Yet – as now – whenever George was home in Toronto, he was back again at the Globe office: up in the third-floor editorial rooms in shirt-sleeves, bristling with enthusiasms, full of expansive gestures, and frequently smudged with printer’s ink from the sheaves of sticky proofs he fingered. His parliamentary life still seemed a temporary avocation, however pressing it might grow at times. He stepped back easily and whole-heartedly into editorial writing and direction, and, above all, into the making of policy. Indeed, the major matters of policy and business management had never left his hands.18 The Globe’s present programme of expansion was decidedly his own.
It had been no light matter for Brown to undertake costly improvements in the paper at this moment, not merely because of the still-lingering depression, but because another of his loves, his estate at Both well in Kent County, also insistently demanded money. He had found it hard enough to hold on to his extensive property in Upper Canada’s far south-west. The lack of cash available in the bad times, and his inability to collect debts owed to him on his lands, had forced him to give some of it up. Only that January he advertised the cabinet factory at Bothwell for sale, and with it an assortment of completed furniture valued at $10,000.19 Still, he clung to his farm and village lots, his sawmills, and his timber interests there.
American lumber dealers, moreover, had promised him good prices for all the sawn hardwood his mills could deliver through the winter.20 Accordingly, in mid-December the “Laird of Bothwell” had made a brief trip to Montreal in order to arrange a bank credit of $20,000 to finance the season’s operations. There he had opened negotiations through Luther Holton, his old friend and fellow-Liberal prominent in Montreal business circles, and had finally obtained the necessary credit from Edmunstone, Allan and Company, a commercial house accustomed to these transactions in the lumber trade. Brown had to mortgage his Bothwell property and agree to pay back the funds advanced as the proceeds from his lumber sales came in.21 But he now could saw some four or five million feet of hardwood. And so his mills were steaming full blast as the winter wore on. It was a large undertaking, but the chance seemed good that he could sustain his Bothwell interests successfully.
He had quite a different sort of interest far to the north-west. Here lay that spacious inland empire beyond the Lakes which the Hudson’s Bay Company controlled, and which George Brown strenuously urged Canada to acquire. He and his journal had eagerly supported Toronto’s efforts to open effective communications with the North West, to extend Upper Canadian interests westward and to make the city the metropolis of a vast new hinterland. Brown still hoped for great things from the North West Transportation Company, founded in Toronto by a group of leading business men, including several of his Liberal associates. And though its promoters had so far had little return from their attempts to develop the transit trade across the Upper Lakes, the Globe in January of 1860 was confidently predicting imperial assistance for the company and declaring that these “pioneers of modern northwestern enterprise” would yet obtain a contract to carry the mails as far as the Pacific slopes of British Columbia.22
Be that as it may, another Toronto venture into the North West had apparently succeeded. At the Red River, the one pocket of settlement in the Hudson’s Bay territory, two young Toronto journalists, William Buckingham and William Coldwell, had recently established the first newspaper in the inland country. Their Nor’Wester would agitate for the annexation of the western lands to Canada, and it was not surprising that the Globe should run frequent excerpts from its pages. Buckingham, indeed, had been Brown’s prize parliamentary reporter before going west, and Coldwell would be received into the Globe staff on his return from distant Red River.23
The two had journeyed to the Hudson’s Bay territory the previous autumn, travelling overland from St. Paul, Minnesota, by Red River cart, their precious type and press in a wagon drawn by two yoke of oxen. The Globe fully reported all their adventures: the passages through river, swamp, and prairie fire, and the near-disaster at the outset, when their oxen ran away with the wagon and spent an entire day lumbering in a mad circuit around St. Paul before the men were able to catch them.24 But at length the pioneer printers had reached the Red River and set up shop. On January 26, 1860, when the north-western mails were in, the Globe proudly presented the contents of the first issue of the Nor’Wester.
The issue also provided a noteworthy disclosure, which came in a published letter from A. K. Isbister, the Red River’s expatriate son in England, who for years had been lobbying at the Colonial Office for the ending of Hudson’s Bay rule. Isbister reported gleanings from an interview he had had with Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, till lately the Colonial Secretary. It seemed that when George Etienne Cartier, the Liberal-Conservative premier of Canada, had recently visited England, he had persuaded Lytton that the annexation of the North West to Canada was inconceivable. “He told him very frankly that, as the head of the Lower Canada party, any proposal of the kind would meet with his determined opposition – as it would be putting a political extinguisher on the party and the province he represented.”25 Here was plain indication that Lower Canadian fears of being swamped by an expanding Upper Canada were preventing the acquisition of the North West – that Lower Canada most decidedly was directing the government of the United Province in its own sectional interest!
One might note, of course, that the report of what Cartier had said was at least third-hand, that Lytton would hardly have conveyed Cartier’s words direct to Isbister, and that even if this were the view of the Lower Canadian government leader, it was no more sectional than the belief among Upper Canadians that gaining the North West would markedly enhance their own strength and influence. These, however, were not the Globe’s concerns. What was important was north-western expansion in itself; and whether Isbister’s story stemmed from Colonial Office gossip or not, it seemed sharply to illuminate the Canadian government’s apathy in regard to the North West.
Obviously, the ministry had hung back. Its Upper Canadian members might make resounding speeches to their constituents on expansion; the cabinet might talk of western boundary claims and send an exploring party to the Hudson’s Bay territory; but these were mere sops to Upper Canada. The Liberal-Conservative ministers had taken no effective steps to secure the North West. Instead they had passed quibbling resolutions through the Assembly to evade the Colonial Office’s proposal that Canada test her claim to the territory in the courts, and had rejected any other action as premature. In all this, Lower Canada’s antipathy to westward expansion had been more than suspected. But now – now here was a vivid illustration of how its power in the Canadian union flatly prohibited a vital advance.
That was enough for the Globe. Cartier might also have told Lytton (so Isbister had added) that he could conceive of a separate province being erected in the North West which might some day form part of a British North American federation. Yet to Brown and his journal this was all one with the ministry’s shelved policy of confederation – a useful dodge, a vague, high-sounding reference to the indefinite future, invoked when necessary to avoid practical action now. The paper saw the meaning before it quite simply: “The North West territory lies open before us – a field white for the harvest. We must not enter upon it; Lower Canadian interests forbid it.”26
It was just one more aspect of Lower Canadian domination: the baneful consequence of a union based on equal parliamentary representation, which prevented the more populous Upper Canada from exercising its proper weight of numbers, while effectively throwing the balance of power to the close-knit French-Canadian community of Lower Canada. “Both the British and French in Lower Canada persist in ruling us,” the Globe