Wilfrid Laurier was a small-town Quebec lawyer who didn’t venture west until he was well into adulthood and yet led a government that had a significant impact on the Canadian Prairies.
With an 1896 cabinet that many historians rate one of the strongest in Canadian history, Laurier’s Liberal government presided over 15 years of policy making that laid the groundwork for the western agricultural economy.
His government negotiated the Crowsnest Pass freight rate agreement with Canadian Pacific Railway starting Sept. 1, 1899, which froze grain freight rates and subsidized the movement of prairie grain to port for the next 96 years until a modern-day Liberal government killed it in 1995.
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His interior minister, Clifford Sifton, promoted prairie settlement by experienced European farmers.
His agriculture minister, Sydney Fisher, pushed through Parliament the Canada Grains Act in 1900 to begin establishing rules for inspecting and grading wheat.
He expanded the Experimental Farms Stations Act in 1900 to make sure one experimental station was located in each province. And an 1897 agreement with the United States to co-operate in tracking and reporting animal diseases led
to increased livestock trade across the border.
Laurier became personally involved in negotiating creation of a northern transcontinental railway that would give farmers in central and northern prairie areas a vehicle to ship their grain.
The resulting main line and branch line system that became the Canadian National Railway led to the creation of the widely dispersed country elevator system that created small town prairie society.
Parliament approved legislation to sponsor the railway network on July 18, 1903.
“The prairie section of the western division was completed by 1910, as was a branch to the lakehead,” grain industry historian C.F. Wilson wrote in his book
A Century of Prairie Grain.
“Sir Wilfrid Laurier as prime minister had become preoccupied with railway policy and he sponsored the development of a northerly transcontinental route.”
University of Manitoba historian Gerald Friesen, author of a history of prairie development, said in an interview Laurier and in particular his strong ministers were key to creating the conditions for western development.
“His administration presided over the opening of the West and agricultural policies that helped the Prairies develop for many decades,” he said.
“I also think his promotion of a transcontinental railway was immensely important in the development of the grain economy.”
Laurier’s policies turned Western Canada into a Liberal political bastion that led him to stand as a candidate in Prince Albert, Sask. He won, but he never sat in Parliament as a representative of the city, always choosing to sit as a
Quebec MP.
And it was Laurier’s support for western agriculture’s dislike of high tariffs protecting eastern Canadian industry that contributed to his government’s defeat in 1911.
In 1910, as many as 1,000 prairie farmers marched on Ottawa to protest government policies including high tariffs that denied them access to cheaper American equipment.
Laurier, a long-time free trade advocate, negotiated a free trade deal with the Americans that was popular in the West but roundly rejected by voters in Ontario and Quebec who voted for protectionist Conservatives to save jobs.
