Cover
Acknowledgements
My research into the career of John A. Macdonald was assisted by a Government of Canada Faculty Enrichment Award. I record appreciation to conference and visiting speaker funds of Brock, Edinburgh, Fraser Valley, Galway, and Ryerson Universities. Kirk Howard encouraged me to write this book, and his colleagues at Dundurn Press have efficiently steered it to completion. Thanks are owed to many individuals, including Elizabeth and Robert Andrews, Ann Barry, Colin M. Coates, Vivien Hughes, Robin Jeffrey, J.K. Johnson, Barbara J. Messamore, Brian and Anne Osborne, Grace Owens, Simon J. Potter, Peter B. Waite, and Donald Wright.
Introduction
Only Make a Beginning
On July 1, 1867, John A. Macdonald became Canada’s first prime minister. Confederation, as the process was called, split the existing province of Canada, formed in 1841, allowing its two sections, Upper and Lower Canada (Canada West and Canada East), to form the separate units of Ontario and Quebec. They joined New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to become the Dominion of Canada. A talented lawyer, efficient administrator, and prominent figure in Upper Canadian politics, Macdonald had played an important role in creating the new political union.
His family had arrived in Kingston, Ontario, when he was five years old, after the failure of his father’s business in Scotland. They continued to struggle in Canada. At fifteen, he became a clerk in a law office, and worked his way to the top. Years later, a friend confided that he too wanted to become a lawyer, but doubted whether he had the time or resources to study. Macdonald offered sage counsel: “only make a beginning, and you will get through some way or other.” He applied that philosophy to projects such as Confederation and the transcontinental railway, with a combination of determined optimism and practical caution that earned him the grudging nickname “Old Tomorrow.” John A. Macdonald died in office in 1891 after leading the Dominion for nineteen of its first twenty-four years. By then, Canada had expanded to the Pacific and acquired three more provinces (Manitoba, British Columbia, and Prince Edward Island). Newcomers settling the prairies (the future Alberta and Saskatchewan) disrupted traditional lifestyles, and in 1885 some Métis and Native people rose in revolt. It was ironic that Macdonald’s final years were overshadowed by the tragedy of the Riel uprising, since his political philosophy of deal-making compromise had been shaped by the shocking experience of Upper Canada’s 1837 rebellion. Although he rarely spoke of his experience of serving in the government forces in that minor civil war, he learned an enduring lesson about the fragility of Canadian society.
Of course, Canada has changed since Macdonald’s day. The title “Dominion” was no accident: Macdonald intended Ottawa to be the boss, with the provinces as subordinates, not federal partners. The centrepiece of his later years was the Canadian Pacific Railway, completed in 1885 to stiffen the transcontinental nation with a steel spine. Canada’s rail network still handles bulk freight, but trains carry more tourists than travellers. The railway formed part of Macdonald’s National Policy, the 1879 protective tariff that encouraged western Canadians and Maritimers to buy goods mainly manufactured in Ontario and Quebec, a structure finally discarded in the Canada-U.S. Free Trade pact of 1988. John A. Macdonald forged the Conservative Party as a powerful instrument to govern Canada by mobilizing support among both its English- and French-speaking citizens. But, after his time, the party generally failed to win support in French Canada. Political parties evolve new policies as circumstances change: the 1988 continental trade pact was struck by the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney. Macdonald’s Pacific Railway was a partnership between government and a heavily-subsidized private company; Canada’s modern-day Conservative Party champions a free-market economy. John A. Macdonald’s nineteenth-century blueprint cannot function as a straitjacket for twenty-first-century Canada.
The rising lawyer-politician, John A. Macdonald, about 1856.
Ruling Canada from Ottawa, squabbling with provincial premiers, protecting the country from the Americans — John A. Macdonald can seem a very modern figure. However, social and political values were often different to those of today. Politics was a man’s game. Macdonald was encouraged to enter Parliament by his ambitious mother, Helen (Shaw), but his first wife, Isabella (Clark), who died in 1857, played no part in his campaigns and disliked his involvement. His second wife, Agnes (Bernard), who married him ten years later, was initially snubbed if she dared to offer her opinions. Ultimately, this tough-minded woman became his confidante, but she never made a political speech, nor indeed could she even vote. In 1885, Macdonald considered giving the franchise to women who owned property, but his agenda was conservative, not feminist: women did not vote in any federal election until 1917.
It was an era in which religion formed a public, almost tribal, badge. Until Macdonald solved the issue in 1854, Protestant denominations squabbled over the clergy reserves. A deep schism existed between Protestants and Catholics. Even Macdonald, a generally tolerant person, objected when his own son decided to marry a Catholic. He was first elected, in 1844, as a Protestant politician, backed by a fraternal organization, the Orange Order — fraternal to other Protestants, but hostile to Catholics. The governing alliance that he built from 1854 with the “Bleus,” French-speaking conservative Catholics, strained his local powerbase, and in 1861 a section of Kingston Orangemen turned against him. In the province of Canada, the two sections were allocated the same number of seats in the Assembly. By 1860, the population of Upper Canada was surging ahead, and Confederation was partly designed to give its people a larger say in the running of the government: Ontario in 1867 received eighty-two seats, to Quebec’s sixty-five. To modern ears, that sounds like democratic fairness, but the cry for “rep. by pop.” was often a coded demand by Protestants for supremacy over Catholics.
Catholics and Protestants argued about schools, but they agreed on many issues that would be divisive today: Macdonald believed abortion “saps the very life blood of a nation” and called it a worse crime than rape. Almost everybody believed in capital punishment, that the State had the right to punish serious crimes by killing the offender. John A. Macdonald was the prime minister whose government confirmed the execution of rebel leader Louis Riel in 1885. That seems shocking: nowadays only the cruellest dictators use the death penalty to silence political opponents. But hanging was part of Macdonald’s world. Aged twenty-two, he lost a case and his client died on the gallows. As attorney general (justice minister) before Confederation and as prime minister after 1867, Macdonald approved the executions of ninety-five men and two women, mostly sentenced to death for murder. Riel’s death was controversial at the time, but we should assess Macdonald by the values of his era, not ours.
The sternly vengeful nineteenth century was surprisingly easy-going about the relations between business and the rough trade of politics. MPs received no salaries: there had to be some pay-off for taking part. Elections were violent and expensive, and serving in Parliament involved long absences in distant cities. Most politicians had business interests — hence politics was dominated by lawyers (like Macdonald himself) and merchants. They helped their ridings by boosting local companies and lobbying for public works. A candidate who could not enrich himself was reckoned too dumb to look after his riding. But there were limits: John A. Macdonald lost office in 1873 because he appeared to have sold the contract for the Pacific Railway to the Montreal magnate who had funded his election campaign the previous year. The charge was exaggerated, but it took him
