John A (15 page)

Ogle Gowan. As grand master of the Orange Lodge—a moderate later pushed out by hard-liners—he brought to Macdonald the greatest of all political assets: votes.

Quite different was another Gowan, James Gowan, a cousin, who, when appointed to the bench in 1843, was the youngest judge in the British Empire. Sophisticated, intelligent and an outstanding judge, although refusing all promotions (during his long career on the bench only two of his judgments were overruled), Gowan exchanged letters with Macdonald over the decades on everything from politics to literature. Near the end of his life, Macdonald appointed Gowan to the Senate, where, although nominally a Conservative, he functioned as an independent.

Macdonald gave at least one strong signal that he still wasn't really committed to politics. At the close of the 1840s, Canadian politics were dominated by a crisis that touched directly on the
subject that most commanded Macdonald's heart—Canada's connection to Britain. Yet he had almost nothing to say about this defining issue.

In the mid-1840s, the British prime minister, Robert Peel, adopted free trade. One objective was to reduce the cost of importing food, so as to help the starving Irish through the potato famine. The main reason was that Manchester free-traders such as Richard Cobden and John Bright had won the argument that Britain, as the world's leading economy, would gain by opening wide its doors to raw materials while exporting its cornucopia of manufactured goods.
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No nation was more affected by the abandonment of Imperial Preference than Canada. Within a few years, all the protective tariffs that subsidized its exports to Britain—principally of lumber and flour—vanished. A few years later the Navigation Laws, which gave an advantage to colonial shipping, were repealed. Wheat exports dropped by more than 50 per cent, and flour exports by 40 per cent. Cheaper and better wood began to be shipped to Britain from the Baltic. In 1849 Governor General Elgin estimated that “property in most Canadians towns, and most especially in the capital [Montreal], has fallen 50 percent in value…three-fourths of the commercial men are bankrupt.”

Across Canada there was widespread anger and a sense of abandonment. To magnify this discontent, the Imperial government had refused the demands of Tory Conservatives to disallow
a Rebellion Losses Bill introduced by the co-premier, LaFontaine. The bill provided compensation for property damaged during the Rebellion of 1837–38, and many of the beneficiaries would be those Lower Canadians who had actually rebelled against the Crown. On April 25, 1849, riots instigated by local Conservatives broke out in Montreal. That night, the rioters (all of them English-speaking) broke into the Parliament Buildings and put them to the torch; the buildings were burned to the ground, and almost all the books and collections in the parliamentary library were destroyed.

In response, Montreal businessmen and financiers organized a petition condemning British policy. Eventually, the document carried more than one thousand signatures, among them two Redpaths, three Workmans, two Molsons, a future prime minister (John Joseph Abbott) and three future cabinet ministers of Canada. In October, a mass meeting in Montreal approved a manifesto calling for “a friendly and peaceful separation from the British connection and a union upon equitable terms with the great North American Confederacy of Sovereign States”—in other words, for annexation.

Macdonald kept almost completely silent about this direct challenge to the British connection, though he helped to organize a meeting in Kingston of a new British America League. After roundly rejecting annexation, the league argued instead for some form of reciprocity pact or cross-border free-trade deal with the United States to replace the lost British market. The Kingston meeting attracted few other leading politicians, excepting Macdonald, a home-towner. He did not make a speech or play any role in drafting the communiqué. By the time the league ceased to function, towards the end of 1850, Macdonald had already cut his association with it.

In fact, with the ending of a worldwide depression in 1850,
most of the lost prosperity quickly returned. Montreal businessmen and financiers abandoned their temporary interest in protest and transferred their allegiance to the cause of reciprocity with the United States. Elgin exercised some brilliant diplomacy to arrange a pact between the two countries in 1854. The real political significance of what had happened was that during the turmoil Macdonald had scarcely stirred.

Two factors may have caused Macdonald to make up his mind sometime in the early 1850s that politics, and not the law, would be his life's work. The first was that, late in 1849, Isabella told him a second miracle was about to occur in their married life: although now forty years old, she was pregnant again. On December 9, 1849, Macdonald informed Margaret Greene, with mixed hope and fear, that “Isa views her coming trials with great fortitude & from her courage & patience I have every hope of a happy issue. Still she prepares for the worst.” A month later, he reported that “all arrangements have long been made, and she now awaits for the issue with patience and fortitude. She has given me many directions about herself and her offspring, which any evil happen, & having done all that she can do, is now content.” But Macdonald was not able to focus only on his wife and unborn child. A fortnight earlier, he told his
sister-in-law in another letter that his mother, following yet another couple of attacks, was “perfectly resigned to her probable fate and sudden exit.”

Hugh John as a baby, c. 1852. He was the only child of Macdonald and Isabella to survive. His mother was too ill to care for him, and he and Macdonald later became estranged. The artist is Sawyer.

By early February 1850, Mac donald was writing that Isabella's “immediate confinement is much to be desired, this continuance of suffering wears down her strength.” A few days later he reported again that “the struggle has exhausted her very much, but she has kept up her spirits.” Finally, on March 13, 1850, Macdonald declared in triumph, “We have got Johnnie back again, almost his image.” The baby was less “delicate” than the brother he would never meet, but “born fat & coarse.” He was called Hugh John, names that connected him to both his father and his grandfather.

The second explanation for Macdonald's decision about his career was that, sometime early in the decade, he realized that he could get right to the top. He was, still, a relatively new guy, and he had at last begun to frame in his mind a genuinely new idea. As well, his mother, still watching over him despite her repeated strokes, had always told him that he was destined one day to be “more than an ordinary man.”

 

NINE

Enlarging the Bounds

If a Lower Canada Britisher desires to conquer, he must “stoop to conquer.” He must make friends with the French; without sacrificing the status of his race or lineage, he must respect their nationality. John A. Macdonald

A
lmost without exception, almost every party that has formed the government in Canada has embodied two defining characteristics: it has been a centrist coalition, and it has been a French-English alliance. These ruling principles of Canadian politics were invented by Macdonald. In this sense, he can lay claim to a second “Father of” title—as the architect and builder of Canada's political Big Tent.

In February 1854, while still in opposition, Macdonald wrote a long letter to James McGill Strachan, a Toronto lawyer, alderman and Conservative supporter, in response to his criticism that their party was habitually ineffectual. Macdonald began by admitting that Strachan was quite correct, saying, “We are a good deal hampered with ‘old blood.'” He reassured Strachan that the party's leader, Sir Allan MacNab, whom Macdonald always referred to with mixed exasperation and affection as “the Gallant Knight,” will “not be in our way.” MacNab, he continued, was “very reasonable and requires only that we should not in
his ‘sere and yellow leaf' offer him the indignity of casting him aside.” In case the doubts he had expressed about his leader should ever get back to MacNab, Macdonald added that he himself “would never assent to” MacNab's being dumped, “for I cannot forget his services in days gone by.”

The preliminaries done, Macdonald got down to the point he wanted to make to Strachan: the Conservative Party could be, and had to be, radically reorganized and re-energized. “My belief is there must be a material change in the character of the new House. I believe also there must be a change of Ministry after the election, and from my friendly relations with the French, I am inclined to believe my assistance would be sought.” As for other changes after the election, “There would be a new House & new people to choose from, and our aim should be to enlarge the bounds of our party so as to embrace every person desirous of being counted as a ‘progressive conservative.'”

In those few sentences, Macdonald sketched out a formula to create a different kind of Conservative Party—an entity quite unlike any other party then functioning in Canada. He was proposing that the Conservatives stretch themselves in two directions they had never gone before or had seldom ever thought about: first, to reach out to French members to try to form an alliance with a group among them.
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And, simultaneously, to open themselves—“to embrace,” as Macdonald put it—all voters who were prepared to be progressive about some issues, even while being conservative about others. There would be a cost to this dual expansion: certain ridings would have to be reserved for candidates who were not themselves Conservatives, and, by
extension, some cabinet posts also. Patronage would likewise have to be divvied up to accommodate more than party members. Another complication, potentially even greater, was that quite a few Conservatives, above all those who were members of the Loyal Orange Lodge, were decidedly hostile to French Canadians. They would have to be persuaded that finding space among themselves for a bloc of Canadien members was a worthwhile price to pay to achieve power—principally on the grounds that this was the only way for the Conservatives to ever do so.

Macdonald had come to his Conservatism without having given it much thought, if any at all. Being a Conservative was of course a virtual precondition for getting elected in Loyalist Kingston. All his friends and business partners were Conservatives. They favoured what he favoured—loyalty to the Crown, hostility to the universal franchise, deep suspicion of anything American, a great respect for law and order and an abiding skepticism about change as a virtue in its own right. In the middle of the nineteenth century, little in this litany of attitudes and assumptions made the Conservative Party in the least unusual. The Reformers, now in government, were about as conservative in their views, and even more timid than the Conservative Party about spending money on nation-building projects such as railways and canals. The pro-clerical
bleus
in Lower Canada were more conservative still. The only exceptions were, in Upper Canada, the populist Grits and, in Lower Canada, the liberal
rouges,
who opposed the right-wing conservatism of Montreal's ultramontane Bishop Ignace Bourget.

In fact, this kind of taxonomy of parties and groupings in mid-nineteenth century Canada is far too neat and tidy. In the contemporary sense of the term, parties scarcely existed then. Many members, no matter on what label they gained election, performed thereafter as “loose fish,” as the term went. They
voted, this is to say, not with their party but as they judged best, in their own and their constituents' interest; nor were they penalized for their lack of discipline. Indeed, party discipline of the contemporary kind was widely condemned as “partyism” the ideal, if seldom achieved, was that the legislature should function as a debating chamber somewhat like a Greek
agora
or a New England town hall. As a consequence, and as one of the most striking differences between politics then and now, premiers (or co-premiers, as a further complication) functioned roughly as leaders of a permanent minority government, always at risk of defeat and having forever to bargain with groups of members or with individuals for their temporary support. This challenge applied no less to the Reformers, who were more often in office, than to the Conservatives. Thus, after Baldwin and LaFontaine retired, a leading Reformer, Francis Hincks, became premier. An able man but forever dogged by scandal, Hincks led a fragile government that depended on the support of a small group of Canadiens led by a fellow Reformer, Augustin-Norbert Morin.

Just one party had about it some of the attributes of modernity (in an ideological sense rather than an organizational one): those intriguing newcomers to the Canadian political scene, the populist Grits. Early in 1850, a number of high-minded types gathered at the Toronto offices of a young lawyer turned journalist, William McDougall, to form an association of what one of them called “only men who are Clear Grit.” The name stuck, and the new movement spread rapidly in Toronto and through the rich farmlands to the west and south. The old rebel, William Lyon Mackenzie, returned from exile to join it. In many ways, the Grits prefigured by more than a century the populist Reform Party of the 1980s and 1990s. They advocated direct democracy (including the election of many office holders), the secret ballot, fixed parliamentary terms and Representation by Population
(although not the universal franchise). They produced a lively newspaper, the
North American,
edited by McDougall. The movement's most important qualities were energy and purposefulness. In the short term, its principal political effect was to split the non-Conservative vote in Upper Canada.

In many ways the political system was often downright amateurish, certainly by contemporary standards, if in some respects engagingly so, because nineteenth-century politicians often said what they meant rather than what they thought their party wanted them to say. And the “partyism” we now take for granted as the way parties should function is indeed thoroughly bureaucratic. But then it was all quite chaotic and intensely local, with petty and immediate issues repeatedly trumping national ones.

Macdonald now began to plot a way through this congenial chaos towards some political order. In no way was he seeking order for the sake of implementing particular policies, national or otherwise. He was seeking it for the sake of power, because he had come to realize, by some combination of instinct and experience, that the precondition for power, for gaining it and even more for holding it, was order and organization. Feeling his way along, and without any precedents to guide him (none existed in Britain at this time),
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Macdonald was working his way towards turning the Conservative Party, with all the “loose fish” swimming inside it or every now and then darting towards and then away from it, into an entity that roughly constituted a precursor to Canada's national political parties of today.

He was out to reorganize the Conservatives in three radical respects. First, he wished to make it a centrist party, so that its
members wouldn't repeatedly charge off on their own pet crusades. To do this, he wanted it to be filled with “progressive Conservatives” rather than the old bewhiskered crowd of Family Compact Tories. They, he wrote cuttingly, had “little ability, no political principles and no strength in numbers,” adding, in case anyone doubted his feelings, that they had “contrived…to make us and our whole party stink in the nostrils of all liberal-minded people.” In one particularly graphic phrase, Macdonald denounced those he called “pre-Adamite Tories”—those who hadn't evolved much beyond the dinosaurs. He would quit, he wrote to a Conservative friend, “rather than have anything to do with such a reactionary party.” Second, Macdonald wanted to make it a true national party. This required forging an alliance between the Conservatives and a bloc of Canadien members. LaFontaine and Baldwin had already followed this route, but their alliance had lasted only a few years, with both leaders retiring soon after they had achieved their goal of Responsible Government. By contrast, Macdonald wanted to create a French-English union that would be the foundation of a permanent governing party. Lastly, he aimed to use patronage not just to reward supporters but to attract newcomers into the party, and to keep supporters loyal when particular actions by their party might otherwise have caused them to waver.

The consequence of all this work would be power, for the Conservatives and for Macdonald. This power, though, would be in the hands of moderate men, both French and English—“moderate” being one of his favourite words. This new, organized coalition would be made up of three groups: his own Conservatives, with the “pre-Adamite Tories” among them kept firmly in check; a bloc of Canadiens, the obvious ones to target being the
bleus;
and, finally, a number of “loose-fish” Reformers who would hop abroad the bandwagon as it rolled towards power.

From this mélange emerged as oddly named a party as any that ever made it to the Canadian political stage: the Liberal-Conservative Party. (The name had to have been Macdonald's, but no specific evidence of its authorship exists.) To a substantial extent, the new nomenclature was pure illusion. The party's so-called Liberal wing comprised just a few Reformers whom Macdonald seduced into joining him by promising them cabinet posts. Their presence, though, discomforted his Reform opponents and, no less usefully, diminished the influence of the new party's outright Tories. At the same time, Macdonald's concoction had substance. Combined with the bloc of
bleu
members, the coalition would have a quasi-permanent majority in the legislature and, thereby, a firm hold upon power. The result would be Canada's first stable government—giving it at least the possibility of administrative professionalism. Moreover, because this government would be composed of both French and English Canadians, the two sides would learn about each other—and about accommodation and compromise.

In trying to get all these factions heading in the same direction, Macdonald faced one distinctively Canadian problem. If a Liberal-Conservative alliance was imaginable, so too was its mirror image of a Conservative-Liberal alliance—or an alliance between the Reformers and “progressive Conservatives.” The leading Reformer was George Brown, owner and publisher of the Toronto
Globe.
The same idea had, in fact, occurred to him. “Between the great mass of the Reformers of Upper Canada and this largest or liberal section of the Conservatives, there is little difference of opinion,” he said in a statement reported in his
newspaper on February 27, 1854. “Not one great principle divides them. Nothing but old recollections of antagonism.”