Near Ottawa City Hall at the corner of Cooper and Cartier Streets lived an unforgettable prime minister, Charles Tupper. His grand home like so much of the city’s architectural heritage is gone. Yet Tupper is oddly immortal.

His autograph lists on eBay for $4,950. In Parliament his portrait peered down over the main entrance to the Commons foyer. Across the country there are Tupper schools in Halifax and Vancouver where the basketball team is called the Tupper Tigers. There was a Tupper icebreaker in the Coast Guard, a Tupper township in Ontario, a Tupper Mountain in British Columbia.

The post office designed a Tupper stamp in 1955 and printed up 50,000,000 copies. The National Film Board once produced a Tupper movie, The Big Man. In painter Robert Harris’ famous composite portrait of the Fathers of Confederation the mutton-chopped Tupper stands as the most prominent figure in the foreground. Interestingly, he was prime minister only two months.

Tupper bought the house at 123 Cooper Street in the spring of 1896. It was an exclusive address. The home was built for the manager of the Bank of Ottawa.

Tupper became prime minister in May that year. On Cooper Street he plotted a disastrous election campaign in June that cost the Conservatives 35 seats including Tupper’s own Cape Breton riding, and here he sulked until resigning as prime minister in July.

“It was a hopeless task,” recalled Hector Charlesworth, a newspaperman who covered the ’96 campaign. Tupper assumed the premiership in the twilight days of a creaking Conservative dynasty 18 years in office. No Tory could have won that election, Charlesworth recalled: “Tupper was one of the greatest and most farseeing statesmen this continent has produced.”

Tupper was the nation’s sixth prime minister and the most fearsome. He once punched a man who interrupted his Bible reading. He was the first prime minister to speak Greek and Italian, the first to publish his memoirs, Recollections of Sixty Years in Canada, the first to use lapel buttons in an election campaign.

As a self-made millionaire he was founding president of Crown Life. As a gynecologist he was founding president of the Canadian Medical Association which annually sponsored a Charles Tupper Award for Political Action.

As public works minister Tupper oversaw construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was said he accepted $100,000 in payoffs. “They were a hungry lot in Ottawa then,” as one railway promoter put it.

In Tupper’s old hometown of Amherst, N.S., the Cumberland County Museum and Archives reported 5,000 visitors a year came to see Tupper’s desk. There is no such shrine at the corner of Cooper and Cartier Streets in Ottawa. Instead they put up a Holiday Inn.

By Andrew Elliott

They don’t make British Columbia premiers like they used to. Richard McBride was the first to build his own navy, the first to create a university. “Any complaints?” he asked voters.

McBride was so sentimental that, when confronted by a petitioner with a son in the penitentiary – “He is only a boy, Mr. McBride, and meant no harm” – he gave the woman $20. He was a glad-handing spendthrift who cheerfully accepted a case of Old Curio Whiskey from lobbyists, and told British Columbians: “Let everyone wear a smile.”

In Boundless Optimism biographer Patricia Roy captures the forgotten genius and sinfulness of this flawed man who campaigned by stagecoach and ruled for three terms.

In McBride’s time the population of his province grew tenfold. His life marked the opening of a territory vast as an empire, with timber, coal and peach orchards. If B.C. was big, then bigness was a criterion for the premiership. McBride fit.

“I am always devoted to the interests of British Columbia, first, last and always and all the time,” he said in 1908.  A Toronto Telegram reporter assigned to cover the premier’s speeches recounted, “When you’ve done shouting, ‘Be loyal to the party,’ and, ‘if you can’t boost don’t knock,’ you have all he said in half an hour.”

Of course there was more. Author Roy, professor emerita of history at the University of Victoria, documented the premier who was as hard-driving as the era.

He created the University of British Columbia in 1908, and in 1915 bought his own navy, two U.S.-built submarines. Without them, McBride told the legislature, “Vancouver and Victoria would have been subjected to a bombardment by German warships.”

McBride was a Conservative of contradictions. He had a Chinese cook but cursed Asian immigration. “Nothing would be left undone to make British Columbia a white man’s country,” he said.

McBride had six daughters but opposed votes for women, and restricted his wife to the sole function of wearing pretty gowns at tea parties. He was an attorney and real estate speculator, but could not balance a cheque book and left his own province nearly bankrupt. “He was a poor financial manager,” noted Roy.

McBride was never prosecuted for corruption, yet prospered as if by miracle. He never earned more than $10,000 a year as premier, yet rode in a chauffeured $3,000 Cadillac, sent his daughters to private schools and hired a household staff. When visiting London, he rang up a $620 bill at the Savoy hotel, the equivalent of $13,000 today.

“McBride’s enemies alleged that he had acquired an immense ‘fortune’ by ‘mysterious’ means, but there is no evidence of this apart from some ‘perks,’” Roy concluded.

The McBride era is vanished in B.C.  Voters today expect honesty and financial competence. Yet, to read Boundless Optimism is to relive the gaslight era when the land was young, and rogues were tolerated.

By Holly Doan

Boundless Optimism: Richard McBride’s British Columbia by Patricia Roy; University of B.C. Press; 428 pages; ISBN 978077-4823-890; $32.95