Pacific Scandal

However, a route across the Canadian Shield was highly unpopular with potential investors in not only the United States but also Canada and especially Great Britain, the only other viable sources of financing.

Copying the American financing model while insisting on an all-Canadian route would require the railway's backers to build hundreds of miles of track across rugged shield terrain, with little economic value, at considerable expense before they could access lucrative farmland in Manitoba and the newly created Northwest Territories, which at that time included Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Nevertheless, the Montreal capitalist Hugh Allan, with his syndicate Canada Pacific Railway Company, sought the potentially lucrative charter for the project.

He announced he had uncovered evidence that Allan and his associates had been granted the Canadian Pacific Railway contract in return for political donations of $360,000.

[10] In making such allegations, the Liberals and their allies in the press (particularly George Brown's newspaper The Globe) presumed that most of the money had been used to bribe voters in the 1872 election.

Since party discipline was not as strong as it is today, once Macdonald's culpability in the scandal became known, he could no longer expect to retain the confidence of the House of Commons.

Perhaps as a direct result of this scandal, the Conservatives fell in the eyes of the public and were relegated to the Official Opposition status in the federal election of 1874, in which secret ballots were used for the first time.

[12] Despite the short-term defeat, the scandal was not a mortal wound to Macdonald, the Conservative Party, or the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway.