Close Ties Railways Government and the Board of Railway Commissioners 1851-1933

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Hard Cover

By Ken Cruikshank

287 Pages

Indexed

MANY TABLES, MAPS & FIGURES

Chapter 1 introduces the story by analyzing the politics of private rate-making, a politics that generated grievances and demands for greater public control over freight rates. Those who sought this control did not readily abandon the market, and chapter 2 follows a number of efforts to have governments capture the benefits of railway competition, efforts that produced two regulatory landmarks - the 1897 Crow's Nest Pass agreement and the 1901 Manitoba agreement. The following two chapters recount the search for a governing form capable of resolving freight rate disputes, a search that culminated in 1904 with the creation of the Board of Railway Commissioners.

The interaction of the railway commission with its clients, shippers, and railway officials, and with its political masters, cabinet and Parliament, provides the main focus of the remainder of the study. Chapters 5 and 6 describe the regulatory strategy adopted by the commissioners in their efforts to create a viable forum for resolving disputes. The second of these chapters concentrates on the board's initial response to the rate grievances of the prairie west and British Columbia. The action taken by both the government and the railway commission to deal with the extraordinary regulatory demands generated by World War I forms the subject of chapter 7. The final two chapters pick up the story of regional rate controversies in the i 920s, describing the efforts of both governments and the commission to accommodate those protests. Those regional controversies produced two important additions to the Canadian regulatory system - statutory grain rate legislation and the Maritime Freight Rates Act. Throughout the 1920S, the railway commission came under attack from all sides - from those who thought it had developed close ties with the railways and those who thought it had developed close ties with the politicians. The study concludes on the eve of the Depression, with the railway commissioners divided over their regulatory role, and with politicians increasingly involved in resolving rate grievances.

The orientation of the study is decidedly national. The dominion government's jurisdiction included control over Canada's major railway corporations. Quite a few provincial lines were also brought within the jurisdiction of the central government through the use of the declaratory power. As a result, I have not examined the regulatory response of provincial governments to the railways they did control. Provincial governments are not absent from my story, however, for they played an important role in organizing and directing regional rate protests. More than any other rate grievances, those regional protests tested and demonstrated the limits of regulation.

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