The most popular politician in Canada at the moment, according to pollster Angus Reid, who knows these things, is Louis Riel. In a national survey published last week by the National Post, Riers "approval rating" stands at a phenomenal 75 per cent, that being the proportion of Canadians who believe it was dead wrong that the government hanged the Metis leader as a traitor in 1885 at a Regina jail.
Most Canadians want Riel exonerated and declared one of the true Fathers of Confederation. It's a worthy cause that deserves to be taken seriously. We don't have nearly enough heroes in this country, and the Metis visionary richly deserves that recognition.
The Red River Rebellion, which Riel led in 1869-1870, and the Northwest uprising in which he was defeated 15 years later, are the most enduring of Canadian myths. His execution, on the direct orders of Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, was based more on politics than on justice. For one thing, Riel ought never to have been tried in Regina. Captured in what is now northern Saskatchewan, the Metis leader was en route to Winnipeg for trial, but when he reached the CPR main line at Moose Jaw, Ottawa ordered him rerouted to Regina for "judicial reasons." The real motive was that under Manitoba law, prisoners could demand that half the jury be French-speaking. The Northwest Territories, where Regina was then located, had no such provision.
Riel's dominant characteristic was his very Canadian sense of ambiguity. Caught between his Metis nationalism and a surprisingly strong Victorian sense of loyalty, he could never let go of either emotion. It even pervaded the way he dressed. During the eight months he spent in 1870 as the self-proclaimed president of the Northwest provisional government. Riel received visitors wearing hand-sewn, buffalo-hunt moccasins and a formal Victorian frock coat.
Throughout his life, he constantly challenged Anglo-Saxon hegemony (represented by the Hudson's Bay Co.) in order, as he paradoxically kept insisting, "to gain our just rights as British subjects." In one moving address to his followers, the Metis leader glowed with bonhomie as he praised them for bowing to the Queen--the same Queen whose forces were at that very moment marching west to destroy him. It was Riel's efforts--marred only by the senseless execution by his followers of a Protestant rowdy named Thomas Scott--that earlier brought Manitoba into Confederation.
The Northwest Rebellion that followed much later, in fact, was not triggered by Riel, but by the settlers along the South Saskatchewan River, radicalized by Ottawa's insensitivity to their demands, who asked the then-exiled Metis to champion their cause. Riel, who had been living peacefully in Montana, set up a provisional government at Batoche, a fording southwest of Prince Albert, and organized people of the Northwest Territories to resist the central authority.
Macdonald desperately wanted to quash the rebellion, but there was no practical way to move the militia west. The CPR's Lake Superior link was incomplete, with four gaps totalling 138 impassable kilometres yet to be filled in. At precisely this moment, the CPR, already heavily over budget, faced bankruptcy. Its founding financiers, Donald Smith and George Stephen, were back in their customary pose, palms outstretched for yet another government handout. The CPR had run out of payroll money and notes worth $7 million would be maturing by June, 1885. Failure to redeem them would push the company into insolvency. In British Columbia, a band of 300 strikers, demanding back wages, was being held at bay by the North West Mounted Police and the company's stock was in a free-fall on the New York and London exchanges.
William Van Horne, the CPR's construction boss, who was in Ottawa to backstop Smith and Stephen, announced that if the government put 3,000 men in his care, he would guarantee to have them on the Qu'Appelle River in 12 days. Two days later, CPR trains were pulling into Ottawa to load the soldiers. Singing The Girl I Left Behind Me, the men marched to the station for one of the most remarkable train rides in history. Van Horne routed trains across temporary rails laid only hours earlier, and at each end of track loaded the troops into hastily fashioned freight sleds, feeding them steak and roast turkey to keep up their spirits. Fifteen years earlier, it had taken the troops 96 days to move from Toronto to Red River. Van Horne's army made it in seven, and two days after that they were safely in what is now Saskatchewan. After a four-day battle, Riel surrendered to three Mounted Police scouts. Ottawa immediately rewarded the CPR with enough government cash to complete its railway--in no small way, Riel helped save the railway.
Had it not been for Scott's execution, the Metis chief would undoubtedly have been elected Manitoba's first premier and could justifiably have claimed to be a Father of Confederation. But in Canada, civic monuments are erected to functionaries, not rebels. Still, Riers resistance salvaged the French element in Canada's Northwest and in the process bestowed on the Metis a degree of self-confidence and self-assertion they have not possessed before or since.
Louis Riel's inner conflict was as ancient--and as contemporary-as Canada itself: a clash between the collective demands of a largely French-speaking group, the Metis, and the stubbornly held individual rights of English-Canadians. A useful way for us to get closer together would be to honour Louis Riel for his undeniable achievements. He was one of our genuine frontier heroes. It's high time we gave him his due.
By Peter C. Newman
Source: Maclean's, 04/12/99, Vol. 112 Issue 15, p48, 1p