SIFTON, Sir CLIFFORD, lawyer, politician, newspaper publisher, and office holder; b. 10 March 1861 in St Johns (Arva), Upper Canada, second son of John Wright Sifton and Kate Watkins; m. 13 Aug. 1884 Elizabeth Armanella (Arma) Burrows (d. 1925), sister of Theodore Arthur Burrows, in Winnipeg, and they had five sons, one of whom predeceased him; d. 17 April 1929 in New York City and was buried in Toronto.
Clifford Sifton represented the second Canadian-born generation of descendants of Anglo-Irish gentry who had settled in Upper Canada in 1818 and 1819. His father, John Wright Sifton, was a farmer and a small oil producer in Lambton County. After Clifford’s birth he became a railway contractor in Brant County and later a businessman in London. Throughout his life he was an active and devout Wesleyan Methodist and a prohibitionist. A long-time supporter of the moralistic, crusading politics of George Brown* and Alexander Mackenzie*, John Sifton was rewarded in 1874 by Mackenzie’s Liberal government with contracts to build a telegraph line northwest of Winnipeg and two sections of the Canada Pacific Railway, east of Selkirk and west of Port Arthur (Thunder Bay), Ont. The following year he moved his family to Manitoba, where he also farmed and continued to be involved in politics.
Clifford thus was educated in various public schools, at a private boys’ school in Dundas, Ont., and at high schools in London and Winnipeg. He graduated at age 15. A boyhood attack of scarlet fever had left him partially deaf, a handicap that would worsen throughout his life. In an effort to overcome the impediment he developed a rigorous self-discipline that would lead to rapid academic advancement and numerous awards. He attended Victoria College in Cobourg, Ont., from 1876 to 1880, graduating the gold medallist of his class. Following two years of articling with the Winnipeg law firm of Samuel Clarke Biggs, he was called to the Manitoba bar in 1882.
Sifton’s family had recently moved to the newly created boom town of Brandon and there he established a law practice in which his elder brother, Arthur Lewis Watkins Sifton, shortly became a partner. Like most lawyers on the Canadian settlement frontier, he developed an expertise in land and homestead law, and he speculated in real estate. He appears, however, to have had little intention of pursuing a career in law; his real avocation from early adulthood was politics.
Such a choice probably came naturally to young Sifton. His father had held minor positions in local politics in Upper Canada and had worked in Mackenzie’s campaigns. Since 1878 he had tried, more often with failure than with success, to launch a political career in Manitoba. Clifford’s first direct intervention in politics occurred in 1882 when he spoke in support of his father’s ill-fated attempt at re-election to the Manitoba legislature. From 1883 to 1885 he was active in the Manitoba and North West Farmers’ Union and its successor, the Manitoba and North-West Farmers’ Co-operative and Protective Union. Both were agrarian protest organizations that Liberal politicians used to help establish the Manitoba Liberal party as the voice of western protest against the federal Conservative government of Sir John A. Macdonald* and against what the Liberals believed was Macdonald’s “puppet,” the provincial government of John Norquay*. The Manitoba Liberals founded a permanent organization in 1885 and nearly defeated the Norquay government in the election of the following year, mainly on the subject of Ottawa’s disallowance of provincial railway charters and more broadly on issues of provincial rights. Clifford performed strongly in supporting his father’s last, and failed, campaign in 1886.
The momentum lay with the provincial Liberals under Thomas Greenway*. They won a convincing victory in the election of 1888, in which Clifford stood successfully for North Brandon. The election marked the triumph of Manitoba in its long struggle with the federal government, which sought to maintain the Canadian Pacific Railway’s monopoly against the province’s determination to provide effective competition and reduce freight rates. It also marked what historian William Lewis Morton* called “the triumph of Ontario democracy,” the election of a government dominated by newcomers – most from Ontario – and the final rejection of a government that at least had paid lip-service to respecting the population and traditions that pre-dated provincehood in 1870.
