Ecclectica » Clifford Sifton

by Mr. Curtis Brown
Editorial Page Editor, Brandon Sun; Columnist, Winnipeg Free Press

Curtis Brown

The drummer who refuses to march in time with the rest of the band will eventually be forced to turn in his sticks.

This is so often true in politics - step off the beat your colleagues are following, and you'll find yourself on the margins pretty quickly. The Pavlovian response of most politicians is to look forward and march in time with the rest of the band, with only the odd maverick or rebel left on the fringes of the decision-making process. Yet one western Manitoba politician managed - for a time - to wield real power while going against the grain. Though his rebellious nature proved to be his undoing, Clifford Sifton's legacy remains with us today - even if the traits of his political character have been all but purged from today's leaders.

Had it not been for Clifford Sifton, MP for Brandon from 1896 to 1911, western Canada would be a vastly different place. As minister of the interior at the turn of the 20th century, Sifton ensured that the thinly-populated western provinces filled with settlers and laid the groundwork for the waves of immigration that are growing Canada today.

Facing a harsh physical landscape and an even more brutal political setting, Sifton pushed ahead with a farsighted immigration policy that truly brought the West into Confederation and cemented his status as the greatest politician this region has ever known.

Born in what was then Upper Canada in 1861, Sifton came west at the age of 14 after his father, J.W. Sifton, won lucrative telegraph and rail line contracts the Liberal government he supported. The younger Sifton attended college in Ontario, but returned to the newly-formed Keystone Province to article for a Winnipeg law firm.

In 1882, he and his brother Andrew arrived in Brandon - which at the time was a barely-incorporated city of tents along the Canadian Pacific Railway - to practice law. But Clifford Sifton was not long for the legal world. Following in the footsteps of his partisan father, who had served as the Liberal Speaker of the Manitoba Legislature in 1879, Sifton ran for the provincial seat of North Brandon in 1888 and beat the Conservative candidate, lawyer W.A. MacDonald.

Even though this 27-year-old MLA was new to the game of politics, Sifton proved right then and there that he wasn't afraid to swim against the current. In that era, rival companies fought hard for government railway contracts to connect the newest corners of the dominion. A large contingent of the Liberal caucus was prepared to jettison their party's leader, Thomas Greenway, over Greenway's decision to award a contract to the Northern Pacific Company.

As former BU political science professor (and future Brandon-Souris MP) Lee Clark wrote in his book Brandon's Politics and Politicians, Sifton incurred the wrath of several Liberal MLAs and the pro-Liberal Manitoba Free Press by taking Greenway's position. This decision, which according to Clark resulted to Sifton making "a number of significant enemies within his own Liberal party," would sow the seeds of his later troubles as a member of Parliament.

Sifton became an MP in 1896, after the election that saw Wilfrid Laurier and his Liberal Party defeat the last vestiges of a Tory government that had been in power for nearly two decades. Appointed as minister of the interior and superintendent of Indian Affairs, Sifton was handed the task of peopling the vast West with settlers. Sifton started in the U.S., enticing former Prairie homesteaders who had left in search of an easier life south of the 49th parallel to return to Canada. Sifton's department hired 3,000 immigration agents across the U.S., and advertisements extolling the good life on the Canadian Prairies were published in 7,000 American newspapers. But it was another recruitment effort - one that went beyond the English-speaking world to the peasant class of Eastern Europe - that put the MP for Brandon in the line of fire.

Around 1900, Sifton's department of the interior began to offer people in Galicia and Bukovina free land if they came to Canada.

Thousand upon thousands of these "stalwart peasants in a sheepskin coat, born of the soil" - Ukrainians, Doukhobours, Poles, Mennonites, Russians, etc. - made their way to the promised land across the ocean.

Canadians may pride themselves and their country as open and tolerant today, but it was not quite so in 1900.

Horrified writers like W.G. King, a former employee of Sifton's department who founded a bigoted and (thankfully) short-lived paper, The Independent, summed up this nativist sentiment by decrying the "Doukhoborskis" and "European Freaks and Hobboes" who came here to steal jobs and sell their votes to the Liberals.

In spite of this opposition, Sifton's policies worked. Annual immigration to Canada surged by 840 per cent in nine short years, with more than 140,000 new arrivals in the country by 1905, with many of those settling west of Lake of the Woods. As Sifton's years in Parliament wore on, however, his opposition to some of his party's policies led to a waning of his power and influence. In 1905, he resigned from the Liberal cabinet after Laurier extended separate school provisions to Catholics in the newly-created provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Six years later, he opposed Laurier's plans to enter a reciprocity agreement for freer trade with the United States. Though he had already made up his mind to retire, he decided to campaign for the Conservative candidate in Brandon, J.A.M. Aikins. Aikins won, handily defeating Liberal candidate A.E. Hill on the strength of Sifton's support. After this, Sifton became a political pariah, loathed by members of his former party and mistrusted by the Tories he had fought and defeated for 15 years as the MP for Brandon.

Though he had his share of troubles towards the end of his career, Sifton remains the most-renowned and most-successful politician in this region's history. Though retired Tory MP-turned-provincial Conservative candidate Rick Borotsik comes close to being as colourful as Sifton, Borotsik never had the opportunity to wield power from the far corners of the opposition benches in Ottawa. Sifton, on the other hand, proved that it is possible - at least for a time - to be your own man while making decisions. The notes Sifton struck for immigrants and the West continue to reverberate to this day. Millions of Canadians whose ancestors came here from every corner of the earth can thank the offbeat MP from Brandon for beating a path for them to the true north strong and free.

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