THE RED PARLOUR OF CANADA

Evening Post, Issue 86, 11 April 1936, Page 21

THE RED PARLOUR OF CANADA

"What, and where, was the Red Parlour?" asked a student recently, who is working his way through the Hansards of the 1880's and 1890's and the bound volumes of the newspapers of the same decades, writes W. J. Healy, Provincial Librarian of Manitoba, in the "Winnipeg Free Press." Was it, he meant, a figure of speech, a fabu- J lous place of fantasy with furnishings of such stuff as dreams are made on, or a real, actual room somewhere?

As a typical example of how the Red Parlour used to figure in the debates at Ottawa and in the "Toronto Globe" and other Liberal .papers, take this record of a passage of thrust and parry between Sir Richard Cartwright, the master swordsman of debate on the Opposition' side, and Mackenzie Bowelland George E. Foster-(who later on were both Sirs):— • ,

Sir Richard Cartwright: Of that sum, I suppose, when these gentlemen meet together in the Red Parlour to be assessed for funds for the purpose of defrauding the public 10,000 dollars or 15,000 dollars will find its way into the pockets of the Finance Minister, or the Minister of Public Works, for the development of the election fund.

Mr. Bowell: If it is necessary to deny the insinuations made by the hon. gentleman, I have no hesitation :in doing so in the most emphatic terms.

x Sir Richard Cartwright: What! That the Prime Minister called together 80 or 90 manufacturers and assessed them for election purposes? I say this whole business of protection is robbery, legalised robbery, that you subsidise the manufacturers,-and that the manufacturers subsidise you. . . . • ■

Mr. Bowell: It is untrue.

Mr. Foster: Then you explain it

away by saying we do not profit' by it personally. That is circumlocution.

Mr. Bowell: You are judging now from your own personal experience.

Sir; Richard, Cartwright: I am judging from what I have seen and know of you!

The Red Parlour was the most famous room in Canada fifty years ago. It was on the second floor of the old Queen's Hotel, Toronto's best hotel for decades—a long three-storey building on Front Street. It dated from the 1860's. Its dining-room was famous. The waiters were all perfectly trained darkies from the south. When it was being demolished in 1927, in clearing the site for the Royal York, the interior fittings were sold by auction, but there was no one to buy the red carpet and window curtains and redupholstered furniture of the Red Parlour, to preserve them together for old time's sake, as the gateway of. Fort Garry is treasured here in Winnipeg in a little park of its own."

The front windows of the Red Parlour looked* out over Toronto Bay, and its east windows looked down on a garden, with a fountain which, as the present writer well remembers, was sometimes dry. But'what a flowing fountain of favours there was, at times, up in the Red Parlour —if we may believe all that Sir Richard Cartwright and the "Globe" said. If the Red Parlour had Only been preserved by the Historic Sites and Memorials Board! There is not even a bronze tablet to mark where it was. Soon its name will have vanished from every living memory that ever knew it as a real room, not merely a name in a fading chronicle of

"far-off old events And battles long ago."