Boundless Optimism: Richard McBride’s British Columbia by Patricia E. Roy (review)

Sir Richard McBride is an archetype of British Columbia history. His name remains synonymous with the economic boom that characterized his twelve-year-long reign as premier (1903–15). During most of that time the possibilities of economic development on Canada’s west coast seemed limitless, and McBride spearheaded projects like the expansion of railways, helping raise huge sums of money to connect the disparate parts of the province and, in the end, putting the provincial government into dire fiscal straits when the boom turned to bust just before the First World War. Perhaps no historian is as well placed to chart McBride’s career and the era of exuberance over which he presided as Patricia E. Roy, professor emerita at the University of Victoria, who began the research for this book for an undergraduate essay in 1958. Since then, Roy’s distinguished work has highlighted the fascinating trends and tensions of British Columbia history. Nearly twenty-five years after its publication, for example, her A White Man’s Province remains one of the best explorations of white supremacist political ideology in Canada.

Roy’s new book is not a straightforward biography, and readers looking for insights into McBride’s personal life will be disappointed. Instead, Roy has assembled a dizzying amount of material on McBride’s political career and on the government he ran, focusing in especially great detail on the period from his rise to the premiership at age thirty-two to his resignation at forty-five. During these years McBride was in constant movement, touring the province, speaking to crowd after crowd, building the Conservative Party across the province (in large part through patronage), and flitting back and forth to Britain and to Ottawa, where he played key roles in national and imperial politics and worked hard as fundraiser-in-chief for British Columbia’s economic expansion. As Roy tells us, McBride’s personality was essential to his success – one newspaper said of him at the time that he was a “glad hand artist of the first rank.” Yet readers may wish that Roy had spent more time both analyzing and illustrating this persona, since the abundance of quotations about McBride and the profusion of short quips from his speeches do not seem to convey the charisma of the man or shed much light on the political culture in which he thrived.

In charting McBride’s premiership, Roy illustrates very well the frenetic nature of political life. Much of the book bounces quickly back and forth between the issues he confronted as premier, from his railway dreams, to land-use policies and his push to stifle the idea of Aboriginal land title, to patronage, to his push to sweeten British Columbia’s federal subsidy, to his engagement with the issue of imperial defence in the run-up to the First World War, to his campaign against Asian immigration. In short, this book is a graphic illustration of the constant din of politics. Yet many readers will find several of these issues quite interesting in their own right. McBride’s effort to restrict Asian immigration and his ardent imperialism – Roy rightly calls him a “British Columbian” – stand out particularly. In fact, both his fealty to the empire and his white supremacist ideology were essential to McBride’s belief that British Columbia’s future was bright. As a white, British, settler society, with a surging economy driven by investments in infrastructure, he believed the province would stand out in Canada and across the empire as a beacon of civilization and prosperity. Academic readers might wish for a more critical engagement with the historiographies of race and empire on these points, but the frankness with which he espoused ideas about imperial greatness and white supremacy everywhere he went says much about McBride’s British Columbia.