Anyone who thinks that Sir Wilfrid Laurier was simply and always the gentle man of “sunny ways,” has obviously never read his first major speech in the House of Commons as Prime Minister. I’m pretty confident, for example, that Sir Charles Tupper, who had been defeated by Laurier in the general election only weeks before, didn’t feel any the warmth of sunny ways in the Commons chamber on this date in 1896.
“He (Tupper) was defeated, because by his policy on this question he created amongst the better classes of his party a distrust, which rent his party into factions which are now irreconcilable,” Laurier told the House regarding Tupper’s waffling on the Manitoba Schools question during the campaign. “Sir, these are the reasons why the Honourable Gentleman did not succeed. And in view of the tactics which were adopted by the Honourable Gentleman and his party to succeed, in view of the methods which were resorted to by them, I say: blessed and thrice blessed is the day when these tactics were defeated, when these methods were rebuked, and when these appeals to sectional feelings were trampled underfoot by the people to whom they were addressed.”
Ouch.
For added effect, Laurier also said the following:
“There was throughout it, from the fist to the last syllable, a tone of disappointment and bitterness; but with this I find no fault, and indulge in no criticism,” Laurier said of the remarks by Tupper the new PM was responding to. “I waive it in deference to the feelings of a man who, having abandoned a high and honourable position in the service of the country for the more noble and higher ambition of restoring the wrecked fortunes of his party, and having failed in the task, has not yet recovered from the surprise and the shock, that, like Caesar, he came and saw, but unlike Caesar, he did not conquer.”
Laurier, of course, would continue as PM until 1911. At the time of Tupper's death in 1915, he delivered a generous tribute to his fallen foe in the Commons.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.