Regrettably, the Selkirk operation proved to be a steady drain on Van Horne’s purse. Nevertheless, he appreciated the additional opportunity it provided for him to breed stock. Determined that he would become a champion exhibitor, the competitive Van Horne set out to obtain the best stock and to beat rival contenders at the game. He succeeded, acquiring a prize herd of shorthorns that took blue ribbons at shows in Winnipeg, Chicago, and elsewhere.
The farm’s drain on Van Horne’s pocketbook was imitated by another of his ventures — the Canadian Sardine Company, a giant undertaking founded in 1911 to harvest and can the sardines of Passamaquoddy Bay. Van Horne planned to build a cannery and a model residential village at Ross’s Point at Chamcook, just outside St. Andrews. He found skilled workers knowledgeable about the fishery in Norway, but when the twenty-eight young men and one hundred young women arrived at St. Andrews, their promised accommodation was still under construction. Unfortunately, this mishap proved to be but one of many associated with the enterprise, and it finally closed in 1914. Aside from the original stock that Van Horne purchased, he lost about $100,000 in the venture.
Van Horne lost money in many of the projects in which he was involved, all too often because he lacked the time or the skills to carry out some of his schemes effectively. Still, he was certainly a businessman with vision, as his association with the Laurentide Pulp and Paper Company and the East Selkirk ranch both prove. He lacked the business instincts necessary to accumulate a huge fortune, however, because his restlessness and diversity of interests prevented him from focusing his attention on a handful of promising undertakings and fully exploiting their potential. Nevertheless, he undoubtedly made money in such companies as Canadian Salt, Laurentide Pulp and Paper, Royal Trust, and the Equitable Life Assurance Society. Money-making aside, Van Horne was highly respected by his peers and much sought after as a company director. Perhaps that is why, in early 2000, a blue-ribbon panel of judges assembled by the Canadian Business Hall of Fame voted him the most outstanding business leader of the twentieth century.
12
The Twilight Years
In the spring of 1906, Van Horne took Bennie and Lord Elphistone, a Scottish peer and CPR shareholder, to dinner at Henri’s, the celebrated restaurant in Paris. When the Van Horne party arrived, the head waiter rushed forward to receive them, and, to Van Horne’s embarrassment, the orchestra played the opening bars of “God Save the King.” Such was the price the railway magnate occasionally paid for resembling the portly Edward VII.
Although neither a crowned monarch nor a member of the British or the European landed nobility, Van Horne was a leading member of Canada’s financial aristocracy and one of this country’s most influential men. As a result, he was frequently invited to accept honours. Because of his odd shyness in formal social situations and his dislike of public speaking, he frequently turned down these invitations. Despite his disdain for pomp and ceremony, however, he did agree on occasion to serve on committees that were charged with a variety of public duties.
In the early autumn of 1901, for instance, he helped to arrange the Canadian tour for the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall (the future King George V and Queen Mary). Van Horne played a role in planning the two days of elaborate ceremonies and festivities that took place in the flag-bedecked city of Montreal. The “new imperialism” then in full swing stressed the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race and Great Britain’s civilizing mission in the world, and the reception committee spared no effort to cement still further Montrealers’ ties to Great Britain and the empire. On the third morning of the visit, Van Horne rose early and went to Windsor Station to see the duke and duchess board a special train to Ottawa. He took great pleasure and pride in the royal train that the CPR had provided for the royal couple’s transcontinental journey. Two of the seven cars that had been specially built for this trip boasted elaborate interiors complete with telephones and electric lights as well as royal crests on the exterior.
Four years later, in the autumn of 1905, Van Horne again helped to arrange a royal visit to Montreal — this time for Prince Louis of Battenberg, the grandfather of the present Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip. From Montreal the prince left for Fredericton and St. Andrews, where he stopped off at Minister’s Island to enjoy Van Horne’s hospitality.
Although he was now in his sixties, Van Horne found himself even busier than he had been as president of the CPR. Now at the height of his career, he was involved in a staggering number of business enterprises — his supervision of the Cuba Company and the construction of the Cuba Railroad; the administration of his estates in New Brunswick, Manitoba, and Cuba; and his participation in various schemes of municipal and national advancement. There were times, even for Van Horne, when the demands made by these various commitments seemed overwhelming, especially when he experienced health problems.
One of the highly touted federal schemes in which Van Horne became involved was a scheme promoted by Canadian farmers and politicians to construct a shipping canal from Montreal to Georgian Bay. This Georgian Bay Canal Project simmered for decades until the Laurier government publicly committed itself in 1904 to provide funds for it. Van Horne initially embraced the project warmly and did whatever he could to make it a reality. When he studied it more closely, however, he began to doubt the feasibility of constructing a canal twenty-eight feet or more in depth and adapting facilities for it at lake ports. As it turned out, the canal was never built and, in 1917, it was voted down by a special Commons Committee on Railways, Canals and Telegraph Lines.
Notwithstanding the enthusiasm with which he embraced new ideas and schemes, age was catching up with Van Horne — and he knew it. In the wake of the Equitable Life Assurance Society fiasco, he began to relinquish numerous company directorships and, by the spring of 1910, he had withdrawn from about thirty boards. The only severance he regretted was his resignation in 1910, at age sixty-seven, from the chairmanship of the Canadian Pacific Railway. When he retired as president of the railway in 1899, the company’s stock sold for $110 a share. Now it was fetching $181.50 a share. As an optimist, he had always believed in the CPR’s prosperity, even in the depths of the financial panic of 1893–94. At last it seemed that his unwavering faith in its prospects was more than justified.
Friends expected that Van Horne would now devote more of his time to public service. The Laurier government pointed the way in 1903, when it offered him the chairmanship of the National Transportation Commission. The temptation to accept was great, but Van Horne declined the invitation, claiming prior commitments. When Sir Lomer Gouin, the premier of Quebec, asked him to become a member of Montreal’s Parks Commission, however, he agreed. The commission, made up of politicians and businessmen, was established in 1910, when a wave of enthusiasm for city planning, garden suburbs, and parks was sweeping across Canada. Van Horne was an ideal choice, given his long-standing interest in the beautification of towns and cities and his passion for designing structures and gardens, and he welcomed the opportunity to serve on it. Regrettably, the commission’s work was hampered by a perpetual lack of funding, accentuated by the recession of 1913. As a result, the body in which Van Horne had invested so much hope was unable to discharge its ambitious mandate. Disheartened, his goodwill utterly exhausted, he suggested in April 1914 that it be dissolved.
The whole experience was certainly disillusioning for Van Horne, especially as his sardine fishery enterprise had also recently collapsed. Fortunately, the other public causes with which he was associated progressed more smoothly. They included the Royal Victoria Hospital, which he served as a governor; McGill University, on whose board of governors he sat; and