7 - ‘I am here as one of yourselves’: Political difficulties and imperial imperatives, 1898–99

Summary

Despite Hutton's successful militia reforms in the first year of his appointment in Canada, or perhaps to some degree because of them, friction between the GOC and the Canadian Government had begun to simmer under the surface. Matters finally came to a dramatic head in the latter part of 1899, in the context of events unfolding in South Africa, and they need to be understood as the logical endpoint to a process that was already in train. There were two layers to the problems that eventually drove Hutton and the Laurier government to loggerheads. The first, as much a catalyst as a cause, was Hutton's predetermined mission to rid the militia of what he and many others considered to be undue political influence. On a second level, as important as this ‘crusade’ was in framing mutual distain, it was in some respects a symptom of a more significant issue – one of power and control. Hutton coveted it, Canadian politicians jealously guarded it.

Before Hutton sailed for Canadian shores he was convinced, as were many of his patrons, superiors and colleagues in Britain, that the root cause of Canadian militia inefficiency was political interference and ‘jobbery’. In 1885, after the North-West Rebellion, the Secretary of State for War, Lord Lansdowne, complained that political intrusion was ‘the secret of the rottenness which one encounters again and again whenever one is tempted to force one's penknife into the political fabric of this country’. Lord Minto, with his experience as Military Secretary to the Governor-General in Canada in the 1880s, agreed, arguing that the ‘whole Militia system is saturated with political influence, which is the ruin of its efficiency’. Indeed, much of the reason why a British GOC to command the militia was originally agreed upon by John A. McDonald in the first Militia Act was so that the incumbent would be placed beyond local political intrigue.