Canada’s founding father brilliant, but also flawed

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This article was published 10/01/2015 (3998 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Some Canadian politicians are skilled, talented and dedicated individuals. Others are entitled, incompetent and even corrupt. Politicians are far from perfect. Like many of us, they are given to hubris and delusional thinking and rife with personal flaws.

On Jan. 11, 1815 (possibly the 10th), five months before Napoleon fought the Battle of Waterloo, John A. Macdonald was born in Glasgow, Scotland. On the bicentennial of his birth, how should we remember the country’s founder?

He arguably was the most important Father of Confederation and the architect of the National Policy, which bolstered industry, built the Canadian Pacific Railway and settled the West. “Had there been no Macdonald,” asserts his latest biographer, Richard Gwyn, “there would be no Canada.”

In assessing the legacy of this complex historical figure, you have to reflect on the good and the bad.

First, the good: Macdonald came to Canada from Scotland with his parents at the age of five, setting with them in Kingston in Upper Canada.

In 1844, he won a seat as a Conservative in the Province of Canada assembly. Until his death, in 1891, he lived and breathed politics. In 1864, with George-Étienne Cartier and his rival George Brown, Macdonald led the fight for Confederation, convincing many skeptical Canadians and Maritimers a larger political union was the only way to save British North America from takeover by the United States.

He was prime minister from 1867-1873 and 1878-1891. Building the country from sea to sea via the CPR and protecting Canada from American encroachment were his chief objectives.

No one mastered the art of politics better. He was charming and had an amazing memory. He could recall names and faces of his supporters for decades. In an era when prime ministers did not have absolute control over caucus, his genius lay in “managing other people,” as Lord Dufferin, the governor general in the 1870s put it.

In 19th-century Canada, political success required a manipulative and devious streak, and in an age of extreme partisanship, he was a brilliant practitioner. At the same time, he respected French Canadians and Catholicism when many Protestant Canadians did not. He tried to give women the vote, a unique position for a western male politician in 1885.

Then, there is the bad: Macdonald was no angel. If Canadians think about him at all, they recall his bad drinking problem. A heckler once pointed out how intoxicated Macdonald was, and he replied, “Yes, but the people would prefer John A. drunk to George Brown sober.” And that was generally true.

His drinking was connected to his tragedies. When he was seven, he saw a drunken servant kill (perhaps accidentally) his little brother, James. His first wife, Isabella, was ill for much of their marriage. The couple’s first son, John, died as an infant and Isabella died in 1857. Macdonald was left to raise his son, Hugh John (Manitoba’s premier in 1900). By all accounts he was a neglectful father. His marriage to Susan Agnes Bernard in 1867 was a happier union, though they had a difficult time with their daughter Mary’s physical and cognitive disabilities.

Macdonald made mistakes. In 1872, he got caught up in the Pacific Scandal, in which the Conservatives accepted large campaign contributions from the shipping magnate Hugh Allan, head of a syndicate that won the lucrative contract to build the CPR. The fallout forced Macdonald from office a year later and into opposition until 1878.

Macdonald has been criticized for his treatment of Louis Riel and for ensuring the Métis leader was hanged in 1885. It was the poorest decision of his career, though Macdonald would be shocked by the veneration of Riel today.

More recently, Macdonald has been accused of deliberately withholding food from Prairie First Nations people to force them onto reserves, to make way for the railway and western settlement. (For the record, the Liberal opposition argued the government’s food policy was making aboriginals “a dependent population.”)

Macdonald believed in the superiority of white people — like the vast majority of white people of his time. From our 21st-century, politically correct perspective, his prejudice toward First Nations people, Chinese, Jews and other minorities was deeply offensive.

Macdonald, however, was a product of his time, just as Abraham Lincoln was. Lincoln, who freed African-American slaves, believed blacks were inferior to whites, that they should not have the right to vote, hold office or marry whites.

This does not make Lincoln any less historically significant or worthy, but it does show how difficult it is to separate a historical figure from the values and standards of their age.

The dictum applies to Macdonald. In the same year he sanctioned Riel’s execution, he supported giving the federal vote to adult male aboriginals if they met the property qualification.

Macdonald was a complicated political personality, hardly perfect, but nevertheless integral to Canada’s history — no less than George Washington was for the U.S. and Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone were in Britain.

In 1884, Macdonald, speaking at a celebration to mark his four decades in public life, spoke about departed friends and “feeble old men” like himself. Someone shouted, “You’ll never die, John A.” and the crowd erupted in applause. On the 200th anniversary of his birth, that sentiment rings true, though less loudly.

 

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.