For the next four years Borden was a backbencher, practising law in Halifax and politics in Ottawa. He disliked being away from Laura. Borden became involved in his work on house committees and, over time, grew more confident to speak on broader, national issues. By he had been moved to the front bench and had begun to be noticed as an emerging figure in the party.
On 7 Nov. But they had acquired as many rivals and enemies as friends during their long careers, and their prospects of beating Laurier in a future election were dismal.
The party needed a fresh face and the Tuppers, father and son, turned to Borden. He had no enemies in the caucus and had been an able and conscientious worker in parliament. On 6 February the members, many sceptically, chose Borden as their leader. Borden played out the formalities of surprise and set two conditions. He would, he said, accept for only one year and he demanded that the party appoint a committee to search for a permanent leader.
The committee was quickly forgotten and the commitment to one year was never made public. Borden led the party in opposition for a decade. Previous leaders, Macdonald, Thompson, Tupper, and the others, had had years of parliamentary experience before assuming the position.
Borden, in his late forties, had spent his adult life as a lawyer and had had only a brief apprenticeship in politics. Though he applied himself to his new duties with the same earnestness and ambition that he had devoted to his legal career, he regarded politics with a sense of detachment unknown to the career politicians who preceded him.
Political life, he believed, was a responsibility, something a successful man should take on in the public interest. While he had long since conquered his anxieties about arguing the law in the highest courts of his country and the empire, Borden never enjoyed public speaking and debate. He found it both physically and emotionally demanding. Leading his colleagues was even more challenging. They were a fractious lot in parliament and the constituencies, cursed with long-standing rivalries and deep divisions between Catholic and Protestant, French and English, and, reflecting changing times, urban and rural factions.
Though ultimately the leader had the authority to decide, party organization and party policy had evolved as prerogatives of the mp s, which they jealously guarded. Once, in , Borden had to reprimand a colleague and then regretted it. Geo[rges] Lafontaine also wept today when I spoke kindly to him.
Once the backbone of the Conservative Party, the Quebec membership in caucus had been reduced to a tiny rump. Borden often thought their ideas were parochial but never went out of his way to try to understand them. Monk, like Borden, was a lawyer who had first been elected in and, again like his chief, he was serious, earnest, and moody.
Neither man got on easily with the other. Monk was a champion of growing nationalist sentiment in Quebec. Monk, feeling isolated and unsupported by his leader, resigned his position in January A year later he and Borden clashed over the schools issue in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Monk wanted Borden to stand up for establishing separate schools in the new provinces while Borden, knowing they were opposed by local officials, backed the arguments for provincial autonomy.
Monk, angered, said that his leader had set back the Conservative cause in Quebec by 15 years. Borden was influenced by the progressive ideas about democratizing political parties and using state power in the public interest that were being debated in the United States. Borden agreed that the rapid expansion of the prairie region required new transportation routes. He countered with a proposal for a government-owned and -operated transcontinental railway, controlled not by private corporations but by the people of Canada.
It did not work. Borden talked of resigning. But the attractions of public life had begun to grow on him: he enjoyed the recognition a party leader received and the continual association with men of affairs that political life demanded.
His confidence in his performance as leader had grown and his job was unfinished. But just before Christmas he decided to remain as party leader. The couple moved into their new home, Glensmere, on Wurtemburg Street and backing onto the Rideau River, in the summer of Borden spent much of his second term as leader developing a new platform for his party. A scheme to hold a policy convention was mooted and then shelved when Quebec Conservatives declined to attend.
It called, among other things, for reform of the Senate and the civil service, a more selective immigration policy, free rural mail delivery, and government regulation of telegraphs, telephones, and railways and eventually national ownership of telegraphs and telephones. Though he spent more than a year promoting the platform in speeches across the nation, the effort was not enough to prevent another victory by the Liberals in October Borden had now lost two general elections and his party four in a row.
Borden was more determined than ever to carry on. Many of his parliamentary colleagues had other ideas. They resented having been ignored in the planning of the Halifax Platform. They feared his ideas for developing party structures that would lessen their influence. And he had now led them to another painful defeat. In February the Conservatives placed upon the order paper of the House of Commons notice of a resolution recommending that Canada provide for its own coastal defence, something Laurier had promised in but never acted upon.
Early in March, before the resolution could be debated, a short-lived crisis in Great Britain over the relative strengths of the imperial and German navies shocked and surprised both parties. In English-speaking Canada public figures and many of the large urban dailies demanded a Canadian contribution to the sudden apparent shortfall in British Dreadnoughts. Neither Laurier nor Borden was sympathetic to this clamour.
Laurier proposed an amendment to the Conservative resolution, recommending that the house approve any necessary expenditure designed to promote the organization of a Canadian naval service which would work in close cooperation with the imperial navy. It was quickly accepted by the Conservatives and the revised resolution passed unanimously at the end of March.
In January Laurier introduced a bill to create a Canadian naval service, with ships stationed on both the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts.
If required, they could be put at the service of the imperial navy in time of war. The Conservatives were deeply divided. Monk, whom Borden had reappointed as his Quebec lieutenant a year earlier, was demanding a plebiscite on the issue. Borden continued to support the concept of a Canadian naval service — though not necessarily the one proposed by the Liberals — but now also favoured immediate aid.
Many other Tory members wanted a simple, outright contribution to the imperial navy. In early April the Toronto Daily Star broke the story of seething discontent in the Tory caucus, claiming as many as seven different factions at war with each other. Borden responded by handing his resignation as party leader to the chief whip on 6 April. He had no intention of leaving. Instead, he was challenging his caucus.
He addressed it for an hour on the 12th and left knowing that his allies would beat back the revolt. Shortly after noon a motion reaffirming support for him was passed by all. In November , responding to an invitation from the United States, Laurier sent his ministers of finance and customs to Washington to discuss a new Canadian-American trade arrangement.
After another session there in January, the finance minister, William Fielding, announced the agreement in the house on the 26th. It was staggering in its breadth. The two nations undertook to eliminate customs duties on a long list of natural products.
Then there was another long list of reduced duties on many manufactured goods. The arrangement concluded with two further lists, one Canadian and one American, of lower duties on yet more processed products of the other nation. To avoid the possibility of the agreement being defeated in the United States Senate if it was styled a treaty, it had been decided to bring it into effect by reciprocal legislation.
The Conservatives, to a man, were stunned. It was the Tory premiers who initially rallied the troops. Their delegation met him on 1 March, anticipating that the reciprocity issue would force a new election. What would Borden do if he won?
In short, they wanted representation of the anti-reciprocity Liberals in his cabinet. Borden quickly agreed and a curious coalition against the trade agreement began to emerge under his leadership. Borden again threatened to resign, triggering a petition asking him to carry on. Sixty-five members signed; twenty did not. For a second time in a year opposition in his caucus had been crushed just as the prospects for eventual electoral victory looked better than they had in 15 years.
He won the ensuing fall election amidst controversy and fierce recriminations, maneuvering many Liberals into supporting his Unionist ticket by making the conscription issue a test of loyalty to King and country. Borden improved his chances for victory by giving the vote to likely supporters of conscription such as soldiers, as well as their mothers, wives, or widows while taking it away from likely opponents some recent immigrants.
The conscription debate continued through the end of the war, embroiled in larger controversies over Western alienation from central Canada, French-English relations, and the power of the federal government in the lives of Canadians.
Bennett Louis St. Robert Borden. Robert Borden by Kenneth K. More Options. Select a School. Elementary A. Erskine Johnston PS W. Gowling PS W. Mathematics Math Mastery Math Contests. Ski and Snowboard Sports Teams. Skip Sidebar Navigation.
Principal's Message. Welcome Presentation. General Information. Student Accident Insurance. He returned to Nova Scotia two years later and began articling with a Halifax law firm, not having the means to study law at university.
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