"...that in many ways, the Tories were victims of their own success. The Canadian economy had, after all, boomed on their watch, and ethnic and sectarian tensions had quieted markedly even despite brief dustups such as the Ishii Maru affair in Vancouver in 1914 and the anti-Prohibition riot in Vancouver in 1917; immigration from Britain, Scotland and increasingly Ulster was continuing at a strong clip and many other Europeans, especially with the unemployment crisis gripping the great neighbor to the south, were choosing to find work in Canada's burgeoning, and tariff-protected, industries instead.
So why did the Tories elect to enter into what can best be described as internecine bloodletting in the autumn of 1918, all the way into the following spring? There were a variety of reasons, beginning and ending largely with increasing discontent among the rank-and-file with McCarthy's closely-held, personalist control of the Cabinet, and the ambitions of a cadre of rising figures who found the perfect catspaw for their hopes to topple McCarthy - Howard Ferguson, the former Minister of Finance who had resurrected his career in the relatively minor Cabinet post of the Minister of Mines, brought back into the fold by McCarthy in an effort to counterbalance the various factions in the party, and who in May of 1918 was appointed the Minister of Customs and Inland Revenue when those ministries were merged together for the first time in a wide-ranging Cabinet reshuffle.
The reshuffle had been necessary, in part due to a number of sudden retirements as several officials - nearly Ferguson among them until McCarthy, again in a stroke of irony, persuaded him not to - resigned from "His Majesty's Loyal Government" in protest of the looming passage of the New Year's Day Agreement, the compromise hashed out at the Irish Convention in Dublin to settle the question of government in Ireland once and for all and which would leave Ireland as a constituent Kingdom, but with powers more akin to a Dominion, such as Canada, Australia, or South Africa. In theory, Ireland was co-equal with the other Dominions; symbolically, however, its retention of the name "Kingdom of Ireland" suggested an order of precedence that ranked Dublin ahead of Ottawa, and while the Government of Ireland Act had not been passed yet, the symbolic resignations of a third of Canada's Cabinet was meant to send a message to conservative lawmakers at Westminster precisely what they thought of the looming vote that was regarded as a fait accompli.
As this book has mentioned frequently, it was a joke that Canada was "more British than Britain, and more Orange than Ulster" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and this manifested itself in several ways. Canada went to great lengths to resist American economic and, later, cultural influence; [1] they were also enormously proud of their identity, influenced in great part by American proximity, as the outpost of Britishness on the North American continent in a way that South Africans and Australians were not in their part of the world. Through the dominant political position of the Orange Lodges, this meant that Canada also paid a great deal more attention to the question of Ireland, and the passage of the Government of Ireland Act was of grievous offense to the Order as it went down. "Ulster has been betrayed," Ferguson thundered from the floor of the Commons, "and Canada with it!"
This opened up a question in the Tory ranks, one that McCarthy had kept the lid since taking over for Whitney five years earlier: what, exactly, was the aim of the Order - a defense of Protestantism, a defense of Canada's Britishness, or both? And was there a difference, or were they one and the same? For McCarthy, the answer had been rather simple - the Order's primary mission was to maintain an English Canada that enjoyed economic and cultural primacy over the backwards and Catholic French Canada, and that by defending the English language in Ontario, the Maritimes, and critically in the virgin West, Canada's Britishness was thus guaranteed. Though he was no student of Dutch politics, the Canada he envisioned was similar to the concept of pillarization in that country; English and French Canadians would enjoy their own institutions, newspapers, schools, even organs of government when one took the provinces into account, and in return for French Canadian acceptance of these terms outside of Quebec, English Canada would keep its interference in the culturally unique and sensitive Quebec to a minimum. The flaws in this line of thinking were apparent, as they disregarded Quebec as little more than an internal colony beyond the Island of Montreal, but this policy of co-noninterference had basically been accepted for the previous decade by figures such as Bourassa and was essentially an extension of Whitney's stance.
To make this work, of course, McCarthy needed more than merely Orangemen, and that was where his problems arose - his focus had been on siloing Canada into English and French segments, and forcing immigrants to choose between the two. Considering the cultural peculiarities of Quebecois insularity and suspicion of outsiders that typify her even today, it was an easy bet which way many of them would go, especially Irishmen who chafed at the control of Catholic parishes and other diocesal organs by the French, and thus served McCarthy as a useful wedge and a key pillar for his English chauvinism. It was in this context that many Irish in Quebec leaned Tory, whereas they generally leaned Liberal (and, soon, Progressive) in Ontario or Nova Scotia.
The question had a different answer if one asked many rank-and-file Orangemen, however, who saw little distinction between a defense of Protestant faith and a defense of the British Empire. The Anglican Church to them was Britain, and thus was Canada, and steeping for decades in a potent stew of anti-Irish contempt that considered British history essentially a long story of war against an evil, autocratic Roman Catholicism hellbent on world domination, the nuanced triangulation and anti-French polarization that McCarthy pursued was not just nonsense, but a betrayal. This boiling sense of frustration finally tipped over with the Irish Convention and its conclusion, which was the result that the Orange Order had feared for decades on both sides of the Atlantic and had even staged a soft putsch in Ireland to head off - the subornation of Ulster under an Irish government in Dublin dominated by Catholics, and the policy of Home Rule being a precursor to 'Rome Rule.'
The extent to which this belief was held to the point of being near religious dogma as the 1920s approached is hard to emphasize in a modern context, especially once the Order started its rapid secular decline in the 1950s and afterwards. It mattered little that Ireland quickly, though often fractiously and with unstable governments, established a working though imperfect democracy that quickly pillarized into separate but largely peaceful sectarian communities living side-by-side with little issue; the most vehement of Orangemen from Ulster decamped to Britain and Canada with lurid tales of oppression that only reinforced the views of Toronto's powerful Old Lodge political machine. As such, the Conservative Party in Canada was not merely a political party but an extension of a social movement, a movement that saw Catholic conspiracies behind every corner, and adopted a siege mentality within months, convinced that if London would betray her own subjects in Ireland, then Canada was truly the last line of defense of democratic self-government against Rome. [2]
As such, the first enemy that the "Ultras," as they came to be called, identified were Catholic Tories, demanding with no evidence and no reason other than their resentment over the Government of Ireland Act that they be purged from the halls of power, especially the Cabinet. Several former Cabinet ministers who had resigned in May began circulating in September an open letter, published in the Mail and Empire - the preeminent Tory paper, with the triple the circulation of the more liberal Globe and Star combined and thus regarded as the public mouthpiece of the Old Lodge - targeting in particular the Minister of Justice, Charles Doherty, and demanding his resignation. His crime? Being born to Irish parents, having attended a Jesuit college in Montreal, and most crucially, having fifteen years earlier served a yearlong term as the president of the St. Patrick's Society, a fraternal organization for Montreal's Irishmen.
Doherty was a strange target for a variety of reasons; he was as true blue a Tory as any, being firmly in favor of the National Policy, having criticized the United States' overzealous destruction in several Confederate States during the Great American War, and as Minister of Justice giving a speech in Winnipeg just a year earlier where he praised the end of official bilingualism in Manitoba schools, citing the "schools compromise" of the late 1890s that had brought about a Liberal government as "the twenty-year mistake foisted upon us by Laurier and his ilk." Doherty had even once gone so far as to refer to the provincial language policies as being a "preemptive campaign of containment against the Frenchification of Canada" and he had said at the annual St. Patrick's Luncheon in 1916 that the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society - French Canada's answer to the Orange Order, at least in theory - was a greater enemy to Irishmen in Montreal than the Orange Order, defending this fairly extreme point of view by suggesting that the Order, "for its faults, and they are many" did not deny Irishmen "advancement and enhancement within their own faith, and seek to dominate the institutions upon which Irishmen rely." It is plain to see why the more populist McCarthy, eager to find ways to appeal to a broader audience, would find a man like Doherty an outstanding ally.
Alas, to the Old Lodge, Doherty had to go, because he was a Catholic, and to them Catholics - regardless of tongue or ethnic origin - were part of a greater mob that threatened world Englishness and had infected, like a virus, even the liberal and once-Anglophone Protestant United States. Doherty was also an enemy of powerful Anglo-Quebecker interests who saw the Irish Convention as being the first step in a likely attempt by French Canada to flex its muscles, and afraid of the looming predicted oppression that was to occur in Ireland, wanted an all-hands-on-deck effort in Quebec, too.
McCarthy defended Doherty, publicly and before the Cabinet, which Doherty never ceased to thank him for, but the gauntlet was thrown down when a second letter was circulated, this one attacking Doherty in the Montreal press for his lenient stance on immigration to Canada and "undesirables streaming to our shores" (even though the Immigration portfolio was not his); this time, Ferguson added his name to the letter, as did a number of riding association chairs in Montreal, firing an even bigger shot across the bow. If McCarthy was to defend Doherty, it was to come at considerable political cost - and McCarthy's enemies not only had time and patience, they also had amongst them men who had no qualms of doing what they could to topple the Prime Minister and seize the ring for themselves..."
-Faultlines: The Complicated History of Canada's Ethnic Tensions
[1] In my head canon, Canadians are thus much more serious "aboot" trying to maintain a more distinctive accent from Americans and other various Anglophilic tics to make themselves distinctive. (I couldn't throw an "eh" in there anywhere, "so-aw-rry").
[2] If this sounds batshit to you, well, this is what the Orange Order in Ulster genuinely (and as far as I'm aware to this day) believes.