John A
Page 9
Few in Upper Canada noticed. Their attention was focused on the other part of Durham’s report, one calling for a totally different kind of Parliament. It was to be a responsible Parliament, with a cabinet composed of members of the majority party rather than chosen at the pleasure of the governor general. In a phrase of almost breathtaking boldness, Durham wrote, “The British people of the North American Colonies are a people on whom we may safely rely, and to whom we must not grudge power.”
Durham almost went right to the constitutional finish line. He recognized the advantages of Confederation: “Such a union would…enable all the Provinces to cooperate for all common purposes,” he said. “If we wish to prevent the extension of this [American] influence, it can only be done by raising up for the North American colonist some nationality of his own.” At the last instant, Durham drew back from specifically recommending Confederation because he doubted that Canada possessed politicians of the calibre needed for so ambitious an undertaking.
At the time, Durham’s report attracted little applause either in Canada or in Britain. A century passed before it came to be recognized by some as “the greatest state document in British imperial history.” His recommendation for Responsible Government began a fundamental reordering of the Empire, and it set the political maturation of the British North American colonies in motion. Had that precedent—and its logical successor of Confederation—been applied to Ireland, as William Gladstone attempted in his Home Rule Bill in 1886, thousands of lives could have been saved.
Embedded in the proposal for Responsible Government was a fundamental illogicality. The colonial secretary, Lord John Russell, spotted it immediately: it would be “impossible,” he wrote his cabinet colleagues, “for a Governor to be responsible to his Sovereign and a local legislature both at the same time.” To stop Responsible Government, the British government sent out another of its best and brightest, Lord Sydenham, then in the cabinet as president of the Board of Trade. Still in his thirties, multi-lingual, highly professional and confident to the point of cockiness, Sydenham was one of the ablest of governors general—and one of the most dashing. Described as “worship[ping] equally at the Shrine of Venus and at the Shrine of Bacchus,” he died following a fall from his horse after a visit to his mistress. He was also one of the more corrupt. The election of 1841, which he ran single-handedly, has few equals in Canadian history for chicanery, gerrymandering, vote-rigging, bribery and the systematic use of violence. Sydenham’s candidates won handily.
To implement the part of Durham’s program that the British government found wholly acceptable—the assimilation of the French—Sydenham moved the seat of government to Kingston, its attraction being that it was entirely English-speaking. All the legislative documents were unilingual; and the Throne Speech, read by Sydenham himself, was in English only.*38 Following his death later that year, his successor, Sir Charles Bagot, quickly recognized that Britain had positioned itself on the wrong side of history. “Whether the doctrine of responsible government is openly acknowledged or only tacitly acquiesced in, virtually it exists,” Bagot wrote home in 1842.
In fact, Britain ceded Responsible Government with remarkable readiness. The quite separate colony of Nova Scotia actually gained it two months ahead of Canada, in 1848. But it had been allowed effectively in 1846, when Britain adopted free trade and abolished its protectionist Corn Laws and Navigation Laws. Thereafter, Canada and several other colonies were free to make their own trading arrangements, thereby exercising de facto self-government.
The fight for Responsible Government mattered, though. It entered Canadian political mythology as a sort of non-violent version of the Boston Tea Party. And the struggle brought together one of the most important and appealing of all Canadian political partnerships, one that would provide Macdonald with a template of the way to fashion and sustain a political alliance between the country’s two principal European races.
One of these partners was Robert Baldwin. The son of a successful lawyer, William Baldwin, who had originated the idea of Responsible Government, Robert came from the same social circles as the Family Compact. He was highly intelligent and of irreproachable integrity. Robert took over the cause from his father and, in January 1836, sent a letter to the Colonial Office. In it, he made a case for Responsible Government on the politically shrewd grounds that it was essential for “continuing the connection” with Britain. Durham’s advocacy of the idea can be dated to this letter.
The other partner in the emerging alliance was Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine. He was the prototype of the commanding le chef figure whom Quebecers have so often followed. Grave in manner and exuding gravitas, LaFontaine was blessed with a resemblance to Napoleon that he assiduously fostered. As a one-time Patriote, he had nationalist credentials that were unimpeachable.
Robert Baldwin. He won Responsible Government, or self-government, for the colony of Canada. High-minded and single-minded, he was known as the “Man of the One Idea.”
Soon after the formal creation of the United Province of Canada, LaFontaine spotted an opening for himself and for his Canadiens. Skilfully used, the new configuration could lead not merely to la survivance in defiance of Durham’s assimilation program but to substantive economic benefits for his people. He saw that an alliance between his bloc of French members and the Reform group led by Baldwin would form a majority in the legislature. Baldwin would get the Responsible Government he so desired (even if it was of small interest to LaFontaine, who, by inclination, was a conservative). In exchange, LaFontaine would get the keys to the patronage treasure chests that Responsible Government would transfer from the governor general to the Canadian politicians in power. Though a partnership of convenience, the alliance was also one of principle and of personal trust. In the election of 1841, with LaFontaine badly in need of a winnable seat, Baldwin found one for him among the burghers of the riding of Fourth York in Upper Canada. A year later, LaFontaine returned the compliment by handing to Baldwin the equally unilingual riding of Rimouski. (And at the personal level, Baldwin sent all four of his children to French schools in Quebec City.)
Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine. With Baldwin, he forged a French-English political alliance that turned Durham’s policy upside-down.
To move the Imperial government over to the “right” side of history took a new governor general, Lord Elgin. Exceptionally able, he was Durham’s son-in-law and, later, viceroy of India—the top position on the Imperial ladder.*39 The key year was 1848, when an election re turned a majority for Baldwin and LaFontaine. Acting on the principle of the sovereignty of the people, Elgin accepted the result and invited the pair to form the first biracial ministry. (Technically, LaFontaine, the leader of the largest bloc of members, was the premier. In practice, Baldwin functioned as co-premier, a system followed throughout the life of the United Province of Canada.) At the opening of that year’s session of the Legislative Assembly, Elgin read the Throne Speech in English, as all his predecessors had done, and then, after a fractional pause, read it again in French. Canadien members burst into wild applause and song; one so forgot himself that he rushed up and kissed the governor general on both cheeks.
Governor General Lord Elgin, with his wife, Mary Louisa, her sister and an aide. Unusually able and far-sighted, he ended Durham’s assimilationist policy by reading the Throne Speech in English and then, for the first time ever, repeating it in French.
The main immediate beneficiaries of the change were the graduates now pouring out of Lower Canada’s collèges classiques. Historian Jacques Monet has memorably described what happened in his essay “The Political Ideas of Baldwin and Lafontaine”: “With a kind of bacterial thoroughness it [Quebec’s emerging middle class] began to invade every vital organ of government and divide up among its members hundreds of posts.” Monet went on to remark that Canadiens “came to realize that parliamentary democracy could be more than a lovely ideal: it was also a profitable fact.”
Elgin accepted this downgrading,
for himself and for his successors. In a dispatch to the colonial secretary he remarked that, henceforth, governors general would have to depend on “moral influence,” adding, surely without really believing it, that this could “go far to compensate for the loss of power consequent on the surrender of patronage.” Even Baldwin, himself skittish about patronage, declared stoutly in a legislature speech that “if appointments were not to be used for party purposes, let those who thought differently occupy the treasury benches.”*40
As always in government, some of the consequences of Responsible Government were unanticipated. The transfer of power from the governor general to elected politicians meant that Canadians hereafter placed blame for the mistakes that all governments make no longer at the entrance to their governor general’s residence but at the doors of their cabinet ministers and premiers. Certainly, the tone of Canadian politics worsened from this time on. Sectarianism, or the injection into politics of the rivalries, suspicions and hatreds between religious groups, now became the dominant issue in Canadian politics. No less significant, once the premiers occupied the shoes of the governors general, they began to acquire some of the quasi-dictatorial habits of those who had run the country before the change to Responsible Government in 1848. Cabinet ministers now became the premiers’ ministers, just as they had once been ministers of the Crown’s representative. The ascent to an imperial prime ministership—best described by Donald Savoie in his Governing from the Centre—began very early in this country’s history; it happened, moreover, far earlier here than in the United States, occurring there largely because the United States acquired immense foreign responsibilities—always quasi-imperial in their nature—which was not at all the case here. An imperial prime minister is another political attribute that is as Canadian as maple syrup.
These were epochal changes to Canada’s political makeup. Yet Macdonald’s contribution to them was almost non-existent. He made a few somewhat critical but carefully noncommittal comments about Responsible Government as a potential threat to the connection with Britain. For the most part, though, he simply listened and learned. It wasn’t long, now, before the era of Responsible Government would be replaced by the era of government by Macdonald.
EIGHT
A Short Time before the Long Game
My plan thro’ life is never to give up; if I don’t carry a thing this year, I will next. John A. Macdonald
Macdonald’s appointment by Conservative premier William Draper to the junior cabinet post of receiver general on May 22, 1847—roughly equivalent to being minister of revenue today—constituted a respectably rapid promotion. By then he’d been in the legislature for just three years and was only thirty-two years old. The Toronto Globe, the champion of the Reformers, dismissively advised its readers that he was “a harmless man” who, during two sessions of the legislature, had “barely opened his mouth.” The Montreal Transcript was more positive, describing Macdonald as “a rising man.” Nevertheless, there was more to the Globe’s judgment than partisanship.
Macdonald’s public record was certainly thin. In each legislature session he’d seldom delivered more than one speech, and his contributions had almost all been on secondary issues. He still seemed undecided whether to make politics or the law his primary career. Indeed, Macdonald had been offered his first cabinet position—as solicitor general—as early as the winter of 1846–47 but turned it down because “it would make me too dependent on Govt and I like to steer my own course.” During his ten months in the two junior portfolios that he did accept (the second being the somewhat more substantial one of commissioner of Crown lands), he made no great impression. Late in 1847, Macdonald introduced a bill to amend the charter of King’s College in Toronto in a manner that would square the interests of the founding Anglicans with those of other religions, notably Catholics, then excluded from the college. His attempt at conciliation failed, and he had to withdraw the bill.
A sharper observer would, nevertheless, have marked Macdonald as a legislator with potential. From the start, he was a popular member of the cosy club that all parliaments become. He sat through the interminable debates, cheering on fellow Conservatives and heckling opposition members—principally the loose group of Reformers—with teasing quips. He spent many hours studying in the library. He schmoozed and chaffed and drank with the best of them, and for as long as any of them. And while he seldom spoke, his speaking style was fresh and effective. Rather than the hours-long orations then the convention, Macdonald’s speeches were short (seldom more than thirty minutes in duration) and conversational in tone, as though he were talking to each member across a dinner table.
As a politician, Macdonald suffered from one serious defect, especially in those days when oratory mattered and there were no microphones to add body and timbre to a speaker’s voice. Even his highly laudatory biographer Joseph Pope admitted that Macdonald “could not be called a great speaker” and that his voice, “while pleasant, was not strong, nor remarkably distinct.” Journalists covering the debates complained constantly that his low voice and manner of delivery—“careless utterance, irregular inflections of voice and general disregard for acoustic effect,” in the phrase of one—caused them to miss parts of his speeches. The leading journalist Hector Fabre (later a senator and diplomat) noted that “he is languid at times at stating his case and rather gropes through his opening sentences.”
Macdonald rarely prepared his speeches in advance but felt his way along, testing out arguments and lines that might get through to his audiences, and chopping and changing them until he was hitting the mark. Pope, with a tone of amused resignation, recalled that Macdonald often wrote down the topic headings for his speech on the back of an envelope, which he then “not infrequently contrived to mislay.” As a consequence, despite some disorganization, he kept that vital ingredient of spontaneity. There may have been defects in his speeches in conventional terms, but Macdonald consistently held his audiences. Even in his earliest years he pulled members into the House because he put on such a good show. Fabre remarked on the “matchless tact” with which Macdonald crossed swords with opponents, scoring points but never drawing blood, because, as he put it, Macdonald was “too clever and too well-versed in the knowledge of mankind to be cruel: his executions are always amusing; they extort a smile even from the gloomiest victims.” Above all, his listeners knew that at one point or other Macdonald would make them laugh—and that often he would make them laugh at themselves.
Macdonald possessed another invaluable asset that made him difficult to outpoint in extemporaneous debates: he had an exceptional memory. He possessed, as many successful politicians do, an uncanny ability to remember names and faces. The examples are endless. J.P. Reeves, once a resident of Kingston, met Macdonald after an absence of more than twenty years when he was a member of a guard of honour in Belleville. “Hello, Reeves. Stand at ease,” said Macdonald, after which they talked about old times. A Mr. Munroe, whom Macdonald had met once at a convention in Kingston in 1849, he remembered by his correct name when they met again thirty-three years later in St. Thomas. Either in jousts in the legislature or in contests with hecklers on the stump, Macdonald repeatedly gained an advantage by tossing out extracts from documents he had read long before, including statements once made by his opponent of the moment. The combination of his memory and his constant reading left him never short of quotations from British authors such as Trollope and Dickens. His journalist friend T.C. Patteson once got into a literary argument with colleagues and, to settle it, wrote a letter to Macdonald asking what line followed “Ye gentlemen of England who sit at home at ease.” Back instantly came the answer, written on the reverse of Patteson’s note, “Ah, little do you think upon the dangers of the seas.”
Perhaps the most striking example of Macdonald’s memory concerns a newspaper article that he scanned quickly in 1840 and then, forty years later, referred to while giving a speech in the Commons. In the speech, Macdonald recalled that “an Indian once sai
d to myself, ‘We are the wild animals; you cannot make an ox of a deer.’” He then used this example to support his argument that “you cannot make an agriculturalist of the Indian.” The original article, written by an Anglican missionary to a Mohawk community at Napanee, near Kingston, described how an Indian chief had told him that God had made all kinds of different animals, from the wily fox to the industrious beaver, and also all kinds of different men. “Now you cannot teach the fox to live like the beaver, nor can you make the Indian work and live like the white man,” reasoned the chief. “I have a farm and could live by it, but when the season comes for game or fish…I am tempted to go and look for it, even to the neglect of sowing and gathering my crops.” With such a memory bank to draw on, Macdonald was not an easy opponent to outwit.
Behind the scenes, Macdonald’s aptitudes and talents were beginning to get recognized. William Draper, an able man but lacking in the political skills needed to be a successful premier, began to regard him as a protégé. In March 1847 he summoned Macdonald to Montreal to help him brief the new governor general, Lord Elgin—in particular to make sure that Elgin understood the party sufficiently well not to “mistake ultra Toryism for Conservatism (i.e., selfishness for patriotism).” Elgin later described Macdonald in a dispatch home as “a person of consideration,” although, for reasons not entirely clear, relations between the two men were never cordial.