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1886–1891

You’ll Never Die, John A.!

If he had quit politics immediately after his return to Ottawa on August 31, 1886, Sir John A. Macdonald would have ended his career on a high note. In Victoria, he had called the completion of the transcontinental railway “the fruition of all my expectations”: surely he was now entitled to bow out? Four years earlier, when a friendly heckler had shouted, “I hope you will never get old,” he had modestly replied, “I must make way for others.” In 1886 he was seventy-one — high time to act on his promise to “make way for younger and stronger men.” Ideally, the fall of 1886 would have seen an orderly transition to a new leader who could meet Parliament that winter and seek a fresh electoral mandate soon after.

It did not happen, and it was never likely. Far from announcing his retirement, Macdonald was planning his thirteenth general election. The central theme of the last five years of his life was his inability to leave public life. His Dominion was like a house with a smouldering basement fire: smoke and flames erupted in room after room, province after province. There would be no second trip to British Columbia, no more comfortable visits to Britain. Far from being confident of Canada’s future, he felt foreboding. “We have watched the cradle of Confederation,” he had remarked to Campbell the previous year, “& shouldn’t like to follow the hearse.” Only one possible nation-building target remained. As Gowan commented in 1888, bringing Newfoundland into Confederation “would be a grand capping stone to your original conception and a glorious close to your career in public life.” But Macdonald was not inspired by the prospect. “Newfoundland will not come in just now,” he replied in September 1888, “and I am not very sorry.” Sir John A. Macdonald holds the record as Canada’s oldest serving prime minister — a record unlikely to be broken. But his achievement also represented systemic failure: even in his seventies, with his main work achieved, he could not escape from the burden of leadership.

Rejecting Macdonald’s 1867 vision of Dominion supremacy over submissive provinces, Mowat’s Ontario government had challenged Ottawa in a series of cases before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, Canada’s ultimate constitutional court. In 1883, a battle over the billiard table in Archibald Hodge’s Toronto tavern had prompted the London judges to declare that provinces were “supreme” within their own spheres of jurisdiction. Even Macdonald now occasionally used the term “Federal Government” instead of “Dominion.” Although he was astutely aware of “the opposition cry that we are centralizing everything,” he remained determined to “protect the Constitution from invasion” by resisting “unworthy concession” to provincial demands. But Mowat had made Ontario a semi-sovereign body within Canada. Worse still, in Nova Scotia, the Liberals won the 1886 election by threatening to secede from the Dominion altogether.

Macdonald’s problems were exacerbated by the Riel case. Defying Conservative policy, the Toronto Mail embarked on an anti-French and anti-Catholic campaign which threw the Irish vote to Mowat in the December 1886 Ontario election. The following year, Macdonald launched yet another Toronto newspaper, the Empire, but with limited success. Riel’s ghost also contributed to a major setback in Quebec, the election of a nationalist Liberal government, led by the unscrupulous adventurer Honoré Mercier.

Conservative defeats in the two largest provinces were an unlikely prelude to a successful Dominion campaign. A cautious politician would have waited until later in 1887: Macdonald defiantly sent Canadians to the polls in February. He knew he was criticized for being “too bold – but boldness won the day.” Macdonald gambled that Ontario voters distrusted Mercier and would back a strong leader in Ottawa. The 1885 Franchise Act had created separate Dominion and provincial voter qualifications: Mowat’s 1886 provincial victory — narrow enough in the popular vote — was no longer a pointer to the outcome of a federal election across Ontario. Liberals charged that the government packed voters’ lists with its own supporters. Indeed, voter numbers jumped by almost 40 percent over 1882, but the Conservative share of the poll in Ontario rose by just 0.3 percent. In Kingston, which Macdonald recaptured, the increase was from 1,686 to 2,728 — but he won by a mere seventeen votes. “We should have been beaten if we had not gone to the Country when we did.”

The seventy-two-year-old prime minister felt “used up” by the campaign, but fresh challenges soon erupted. The fisheries clauses of the 1871 Treaty of Washington, which had permitted the Americans to fish along Canada’s Atlantic coasts, lapsed in 1885. The Americans resented Canadian efforts to exclude them from inshore waters, and retaliated by claiming the Bering Sea as a private extension of Alaska. Unlike 1871, Canadians — Thompson and Tupper — led the tough negotiations which began in Washington in November 1887, backed by a senior British politician, Joseph Chamberlain. Shocked that the Americans attempted to treat Canada like a “country defeated after a great war,” Chamberlain dismissed their negotiating team as “dishonest tricksters.” “The Yankees are very bad neighbours,” Macdonald lamented in January 1891.

No handover of power was possible until his two able lieutenants, Thompson and Tupper, returned from Washington, but in March 1888, Macdonald told Gowan, “we must make room for others,” adding, in June, “I must shortly go.” Yet, in contrast to earlier scares, his health seemed good. In particular, he looked well — “& shiny,” Agnes noted in 1886. “I am in good health,” he reported in 1887. In February 1889, Gowan found him “looking as young as ever,” and Macdonald himself thought his health was “surprizingly good.” In a sartorial gimmick, he had taken to wearing light-coloured suits and a jaunty white top hat, which added freshness to his characteristic good humour. Fifteen-year-old Maud Montgomery encountered him on Prince Edward Island in 1890, “a spry-looking old man — not handsome but pleasant-faced.” (The silver-haired Agnes she thought “stately and imposing ... but not at all good-looking.” Thompson, who disliked her, more bluntly commented, “ugly as sin.”) A visitor to Ottawa that year watched Macdonald greeting callers to his office. Cracking jokes, “Sir John gave a skip” and “poked one of them in the ribs with his cane.” Macdonald seemed “so bright and active … he might have had a great many years before him.”

Maud Montgomery called Macdonald “a spry-looking old man — not handsome but pleasant-faced” when she met him on P.E.I. in 1890.

Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada/C-005327.

There were no pensions for ex-ministers: Macdonald sometimes joked that he needed his $8,000 salary. During his illness in 1881, he had been sued for debt, but a well-wisher settled the case for $2,500. Challenged to explain the transaction, Macdonald pleaded that he had borrowed the cash because “not being a rich man, I had not the money at the time.” The Globe alleged a kickback from a railway contractor, but Macdonald insisted that he repaid the loan, in two instalments, and with interest. He also paid 7 percent annual interest on a $1,000 long-term loan from his sister Louisa, money that he assured her was soundly invested to make her rich “when I kick the bucket.” By 1887, the fund had grown to $10,900: presumably the dividends easily covered the $70 a year that Louisa received. Macdonald purchased the Ottawa mansion “Earnscliffe” in 1883, but five years later he grumbled that renovations caused by dry rot “ruined” him. The bedrock of his finances was the $67,500 testimonial fund collected for him in 1871–72. Invested in six percent debentures, this yielded $4,050 a year — but in 1890 the bonds were refinanced at four percent, costing him $1,350 annually. “I must leave office ere long,” he grumbled in January 1891, “& my income will be reduced”: he wanted the capital invested in British Columbia mortgages, which paid seven percent.

In addition to Earnscliffe, insured in 1890 for $15,000, and the testimonial fund, Macdonald left $80,000 of his own money at his death — equal to the sum he had lost in 1869. There is no evidence for the subsequent rumour that his unexpected prosperity resulted from siphoning off political contributions for personal use. Macdonald’s concern for his finances was understandable. His daughter, Mary, could never live an independent life: two full-time carers supported Agnes in looking after her, and much money was spent on unsuccessful medical treatment. To his credit, Macdonald neither exploited his handicapped daughter to win sympathy nor did he deny her existence: a wheelchair-access gallery at Earnscliffe enabled her to watch guests arriving for prime-ministerial dinner parties.

What might Macdonald do as an ex-prime minister? He cherished an impossible dream, to remain in the House of Commons, in alliance with Campbell in the Senate, to “take care of the Constitution.” In fairness to any successor, Macdonald would have to leave Parliament — but what would he do and where would he live? Sometimes, he talked of writing political memoirs. He derided rumours that he might become governor general: “even if I had any aspirations, there is not the most remote chance of their being satisfied.” Co-existing with the detested Mowat as lieutenant-governor of Ontario was impossible. British admirers hoped that Macdonald “would take his place in English society, which he was so well qualified to adorn.” But London was an expensive city, and the British government would probably have named him to the House of Lords, an honour he could neither refuse nor afford. Tupper also wanted to make him a lord — and send him to Washington as British (and Canadian) ambassador.

Macdonald almost retired in the summer of 1888. “My only difficulty is about my successor,” he told his secretary. Tupper refused the leadership, urging that it was Quebec’s “turn” to provide Canada’s prime minister. Hence Macdonald fell back on Hector Langevin: “there is no one else.” Langevin wanted the job, but he was dragged down by bitter Quebec political feuding. The eventual compromise successor, the government’s bilingual Senate leader, John Abbott, Macdonald thought unqualified. His senior colleagues had been subordinates for so long that it was hard to imagine any of them as a leader. Of the two possible younger candidates, fifty-one-year-old D’Alton McCarthy had refused even to join the Cabinet, while Thompson, fifty-two, was an abrasive Nova Scotian, “very able and a fine fellow,” said Macdonald, but Ontario’s vocal Protestants would not forgive his conversion to Catholicism.

In 1890, Macdonald’s son Hugh thought there was “practically no Conservative Party in Canada,” only “a very strong ‘John A.’ Party” which would disintegrate “when any one else attempts to take command.” “All very well so long as you drive the coach but that cannot last for-ever,” his friend Gowan commented in 1887. Once Macdonald departed, “then the danger comes of a smash up.” Some pinned their hopes on divine intervention. Weeks before his death, a deferential bureaucrat assured Macdonald that the Almighty would not summon him “until He has prepared some one fit in some measure to assume your fallen mantle.” In default of an obvious successor, it became tempting to assume that Macdonald would go on forever. “You’ll never die, John A.!” a loyal supporter had once shouted. As testimony to the devotion he inspired, it was touching. As a political strategy, it represented myopic denial.

In June and July 1888, Canada’s underground fires erupted anew. Premier Mercier suddenly cut through the long-running issue of Quebec’s Jesuits’ Estates, which legally belonged to the province but were morally the property of the Catholic Church. Mercier boldly ignored clerical quarrels over the distribution of the spoils, dividing the Estates among all possible stakeholders — even Quebec’s Protestants were bought off. His master stroke was a provision that the act would take effect when “ratified by the Pope,” which triggered knee-jerk Ontario demands to block this affront to Queen Victoria’s authority. Mercier hurried to Ottawa to ask if his act would be disallowed. “Do you take me for a damn fool?” Macdonald responded. When the matter was raised in Parliament, he bluntly argued that the Quebec legislature “could do what they liked” with provincial property. Disallowance would trigger “the misery and the wretchedness” of religious and ethnic strife.

Only thirteen MPs voted for Ottawa to veto the Jesuits’ Estates Act, but one of them was D’Alton McCarthy. No longer a potential leader, McCarthy almost bolted the party altogether. He encouraged the Manitoba government to ban French from its classrooms and stop funding Catholic schools: incomers from Ontario disliked the bicultural institutions established in 1870. Macdonald sidelined Manitoba Schools to the courts, but the Ottawa flames were fanned by another McCarthy campaign, to ban French as an official language in the future provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. By provoking conflict over language and religion, McCarthy had blocked Macdonald’s chances of handing over either to Langevin, the Quebecker, or Thompson, the Catholic convert, whose sons attended a Jesuit boarding school in England. In any case, even in his mid-seventies, Macdonald was not going to be pushed. Late in 1889, an anonymous letter informed him that D’Alton McCarthy was alleging that the prime minister had lost his grip. Macdonald scribbled a confrontational endorsement: “Dear McCarthy, Who is your friend?” McCarthy, of course, backed off in embarrassment. Whatever their differences about Canada’s future, “you were never in better form to lead your party than you are just now.”

In March 1890 there came a further blow. J.-I. Tarte, a Quebec Conservative, briefed Macdonald about contract scams within Langevin’s department, Public Works. Although Macdonald refused to censure his long-time ally — a Public Works contract in Kingston was less than pure — Langevin was no longer a possible prime minister. When Tupper returned to Ottawa in January 1891, Macdonald “looked up wearily from his papers” and greeted him: “I wish to God you were in my place.” “Thank God I am not,” Tupper replied. “We would all like to walk in your footsteps,” Thompson wrote three months later, “but not in your shoes!” Only death would release Sir John A. Macdonald from office.

Macdonald now faced one last titanic electoral struggle. Wilfrid Laurier, Liberal leader since 1887, had responded to the yearning desire of Ontario farmers to sell their crops in the United States by endorsing “Unrestricted Reciprocity.” Canada would drop its tariffs against American goods and produce, encouraging Washington to open its markets in return. Nobody explained why the Americans should act with such uncharacteristic generosity. A deluxe version of “U.R.,” Commercial Union, committed Ottawa to adopting America’s tariffs against the rest of the world, so that British and German goods could not enter the United States through the Canadian back door. To Macdonald, U.R. and “C.U.” threatened the existence of an independent Canada itself. If five million Canadians integrated their economy with sixty-three million Americans, what would happen if the United States declared war on Britain? Canadians would be forced to choose between their prosperity and their allegiance. To Macdonald, “U.R. meant annexation.”

At first, Macdonald assumed that U.R. “will be as dead as Julius Caesar” before the next election came round in 1892. But, in October 1890, Congress enacted the McKinley Tariff, targeting farm produce and pushing up America’s already high import duties to new levels. It would be suicidal to campaign in rural Ontario once the 1891 harvest demonstrated to farmers their exclusion from American markets. Although he felt “the weight of 76 years greatly,” in January 1891 Macdonald once again plunged Canada into a winter election. It was an unedifying campaign. “Nice chap” was his private assessment of Laurier, but publicly Macdonald accused the opposition of “veiled treason,” branding all Liberals as annexationist plotters. His campaign slogan was “The Old Flag, The Old Policy, The Old Leader.” The Old Leader only just survived the exhausting campaign. On a freezing February night, over-enthusiastic supporters paraded him through the streets of Napanee, where he had first run a law office almost sixty years earlier. By the time he arrived in Kingston, he was near collapse. His voice fell silent during the final week before polling day, on March 5, when the government was narrowly re-elected. Macdonald lost ground in central Canada, but secured a working majority from the “shreds and patches,” as Ontario Liberals arrogantly termed the Maritimes and western Canada.

“I overworked myself during the campaign and forgot I was 76,” Macdonald confessed. But when the new Parliament assembled, he taunted Laurier: “J’y suis, j’y reste” — here I am, here I stay. It was the only occasion he ever spoke French in the House. Six weeks later, he was dead. The campaign against Langevin destroyed Macdonald. On May 11, Parliament agreed to investigate Tarte’s sensational charges of corruption in a Quebec dockyard contract. But there was a skeleton in Macdonald’s own political cupboard. He had rewarded Kingston for re-electing

him in 1887 by gifting the city a dry dock, to create jobs in ship repairing. The contract had gone to the lowest bidder, the unknown Andrew C. Bancroft, who had promptly formed a partnership with the Connolly brothers, experienced contractors

— and also involved in the controversial Quebec project. Bancroft apparently signed the contract and definitely cashed the cheques, but the Connolly brothers built the dockyard. Costs steadily rose, and Public Works nodded through the increases. Bancroft was invisible because he did not exist. His invention was a device to hand the Kingston contract to the Connolly brothers. It defies belief that Macdonald, Kingston’s MP, knew nothing of the scam. As Tarte unfolded his charges on May 11, 1891, Macdonald would have foreseen that he faced the same campaign of embarrassing accusations and shaming revelations that had unseated him in the 1873 Pacific Scandal. This time, aged seventy-six, there could be no way back from disgrace.

Sir John A. Macdonald appeals to farmers and factory workers to save the National Policy in 1891. He barely survived the election campaign.

On May 12, the day after Tarte’s bombshell, Sir John A. Macdonald suffered a stroke, so slight he hoped to disguise the episode even from Agnes. Indeed, Thompson thought him “well and bright again” when he returned to Parliament on Friday, May 22. However, that evening, his implacable foe Cartwright spoke with menacing sarcasm about Macdonald’s generosity to Kingston, hinting at revelations regarding “Mr. Connolly.” The House rose late but the prime minister lingered by his desk, as if instinct told him he would never return. Eventually, a colleague tactfully suggested it was “about time boys like you were home in bed.” That weekend, Macdonald fell ill, and for the next two weeks, he fought for his life. “Condition hopeless,” was the medical verdict on May 29, as a series of strokes gradually destroyed him.

Parliament, government, even Canada itself — all virtually went into abeyance. It was an odd succession crisis, for the two most obvious candidates, Thompson and Tupper, were determined to avoid the job. Despite his previous doubts, Macdonald had urged his colleagues to “rally around Abbott,” but he had changed his mind when the Senate leader begged to be omitted from the Cabinet: Abbott was “too selfish” to lead. But, with Langevin politically wounded, Abbott became the compromise successor.

In the cities, bells announced that the battle was over. Minutes after Macdonald died at 10:15 p.m. on Saturday, June 6, 1891, they were mournfully tolling in Ottawa. Telegraph messages flashed across the country, and soon after eleven, the solemn peals broke out in Toronto. Genuine grief swept Canada, with headlines such as “Dead” in Qu’Appelle and “He Is Gone” in Victoria. The whole country paused for his funeral: at Brandon, even the locomotives were draped in mourning. John A. Macdonald was interred in Kingston, next to his mother “as I promised her that I should be there buried.” Thirty years on, Helen still controlled her son.

In his tribute to Macdonald, opposition leader Laurier thought it “almost impossible” that Canada could “continue without him.” Yet, curiously, Sir John A. was soon largely forgotten. Journalist Hector Charlesworth recalled that “to vast numbers of the community he seemed the prop which supported the whole structure of Canadian nationality.” When his Dominion carried on without its creator, that mirage of Macdonald’s indispensability was dissipated. Britain’s Conservatives had built a million-strong campaigning organization, the Primrose League, on the memory of Disraeli, but nothing came of a proposal to form a Macdonald Guard to defend his ideals. His memory was discredited by the emerging tide of scandal. A month after Macdonald’s death, the mythical Bancroft was exposed — although, like Macdonald himself, the Kingston contract scandal was hastily forgotten, especially by biographers. Although Abbott was only caretaker prime minister, in August he fired Langevin from Cabinet. “The Old Man’s friends must feel … that he was fortunate in his time of dying,” the Globe cruelly remarked. “The most enthusiastic partisan of Sir John Macdonald would not attempt the hopeless task of defending his political morality,” pronounced a British commentator. Instead, Macdonald’s admirers entombed him in bronze across Canada: Hamilton unveiled the first statue, in 1893; Regina only raised enough funds to erect its joyless John A. in 1967. In Toronto’s Queen’s Park, a round-shouldered Sir John A. Macdonald seems weighed down by his imperial robes of the Order of the Bath. In cities across the country, he stared coldly at a Canada that no longer knew him. Despite five biographies, by 1921 he was “imperfectly, if at all, known” to contemporary Canadians.

Macdonald’s funeral united Canadians in grief. The massive procession leaves Ottawa’s Parliament Hill on its way to Kingston.

Listening from the gallery that June day in 1891 as Canada’s parliamentarians delivered emotional tributes, was a Halifax lawyer, visiting Ottawa on legal business. In 1911, Robert Borden would lead the Conservatives to victory, their first success in two decades. In twenty-four years, Macdonald won six elections — albeit narrowly in 1872. It took the Tories another 120 years, until Stephen Harper in 2011, to win their sixth majority government in the post-Macdonald era (plus a seventh in a wartime coalition sweep in 1917). Louis Riel had not risen from the grave, as he had foretold, but his ghost drove a wedge between the Conservatives and Quebec. Initially, Macdonald was philosophical about this: “from a patriotic rather than from a party point of view, it is not to be regretted that the French should be more equally divided,” he wrote in 1886. But throughout the twentieth century, French Canadians were not “equally divided,” and the Conservatives paid the price for their weakness in Quebec with six federal minority governments between 1926 and 2008.

Macdonald himself ceased to be a potent political symbol. In his magnificent two-volume biography of 1952–55, Conservative intellectual Donald Creighton re-launched him as a Tory-nationalist icon, but the failure of the Diefenbaker government once again made Sir John A. a dated symbol, his British knighthood and his waving of the “Old Flag” irrelevant to the new bicultural Canada. In 1988, the next successful Conservative leader, Brian Mulroney, tore up the remnants of the “Old Policy” and took Canada into a continental trade deal, the strategy that Macdonald had denounced as treason a century before.

Academics talk of the “Macdonaldian” constitution, a centralizing straitjacket imposed in 1867, which crumbled against the reality of Canada’s size and diversity. The picture is exaggerated. Macdonald intended the Dominion to be boss, but he never conspired to destroy the provinces — indeed, it was his constitution that the judges reinterpreted on looser, federal lines after 1883. Canada still endures the tensions between Ottawa control and provincial autonomy that first emerged in Macdonald’s time, with the scope of government now extended into the wider battlefields of external relations, health, and welfare. Macdonald’s 1867 constitution has changed much in spirit. No provincial legislation has been disallowed since 1943, the last British governor general went home in 1952, while the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms shifted the balance of authority between Parliament and the courts. Yet Canada remains one of the few countries to be governed for a century and a half through the same basic document. Its truly “Macdonaldian” quality is its adaptability and capacity for compromise.

“There was in him some indescribable charm that acted by presence, seemingly without means or argument,” commented a supporter. Macdonald’s brother-in-law once remarked, “no one can know him long and not like him.” Brown and Cartwright would have disagreed, but thousands of Canadians responded to his rare combination of “vivacity in social life linked to the coolest deliberation in affairs political.” Yet the good humour and the approachability masked a complex personality. Macdonald’s life was driven by his mother’s determination that her surviving son should wipe out the humiliation of emigration. His father’s continued business setbacks in Canada schooled him to cope with the mixed fortunes of politics. He would refer to “my usual desire to make the best of a bad state of things,” urging voters that “we can’t have all we want, and we must endeavor to get as nearly what we want as possible.” He was in politics for the long term, not the quick fixes that some opponents naively thought possible. “My plan in life is never to give up,” he wrote in 1864; “if I don’t carry a thing this year I will next.” His lonely schooldays left him with an enduring competitiveness. He fought, for the government, in 1837, a traumatic experience that he rarely mentioned, and he blamed that rebellion on an arrogant elite. In 1873 he boasted that “the old Family Compact tried to keep me down, but they couldn’t.” He was a moderate Conservative who fought extreme Tories, a compromiser who cried, as in 1885, “let us have peace.” Once, in 1881, even Macdonald’s sharpest critic had offered a sympathetic insight. “Putting the best possible construction on his political motive,” observed the Globe, “it has been to carry on the government of the country somehow or other.” Sometimes, governing Canada required dubious expedients.

In his forties, with his wife bedridden, his workload overwhelming, and his finances in trouble, the pressures triggered a midlife alcohol problem that intermittently erupted over two decades. But to remember someone who contributed so much to Canada merely as a drunk not only distorts the memory of John A. Macdonald but also dishonours the country that he did so much to create. Macdonald was not permanently intoxicated and his achievement was impressive even in the years when he struggled with his infirmity. As a later governor general, Lord Minto, commented, it is appropriate to recall Macdonald’s alcohol problem if only because “he completely triumphed on this weakness.”

We cannot know whether Confederation would have happened if he had never left Scotland, whether Canada would have expanded westward and built a railway to the Pacific had there been no John A. Macdonald. But, equally, we must not assume that others would have filled the gap with the same combination of personal skills and political judgment. “I have committed many mistakes,” he admitted in 1882, “… there are many things I have done wrongly, and many things I have neglected that I should have done.” Honest about his failures, he deserves the last word on his successes. “I have tried, according to the best of my judgment, to do what I could for the well-being of good government and future prosperity of this my beloved country.”