Chapter 3. Urban, Industrial, and Divided: Socio-Economic Change, 1867-1920
Chapter 3. Urban, Industrial, and Divided: Socio-Economic Change, 1867-1920
3.7 Limits of Democracy
The 1850s and 1860s witnessed the rise of a new class of political leaders and a new style of politics in British North America. The aristocratic airs of the Family Compact in Upper Canada and the HBC squirearchy on Vancouver Island were trademarks of a leadership caste on whom the sun was setting. In their place were men — and they were all men — of business, the law, and journalism. They were very much unlike their predecessors: wheelers, dealers, and professionals practiced at speaking and arguing a point. They weren’t without airs but they were willing to wade into a crowd and take on the mantle of populism. They were also men on the make; corruption, graft, and bribery were mainstays of Canadian politics. The Pacific Scandal was only the most consequential of what would be generations of pay-offs associated with the “railway hucksters” whose avarice and ambition, according to one historian, “plunged Canada into an orgy of railway overproduction.”[1] These conditions were not exclusive to Ottawa and federal politics: the railway binge in British Columbia that began in the 1890s and accelerated under Premier Richard McBride’s Conservatives was no less dubious in its ethics.
The culture of democracy in Victorian and Edwardian Canada was, effectively, an exclusive club. The federal government represented landowning farmers, merchants, and professionals — people who, by dint of their investment in the economy, were seen as stakeholders in the running of the country. And their qualifications were gilded, generally, by a better education. This is what privilege looked like in the late 19th century, and it helps to explain why the thought of overthrowing rather than voting out the government appealed to so many radicals in the labour movement and political activists on the left. It simply wasn’t their government.
The Franchise
The ballot box and Canadian-style parliamentary democracy held out the promise of an empowered public. The principle of responsible government was a premise of membership in the Dominion: it was seized upon by British Columbia when the colony became a province in 1871 and would be part of the package that created Alberta and Saskatchewan in 1905. What remained at issue was how to define that public. Who was the electorate and how (and when) should they be allowed to express their preferences and cast their votes?
For working people these questions were extremely important. An electorate made up of the wealthy would result in governments that were bound to be unsympathetic to workers’ concerns. As workers’ populations increased in urban areas, the disconnect between governments (civic, provincial, and federal) that represented economic elites rather than the majority of city-dwellers became more apparent. As well, urban working people sometimes found themselves at odds with rural Canadians.
In large measure these conditions arose