Horn into Grain Exchange, little office--Under Crerar Co. grows to much the biggest corporation in Exchange; whole ground floor offices of G.G.G. Co. which as commercial organization focuses the buying and selling end of whole agrarian movement--Head of this, naturally chief of movement--All remedial and legislative programmes merged in economics of G.G.G. Co.--Crerar wiry, quiet executive, now fuse plug to a real agrarian party with a programme which through Canadian Council of Agriculture, members from all over Canada, const.i.tutes itself a parliament of farmers telling old parties to go to the devil--Liberal gov'ts in prairie province mere annexes of new radical group which is now bigger nationalist force than Quebec ever was, ready to march upon Ottawa----

On this basis the novelist builds his political fabric of Crerar, who began life as a Laurier Liberal, became a Free Trader of the Michael Clark school, and ten years ago gave symptoms of pushing the economic side of the agrarian movement to a point where it aimed to become the new Liberalism of the prairies. He was the business head of a revolutionary movement of which other men became the ardent, flaming crusaders, both in and out of Ottawa. Crerar calmly evolved his practical evangelism out of the ledger of exports and imports. Nothing excited him so deeply as comparative statistics. He never trusted to the moral or emotional side of the case. His crusade was in the national ledger. His church was the elevator; his economic Bible the Grain Growers' Guide.

Since 1914 or thereabouts this man has kept his balance at the head of a movement that split again and again into local factions only to come together again in the head offices of the Grain Growers' Grain Co. and the Canadian Council of Agriculture. He represented multi-millions of investment in land, agriculture, co-operative commercial enterprises and speculation. On the ground floor of the Grain Exchange he was at the head of the greatest organization in the world speculating in visible supply wheat. The grain that Crerar's cohorts bought and sold was either just sown, or heading out, or being threshed, or it was crawling to Winnipeg in miles of box cars on its way to Fort William. In wheat he put his trust; in railways and steamships never; in centralized banks and eastern manufacturers not at all; in old parties at Ottawa still less--if possible.

Crerarism was becoming power to act. Behind Crerar was a sullen but optimistic reformation of such varied emotional character that none but a quiet, steady man could have controlled it in Winnipeg. The novelist's prairie farm was now a power in the land. It was Agrarianism; that had bolted like an ostrich both old parties in the West, and now offered a new one supposed to contain as a new National Policy a general and itemized contradiction of the old N.P. of 1878--The National Progressive Party.

No economic crusade had ever been so rapid, gigantic and revolutionary.

Trades unionism had taken decades to make head where the Agrarian movement took years. The One Big Union of the Reds, anarching against all Government as it is, merely applied the principle of direct action which the farmers had taught them by suggestion in the unofficial parliaments of the prairie. The Agrarian is himself a One-Big-Unionist.

His concern is not with wages and hours, but with exports, imports and elections. The Agrarian will not strike. Crerar knows that. He must not tie up communities and stop trade. He must work through Parliament.

His aim is to establish farmerism as the basis of the nation. His creed is, that no matter what use we make of raw material, cheap power, manufacturing experience and capital, Canada's greatest revenue and export production must be in the farm; and that therefore national legislation must gravitate about the farmer's garage.

This thing came to a head in a part of the country which contains less than one-sixth of Canada's total population, and more than half of them Canadians only by immigration. The one biggest man in the whole movement, besides Mr. Crerar, the man who practically elected the new farmer Premier of Alberta by appointment, is an American born. H. W.

Wood, the Czar of Alberta, came as a farmer in search of cheaper land from the Western States. He is a good citizen, and as much ent.i.tled to play strong-arm in our politics as any native Canadian is to enter the Cabinet of the United States. But as a rule a free people resent men from other countries agitating for revolution on behalf of an original small minority in a part of the country where industrialism can never become more than a sideshow in the business of production. A people of national consciousness do not relish the idea of a minority group organized to the last man and the last acre, trying to organize a nation-wide group in provinces where the factory and the mine and the fishery are at least as important as the farm.

The whole plan smacks too much of engineering. It is a case of complete, almost Teutonic, organization masquerading as a sort of democracy, but in reality a controlled tyranny whose aim so far as at present defined, is to establish group government under a camouflage of the National Progressive Party, and by means of the power so obtained or by alliances with some other group, to upset the whole economic structure which it has taken fifty years to build up. No true citizen will object to farmers in Parliament and many of them. None but a slave will consent to a Parliament dominated by any group, whether farmers, manufacturers, lawyers or labourites. Democracy means free government on behalf of the people; not on behalf of a great group which arrogates by organized majorities the right to represent the people. Agrarianism is not a nation-wide interest. Quebec has more to hope from the Government now in power than from the farmers. Ontario cannot elect a clear working majority of farmers. It is the West and the West only, which has become Agrarianism rampant. And according to the new officialdom of the West the farmer must save us all. Elect him to Administration and he will open the golden gates of real prosperity by establishing a maximum of free trade, on the a.s.sumption that our present protective investment in great railways (two of them bankrupt), in banks, industries and speculative land is all wrong.

The prospect glitters. Mr. Crerar is not dazzled. He sees with a calm and collective gaze into the future. He contemplates with profound elation the sc.r.a.pping of our present system built by experience, and the setting up of another which makes theories a subst.i.tute. Nothing is difficult to a revolutionist. Crerar's success in building Agrarian grand opera is a mere augury in his mind to still greater success in rebuilding a nation, which he thinks is the same thing because the farmer is the nation; and a nation is the easiest thing in the world to revolutionize so long as you do not obliterate its inst.i.tutions. We are not expected to abolish Commons, or Cabinets, or even the poor old Senate--until further notice. Mr. Crerar may need them all in his business. "For this relief much thanks!" Mr. Crerar is not to be nicknamed Cromwell.

The repeal of the Underwood Tariff and the Agrarian majority in Medicine Hat gave him great joy. The prospect for a farmer victory in the general election is to him almost certain by some form of coalition--perhaps with the Liberals; possibly with Labourites. In 1920 a man very close to Crerar estimated a return of 75 National Progressives in a total of 235 had the election been held at that time. Since then farmer prospects have bulled on the market. Alberta has gone Agrarian, following Medicine Hat. Organization has been extended. The old Liberalism on the prairies has been absorbed. Dafoe, of the _Free Press_, has swung into line with Crerar. There is prospect of the Government winning some seats in the West, as there is of the Liberals fielding candidates who will not be elected. Ontario is already a loose-jointed but effective part of the movement. Business is not good. A time of trade depression has always been a good time for a change of government, even along orthodox lines.

The present economic aftermath of destructive war and a large element of I-Won't-Work labour along with high wages no matter what else falls, must look to Crerar like a good time to make us all believe that we shall all get through to Canaan if we follow his Ark of the Covenant. He is able to a.s.sure us of cheap clothes and furniture and machinery, because the farmer needs these things in the production of food, which must not become too cheap or the advantage will be lost. What is to become of our industries is not clearly stated; but if living is to be so cheap we shall probably not need employment except on the farms; though under free trade we are told that industry, free to flow, is sure to locate itself at the point of advantage in material, power, transportation, and getting to market. In fact some free traders blithely tell us that once you get rid of tariffs, living becomes so cheap that people naturally flock to the free trade country, and industry is bound to follow the people; therefore free trade will give us factories as we need them.

There is no end of the mirage for your head and mora.s.s for your feet once you begin to consider the possibilities of a revolution. We had somewhat the same experience forty odd years ago in the forests of smokestacks supposed to spring up in the wake of the National Policy. It took a long while and much hard patient work to get those smokestacks. Now we have got them as part of our national equipment, along with great water powers and long-haul railways and centralized banks and a number of trusts and an undeniable number of dear manufactures under a tariff--and Mr. Crerar purposes to abolish the whole thing, to begin all over again as it was in the beginning, except that even then if the farmer had lost his market town on Sat.u.r.day he would have been in a very bad way for his Sunday clothes.

In short, Crerar proposes one more revolution, whether by one fell swoop or by a slow process of getting us used to here a little and there a little more--we do not know yet. What we do know is that he proposes to govern this country by a huge economic group that used to go to Ottawa as delegations; that in his opinion the real Capital of Canada is not economically Ottawa, but the ground floor of the Grain Exchange Building in Winnipeg.

We may not all have been reared on the farm, but be it known to all of us, our natural gravitation is back to the land.

Not many years ago also it was said that one large nation would Boss the world; later that Soviets would do it. Both the Boss nation and the Soviets seem to be reconsidering the contract. The world is a perversely complicated technicality.

Meanwhile Crerar smiles when the Premier (by appointment) calls the Agrarians "a dilapidated annex" to the Liberals. He thinks he knows better. He smiles even more sarcastically when he sees Mackenzie King chortle over that amusing fiction. He may have some use for King. If the Liberal leader will be reasonable he may permit him to merge his party with the Agrarians. If not he may threaten to rob him of Mr.

Lapointe and Quebec, and let him see how he will like that.

Last winter I met Crerar in a Toronto hotel. He had just been down east proclaiming for United Farmers in the Maritimes. An ardent Crerarite who spends his life watching Ottawa closely said as the leader came up:

"Tom, your one best bet is to make an alliance with Lapointe. That combination could upset any other confederacy in Parliament."

Crerar smiled--warmly. He said nothing. At lunch no doubt he discussed this with his supporter. The old ace of Quebec! When will that home of race Nationalism ever get into the hand of cards held by Crerar who would inundate Quebec with reciprocity? Perhaps one E. C. Drury can tell. He is talked about as the man whom Crerar may call to the Premiership in a Cabinet of fourteen Ministers of Agriculture and one Minister of Justice.

THE PREMIER WHO MOWED FENCE-CORNERS

HON. E. C. DRURY

MOWING FENCE-CORNERS.

A zig-zag old rack with its ivies and moss, Just fifty-odd panels or so; A wheat-field, a scythe and a boy his own boss; He had the fence-corners to mow.

He slivered the whetstone clear out to the tip Of his snake-handled, snubnosed old blade; And he swung his straw hat with a sweep and a rip With the sun ninety-four in the shade.

He thought of the water-jug cool as a stone Right under a burdock's green palm, By the leg of a fence-corner hickory half-grown, Where the breeze always blew in a calm.

But the boss saw him loafing clear over the corn, The next the boy heard was a shout; And he wished for a moment he never was born To mow all those fence-corners out.

Past the elder-bush blow it's five corners to mow, To get to that burdock's green lug-- So he put on a spurt till the sweat blacked his shirt, And he mowed his way in to the jug.

What cared the boy then for the boss in the corn With a beaded brown jug at his feet, While he pulled out the corn-cob as glad he was born As the bobolink there in the wheat?