Speech of Sir John a Macdonald on Introducing the Bill to Give Effect to the Treaty of Washington as Regards Canada: Delivered in the House of Commons ... on Friday the 3rd May 1872
(Excerpt from Speech of Sir John a Macdonald on Introducin...)
Excerpt from Speech of Sir John a Macdonald on Introducing the Bill to Give Effect to the Treaty of Washington as Regards Canada: Delivered in the House of Commons of Canada, on Friday the 3rd May 1872.
Liberal Conservative Hand-Book: Grits in Office; Profession and Practice Contrasted; Sir John Macdonald's Speech at Montreal; Hon. C. Tupper's Speech at Halifax
Sir John Alexander Macdonald was the first Prime Minister of Canada.
Background
Macdonald was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on January 11, 1815. His father was Hugh Macdonald, an unsuccessful merchant, who had married John's mother, Helen Shaw, on October 21, 1811. John was the third of five children. After his father's business ventures left him in debt, the family immigrated to Kingston, in Upper Canada (today the southern and eastern portions of Ontario), in 1820, where there were already a number of Macdonald relatives and connections.
The Macdonalds initially lived with another family, but then resided over a store which Hugh Macdonald ran. Soon after their arrival, John's younger brother James died from a blow to the head by a servant who was supposed to look after the boys. After Hugh's store failed, the family moved to Hay Bay (south of Napanee, Ontario), west of Kingston, where Hugh unsuccessfully ran another shop. His father, in 1829, was appointed a magistrate for the Midland District. John Macdonald's mother was a lifelong influence on her son, helping him in his difficult first marriage and remaining a force in his life until her 1862 death.
Education
John initially attended local schools. When he was aged 10, his family scraped together the money to send him to Midland District Grammar School in Kingston. Macdonald's formal schooling ended at 15, a common school-leaving age at a time when only children from the most prosperous families were able to attend university. Nevertheless, Macdonald later regretted leaving school when he did, remarking to his secretary Joseph Pope that if he had attended university, he might have embarked on a literary career.
In 1830 Macdonald was articled to a prospering lawyer with connections that were to prove helpful to him, and he rose rapidly in his profession. He began his own practice in 1835 in Kingston, actually before he had been called to the bar, and for several years lived the usual active life of a young professional man, active in local political and social affairs. Since Kingston was a border town, it was inevitably involved in the border incidents of the late 1830s, and Macdonald's first celebrated case found him in 1838 defending a captured invader from the United States on a charge of murder. Kingston's location kept it immediately free of the abortive Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837, but Macdonald's sympathies were from the first on the side of constituted authority, and the rebellions and the coincidental border incidents gave him a lasting concern for the military vulnerability of the colonies.
Macdonald was elected to the Assembly of the Province of Canada (created in 1840) in 1844 as the member for Kingston, beginning a public career that spanned half a century. His abilities brought him rapid promotion, and he became receiver general in W. H. Draper's Cabinet in 1847; thereafter he was without public office only when his party was in opposition. He worked indefatigably to conciliate the dissident elements in his party and by 1851 was the recognized leader of its Canada West (now Ontario) wing.
By 1856, when Macdonald was, as attorney general for Canada West, the recognized leader in the Assembly of a Cabinet whose titular head was in the upper house, his position had been confirmed, and his leadership was never seriously challenged in his lifetime. He was premier of the Province of Canada in all but name while his party was in power (and actually so for the first time in 1857), simultaneously holding major portfolios, which included Militia Affairs.
The politics of the Province of Canada, in which Canada East and West had equal legislative representation, was extremely unstable, and successive administrations in the colony, in the absence of reliable party lines, broke down; an impasse was reached in 1864, when Macdonald was one of the leading protagonists in arranging what became the Great Coalition, which led to confederation in 1867. In 1858, although federation was an older idea than that date, he had been a member of the first Canadian Cabinet to announce officially its interest in a federal union for the British North American colonies.
Once he had taken up confederation, Macdonald threw all his energies into the task of persuading the colonists of its soundness as a solution to their economic and military weaknesses. In 1864, he led the delegation from Canada to the conference at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island and continued to lead when the conference adjourned to Quebec in the same year. In 1865, he went to London to discuss military arrangements for Canada in the light of the outcome of the American Civil War and resulting British-American relations. Macdonald was back in London in 1866, though disturbed by Fenian raids on Canada from American soil. He presided over the conference which worked its way through several drafts of the British North America bill before its final enactment by the United Kingdom Parliament as the written basis of the Canadian constitution.
In 1867 Macdonald became the first prime minister of the Dominion of Canada. He set about consolidating into reality his vision of Canada as a northern transcontinental nation whose nerve center was always to be the national government. He immediately pacified Nova Scotia, the least satisfied member of the new federation. He gradually gathered into federal hands control of the election machinery, giving the country a unified national electoral system which still exists. He used freely the federal power of disallowing provincial statutes which he considered to be against the national interest. He worked hard to enlarge Canada's boundaries, first helping to acquire the Northwestern Territory and then obtaining the admission of Manitoba, British Columbia, and Prince Edward Island.
Macdonald consolidated Canada's continental position in more than territorial ways. Through two great policies - the building, under incredible financial and technical difficulties, of a transcontinental railway; and the establishment of a national policy of protective tariffs for the stimulation of industry - he sought to build the national economy clearly envisaged in the British North America Act. The railway cost him his only major electoral defeat, for in 1873, in a well-meant and undoubtedly customary move, he turned to potential backers of the Canadian Pacific Railway for election funds; and the opposition caught him out. Facing certain parliamentary defeat, he then resigned and lost the general election of 1874.
But in opposition, Macdonald was as wily as in office: he gave his Liberal opponents a couple of years in which to fall out among themselves and then produced his national policy, which he discussed widely at great public picnics, beginning in 1876. In 1878 he returned triumphantly to the prime ministership and held it until his death. Macdonald was fortunate in his political career, as his opponents never really produced a fighter who could challenge him. Even in his most trying problems, as in the Riel Rebellions of 1870 and 1885, his opposition seemed unable to exploit his undoubted difficulties; and even after the execution of Louis Riel in 1885 - an act which, despite careful judicial decisions, outraged some Roman Catholic and considerable French-Canadian opinion - he won his last two general elections. He was defeated as the candidate for Kingston only once, in 1878, but in the same election he won two other seats and sat for one of them.
After the election, Macdonald suffered a stroke, which left him partially paralysed and unable to speak. "The Old Chieftain" lingered for days, remaining mentally alert, before dying in the late evening of Saturday, 6 June 1891. Thousands filed by his open casket in the Senate Chamber; his body was transported by funeral train to his hometown of Kingston, with crowds greeting the train at each stop. On arrival in Kingston, Macdonald lay in state again in City Hall, wearing the uniform of an Imperial Privy Counselor.
At a time when party lines were loose, Macdonald regarded himself as a moderate conservative and always remained one, serving for the rest of his life in the Liberal Conservative party.
Macdonald never relinquished his interest in the defense of British North America and was indeed frequently exasperated by what seemed to him British indifference not only to Canada's military needs but to its economic relations with the United States; he often saw that British and American authorities were, in their own interests, only too ready to make concessions to each other at Canada's expense.
Views
Quotations:
"Politics is a game requiring great coolness and an utter abnegation of prejudice and personal feeling."
"There were, unfortunately, no great principles on which parties were divided - politics became a mere struggle for office."
"Anybody may support me when I am right. What I want is someone that will support me when I am wrong."
"There may be obstructions, local differences may intervene, but it matters not - the wheel is now revolving, and we are only the fly on the wheel, we cannot delay it. The union of the colonies of British America under one sovereign is a fixed fact."
"I don’t care for office for the sake of money, but for the sake of power, and for the sake of carrying out my own views of what is best for the country."
"When fortune empties her chamber pot on your head, smile and say, ‘We are going to have a summer shower'."
"If you would know the depth of meanness of human nature, you have got to be a Prime Minister running a general election."
"My sins of omission and commission I do not deny; but I trust that it may be said of me in the ultimate issue, ‘Much is forgiven because he loved much,’ for I have loved my country with a passionate love."
"If I had influence over the minds of the people of Canada, any power over their intellect, I would leave them this legacy: ‘Whatever you do, adhere to the Union. We are a great country, and shall become one of the greatest in the universe if we preserve it; we shall sink into insignificance and adversity if we suffer it to be broken."
Personality
Macdonald was plagued until his later years by what would now be recognized as alcoholism: he was a sporadic heavy drinker, often at inconvenient times for his public duties. Yet his colleagues never lost faith in him, and successive able governors general, who had to report on his activities to their home government, treated his intemperance as merely an unfortunate weakness in an otherwise remarkable man. That he was. A cheerful, convivial person who loved stories, a crafty partisan who enjoyed discomfiting his opponents by any means, and a voracious and perceptive reader of a wide range of literature, Macdonald had a vast capacity for arousing the affection of his colleagues.
Quotes from others about the person
Conservative Senator Hugh Segal believes that Macdonald's true monument is Canada itself: "Without Macdonald we'd be a country that begins somewhere at the Manitoba-Ontario border that probably goes throughout the east. Newfoundland would be like Alaska and I think that would also go for Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and B. C. We'd be buying our oil from the United States. It would diminish our quality of life and range of careers, and our role in the world would have been substantially reduced."
Macdonald's biographers note his contribution to establishing Canada as a nation. Swainson suggests that Macdonald's desire for a free and tolerant Canada became part of its national outlook: "He not only helped to create Canada, but contributed immeasurably to its character."
Gwyn said of Macdonald, "His accomplishments were staggering: Confederation above all, but almost as important, if not more so, extending the country across the continent by a railway that was, objectively, a fiscal and economic insanity ... On the ledger's other side, he was responsible for the CPR scandal, the execution of Louis Riel, and for the head tax on Chinese workers. He's thus not easy to scan. His private life was mostly barren. Yet few other Canadian leaders - Pierre Trudeau, John Diefenbaker for a time, Wilfrid Laurier - had the same capacity to inspire love."
Connections
Macdonald's brilliant public career was not matched by an equally felicitous private life. His first wife, his cousin Isabella Clark, whom he married in 1843, was an invalid almost all their life together and died in 1857; their first son died in his second year, but their second son, Hugh John, lived to become a lawyer-politician with modest success.
In 1867 Macdonald married Susan Agnes Bernard, and they were very happy; but their only child, Mary, was a hydrocephalic who never approached normalcy.