Mackenzie Bowell's Administration, exercising, as it were, appellate jurisdiction, decided that the minority were entitled to all they claimed. The Government of Manitoba, however, had hardened their hearts against the minority in the province, and refused to obey the remedial Order. … "The refusal of the provincial Government 'to accept the responsibility of carrying into effect the terms of the remedial Order' for the first time brought the Parliament of Canada into the field, and empowered them to pass coercive legislation. A remedial Bill was accordingly, after an inexplicable delay, brought into the Federal Parliament to enforce the remedial Order. … The Cabinet recognised that the Federal Parliament had no power to spend the money of the province, and so all they could do was to exempt the minority from the obligation to contribute to the support of schools other than their own. The Bill bristled with legal and constitutional difficulties; it concerned the coercion of a province; it contained no less than 116 clauses; it was introduced on the 2nd of March 1896, when all Canada knew that the life of the Federal Parliament must necessarily expire on the 24th of April. Some fifteen clauses had been considered when the Government admitted, what all men saw, the impossibility of the task, and abandoned the Bill. … While the fate of the remedial Bill was still undecided, Sir Donald Smith and two others were commissioned by the Federal Government to go to Winnipeg and see if by direct negotiations some sort of tolerable terms could be arranged. … Sir Donald Smith proposed that the principle of the separate school should be admitted wherever there were a reasonable number of Catholic children—thus, wherever in towns and villages there are twenty-five Catholic children of school age, and in cities where there are fifty such children, they should have 'a school-house or school-room for their own use,' with a Catholic teacher. … In the event the negotiations failed; the baffled Commissioners returned to Ottawa, and on the 24th of April 1896 Parliament was dissolved. The Government went to the country upon the policy of the abandoned Bill. On the other hand, many of the followers of Mr. Laurier in the province of Quebec pledged themselves to see justice done to the Catholics of Manitoba, and let it be understood that they objected to the remedial Bill only because it was not likely to prove effective in the face of the combined hostility of the legislature and the municipalities of the province. … Catholic Quebec gave Mr. Laurier his majority at Ottawa. … {61}