Liberal-Conservative.
Tupper was sworn in to replace Bowell, but the Conservatives, split on the Manitoba Schools question lost the subsequent parliamentary election. He served as PM only 69 days.
Originally from Nova Scotia, he studied medicine at the University of Medicine. In the early 1860s he has been an advocate of a union of all the British North American provinces, and then of the Maritime provinces. He served in the MacDonald government and as Canadian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, (i.e. as a kind of representative of the dominion to the crown.)
8. Sir Wilfrid Laurier (1896-1911) Liberal.
Laurier was born in 1841 in Saint-Lin-Laurentides, Quebec, and became the first French speaking prime minister of Canada, and the first Liberal to hold the office since Alexander Mackenzie. He remained Prime minister for 15 years, from 1896 to 1911. While Quebec had originally been a conservative stronghold owing to the social conservatism of the majority French Catholics who lived there, the Manitoba Schools crisis had succeeded in aligning the Quebec population against the strongly Protestant Conservatives MacBowell and Tupper.
At the same time Laurier, a believer in church and state separation was at odds with the Catholic church. The Pope who had recently put out an encyclical condemning strict Church/State separation, as was customary in France. In spite of these difficulties Laurier produced a satisfactory compromise in the Manitoba Schools Question that provided for a French and Catholic public education in any school area, provided there were enough French Catholic students in the area to justify one.
During the Second Boer War in 1899, Laurier resisted sending a militia to aid in the war, considering it an English war unrelated to the interests of Canada, while he did allow a volunteer force to go to South Africa. Later, rather than provide the British with money for ship construction, Laurier founded the Canadian Navy instead, with the option offered of lending Naval assistance to the British at such time as it was needed.
It was the issue of trade reciprocity with the US which led to the fall of the Liberal government. Western agricultural interests were very much in favor of it, but opposition elsewhere led to the fall of the government and the return of the conservatives under Robert Borden.
During his time as Prime Minister, Saskatchewan and Alberta were created as Canadian provinces, and the Yukon territory was created out of the Northwest Territories.
9. Sir Robert Borden (1911-1920) Conservative Party, Unionist Party.
Born in 1854 in Grand Pre, Nova Scotia, he worked for a while as a teacher in Grand Pre and later in Matawan, NJ, but gave it up and decided to study for the bar and was admitted in 1878. He ran a very successful legal practice in the Maritime provinces. Originally a Liberal, he broke with the party on the issue of trade reciprocity and became a conservative.
With the onset of the First World war, Borden promised the United Kingdom half a million soldiers, but when it became clear that volunteers would not supply those numbers, conscription was instituted, which led to the Conscription Crisis of 1917. The War Measures Act was passed which allowed for, in times of emergency, suspension of habeas corpus, detention of enemy aliens, censorship, and even the outlawing of the reading and writing in an "enemy" language. As many of the population of Ukrainians living in Canada had come from from parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire, many of them were deprived of their property, and detained, until a labor shortage led to the release of some of them to ease that shortage.
In 1917, to ensure the return of the Conservatives to power they formed a "unionist" coalition with Liberals disenchanted with Laurier's leadership, and crushed the opposition. During the campaign Borden also promised that he would extend the voting franchise to women in Canada, which he subsequently did in 1918. He sought to have Canadians serve in units of the Canadian Army rather than, as previously, simply inserted into the ranks of the British Army. Borden also introduced the "temporary" Canadian income tax to help finance the war, and, just as in the US, which instituted an income tax around the same time, has never gone away.
Borden was the last Canadian Prime Minister to be knighted after the Canadian parliament expressed a desire that such honors be discontinued.
In the Paris Peace Conference Borden finally prevailed on the leaders of the peace conference, Lloyd George and US President Woodrow Wilson to allow the participation in the conference as "minor" powers all of the British commonwealth nations that had participated in the war.
After leaving office Borden returned to private life serving as president of Barclay's Bank of Canada and the Continental Life Insurance Company. He died in 1937.
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