Look up Sir Wilfrid Laurier (1841-1919) in the online Canadian Encyclopedia, and you will find Canada’s seventh prime minister described as “a skilful and pragmatic politician (who) … unceasingly sought compromise.”
Nicknamed “The Great Conciliator”, Laurier was always clear about his preference for smoothing out bitter conflicts — of which there were many between Canada’s English Protestants and French Catholics. “If there is anything to which I have given my political life,” Laurier once told the House of Commons, “it is to try to promote unity, harmony, and amity between the diverse elements of this country. I shall not deviate a line from the policy that I have traced out for myself.”
Laurier’s disposition inclined him to seek compromise. “Having spent three years researching Laurier through his lifetime of public speaking, I have concluded that he simply did not hate anybody,” says veteran political speechwriter and historian Arthur Milnes, editor of Canada Always: The Defining Speeches of Sir Wilfrid Laurier. “Sir Wilfrid could also get into the shoes of his opponents to understand where they were coming from, no matter what they believed. He just had that gift of open-mindedness.”
Laurier was a nation-builder, like Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister. “Time and again, Laurier focused on the big-picture goal of making Canada work, rather than scoring partisan political points,” says Milnes. “It speaks to Sir Wilfrid’s success as a ‘big tent’ politician that he was generally respected by English and French Canadians alike at a time when Canada’s two peoples barely got along with each other.”
If Laurier’s pursuit of political compromise meant setting aside his own goals from time to time, so be it. “No great reform can be achieved except at the sacrifice of some opinion, even by those who are the most ardently in favour of it,” he told Parliament. “The true reformer is he who, after having earnestly combatted for his opinions, then yields in order to attain some greater end, and to facilitate the change from the old to the new order of things.”
Not everyone shared Laurier’s insistence on putting compromise first. This was demonstrated during the Manitoba Schools controversy of the 1890s. This occurred when the Manitoba government cut off the francophone minority’s federally guaranteed right to publicly funded provincial education in a bid to win votes from English-speaking taxpayers.
“Following numerous legal challenges, the federal Conservative government went after Manitoba to restore French public education, stirring up bad feelings between English and French Canadians in the process,” says Milnes. “Not wanting to feed such strife, which was a constant threat to Canada’s fragile unity, Laurier instead suggested that Ottawa should take a ‘sunny ways’ approach to the situation instead.”
Laurier encouraged both sides to work out a compromise by “placing our common country before any other considerations that may animate us,” he said. “I could have made an appeal to the passion, to the prejudices of my fellow countrymen,” he added, “[but] I despise such conduct.” Once he became prime minister in 1896, Laurier hammered out an agreement with Manitoba Premier Thomas Greenway, one that gave some public funding to French instruction but not on the level that had existed previously.
Laurier took a similar conciliatory position between English and French Canadians during the 1899 Boer War, in which British troops fought Dutch-descended colonists in South Africa. The English wanted the Canadian government to pay its troops to fight alongside the British, while the French opposed the idea. Laurier’s solution was to send Canadian volunteers to the region and have the British financially support them once they arrived in Africa. It was a compromise that fully pleased no one, but it kept the peace in Canada.
Political compromise might be an unfashionable position in many countries today, “but like it or not, compromise offers the best chance for disagreeing peoples to live together peacefully,” says Milnes. “As Laurier said when he advocated ‘sunny ways’ to resolve the Manitoba Schools controversy, ‘it is the only way in which Canada can be governed, not only on this question, but on all other questions as well.’”
This story was created by Content Works, Postmedia’s commercial content division, on behalf of Confederation Centre of the Arts.