Naming Mont Laurier

When places, including schools and even mountains and rivers have their names chosen, it is best to look at the world and the locality to understand the temper of those times. What would have caused that choice, the story behind that name? Does the choice seem odd, or has it stood the test of time?

Curé Antoine Labelle could not have developed the upper Laurentians if he had not been empowered and supported by Ignace Bourget, Bishop of Montreal. Bourget was one of the most powerful clerics in Quebec during the 19^th century. From his inauguration in 1840 to his death in 1885, he led the Quebec clergy in filling a leadership vacuum in French Canada. The Laurentian colonisation and the creation of the towns north of Ste. Agathe were among the many accomplishments of the clergy, but they could not tolerate criticism. Among the critics were Sir Wilfrid Laurier and the other members of the Institut Canadien, men denounced from the pulpit as heretics and threatened with excommunication from the Catholic religion if they did not repent on their death beds. Many did, but not Joseph Guilbord.

On the morning of September 2, 1875, the funeral procession of Joseph Guilbord, a respected member of the Institut Canadien, found itself blocked from entry to the Côte des Neiges Cemetery by a large, unruly and armed crowd. Forced to withdraw, the procession honouring this excommunicated printer returned with 1000 troops and 100 police on November 16. Joseph Guilbord’s crime was to refuse, on his deathbed six years earlier, to renounce his membership in the Institut Canadien. After six years in court, the civic authorities ruled that the Church must permit the burial. His remains were entombed in a large block of concrete so that they would not be removed, but quickly afterwards Bishop Bourget came by and officially de-sanctified the ground.

The Institut Canadien was formed in 1844 and, while it did not automatically support Confederation, it was dedicated to defending and promoting democratic principles such as universal suffrage, separation of Church and State, non-denominational public schools, and various constitutional and judicial reforms. It promoted literacy and founded libraries. In short, it stood for the values that we take for granted today, but in the 1870’s it was still a revolutionary force.

Wilfrid Laurier was opposed to confederation in 1871 when he was first elected to the Legislative Assembly of Quebec. He may have been following the lead of powerful contemporary thinkers of the Institut Canadien, such as Louis-Antoine Dessaulles, the nephew and spiritual heir of Louis-Joseph Papineau, but Laurier was more a pragmatist and politician than a philosopher. While Dessaulles and Papineau were strongly influenced by the movement that had come to be called liberalism and they fought for such things as non-denominational schools, they had to contend with the ultramontane perspective of the clergy. The ultramontanes maintained extreme views supporting the supremacy of the pope, and Pius IX, who was pope during most of Bourget’s career, was a staunch and effective opponent of liberalism.

It was in this atmosphere that Laurier entered politics. Unlike our day, nationalism was not so much a factor as was this new liberalism first argued by John Locke in the 1600s. The term ‘liberal’ traces back to a middle-class Spanish movement called the Liberales, which opposed the powers of the nobles and clergy in the early 1800s. British Tories subsequently taunted and berated the more progressive Whigs by calling them liberals, and the term stuck. Locke proposed that every individual had an innate right to life, liberty and property, and that a consensus of individuals should form the basic social contract.

In a landmark speech presented before the Institut Canadien in 1877, Laurier proclaimed his support for the reformist liberalism of English Canada rather than the revolutionary liberalism that influenced his contemporaries in the institute in Quebec. This was a significant departure for him and for the other members. In coming to this position, he was certainly influenced by the Guilbord affair, which had almost bankrupted the institute, and felt that his associates in the institute had to move away from graveyard confrontations with the Catholic Church and look to the British model of slow change. He condemned the Church for trying to control a political party by threatening its opponents from the pulpit and encouraged his followers to work around the clergy. Like many Canadians since, he reached for that middle ground. Having resigned his provincial seat in 1874, he experienced a federal election defeat when the Church condemned him from the pulpit and threatened anyone who voted for him with eternal hellfire. Throughout the 1800s the Catholic clergy in Quebec had made common cause with the Conservatives in Ottawa and had thereby assured them support in Quebec. Laurier won in a by-election in a safe seat and became Minister of Inland Revenue in the federal Liberal government of Alexander Mackenzie.

In 1887 when the Liberals lost an election, Edward Blake, the leader who had succeeded Mackenzie, resigned and encouraged the caucus to choose Laurier in his place. While it was not obvious that a Catholic French-Canadian could lead the federal party in Ontario, let alone garner the necessary support in Quebec, the charismatic Laurier won the hearts of its members. It would be another nine years before he would become Prime Minister.

In 1896, when the election was called, the country was divided over issues ranging from the execution of Louis Riel, the Manitoba government’s passage of a law closing Catholic public schools and evidence of corruption in the governing Conservatives. Laurier encouraged Clifford Sifton, his western lieutenant, to back the Manitoba decision to close French/Catholic public schools while assigning Israël Tarte the job of handling Quebec. He argued for respect of provincial powers and the rights of the Manitoba government on issues of provincial jurisdiction such as education, and argued in Quebec that a Catholic prime minister would have more success in negotiating with the Manitoba government regarding Catholic education. In the meantime, the Conservatives were still identified with Louis Riel’s execution and the powerful Protestant lobby of Orangemen in Ontario and Manitoba. Coupled with that, Tarte played aggressively on a corruption scandal in Conservative ranks. While the Catholic Church raged against Laurier, Catholics were faced with choosing between a Catholic prime minister who backed provincial rights and the admonitions coming from the pulpits that they should support the Conservative government that had hanged Louis Riel and allowed the Manitoba crisis to materialise in the first place. Quebec chose Laurier, and elsewhere they heard Sifton’s message that Laurier would respect Manitoba’s jurisdiction over education. Inasmuch as the Conservative Party was democratic, it had depended for its support on the ultramontane, antidemocratic authority of the Catholic Church. The crisis of the time was Church versus State, and the contest was ultimately between the Protestant-Catholic alliance represented by the Conservatives, and the, surprisingly, Catholic-led anti-sectarian Liberals. While the Liberals won the election, the final victory had to be fought in Rome.

With a firm power base established in Ottawa, Laurier immediately sent two emissaries to Rome. Arriving there, they were confronted by “half of ecclesiastical Canada”, but Laurier persisted. Bourget had been dead 11 years and Pope Leo XIII had succeeded Pope Pius IX. A new order of conciliation reigned in the Vatican. That same year an emissary was sent to study the situation in Catholic Canada, and subsequently the pope issued an encyclical to be read from every pulpit in Canada urging moderation, meekness and brotherly charity. Laurier had succeeded in curbing the power of the clergy, however temporarily, and had firmly established liberalism in Canada.

It must have been a sweet moment for Sir Wilfrid and a sign of Bourget’s lessening influence in Heaven when Rapide-de-l'Orignal, this jewel in the crown of the Church, was renamed in 1909 in honour of one of the heretics of the Institut Canadien.