When was laurier elected

Announced in , the program was rejected in the general election. Laurier was perceived as a continentalist and as anti-British.

He was rejected by the Canadian electorate; but for the first time since , Liberals won a majority of the seats in Quebec. The second more fruitful phase took place between and This was the period when Laurier, more sure of himself, built a strong national Liberal Party.

At the time, the Conservatives were mired in difficulties after the death of Sir John A. In , Laurier organized an impressive political convention in Ottawa; there, the party approved a new program and the basis for a truly national structure.

In the election , the education rights of the Catholic minority in Manitoba became an important issue. In , Manitoba Liberals had established a uniform school system in place of the separate school system enjoyed to that point. This prompted protest from the Catholic minority. See Manitoba Schools Question. Laurier avoided taking a definite stand; but French Canadians believed he would be more supportive of minority rights than the Conservatives.

Contrary to the expectations of many French Canadians, Laurier did not champion the minority rights of Catholics in Manitoba. In , he signed the Laurier-Greenway agreement. This group would never again have the separate schools it enjoyed prior to ; although it would be possible to obtain religious instruction during the last half-hour of the school day and instruction in a language other than English.

This approach kept him in power for many years. But it never completely redressed the wrongs committed against the Catholic minority. Laurier adopted a similar approach to relations with Britain. Shortly after becoming prime minister, he began to reorganize the immigration system with Clifford Sifton. With William Fielding , he finalized the details of a tariff policy based on imperial preference.

In , Laurier went to London, England, to participate in his first colonial conference. He also received a knighthood. See also Commonwealth. This conciliatory stance was criticized by French Canadians who were fiercely opposed to any participation. However, Laurier and his Liberals easily won the election. They were well supported by Quebec; it gave the Liberals 57 of its 65 seats. After this victory at the polls, Laurier led his country forcefully.

That same year, Laurier also commanded attention outside the country. At the colonial conference in London, he again opposed all proposals to unify the Empire. In , shortly after the failure of the Alaska Boundary discussions with the US, Laurier revealed the most important policy of his second term; the construction of a second transcontinental railway.

The federal government would undertake the construction of a line called the National Transcontinental from Moncton and Quebec City to Winnipeg. By agreeing to multiple railways, much of it at public expense, Laurier mortgaged the future with a heavy financial burden. At the peak of his prestige, he allowed nothing to check his ambitions.

Canadians re-elected him with a comfortable majority on 3 November In , Laurier succeeded in adding two new provinces to the Dominion of Canada : Alberta and Saskatchewan. However, the addition of these provinces also meant that a decision had to be made regarding the educational rights of the Catholic minority.

Once again, Laurier yielded to pressure from anglophones and Protestants. But in deferring to the status quo of one uniform school system, he deprived a minority group of separate schools.

As a result, the last chance to establish genuine cultural duality throughout Canada was lost. Offended by this retreat, French Canadian nationalists bitterly criticized Laurier. His prestige in Quebec began to fade. This led to the progressive decline of the Laurier government. In the years that followed, Laurier mainly sought to counter accusations of corruption and patronage within his administration and to rebuild his Cabinet.

In the general election, Canadians once again entrusted him with their destiny. After , Laurier focused his attention primarily on two bills. Laurier proposes the Naval Service Act. The bill is passed and Laurier creates the Royal Canadian Navy.

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Despite a promising start, Laurier almost lost his way in the mids. He was influential in Quebec Liberal circles, but was not viewed so much as a leader anymore. Then Riel happened. Rising in the House of Commons, Laurier pointed a finger at Macdonald, accusing him of stirring up events in the West and persecuting a branch of the francophone and Catholic family.

An opponent of Confederation as a young man, Laurier appears to have returned to that position in his mids. However, his kind of nationalism was one that accepted the federal system as an environment in which Quebec could, with the right guardians, thrive.

This was a precisely dualist vision of the country: A vision in which both French and English coexist respectfully, and compromise is sought at all costs. When the Liberal Party failed once more at the polls in , its leader Edward Blake handpicked Laurier as his successor.

There were no leadership conventions at this time, just the discretion of the party leader. Laurier failed to win government for the Liberals in In that instance both leaders called for tolerance of Papal intervention in a Quebec dispute over property claimed by several religious orders, a move that outraged Orange anti-Catholic feeling in Ontario. On the cultural and economic front, then, Laurier was measured and found wanting.

Five years later, the situation would be much changed. Macdonald was gone, the Conservative Party was careening from one endangered leader to the next, and — most importantly — the Liberals had come to terms with the tariff.

The economy in the mids was desperately poor and the American response involved erecting a tariff wall of their own. Protectionism was the order of the day. What Laurier could promise, in good conscience, was no free trade for now but later, when the time became right.

Once he abandoned the tariff and he would do so in , he would again become exposed. Oliver Mowat , the Premier of Ontario and the most effective and unrelenting advocate of decentralized confederation, was joined by Nova Scotian Premier William Fielding in an endorsement of Laurier.

The ongoing acrimony between the provinces and Ottawa over federal powers had the effect of boosting the cause of the Liberals provincially: Both Mowat and Fielding were Liberals and thus motivated to see a change in Ottawa. What this meant, of course, is that Laurier wanted federal power but not so much of it that he would alienate his own base of support. In he became prime minister.

The first Laurier government faced several issues immediately. The foremost of these was the Manitoba Schools Act, Separate, publicly-funded schools for Catholics was an issue in all provinces. Prior to Confederation there was a consensus across British North America that religion and education could not only co-exist in the schools, but they were both essential parts of the moral and intellectual development of children.

Where a church and community established a school, public funding generally followed. Read simply, it was intended to stop Orangemen from English Canada attacking Catholic schools in Quebec. Although, the expectation was that Catholic and French language education elsewhere would be preserved and nurtured as well.