The Masques of Ottawa Part 7

But before Mr. Drury has the chance to be truly elected by the people of Ontario to carry on his People's Party, he hopes perhaps that he may have a chance to be called to Ottawa. It is freely rumoured that Mr.

Crerar has no intention of taking the Premiership which the liberated people of Canada are going to bestow upon him by virtue of one more group-coalition. In which case he may invite Mr. Drury, who has given a sparring exhibition of being a Premier, to succeed him. Then we shall have the undemocratic farce of an appointive Premier all over again--for the third time in three years. And then--well, we shudder to think what is going to become of Mr. Drury's. .h.i.therto unimpeachable Christianity and of the economic welfare of a country which has as much right to modern factories as the bush farmer ever had to saw-mills.

EZEKIEL AT A LEDGER

RT. HON. SIR GEORGE FOSTER

Sir George Foster is a genius. The world forgives much to geniuses, because it lives by them. Canada has tolerated a great deal in Foster for the very good reason that no man except Laurier has for so long a period without interruption seemed so picturesquely necessary to our public affairs.

In his own temperamental way Sir George somewhat compensates Canada for never having produced a Milton or a Bach. One of his best speeches might be made into blank verse or set to a fugue. He illuminates life.

Decade by decade he comes prancing down the vistas of our politics with a vitality that is perfectly amazing. And when some obituarist writes his epitaph, "Foster Mortuus Est," he promptly rubs it out and writes, "Resurgam!"

The first allusion I ever heard made to Sir George Foster was in 1889, on a Sunday School excursion when a Grit lawyer superintendent spoke with admiring deprecation of the then famous divorce case; adding, as might be expected of a righteous Grit, that it was a pity so eminent an advocate of prohibition should have so compromised, perhaps ruined, his political career.

Well, the compromise has lasted a long time and the ruin seems to be long overdue. Public sentiment over both temperance and divorce has somewhat shifted. In 1889, when virtue shuddered over marrying divorced women, drunkards were being made by hundreds in any town under the very nose of the church. In 1921 when Parliament moves to popularize divorce, public sentiment not only abolishes the bar, but votes bone dry on the eve of an artificial millennium.

A man who for some years has wanted the Ministry of Trade made the remark in a magazine article that if he had Sir George Foster in his employ as a salesman he would have him discharged for incompetence.

That man forgets that a genius is not born to sell goods. There were times in the war when less genius and more business in Trade and Commerce would have been better for Canada. Foster was almost seventy when the war began; a pretty old man to act as the chief business manager for a nation at war. His department was the economic backbone of the Administration. The nearer Canada got to total conscription of resources, the more Foster's work should have towered into the blue.

Trade and troops were the life of the nation. Hughes, White, Borden, Rowell, Meighen, were all shoved into greater eminence by the work they did in the war; Foster was no bigger or more potent a figure in war work or any other kind of work when peace was signed than he was in 1914.

He never was a great executive even at his portfolio under Macdonald in the early '80's. He has always been a prophet. Public speech is his besetting pa.s.sion. He could rise anywhere and translate logic and economics into ethical emotion. No man in Canada felt the war more intensely. But Trade was not a matter of emotion; or of oratorical periods; or the right hand descending upon the left. It was a matter of urgent and colossal business.

In 1916, talking to the war budget, he declaimed against patronage. He had done the same thing in 1910 just as ably when he was the pot calling the kettle black.

"I hope," he said, "that in the white light of the present struggle the two parties will agree to do away with the evil."

But the "white light" was more intent on doing away with the parties themselves.

In the same speech:

"When the trenches call for munitions and supplies, when the blood of the country is oozing from its veins in the struggle to preserve its ideals and its liberties, when those who are at home are contributing with generous self-sacrifice and without murmur or repining, I say that to me as a member of the Government, to you as supporters of the Government, and to you, gentlemen opposite, as a part of the great body which represents the people of this Dominion, the call comes to cut off every unnecessary expenditure, to refuse every improper demand. It is our business to administer the funds of the people with perfect economy, and to devote ourselves to the one sole purpose of prosecuting this war to a successful and final conclusion."

Again, he spoke like a prophet when he riddled the blind optimism of the prosperity pack. At that time Canada had a favouring balance of $200,000,000 just two years after a heavy ledger against us.

"The Optimist speaks of the unexampled prosperity that is to follow the war. I would like to think so, but I can't. The prediction of a Montreal newspaper that Canada will have from twelve to fifteen million inhabitants within three years after the war is a mischievous exaggeration. The first trying period of readjustment will come immediately after the actual fighting ceases and an armistice is declared."

Ezekiel was profoundly right up till the last prophecy. The Minister of Trade, with all his great ability to a.n.a.lyze trade, had not mastered economics. Neither had the President of a great Canadian bank when he said before the armistice, that merchants with empty shelves and able to buy cheap goods would be in luck. It was a bad time for prophets.

However, for a man who aimed at so many nails, Sir George had a good average of hitting. But while he was talking so much, and in Europe so long, the biggest-business administration of which he was the chief went along on its own more or less mechanical momentum. By 1917 Canada had a total export trade of more than half a billion; with a possible yearly munition order of 500 millions--no thanks to the Minister of Trade. No nation in the world exported so much from so few people. No Ministry of Trade had such a record. Sir George knew exactly what it all meant. He was used to a.n.a.lytical surveys. But one fails to remember that at any period he issued from his office, the trade centre of the Dominion, any statements that shewed him to be more than a puzzled commentator on the riddle of trade, usually between speeches and journeys. Sir George never did have executive patience for the mastery of detail. In this case he did not even convince the people that he had sized up the great general outlines, so fascinating because so profoundly unusual.

In June, 1916, Sir George issued in his weekly Trade Bulletin a resounding Call To Action for a business conference at Ottawa of all parties interested for the purpose of pulling the country's industries and organizations into one big _ensemble_ for getting back to peace.

That "Call" was published in one paper ill.u.s.trated by a picture of Sir George--in the climax of a speech. A few months later a political writer was in Ottawa, and when he came back he wrote an article about the Foster Conference. The following extract shows what he thought of it:

In Ottawa, last week, I met a big bear of a Canadian westerner. He had just arrived from Toronto. He was all smiles, all energy and enthusiasm, and he was looking for the Minister of Trade and Commerce, Sir George E. Foster.

"Tell you what I want him for," he said. "I want to go up and shake hands with a real live man. That's what I want. I read his message 'bout getting together, and it sure set me thinking. I'm strong for this Conference scheme. I'm going to back it for all I'm worth and do my darndest to help a real, live statesman to pull off a big deal.

d.a.m.n if I care whether he is a Tory. My middle name is--Boost! I want to help."

We walked up to the Department of Trade and Commerce together.

"Just what line of industry are you interested in?" I asked.

"Boilers--steam boilers. Vancouver. Little Van-cou-ver. That's my town."

"And if I may ask, what is your idea about this Business Man's Conference? What do you think ought to be done?"

"Eh? Why, I don't know yet. That's what I'm coming to see Foster about."

An hour later I met the boiler-maker coming away from the Department of Trade and Commerce.

"Well," I said, "everything clear?"

"Clear?" he roared. "Clear? Why, man alive! that fellow Foster's away in the West with some Dominion Royal Commission, making speeches or something, and back there"--nodding toward the Department of Trade and Commerce--"n.o.body home!"

"Couldn't they explain it?"

"Sure. They explain that Sir George is away and nothing definite can be done. I asked 'em when the conference would be called and they said that was indefinite. Then I said where? And they thought somewhere in Ottawa. Why, all that fellow Foster made was a speech. That's all. A speech! Now what the h---- good will a speech do to help me and help the rest of us manufacturers to keep from getting swamped after this war?"

Trade in Canada during the war was of vastly more practical significance than the old fiscal idea of Empire of which Sir George had been such a protagonist when he stumped England for Chamberlain in 1903. But he never seemed able to grasp it as clearly even in a speech. I don't know which seems to me now the greater speech; that on the Chamberlain mirage to the Toronto Empire Club when he elevated fiscal statistics into a pageant of economic emotion; or his speech on the war, I think in 1916, when he lifted his thin spectral figure into a sublime paroxysm of ethical appeal, corralled all opposing arguments into a corner and flogged the life out of them in a great message to awakened humanity. The comparison scarcely matters except to show that in fifteen years of great Foster speeches alas for the prophets!--it was not the fiscal Empire of Chamberlain that had leaped to the war.

Still more startling to Sir George, the economics of war riddled to bits the old economics of Empire. In 1917 he was compelled to forget that a tariff was implied in the Ten Commandments and to consent for all necessary purposes to remove trade restrictions across the border.

That was after the United States had declared war. The high priest of protection himself invented a phrase "economic unit" to express North America. He wanted markets to find their own levels by their own routes. He no longer had any fear of Canada being Americanized.

Canada's nationhood was already defined in the trenches more than ever it had been in tariffs. In Sir George's phrase the food producers of North America were to become one vast international group. When Foster was "Yea" to Macdonald in 1887 and 1891, before he became "Amen" to Chamberlain in 1903, this economic unity was called continentalism, which to Foster was the mother of annexation, and Free Trade Liberals were traitors to the Empire.

Economic unity, however, meant far more than Sir George intended it to mean. He admitted the principle of free-trade only in production. In spite of tariffs North America became, not only a vast group of producers, but a huge family of consumers. Every Victory Loan raised money that was spent in once more paying wages and buying materials for war production in Canada. Every time that money went round the circle, prices for many of the staple commodities went higher. The Department of Trade registered a tremendous increase in the cash value of exports even when the bulk value changed very little. The more loans "put over the top," the more money there seemed to be. The more hazardous shipping became through submarines, the greater the scarcity, and the demand--and the price paid. Sir George witnessed this phenomenon: the fewer producers left by conscription on the land, in the mines, in the factories, the more Canada was able to export--in cash values.

This must have given a good Tory economist loss of sleep. No man could have a.n.a.lyzed the paradox more ably than Sir George. But so far as we can recollect, he published no illuminating bulletins from his Department to tell us about it. How we should have enjoyed his master mind elucidating the phenomenon of a continent being gradually denuded of goods and flushed with money; of prices inexorably mounting; of money hungering for goods; of fabulous wages for munition-making and anything else that could be scaled up to meet the compet.i.tion unloading themselves into Victory Bonds at a sure profit, and the surplus into commodities most of which were not made in Canada and must therefore come from the United States. What a prophetic commentary it would have made on the "buyers' market" which followed the armistice. What wonderful reading it would have made if Sir George had issued replies to those commercial newspaper editors over the border who rushed jubilating into print to say with fabulous statistics that Canada was now the heaviest customer that nation had. How we should have liked to hear officially from the Minister of Trade how Broadway was infecting the country, luxuries reeling in argosies over the dry land to Canada, and Canada buying herself bankrupt on the exchanges; and that though there were powerful economic reasons for it all, we had better enlist in an army of economy instead of being conscripted later by the super-tariff on luxuries and the luxury tax.

But the Minister of Trade confined himself to growling that we should all wear patches and old clothes. Which was one good reason why many people did not. It was easy for Sir George to wear patched trousers if he felt like so doing. He would have been merely picturesque, like those ragged prophets of old. Most of us still had to invest in some sort of decoration. Anyhow a large number of people had the money to spend; and the more they spent the more they approved of self-denial in other people.

This problem of American penetration is big enough at any time here.

The Department of Trade is the place where it is most clearly understood. We are constantly warned about the danger, not only to our Canadian dollar, but to our national independence if we persist in importing motor cars, fashionable footwear, party gowns and lingerie and hats, art furniture, home decorations, phonographs, moving pictures, and magazines. But we go on doing it; because Canada, whether in war or peace, fails to produce a great many things that people like to have and to wear and to go about in; and for those that she does we are charged the foreign price plus the duty and more; so that in many and many a case it has been found more economical to buy the article from catalogue, paying the duty and the express charges.

Has Sir George ever enlightened us about this? Has he ever tried to inform the Canadian manufacturer that if he expects to hold our allegiance even under a more or less protective tariff, he must refrain from charging the consumer all the traffic and more than the consumer will stand? We fail to remember; even when we recollect that on thus and such an occasion somewhere in the Empire he made some glorious patriotic speech. On a subject which causes many Canadians to explode, often with ill-considered accusation of "the Yankees," our greatest maker of pure and applied speeches seldom has a word to say. But he knows. Sir George Foster knows our economic subjugation by the 12 to 1 method, even under a tariff. Alas! he hails from the Maritimes, a land of great people, of constructive Canadians who have too often been in absolute economic need of more of that sort of subjugation.

Then there was the never-dead dragon of high prices for everything, which our St. George made no real attempt to spear. That is a long story. It was his department which furnished the Food Controller, the duties which the Trade Department could not discharge. Well remembered are the evangelical injunctions of the Controller to consume perishable and export other products; to live on garden truck grown in back yards and corner lots so that grain and b.u.t.ter and bacon and eggs and oatmeal might run the submarine blockade on the high seas. There was no fault to find with this, so long as it was economy. But heaven knew what armies of housewives, already desperate from lack of help, were dragooned into making their kitchens amateur canning factories where they wasted good fruit along with tragically expensive sugar in jars that approximated the cost of cut gla.s.s. And after all the slavery and the self denial, b.u.t.ter and eggs that were not shipped abroad because there was no room in munition ships to carry them, vanished mysteriously in the lower price season into some limbo known as cold-storage, only to emerge when it suited the storage barons at prices as high as were paid in Europe. No doubt there is an economic philosophy in cold-storage just as there is in hydro-power. But we have always supposed its virtue was in taking care of a perishable surplus, so that when there is a scarcity the surplus can be released at a reasonable profit.

Did the able Minister of Trade ever stoop to enlighten us with the economics of this? If so, the recollection has faded.

There is at any time, whether in peace or war, a great function for the Department of Trade to perform in the matter of what is the reasonable cost of any commodity in general demand. But no Trade Department in this country has ever done it. There is always plenty of time for the consideration of new markets, the plotting of new trade routes and the planning of mercantile marine for export; all very well, and if we are to pay our bills by exports, very necessary. But the common consumer has many a time, long before the war and often since, found himself in the jaws of a nutcracker in the shape of some combine or trust or confederacy of middlemen; and if there was any sphere of government to deal with these things it was the great Department of Trade.

This has nothing to do with party politics. Any party up to date has been capable of neglecting the people in these matters. But it is quite as important as the abolition of patronage.