Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  Macdonald put on a very spirited and persuasive performance at the committee hearings that opened on September 10. And he exposed the fact that Huntington had gained his material by a break and enter and theft at Abbott’s office, though the identity of the felon was not established. Lord Dufferin began the late summer by assuming that he could simply abide by the vote of Parliament on the issue of Macdonald’s ability to continue in office, and asked the prime minister for a personal defence that he could use to placate the Imperial authorities. This, in practice, meant Gladstone, who was no friend of Macdonald or of Canada. Macdonald gave Dufferin a lengthy and solid chronology and explanation on October 9, but on October 19, having met with the commissioners, Dufferin told Macdonald in writing that it was “an indisputable and patent fact that you and some of your colleagues have been the channels through which extravagant sums of money, derived from a person with whom you were negotiating an arrangement on the part of the Dominion, were distributed throughout the constituencies of Ontario and Quebec, and have been applied to purposes forbidden by the statutes.” He acknowledged that Macdonald’s opponents had done as much and paid great homage to Macdonald’s services and qualities, and wrote, “Your personal connection with what has passed cannot but fatally affect your position as minister.”23 Dufferin had come to this conclusion with reluctance, as he had great admiration and liking for Macdonald, which he frequently expressed to Kimberley (and which Macdonald did not entirely requite). However, Macdonald was heartened on October 21 when Dufferin told him that Kimberley had effectively instructed him to be governed by Parliament.

  Debate on confidence in the government began on October 27, 1873, and the ministerial benches were still confident. Macdonald adopted the policy of waiting for Blake, whom he assumed, from his silence, had something up his sleeve, and he wanted to see it. Macdonald’s majority declined as the debate wore on, and Donald Smith was one of the late defectors, as Macdonald was frequently drink-taken and appeared pale, hesitant, trembling, and of quavering voice. Suddenly, on the evening of November 3, Macdonald concluded that Blake was bluffing, that he had no more ammunition, and he signalled that he wished to speak. There was a brief adjournment to permit members to return and the galleries to fill. The prime minister began at 9 p.m., and it was clear from the start that he was entirely in control of himself and at the top of his form. He had no notes, did not pause, and did not repeat himself, and held the Commons chamber spellbound for five hours as everyone recognized they were witnessing a superb historic performance. Without bluster or anything verging on the maudlin, he defended his actions and evoked the national interest without descending to, or even toward, the rascality of false patriotism. “I leave it to this House with every confidence. I am equal to either fortune. I can see past the decision of this House … but whether it be for or against me, I know – and it is no mean boast for me to say so, for even my enemies will admit that I am no boaster – that there does not exist in this country a man who has given more of his time, more of his heart, more of his wealth, or more of his intellect and power, such as they may be, for the good of this Dominion of Canada.” All knew that this was nothing but the truth. There was thunderous applause and a visibly composed and respectful Opposition. After a pandemonium of congratulations and an emotional scene among the government members and much of the gallery, which included Lady Dufferin, Blake began a reply, and the House rose at 2:30 a.m. No one present that night and early morning would ever forget it.

  It had been a mighty tour de force, and Macdonald had certainly salvaged his career. He met his cabinet on November 5, and they agreed that the issue was lost but the character of the Opposition and composition of opinion had changed from scandal-ridden revulsion at moral turpitude to a civilized view that a change, but not a permanent banishment, was called for. The Pacific Scandal was a very shabby business, and Macdonald’s achievement in downgrading it from a career-ending debacle to a faux pas, punishable in full by an electoral rap on the knuckles, was a greater accomplishment than would have been a slippery survival by a hair’s breadth in a permanently uproarious Parliament. Macdonald was hopeful that he could regain his health and vigour, hold his party, and exploit what he was confident would soon be exposed as the ineptitude of the Liberals. He announced to the House on November 5 that he had tendered the resignation of the government to the governor general and recommended to him that Alexander Mackenzie be invited to form a government. The Liberals would have to clean up the railway mess. Theirs was a hollow victory; Macdonald had suffered a setback distinguished by his heroic mastery of his departure. The only victors were a few not overly distinguished American businessmen who had humiliated Canada and made their point, but in a way that so artistic a political chief as Macdonald could turn to the country’s, and his party’s, and his own, advantage.

  Macdonald met his caucus on November 6 and urged them to choose a younger leader. It will never be known if he was serious or was just playing possum. There was no denying that he had made some serious errors, and errors that reflected unflatteringly on his ethical judgment. But there was also no denying that he was by far the greatest political leader in the country, who had been a party leader for seventeen years, and leader or co-leader of the government of Canada or of the provinces that held 80 per cent of Canada’s people for fifteen of those years. He was the principal founder and builder of the country. Dufferin wrote Disraeli’s returned colonial secretary, the well-disposed Carnarvon, on December 8, “Sir John Macdonald and his party are entirely routed, and nobody expects them to rally during the present Parliament.”24

  There was no need to hurry to replace him, and whatever disappointment there was at the Pacific Scandal, and there was widespread distaste for such a tawdry episode, his party was not at all sure it wished to dispense with him. As time passed, and not much time, his pause on the Opposition benches would look less like the tapering down of a great career than an entr’acte between two halves of a mighty public life, the second possibly even more spectacular and accomplished than the first. A new election was called by Mackenzie and Blake for late January 1874, and they predictably won a clear-cut victory. The Liberals emerged with 129 MPs and 53.8 per cent of the vote to 65 Conservatives with 45.4 per cent of the vote. There were 12 independents. Macdonald, though determinedly contested again by Carruthers, won, after recounts, by a paper-thin margin. He could relax, begin rebuilding his party, enjoy the spectacle opposite, and restore his physical and psychological vitality. Neither he nor his caucus members were in any hurry for him to go, and although he was only a year younger than Cartier, he had been much more robust and was not yet sixty. The redoubtable Benjamin Disraeli was about to sweep Gladstone out of office and form one of Britain’s greatest and most successful governments at the age of seventy, after leading his party in the House of Commons and overall out of a deep wilderness it had languished in for over twenty-five years.

  Macdonald observed an almost total silence while his own wounds healed and strength returned, and the Liberal honeymoon passed. The first initiative of the new government was to reopen the trade negotiations with the United States arising from the Treaty of Washington, which required them to test their fervently advanced complaint that Macdonald had negotiated incompetently. George Brown, now a senator, was sent to Washington to “transmute this give-away sale into a profitable commercial arrangement. Fish … could hardly have been more uninterested, uncooperative, and unenthusiastic.”25 Brown was assisted in Washington by the fact that he was well-known as a newspaper editor and publisher, and well-regarded by the Republicans for his fierce opposition to slavery. He did achieve a considerable breakthrough: duties on a wide variety of manufactures and raw materials were to be gradually reduced over years. But both countries were now dipping into serious economic recession, and Canadian interests were becoming steadily more receptive to Macdonald’s National Policy of protective tariffs. Macdonald told Tupper, who was effectively his deputy leader, as Cartier had not been rep
laced in Quebec, that, with time, our motto “country first, party afterward … sown upon the waters would come back to us, and not, I think, after many days.”26 Yet Macdonald did not press the point publicly, as he thought the country did not yet want to hear from him, and time was on his side as the economy declined and the country got a look at its new leader and his team.

  Macdonald had one more indignity to suffer in this sequence. It was finally determined that he had been returned in a vitiated election, and a by-election was called in Kingston. He won, again over Carruthers, but by only seventeen votes, at the very end of 1874.

  As 1875 progressed, the carapace of the Liberal government started to crack revealingly. Mackenzie was honest and steady, and not fanatical like Brown or moody like Blake. He “was good, stout, serviceable, Scotch tweed.”27 But as Dufferin wrote to Carnarvon, “My prime minister is not strong enough for the place. He is honest, industrious, and sensible, but he has very little talent. He possesses neither initiative nor ascendancy.”28 Mackenzie had been a stonemason and was very proud of his working-class background, but he had none of the flair that usually makes a good political leader. Dorion, who was never really very enthused as a federal minister and was a thoroughly ambivalent man about Confederation itself, left after a few months to become chief justice of Quebec. Edward Blake, the apparent strongman of the regime, also resigned after a few months and gave a controversial speech at Aurora, Ontario, shortly after he resigned. It was a pastiche of the faddish Liberal views of the time: Senate reform, proportional representation, a very chippy attitude toward Great Britain, and an abrupt reduction in the inducements already contractually promised to British Columbia. It was a prudish, slightly left, little Canada, humbug speech that opened divisions in the government. Blake helped found the Liberal newspaper as a rival to the Globe and encouraged the Canada First movement. It was a serious schism. Macdonald, though the beleaguered leader of a beaten party, was not the sort of opponent that could be given such an opportunity without his exploiting it. The Reform sector of the political spectrum had never been pulled together, and Mackenzie was not the man to stop its accelerating dishevelment. Macdonald still bided his time, increasingly confident that the government would not succeed and that the country would become nostalgic for him, especially as economic depression settled on it.

  Macdonald had presented or proposed bills for creation of a Supreme Court of Canada in 1869 and 1870 and 1873 and considered it another important step in nation-building. He generally supported the government’s Supreme Court Bill of 1875, but violently attacked an amendment abolishing appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of Great Britain; though this was not ultimately the effect of the bill, as it was composed in contemplation of changes in British judicature that had been announced but did not occur. Macdonald’s game was to keep the British connection warm so that he could accuse the Liberals of being deliberate or inadvertent annexationists. On July 9, 1877, he would utter the famous line “I am British born … and a British subject I hope to die.” Now that the Confederacy had been crushed in the United States, he overtly stated, Britain and its power of deterrence was the only protection Canada had against the Americans. And he imputed to the entire American public a fervent belief in the manifest destiny of the United States to occupy all of North America. This was a slight exaggeration, but it played well with susceptible Canadian voters.29 Of greater interest was Mackenzie’s sweetening the terms for British Columbia, Blake having accused Macdonald of a sellout to that province. The date for completion of the transcontinental railway was extended to 1890, but Ottawa was to pay the province two million dollars a year for the building of internal railways within British Columbia. This bill passed, with Blake voting against the government, but Mackenzie made further concessions to Blake, who rejoined the government. The Liberal newspaper and the Canada First movement folded. The Liberals had driven a stake (almost a last spike) through the heart of Macdonald’s railway, to the point that they were having trouble resuscitating it; no one in the private sector would touch it financially. This gave Macdonald plenty of room to claim that if he had not been overturned the railway would be largely finished by now and at reasonable cost. As the economic depression worsened, Macdonald hammered his tariff protection plan harder, to the appreciative agreement of the manufacturing and farm communities.

  Following the unification of Italy that deprived the Holy See of the secular government of Rome and the Papal States, the Vatican Council gave Pope Pius IX the status of infallibility, but only in matters where papal authority had always been exercised consistently. It was a symbolic elevation of his authority, but it horrified the Protestant and secular worlds, and there was a scaled-down re-enactment of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, as ultramontanism, the declared superiority of religious over secular authority, asserted itself in the most Catholic places, including Quebec and such parts of the Roman Catholic world as Poland, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and parts of France, Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Bismarck then unleashed his Kulturkampf and restricted Catholic education and other liberties, and Pius IX denounced him as “Attila in a helmet” and in similarly graphic strictures. In Quebec, the bishops raised their voices in criticism of anything they judged secularizing, and bedevilled the government of Quebec. The problems with the conservative Roman Catholic clergy were vividly illustrated by the absurd Guibord affair, in which an unrepentant but dying member of the Church-condemned (but not very subversive) Institut Canadien was denied the sacrament, as well as the convenience, of burial. He remained unburied for six years while the matter was litigated to the Privy Council in London, then needed a military escort to get him past rioting mobs to the cemetery, where he was interred in a steel and concrete vandal-proof tomb, in ground which his bishop then deconsecrated. The anti-papists, who would soon be led by D’Alton McCarthy, were just as extreme.

  The excitable Alexander Galt lashed out at ultramontanism and expressed impatience with Macdonald for not doing the same. But Macdonald, no devotee of theology, correctly judged that “ultramontanism in Canada depends on two old men, the Pope and Bishop [Ignace] Bourget [of Montreal].… There can be no doubt that there is an agreement between the Catholic powers that the next pope shall not be ultramontane. In fact, it is absolutely necessary for Europe that he should be a liberal Catholic who will cure the split in the Church.” The next pope, elected in 1878 after Pius IX’s thirty-two-year pontificate, was the suavely liberal and conciliatory Leo XIII, who though sixty-eight on election, reigned for twenty-five years.30 Macdonald also told Galt, “Use the priests in the election, but be ready to fight them in the Dominion Parliament.”31 As usual, Macdonald’s instinct, even in ecclesiastical politics, was exact. Lucius Huntington, who had first lifted the rock on the Pacific Scandal, attacked the ultramontanists quite gratuitously in a by-election campaign speech in Argenteuil, which was bound to cost his party dearly in French Canada and with other Roman Catholics as well, especially the Irish.

  By the spring of 1877, as Dufferin wrote Carnarvon, as “he wrinkled his nose in fastidious disgust: ‘The two parties [are] bespattering each other with mud’ ” (in view of the coming election).32 The Liberals unearthed the fact that Macdonald had kept control of a substantial part of the Pacific Scandal money for two years after he resigned as prime minister, and some had to be returned. As the session ended in May, Dufferin again wrote Carnarvon: “Blake is ill, thoroughly broken down with overwork and excitement and irritability of the brain.… Mackenzie looks like a washed-out rag and limp enough to hang upon a clothes line.”33 Four years before, Dufferin regretfully assumed Macdonald’s political career was through; now, he foresaw his return. Through the summer, Macdonald barnstormed Quebec and Ontario in full cry as in olden times, accompanied in Quebec by the rising star Joseph-Adolphe Chapleau and the fading eminence Hector-Louis Langevin. On July 9, fifty thousand people cheered Macdonald loudly and at length in Dominion Square in Montreal.

  In 1878, M
acdonald found and pushed another hot button, created by the Eastern Crisis between Russia and the Turks, which caused Disraeli to go to the Congress of Berlin and face down Bismarck, forcing the Russians to ease pressure on Turkey and emerging with Britain in possession of Cyprus. It was a triumph for Disraeli, but it aroused concerns in Canada because of the scare of war, for the first time, between the British Empire and Russia, the only European country relatively close to Canada. Macdonald threw into the pre-electoral hopper a proposal for a permanent army. With tariffs Macdonald seized the nationalist standard “Canada for the Canadians,” and with his Imperial enthusiasm he was trying to bag the loyalists at the same time as he explained with impeccable national feeling that only the Empire could deter an American takeover of Canada. He explained his proposal for a standing army to Stafford Northcote: “Without this, Canada will never add to the strength of the Empire, but must remain a source of anxiety and weakness.”34 With his National Policy of tariffs to revive industry and agriculture and create the revenue needed to finish the great railway, he had armed himself with a full quiver of political arrows. The third Parliament of Canada came to a close amid furious argument, as Macdonald had never forgiven Donald Smith for deserting him in his time of need in 1873, and accused him now of using his position in Parliament to promote a railway scheme of the Saint Paul and Pacific Railroad, in which he was an undisclosed participant. For good measure, Macdonald seized on the dismissal of the Conservative premier of Quebec, Charles Boucher de Boucherville, by the Liberal lieutenant-governor, Luc Letellier de Saint-Just (who accused the premier of “contemptuous neglect” of his gubernatorial dignity), which the Opposition leader represented as tantamount to the repeal of responsible government. The very last words of the session were Macdonald’s allegation against Smith of being “the biggest liar I ever met.”35