Ministers

Sir Robert Laird Borden

Robert Borden was born in the bucolic atmosphere of Grand Pré, Nova Scotia, in 1854. Largely self-educated, he became a prominent and successful lawyer in Halifax. In 1896 he was elected to Parliament as a Conservative just as the Liberals under Sir Wilfrid Laurier were swept into power. When the

Robert Borden in 1901.

Conservatives lost again in 1900, party leader Sir Charles Tupper resigned, and a reluctant Borden was chosen to succeed him in 1901. Borden was intelligent and hard-working, but stolid (some would say dull), a complete contrast to the charismatic Laurier. Still, it was his dogged determination that enabled him to maintain his leadership through two more electoral defeats, before finally gaining power in

Robert Borden in 1911.

1911.

Borden rode into office on a tide of imperial sentiment in English Canada. The Tories had denounced Laurier's plans for a Canadian navy, which was also opposed by nationalist forces in Quebec. Instead, the Conservatives argued the government should simply make an immediate cash contribution to Britain and let London worry about buying warships for the Royal Navy, caught up in a ship-building race with Germany. The Tories also opposed reciprocity with the United States, an issue that ultimately split the Liberal Party, decrying it as nothing short of a betrayal of the mother country.

Once elected,

Editorial cartoon concerning the Emergency Naval Aid Bill in 1912.

Borden moved quickly to implement his naval policy, though he was eventually unable to carry it out in the face of a determined and bitter Liberal opposition. He also quickly reassured the United States that his party's outburst of anti-Americanism during the election campaign did not represent the attitude of his government. Finance Minister Thomas White was sent to New York to smooth any ruffled feathers by declaring that American investors were still welcome in Canada.

Thomas White (left), with Borden and Sir Wilfrid Laurier (right), approximately 1913.

In 1912, Borden moved to place Canada's external policy firmly under his own control, bringing the fledgling Department of External Affairs, established in 1909, under the prime minister's jurisdiction. The next year, he hired a brilliant young Canadian lawyer, Loring Christie, as the Department's legal adviser. A Harvard graduate, Christie was working for a prestigious New York law firm but preferred to return to Canada. In essence, he would function as Borden's

Loring Christie.

personal foreign policy adviser, providing the intellectual underpinnings for Borden's struggle to have Canada assume a larger and more independent role on the world stage.

While Borden may have won election in 1911 with an imperially flavoured platform, he was also a determined Canadian nationalist, who sought in his foreign policy to enlarge Canada's scope for independent action. Borden exhibited this determination from the beginning. In return for a Canadian contribution to the Royal Navy, which eventually became the nucleus of a small Canadian navy that was pledged to assist Britain when necessary, he made it plain to the British that, in agreeing to accept a share in the responsibility for imperial defence, Canada could no longer "be considered as wards by self-constituted guardians."

Borden with Imperial troops during First World War.

By the time the First World War broke out in August 1914, however, little had changed. While Canada automatically became a belligerent as part of the British Empire, Borden had been neither consulted nor advised by the British as the European crisis worsened; like other Canadians, he followed its progress in the press.

Borden visits wounded Canadian troops in 1917.

The war quickly changed this state of affairs. As more and more Canadian troops went overseas, Borden was determined that in the conduct of the war Canada should have a voice appropriate to its contribution. The people of the Dominions, he declared as early as December 1914, must have a voice in imperial diplomacy equal to that of "those who live within the British Isles." As the war settled into a stalemate along the trenches of the Western Front, Borden grew increasingly frustrated by the difficulty in prying information out of the British government. When the British would not relent and meet his demands for information, an infuriated Borden wrote that Canada could not be expected to "put 400,000 or 500,000 men in the field and willingly accept the position of having no more voice and receiving no more consideration than if we were toy automata."

In December

Bordon (seated third from right) with the Imperial War Cabinet.

1916, David Lloyd George assumed power in Britain. With the war situation growing desperate, he knew that the role of the Dominions would be more important than ever, and he was willing to try a new path. He immediately called the Dominion prime ministers to London to join him and several of his Cabinet colleagues in an Imperial War Cabinet, which met for the first time on 2 March 1917. Borden saw this as the answer to his calls for consultation, but not as the harbinger of a centralized empire; while each Dominion now properly had a voice, he asserted, "each preserves unimpaired its perfect autonomy, its self-government, and the responsibility of its Ministers to their own electorate."

At the

General Jan Smuts (left), Mr. H. Burton (center), and Sir Robert Borden (right) in July 1918.

same time as the Imperial War Cabinet met, the prime ministers of Britain and the Dominions also gathered privately in the Imperial War Conference. In this body, Borden, along with his South African colleague, Jan Smuts, was largely responsible for a resolution calling for a postwar imperial conference that would recognize the Dominions as "autonomous nations of an Imperial commonwealth" with a right to "an adequate voice in policy and in foreign relations," with arrangements made for "continuous consultation in all important matters of common Imperial concern." Resolution IX marked a significant advance in Canadian automony and formally spelled the end of a centralized British Empire.

Borden returned to Canada fully aware of the

Anti-Conscription parade in Montreal, 1917.

significance of his achievement. But he was also aware of the seriousness of the situation at the front and the Allied need for more men. To meet this need and to preserve his country's new, hard-won diplomatic standing in London, the Prime Minister was prepared to risk Canada's national unity in order to push through conscription. When Laurier refused to form a coalition government, many English Canadian Liberals broke ranks and joined the Conservatives to form a Union government. Conscription was introduced on 29 August 1917. In the election that followed, the government swept the country - except for Quebec, which remained solidly behind Laurier.

Throughout the final years of the war, Borden continued to promote his vision of Canada's place in the Empire, threatening that if Canada did not have a voice in imperial foreign policy, "she would before long have an independent voice in her own foreign affairs outside the Empire." He even confided to his diary his growing belief that "in the end, and perhaps sooner than later, Canada must assume full sovereignty."

Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

He carried his crusade into the postwar world, demanding and receiving separate Canadian representation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Although the major powers dominated proceedings, Borden achieved recognition of Canada's status as an independent country in its own right, and underlined that status by arranging for separate Canadian signature of the peace treaty, even though Britain signed for the Empire as a whole.

Borden

The International Labour Organisation's governing body in third session, 1920. Sitting second from left is F.A. Acland, the Canadian Deputy Minister of Labour.

ensured that Canada received its own seat in the League of Nations, despite persistent claims from London that it spoke for the whole British Empire at the League. Borden also achieved an independent Canadian seat in the International Labour Organization (ILO) and eligibility for election to its governing body. This time, he was forced to allay American concerns that an independent seat for the Dominion of Canada would amount to an extra vote for Britain.

Although ready to confront Washington when necessary, Borden recognized the importance of the United States to Canada, sending a Canadian War Mission to Washington in 1918. He was satisfied with the war mission, which he considered "in effect, although not in form, a diplomatic mission." After the war, in order to stave off an independent Canadian diplomatic mission in the United States, the British agreed to the appointment of a Canadian who would be second-in-command at the embassy and responsible for Canadian affairs. However, Borden retired before an appointment was made; his Conservative successor, Arthur Meighen, opposed the idea and let it die.

Canadian delegates to the League of Nations in 1930 including Sir Robert and Lady Borden, Norman Robertson, W.A. Riddell, and Philippe Roy.

A weary Borden left office in July 1920. In retirement, besides assuming several corporate directorships, he served as an elder statesman. In 1921 he was appointed as the Canadian representative on the British Empire delegation at the Washington Disarmament Conference, and in 1930, appropriately, he was appointed head of the Canadian delegation to the League of Nations. He served as President of the Canadian League of Nations Society and as Chairman of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs. In 1921 he delivered the Marfleet Lectures at the University of Toronto, and in 1927 he gave the Rhodes Lectures at Oxford. He died in Ottawa on 10 June 1937.