Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  Canada voted on September 17, 1878, and Sir John A. Macdonald (“The weevil came in with the Grits and prosperity with John A.”36) was returned to office as prime minister with a landslide about as great as Mackenzie’s had been four years before. He was defeated in his home district of Kingston after ten consecutive terms, but was elected on the night for Marquette, Manitoba, and Victoria, British Columbia, and chose to sit for Victoria to boost his placation of British Columbia and help finish the railway. The Conservatives had 134 MPs with 53.2 per cent of the vote to 63 Liberals with 45.1 per cent of the vote and 9 independent MPs. It was a great and a sweet victory, and Macdonald attended upon Lord Dufferin, whose reception of him was “gushing.”37 The governor general told the returning leader that “on personal grounds the warmest wish of his heart was granted.”38 (It was ever thus.)

  3. The National Policy, the Railway Crisis, and the Riel Rebellion, 1878–1886

  Alexander Mackenzie had been, in effect, a caretaker. In addition to founding the Supreme Court, he introduced the secret ballot, set up the Royal Military College (where a large building is rightly named after him), and created the post of auditor general. This and Brown’s tariff reductions with the United States were the product of five years of his leadership, a thin but not distasteful gruel, but he was ineffective at stopping or alleviating the depression that accompanied the demobilization in the United States and the deflation of the currency as Grant retired the paper “greenbacks” that Lincoln had issued to pay for the war and he almost killed Macdonald’s railway. Mackenzie remained in Parliament until he died in 1892, aged seventy, and three times declined a knighthood out of loyalty to his working-class origins. He was a thoroughly decent, thoroughly unexciting leader. Macdonald bustled back into office as a new MP from British Columbia with a full agenda, first of all to bind his new province to the old. Of the senior members of his original government, only Tupper (who soon became minister of railways and canals), Sir Samuel Leonard Tilley of New Brunswick (minister of finance), Langevin (minister of public works), and Alexander Campbell (receiver general and then postmaster general) remained. Macdonald would be considerably more dominating than he had been when Cartier, Howe, and Hincks, not to mention Brown, Galt, and Taché, had served with him. He assumed the new post of minister of the interior, which had been established to oversee the development and populating of the West. Tupper would lead the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, Tilley would bring in the new tariffs. Alexander Galt had been appointed by the British government to the Fisheries Commission, where his performance was much appreciated, and Macdonald gave him a special mission to develop increased trade links with the principal countries of Western Europe, a task which flustered the British as smacking of too much independent-mindedness by Canadians.

  Dufferin returned to Britain a very successful and respected governor general, to be replaced by the Marquess of Lorne, son of the Duke of Argyll, and son-in-law of Her Imperial Britannic Majesty Victoria, Queen and Empress. To have a royal princess (Louise) as consort to the governor was a signal recognition of Canada’s rising status in the Empire. There was a new move by Dufferin and Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Disraeli’s latest colonial secretary, that Canada’s governor general become a viceroy. But the prime minister (now the Earl of Beaconsfield, Disraeli having departed the House of Commons for an easier life in the Lords in 1876, after thirty-nine years as an MP) declined out of the same concern for American sensibilities about monarchical incursions in their hemisphere that in 1867 prevented Canada from becoming a kingdom and a viceregal post. (It was allegedly Tilley who first proposed the status of Dominion.) Macdonald, Tupper, and Sir Hugh Allan went together to Halifax to greet the arriving governor. Macdonald confined himself to his room in the lieutenant-governor’s residence and drank himself almost into a stupor, telling his secretary, when the new governor general’s ship approached and he was urged to pull himself together, to “vamoose from this ranch!”39 Macdonald rallied quickly and greeted the viceregal and royal arrivals appropriately.

  To deal with the government’s National Policy on tariffs, Lorne was enlisted as a go-between with the Imperial government, which could be assumed to disapprove of protectionist measures at Britain’s expense. Macdonald and Tilley offered concessions, but could not grant outright ex gratia preferments. The new parliamentary session opened on February 13, 1879, and the tariff was the core of the Throne Speech. The British government was pained by the measure but acknowledged that it was within the authority of the Dominion to enact. As the tariff debate dragged on interminably, the fracas with Letellier de Saint-Just and Boucherville came to a climax and the cabinet reluctantly voted to ask Lorne to dismiss the lieutenant-governor of Quebec for his arbitrary treatment of the premier. Macdonald privately told Lorne that it “was impossible to make Frenchmen understand constitutional government.” 40 They agreed to send the whole issue to London, and Langevin and John Abbott were sent to make the federal government’s case, not that Macdonald much liked it.

  The tariff was finally adopted. Macdonald beat off an attack of cholera and went with his wife on a semi-working holiday in Britain, arriving in London in early August. Macdonald sought a British guaranty for the financing of the transcontinental railway, but as Hicks Beach told him, the Canadian tariff was not popular in London and getting a railway loan guaranty through would not be simple. He also wanted to establish Galt as resident minister in London, another step into foreign affairs. He made headway on both issues, was inducted into the Imperial Privy Council, had an audience with the queen, and had a very satisfactory dinner with Beaconsfield at his country house, Hughenden Manor. Beaconsfield pronounced him “gentlemanlike, agreeable, and very intelligent, a considerable man.”*41 This was high praise from Bismarck’s only contemporary rival and one of the greatest and wittiest leaders in British history. Despite the balkiness of Hicks Beach, the City was very receptive of Tilley’s overtures, and there appeared to be enough capital available for construction to begin anew in earnest. (The Union Pacific Railroad was a huge project for the United States, which had a population of forty million people; the Canadian Pacific was more costly and ambitious, over more difficult terrain, in a country one-tenth the size with not one-twentieth of the credit as the United States. It was a brilliantly bold ambition.) As Macdonald had told Sir Stafford Northcote, “Until this great work is completed, our Dominion is little more than a ‘geographical expression.’ The railway completed, we become one great united country with a large interprovincial trade and a common interest.”42 He was back in Ottawa in late September.

  Canada was prospering; the depression was lifting across the continent, but the imposition of the National Policy program was fortuitous and was widely credited with the recovery, to which it had doubtless contributed. It took almost to the end of November for the British government to respond to Macdonald’s proposal of a resident minister, which they could not accept because of the clear implication of an independent foreign policy. As the foreign secretary, and soon to be Beaconsfield’s successor as party leader, the Marquess of Salisbury wrote to Lorne, “The solid and palpable fact [is] that if they [the Canadians] are attacked, England must defend them … England must decide what their foreign policy shall be.”43 Hicks Beach added that the British would be very solicitous for Canadian views on matters of interest to Canada.

  The converging lines of Canadian interest had finally collided: in pursuing greater autonomy, Canada had got to the point of seeking a degree of sovereignty that made the British uncomfortable as guarantors of Canadian borders and security. Canada could have either British protection or an autonomous foreign policy, but not a blank cheque from Britain to assure Canada’s security whatever it chose as a foreign policy. This was a strained, by the British government, interpretation of the role and significance of a resident minister, but Macdonald would do the necessary to retain an unambiguous British guaranty. After a good deal of toing and froing, the title “high commissioner” was ag
reed upon in early February 1880, and Galt would be the first occupant of the post. It was one of the last acts of the Disraeli-Beaconsfield government, as the Conservatives were defeated by Gladstone in April 1880, and Beaconsfield soon retired in favour of Salisbury and died in 1881, aged seventy-seven, after twenty-two years as Conservative Party co-leader, followed by thirteen years as sole leader.

  Macdonald, now sixty-five, had fainted in a regular service in his church in Ottawa on March 26 and considered retiring, as he had from time to time, but his cabinet beseeched him to put any such thought out of his mind, and he did. George Brown was murdered by a discharged employee of the Toronto Globe on May 9, 1880. He was sixty-one. He had been a talented and forceful man and a capable editor who had rendered inestimable service joining the Great Coalition to bring about Confederation. He was a bigot and too inflexible to be a good politician, but he was a Father of Confederation and a formidable reform politician and newspaperman. It would be ninety years before another prominent politician was murdered in Canada (Pierre Laporte in 1970).

  Macdonald, Tupper, and John Henry Pope had been appointed by the cabinet as a committee to go to London to recruit financing for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) project. There had already been a domestic overture from George Stephen, president of the Bank of Montreal; Donald Smith, who was Stephen’s cousin; and James Jerome Hill, the Canadian president of the Great Northern Railway. They controlled what was now called the Saint Paul, Minneapolis, and Manitoba Railway, the subject of the furious debate at the end of the pre-electoral session of Parliament in 1878 when Macdonald shouted, as the Black Rod announced the ceremony of dissolution of Parliament, that Smith was the greatest liar he had known. Their relations, though hardly cordial, were better now. The British and continental expressions of interest in CPR financing gradually fell away as Macdonald and his colleagues toiled through August in London on a challenging regime of commercial negotiations. The Canadian prime minister knew that he would never make a more important decision and that he would have to be a good deal more meticulous than he had been a decade before dealing with Sir Hugh Allan. The Stephen-Smith offer was to build the railway if given $26.5 million and 35 million acres. Macdonald conducted negotiations with his usual skill and was close to agreement with an Anglo-French-German group represented by financier J.A. Puleston and backed by Société Générale of Paris, for $19 million and 32 million acres. It was down to Puleston and Stephen, and the Puleston offer started to soften and wobble as Stephen came firm at $25 million cash and 25 million acres. Macdonald was a good deal more impressed by George Stephen than by his cousin Donald Smith, and he took the offer, ostensibly as a winning competitive bid, but in fact as winner of a one-horse race. Some British and continental firms joined Stephen’s group, including Société Générale, and agreement was signed on October 21. The parliamentary session to deal with the Canadian Pacific opened on December 9, and Macdonald, fluey and fatigued, attended the opening session, but the government was led in the ensuing spirited debate by Tupper. The agreement included a number of controversial concessions apart from cash and land. The railway was given a substantial tax holiday and an almost unlimited right to build branch lines. It was allowed to import what it needed duty-free, and no permits would be given to railways in direct competition at close proximity for twenty years.

  The Anglo-Canadian alliance had failed financially, though it held politically (rather limply while Gladstone was at the other end of it, but sufficiently to maintain Imperial solidarity). The only non-railway matter Macdonald had dealt with in London was his views of contributing to Imperial defence, which were that Canada could be relied on if Britain were under direct threat, as Britain would be if Canada were, but anything less urgent would have to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Canada was having to make its own way, and its national railway was largely financed in Canada, or at least by Canadians with their own developed financial relationships. The Liberals attacked on straight, continentalist, anti-national lines and said that building a railway to the north of Lake Superior was a scandalous waste of resources. Macdonald’s policy was the only one consistent with Canadian independence of the United States and with the notion of Canada as a functioning and coherent national entity. The debate was intense and often vituperative, with frequent all-night sessions. Macdonald’s health started to give way, but he roused himself to a great effort when, on January 17, 1881, the Liberals presented an alternative scheme which on its face contained none of the controversial aspects of the government’s bill and carried much smaller incentives in cash and land. Macdonald rose as soon as the Opposition bill was presented to the House by Tupper (as the responsible minister) and said, “We have had tragedy, comedy, and farce from the other side.”44 He exposed the new offer as one to build a prairie section only, connected at both ends to the United States, which would run the trade of Western Canada into that country, and not to build a transcontinental railway at all. “The whole thing is an attempt to destroy the Pacific Railway. I can trust to the intelligence of this House and to the patriotism … and common sense of this country … which will give us a great, a united, a rich … a developing Canada, instead of making us tributary to American laws, to American railways, to American bondage, tolls, freights, to all the … tricks that American railways are addicted to for the purpose of destroying our railroad.”45 Once more, a mighty intervention by John A. Macdonald had quelled near pandemonium in the House of Commons and in business circles, and it silenced the New York and London media which, for their own purposes, had been conditioning their readers to discount the Canadian government’s project. A business associate in Toronto wrote the prime minister that because of his address, “the champagne corks have been flying a humming fire of artillery.”46 The Canadian Pacific Bill was passed by the House of Commons on a division of 128 to 49 on February 1 and was enacted by Lord Lorne on February 27, 1881. Macdonald had taken the country another giant step forward, and was again the indispensable man.

  Macdonald now turned his full attention to the next phase of the National Policy: the systematic encouragement of immigration to settle the West and assist in the financial development of the railway. He had left the colonial secretary a lengthy memorandum on the subject, and Alexander Galt’s principal mission in his new and much-discussed post in London was to push such a scheme. But, as usual, Gladstone had no interest in Canadian matters and nothing happened. George Stephen had had a try also, with no success. Macdonald determined to return to Britain in the summer of 1881 to try to get this plan rolling, as well as to seek more sophisticated medical advice, as he had been very fatigued after the parliamentary session. He arrived in Britain on May 29, 1881, after what was now down to an eight-day sea voyage from Quebec. Macdonald was diagnosed with a pre-gouty condition and recovered well over the summer, with a regime of sedate country life and a strict diet, coupled with an ample evening social life, including private dinners with Gladstone and the Conservative leader, Salisbury. He was able to lobby for his immigration plan, and Gladstone, who was personally fairly agreeable, accepted to fund a modest program for Irish emigrants, but not on the basis of any favouritism for the British colonies. Macdonald met with the powerful Roman Catholic primate of England and Wales, Henry E. Cardinal Manning, and made some headway in urging support for what he billed as a humane and promising scheme for organized emigration to a friendly destination. He returned, in excellent health and spirits, to Quebec on September 17.

  The following year, he would arrange for Toronto’s archbishop, John Joseph Lynch, to visit Britain and Ireland and try to generate enthusiasm for a New Ireland in Northwest Canada. The issue would be further complicated in 1882 when the Irish Roman Catholic Conservative MP John Costigan put through a bill calling for Home Rule in Ireland and the restoration of civil rights in that province of the United Kingdom. This was no business of Canada’s, but Macdonald did not want to interfere with a private member’s bill on the eve of an election, and it passed on April 21
. On May 6, 1882, the new chief secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and his undersecretary, Thomas Henry Burke, were murdered in Phoenix Park in Dublin, near the viceroy’s residence. The reaction in Britain and Scotland was predictably outraged, and the colonial secretary, Earl Kimberley, wrote to Lorne that “the people of this country … are not in a temper to be trifled with by anglers for Irish votes at elections for colonial legislatures.”47 The whole subject of Irish immigration was swamped in recriminations over the Cavendish murder, and Galt again resigned over Gladstone’s slights (which were, for once, not just conjured by the hyper-sensitive Galt). Macdonald had written to his mercurial high commissioner that “Gladstone … is governed by his hates, and is as spiteful as a monkey. In a fit of rage he might denounce Canada and its future, and show the danger continually hanging over England by Canada’s proximity to the United States, and the necessity of her fighting our battles. In fact, there is no knowing what he might do.”48 Macdonald also objected to Britain’s likely acquiescence in American assertion of a sole right over an isthmian canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific in Central America, and felt strongly that Canada now had a greater population than that of the United States at the time of the Monroe Doctrine nearly sixty years before, and had the same interest in traffic between the oceans, and that Britain was an American power, despite the loss of the Thirteen Colonies. In the circumstances, he did not judge it appropriate to lobby Westminster on the issue, but the Anglo-Canadian alliance was reaching the point of diminishing returns, as Gladstone resented the burdens of the defence of Canada and Macdonald didn’t think Britain was doing a very thorough job of protecting the Anglo-Canadian interest against the Americans.49 (In fact, Canada’s population was only about three-fifths of that of the United States at the time of the Monroe Doctrine.)