Parties and Cabinets which had seemed firmly entrenched were dramatically overthrown by sudden changes in the personal factors and in the issues of the day.In the summer of 1872 the second general election for the Dominion was held.The Opposition had now gained in strength.The Government had ceased to be in any real sense a coalition, and most of the old Liberal rank and file were back in the party camp.They had found a vigorous leader in Alexander Mackenzie.
Mackenzie had come to Canada from Scotland in 1842 as a lad of twenty.He worked at his trade as a stonemason, educated himself by wide reading and constant debating, became a successful contractor and, after Confederation, had proved himself one of the most aggressive and uncompromising champions of Upper Canada Liberalism.In the first Dominion Parliament he tacitly came to be regarded as the leader of all the groups opposed to the Macdonald Administration.He was at the same time active in the Ontario Legislature since, for the first five years of Confederation, no law forbade membership in both federal and provincial Parliaments, and the short sessions of that blessed time made such double service feasible.Here he was aided by two other men of outstanding ability, Edward Blake and Oliver Mowat.
Blake, the son of a well-to-do Irishman who had been active in the fight for responsible government, became Premier of Ontario in 1871 but retired in 1872 when a law abolishing dual representation made it necessary for him to choose between Toronto and Ottawa.His place was taken by Mowat, who for a quarter of a century gave the province thrifty, honest, and conservatively progressive government.
In spite of the growing forces opposed to him Macdonald triumphed once more in the election of 1872.Ontario fell away, but Quebec and the Maritime Provinces stood true.A Conservative majority of thirty or forty seemed to assure Macdonald another five-year lease of power.Yet within a year the Pacific Scandal had driven him from office and overwhelmed him in disgrace.
The Pacific Scandal occurred in connection with the financing of the railway which the Dominion Government had promised British Columbia, when that province entered Confederation in 1871, would be built through to the Pacific coast within ten years.The bargain was good politics but poor business.It was a rash undertaking for a people of three and a half millions, with a national revenue of less than twenty million dollars, to pledge itself to build a railway through the rocky wilderness north of Lake Superior, through the trackless plains and prairies of the middle west, and across the mountain ranges that barred the coast.Yet Macdonald had sufficient faith in the country, in himself, and in the happy accidents of time--a confidence that won him the nickname of "Old Tomorrow"--to give the pledge.Then came the question of ways and means.At first the Government planned to build the road.On second thoughts, however, it decided to follow the example set by the United States in the construction of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific, and to entrust the work to a private company liberally subsidized with land and cash.Two companies were organized with a view to securing the contract, one a Montreal company under Sir Hugh Allan, the foremost Canadian man of business and the head of the Allan steamship fleet, and the other a Toronto company under D.
L.Macpherson, who had been concerned in the building of the Grand Trunk.Their rivalry was intense.After the election of 1872 a strong compromise company was formed, with Allan at the head, and to this company the contract was awarded.
When Parliament met in 1872, a Liberal member, L.S.Huntington, made the charge that Allan had really been acting on behalf of certain American capitalists and that he had made lavish contributions to the Government campaign fund in the recent election.In the course of the summer these charges were fully substantiated.Allan was proved by his own correspondence, stolen from his solicitor's office, to have spent over $350,000, largely advanced by his American allies, in buying the favor of newspapers and politicians.Nearly half of this amount had been contributed to the Conservative campaign fund, with the knowledge and at the instance of Cartier and Macdonald.Macdonald, while unable to disprove the charges, urged that there was no connection between the contributions and the granting of the charter.But his defense was not heeded.A wave of indignation swept the country; his own supporters in Parliament fell away;and in November, 1873, he resigned.Mackenzie, who was summoned to form a new Ministry, dissolved Parliament and was sustained by a majority of two to one.
Mackenzie gave the country honest and efficient administration.
Among his most important achievements were the reform of elections by the introduction of the secret ballot and the requirement that elections should be held on a single day instead of being spread over weeks, a measure of local option in controlling the liquor traffic, and the establishment of a Canadian Supreme Court and the Royal Military College--the Canadian West Point.But fate and his own limitations were against him.He was too absorbed in the details of administration to have time for the work of a party leader.In his policy of constructing the Canadian Pacific as a government road, after Allan had resigned his charter, he manifested a caution and a slowness that brought British Columbia to the verge of secession.
