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
Almost 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.*43 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),*44 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.”
In the contest between them, Macdonald had one decisive asset. As he had written to Strachan, he enjoyed “friendly relations with the French.” By contrast, Brown had far too often denounced “French domination,” either personally or through the pages of his Globe, and the Grits were even more virulent in their criticism of the French. Macdonald saw this door of opportunity opening before him, and through it he slipped.
Where Baldwin and LaFontaine had left off, Macdonald now took over. In part, his plan was of course pure opportunism. It was also, though, the product of an idea about Canada’s very nature that was uncommonly imaginative and generous. Indeed, it’s not easy to identify any leading English-Canadian politician, all the way down to the 1960s (when the rise of separatism in Quebec caused everyone’s mind to focus wonderfully), who came close to matching the vision of the country that Macdonald expressed at this time.
Macdonald didn’t go in for grand ideas or for the “vision thing.” He expressed his understanding of Canada’s nature in colloquial language in a private letter, one written to a correspondent who disagreed with almost everything he was saying. There was no benefit to Macdonald in this exercise, therefore. He wrote it in order to think out what it was that he actually believed.
This remarkable statement, often quoted but most times only in summary form, is contained in the letter Macdonald wrote in January 1856 to Brown Chamberlain, the editor of the Montreal Gazette. Typically, he began with a joke. He had been lax, he admitted, in replying to Chamberlain’s earlier letters, so “I have hunted up your old letters, so that you see I cherish them, if I do not reply.” Next came some gossip. Then, without any peal of oratorical trumpets, Macdonald set out some of the most insightful passages in all Canadian political prose.
The truth is you British L[ower] Canadians never can forget that you were once supreme, that Jean Baptiste was your hewer of wood and drawer of water. You struggle like the protestant Irish in Ireland, like the Norman invaders in England, not for equality but ascendancy. The difference between you and those interesting and amiable people is that you have not the honesty to admit it. You can’t and won’t admit the principle that the majority must govern. The Gallicans may fairly be reckoned as two-thirds ag-st one third of all the other races who are lumped together as Anglo-Saxon. Heaven save the mark! Now you have nearly one-third if not quite of the representat-n of Lower Canada, & why is it the misfortune of your position that you are in a minority & therefore can’t command the majority of votes. The only remedies are immigration and copulation and these will work wonders.
…No man in his senses can suppose that this country can for a century to come be governed by a totally unfrenchified Gov-t. 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. Treat them as a nation and they will act as a free people usually do—generously. Call them a faction and they become factious.
Supposing the numerical preponderance of British in Canada becomes greater than it now is. I think the French would give more trouble than they are now said to do. At present, they divide, as we do, they are split up in several sections, & are governed more or less by defined principles of action. As they become smaller and feebler, so they will be more united, from a sense of self-preservation they will act as one man & hold the balance o
f power…. So long as the French have 20 votes, they will be a power & must be conciliated.
Then came some political gossip, followed by his customary jaunty ending. “I scarcely think you can read this scrawl. It is written by the light of one dip & my eyes are rapidly becoming irascible. Good night to you.”
Even all these decades later, after such an overflowing abundance of books, of learned articles and speeches and conferences and colloquia, all explaining what it is that Quebecers really want, it is hard to identify an analysis that comes nearer to understanding the way Canada is defined by the political dynamic between a threatened minority and a casually confident majority than this exposition, written late at night by a guttering candle and tossed into the mail without a single word or sentence altered. Much that is in it—the invocation to “respect their nationality” as an obvious example—is as relevant today as it was then. Such a capacity for understanding and generosity would be uncommon under any circumstances, but especially in an unsentimental and pragmatic power-seeking politician. A comment about Macdonald by Pope is relevant here, namely that there was “an entire absence of prejudice in his large and liberal mind.” He took people as they were, with all their faults and frailties, and almost never judged them or moralized about their failings.
Macdonald also exploited people for his own partisan purposes when their religion or culture or language might be of use to him. His goal wasn’t to preserve the French fact in Canada for its own sake, but rather to achieve national harmony so the government could get on with its business—and, as doesn’t need to be added, to gain and retain power. In mid-nineteenth-century Canada, though, it took an unusually large and liberal mind to conceive that government itself had to function so as to accommodate, year in, year out, the inescapably conflicting interests of the two European peoples—or nations—who made up the national political community.
John A Page 11