John A

by Richard J. Gwyn

  The importance of all the other assets that Macdonald deployed to keep together his coalition should not be underestimated. He was above all a politician who enjoyed politics immensely and who went at it with a zest and dedication matched by no other Canadian leader of his time.

  Unique to Macdonald also was the fact that he loved the political game, absolutely revelled in it, for its own sake. He just had fun. The failing of one Conservative member, he complained to another, was impatience: “He destroyed one or two marvellous good plots of ours by premature disclosure.” And he counselled a supporter he was trying to recruit as a candidate (in the end, successfully) that conversations with the governor general, Sir Edmund Head, “will do you good, as you have a great game to play before long.”

  From this time on, Macdonald sent out a stream of political letters—an absolute torrent of them. He gave advice to the editor of the pro-Conservative Hamilton Spectator on how to execute a reversal in policy: “It’s a damned sharp curve, but I think we can make it.” He showered upon members and supporters what he called “good bunkum arguments” on how to deal with such dangerously popular issues as Rep by Pop. He kept in close touch with Conservative newspaper editors, often accompanying his comments with references to likely advertising and printing contracts. “Splits,” or more than one Conservative candidate running in the same riding and so dividing the vote, kept him in a state of constant agitation. In one letter to a supporter, Macdonald raged, “We are losing everywhere from our friends splitting the party. If this continues it is all up with us.” As well, he scouted for candidates, gave them advice and sometimes provided campaign funds (at times from his own pocket), although men standing for office were expected then to cover their own electoral costs. He kept in touch with important non-Conservatives such as the education reformer Egerton Ryerson, who might be able to influence Wesleyan Methodists to vote Conservative (he did), and the leading Reformer Sidney Smith, whom he hoped to persuade to join the Liberal-Conservative cabinet (he did). And when elections approached, his advice to candidates was candid: “Canvass steadily and vigorously, yet quietly—get your own returning office, a true man selected.”

  The fairy dust that Macdonald sprinkled over everything was, of course, patronage. There was nothing new in this. Patronage has fuelled Canadian politics from its earliest days. Macdonald’s oldest preserved letter, dated November 22, 1836, was about patronage. “I am infinitely obliged to you for the hint respecting the clerkship of the peace,” the young lawyer wrote gratefully to a Macpherson cousin. He would remain silent, Macdonald wrote, until the incumbent had committed himself to leaving, “in which case I shall call upon you to exert your kind endeavours on my behalf.” As Macdonald’s letter suggests, patronage flourished because, as is the case in all underdeveloped countries, secure, white-collar jobs were scarce, and because no criteria existed to determine who merited them, other than political favouritism. The political scientist S.J.R. Noel has used the term “clientelism” to describe the condition of mutual dependency that patronage involved—the client needing anything from a land grant to a railway charter to a soft job, and the patron needing votes, or perhaps just deference.*64 Moreover, as Noel observed, clientelism was “long assumed to be a normal part of the political process because it was a normal part of practically everything else.” Patronage was a major issue in the Rebellions of 1837–38; it was also the prime issue in the fight for Responsible Government. The railway boom, which began shortly before Macdonald’s political career, attracted extensive offers of patronage simply because of the huge sums of capital involved. The promoter of the Great Western Railway, Samuel Zimmerman, claimed that at any time more members could be found in his apartment than in any room in the legislature.

  While Macdonald was doing nothing in the least new by distributing patronage, he used it in a radically new way. He employed it systematically as a tool to build and nurture the Conservative Party as an effective and ongoing institution. Unlike amateurish predecessors in all parties, he aimed not simply to please supporters by dishing out jobs, contracts, appointments and emoluments, but to make more Conservatives, both by solidifying the gratitude of those who were already members of the party and by attracting newcomers. He distributed patronage in sophisticated ways that derived from his understanding of human nature. He urged one candidate to “keep the Whitby Post Office [position] open until after the election” because “it may be valuable to have the office to give away.” He urged another to make the same kind of appointments before the election to make gratitude certain, but with no public announcements and the winners being told “they will be appointed immediately after the elections” so as to encourage them to “work harder for your return.” Over time, he became progressively more adept. Local members had to give their approval to patronage choices; those favoured had to have proof of having worked for the party; and no one could get a post by displacing an incumbent.

  Perhaps what was most original about Macdonald’s system was that he was entirely open, and entirely unapologetic, about what he was doing. He made little attempt to pretend that his purpose was good government rather than the good of the party. And he made certain that his own supporters understood his rules. When party members in Toronto complained they weren’t getting their share of goodies, Macdonald retorted, “As soon as Toronto returns Conservative members, it will get Conservative appointments.”

  It wasn’t all crass. If patronage was not about good government, in the sense of getting the best people in the right posts, Macdonald did care about the well-being of individuals. Some of his choices really amounted to charity. He wrote to one official, “De L’Armitage is dying of congestion of the liver or some such devilry and is obliged to give up his Rifle Company. He wants much to retain his rank. Pray do this for him & break his fall.” And, to a cabinet minister, “I have a letter from Noel wanting the Notaryship of the Bank. Can you give it to him[?] Poor fellow, he wants it badly enough.”

  In truth, Macdonald didn’t so much systematize patronage as personalize it. For his system to work, he always had to be there at its centre, with his winning personality, his remarkable range of contacts, his exceptional memory for names and deeds, his incomparable knowledge of politics and the governmental apparatus, and, far from least, his uncommon ability to work extremely hard at high speed. At the same time that he was creating a national, centrist party, he was creating a Macdonald party.

  Besides doing all this, Macdonald had yet one more substantial job: he had to run the country. For all practical purposes he had being doing that since mid-1854, when he functioned behind the facade of MacNab, just as he now functioned behind the facade of Taché. Within a few years of reaching the top, Macdonald had concocted solutions to two deeply divisive sectarian disputes that had bedevilled Canadian politics for more than a decade—the Clergy Reserves and separate schools. He then went right on to dispose of a third, entirely new issue that was almost as polarizing as the first two—the location of a permanent capital. All three involved an exercise in accommodation and compromise for the sake of national harmony.

  The first of the conflicts to develop concerned the Clergy Reserves. By virtue of the Constitutional Act of 1791, one-seventh of all the land in Upper Canada had been reserved for “the clergy,” with the revenues allocated to the established Anglican Church and, later, to the Church of Scotland (by coincidence, Macdonald’s own church). All other churches, the Roman Catholic and the newly expanding Protestant denominations, were exceedingly unhappy to be excluded from this support. Brown in particular was outraged, because this system violated his cherished “voluntary principle”—that each church should be supported entirely by its own believers. Proposals for reform had always splintered on the rock of opposition from Tory Conservatives, the great majority of whom were Anglicans.

  Macdonald’s solution gave something to everybody. The Clergy Reserves would be secularized, and the funds allocated to municipalities for the support of public schools. The
incumbent clergy of the Anglican Church and the Church of Scotland, though, would continue to receive payments until they died. When Macdonald first introduced legislation to deal with the Clergy Reserves, in October 1854, his strongest critics were his own Conservatives. But Brown, in a speech of exceptional generosity, agreed that a genuine advance had been made, even if it was still insufficient. The Tories who protested were now isolated.

  Macdonald’s two speeches in support of this legislation are among his most expressive. In a rare departure from the practical and the immediate, he used them to speak directly about the public interest and how it should be advanced. He was shrewd enough to say little about the details of how he proposed to dispose of the Clergy Reserves fund, talking instead about how the political process itself ought to work. Macdonald talked, that is to say, about the art of compromise.

  He made his first comments on October 27, 1854, during a debate about a private member’s bill to regulate religious holidays. After Brown delivered a strong speech criticizing what he saw as special treatment for Roman Catholics, Macdonald addressed the wider issue of religious tolerance. “It was of the very greatest importance for the mutual comfort of the inhabitants of Canada to agree as much as possible,” he declared, “and the only way they could agree was by respecting each other’s principles, and as much as possible even each other’s prejudices. Unless they were governed by a spirit of compromise and kindly feeling towards each other, they could never get on harmoniously together.”*65

  Ten days later, Macdonald spoke directly on the Clergy Reserves legislation. His bill had been attacked, he remarked, both by those who opposed any changes to the existing system and by those who opposed continuing payments to incumbent clergy. The effect, he said, would be “that the agitation will still be kept up. On the one hand, the ‘drum ecclesiastic’ will be beaten at every election, the worst feelings would be excited…whilst others would be constantly attacking the charge of paying the salaries of these ‘drones’ as these people would be called.”

  Compromise was the only solution. “There is no maxim which experience teaches more clearly than this, that you must yield to the times. Resistance may be protracted until it produces rebellion.” Macdonald continued, “I believe it is a great mistake in politics and in private life to resist when resistance is hopeless. I believe there may be an affected heroism and bravado in sinking with the ship, but no man can be charged with cowardice if, when he finds the ship sinking, he betakes himself to the boat.” He then returned to his theme: “I call on the hon. gentleman [Brown] and upon the Church whose interests he advocates, to yield. I call on them to cease this agitation. They may smart under a sense of wrong and may feel they are deprived of rights, but…one thing is clear that the blow must fall, that secularization must take place. Why then resist against all hope? Why continue to agitate the public mind? Why not yield to inevitable necessity?” Macdonald won this battle against sectarianism by a comfortable margin of 62 to 39 votes. With the Clergy Reserves of Upper Canada settled, Macdonald moved on to deal with Lower Canada’s issue of its quasi-feudal seigneurial system, which gave the seigneurs ownership of the land and left their censitaires as landless tenants. Other legislation in 1854 abolished the seigneurial system.*66

  Another year, another battle. The issue this time was separate schools. Pressure for them to be supported by public funds came from the Irish Catholics, whose leader was the newly appointed bishop of Toronto, Armand-François Charbonnel, a hard-line ultramontane. Macdonald crafted legislation that met the bishop roughly halfway. The largest bloc of Upper Canada members were now the populist Grits, deeply mistrustful of anything Catholic and ardent believers in what was known as the “double majority” parliamentary convention—that no legislation affecting Upper Canada should be passed unless it was approved by a majority of Upper Canadian members. (Likewise for Lower Canada, in reverse.)

  Securing legislative approval would be difficult. To manoeuvre himself into position, Macdonald concocted a clever and partially plausible argument. “He should be sorry,” he told the House, if a legislature, “the majority of whose members were Protestants professing to recognize the great Protestant principle of the right of private judgment, should yet seek to deprive Roman Catholics of their power to educate their children according to their own principles.”

  Nevertheless, the legislature’s majority of Reform and Grit Protestants had every intention of doing just that. Macdonald, though, had spotted a loophole in the “double majority” rule that gave these members their de facto veto. This was that while Upper Canada members had to approve legislation affecting their own territory, no one had ever said that this opinion needed to be expressed by the majority of all elected Upper Canada members rather than just the majority of those in the House when the vote was called. Macdonald waited until the final days of the 1855 session, and as soon as many of the Reformers and Grits had left for home he introduced a bill to extend the privileges of separate schools, much as Bishop Charbonnel had demanded. To the belated fury of the now shrunken opposition, the measure was brought quickly to a vote. It passed by a clear majority of the members present, many of them being Canadien members in alliance with Macdonald.

  Macdonald subsequently justified his tactic on the grounds that the alternative was to withdraw all public funds from an established institution, the separate schools. Such a draconian solution could work only “if they [the opposition] could make the world all of one way of thinking…yet he doubted very much if things would go on one bit better on that account.” This was gamesmanship: Macdonald had won, but the cost of his victory was to further inflame sectarian rage.

  Macdonald experienced more success with another issue that was potentially sectarian rather than explicitly so—the choice of a single permanent capital.*67 One point was certain: whichever city or hamlet was chosen, either the English Protestants of Upper Canada or the French Catholics of Lower Canada would be furious. Indeed, feelings on the issue were so strong that more than two hundred votes on it were taken in the Legislative Assembly.

  There are two particularly good stories about how Ottawa got picked: that Queen Victoria threw a dart at a map, or that Lady Head, the governor general’s wife, made a sketch of the view from what is now Parliament Hill and showed it to an impressed Queen. Common to both stories is the point that the Queen made the choice—and she, of course, could do no wrong. In fact, Macdonald concocted the Queen’s intervention in conjunction with Sir Edmund Head. He and Head had become close, in part because their Toronto houses were near each other, but more because Head, an academic, found in Macdonald an intellectual kin rare in the colony. Head, who favoured Ottawa on the grounds that it was “the least objectionable” of all the contenders, first sent a message to the Colonial Office that “it would not be expedient that any answer be given for 8 or 10 months.” Only after a delay that cooled everyone’s tempers did the Palace send its reply: Ottawa was indeed Her Majesty’s choice. Macdonald got the deed done while appearing to have had no part in it.

  He wasn’t yet finished with it, though. On July 28, 1858, while the House was debating an address to the Queen on the subject, a Canadien member moved a cleverly worded motion that opposed not the choice of Her Majesty—an unimaginable act—but the objective suitability of Ottawa. Most of the customarily tame bloc of bleus broke away from their alliance with Macdonald, and the errant motion was passed 64 to 50. This defeat put the life of the Taché-Macdonald government in peril. Brown, overexcited, moved a motion of adjournment to give everyone time to think. The bleus realizing now how they could make up for their disloyalty, streamed into the House to vote en masse against Brown’s routine motion. Macdonald’s hold on power was thus restored. One day later, however, on what he chose to call “an insult offered to the Queen,” Macdonald and his ministers resigned.

  Governor General Head now invited Brown to form a government. He agreed and did so. Just two days later, though, Brown was out and Macdonald was back again in pow
er. These events were so unprecedented, and so surreal, that a legend grew that Macdonald had planned all along to lure Brown into a trap and there to crush him. Brown indeed was crushed, but he trapped himself; Macdonald had merely closed the gate over Brown’s prone body.

  Brown’s miscalculation was that once he’d agreed to replace Macdonald’s government, the parliamentary rules of the day required all the incoming ministers to resign and regain their seats in by-elections. While his ministers were temporarily absent, Brown would lose his majority in the House. To survive, he had to have an election, which, under the circumstances, he was virtually certain to win. However, as Head had warned Brown when he first called on him, the preceding election had taken place only seven months earlier; to avoid back-to-back elections, Head advised Brown that he had to reserve the right to invite the just-resigned Macdonald to try to form an alternative new government. On Monday, August 2, Brown lost a vote in the House. He asked Head for a dissolution so an election could be called. Head refused. Brown resigned immediately, a bare two days after having taken office.