Cartier Made English-Canadian Wealth Flow from West to East

George-Étienne Cartier owed his influence to an eclectic alliance including the Catholic Church that had educated him, French-Canadian associations and newspapers, and moneyed interests. Cartier chaired the railway committee for the fourteen years before Confederation, and under his watch, Montreal was the epicentre of railway finance and politics. The Grand Trunk Railway, the Bank of Montreal, the government, and party coffers all intertwined in complicated and lucrative ways. Where Macdonald owed his career to his ability to make French-Canadian political power flow from east to west, Cartier owed his career to his ability to make English-Canadian wealth flow from west to east.

--E.A. Heaman, Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017), 37.