The John A. Macdonald Retrospective 2-Book Bundle. Ged Martin
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passing by seventy-one votes to thirty-one. On his second day in office, Premier Brown asked the governor general to call an election. In a rare invocation of the Crown’s prerogative, Sir Edmund Head refused. The governor general had already indicated that he might refuse to allow a fresh election but, as Head wrote privately, Brown believed “he could bully me into dissolving.” Franchise qualifications had been relaxed in recent years, but no provision had been made for reliable voters’ lists. During the recent elections, returning officers had been intimidated into accepting blatantly bogus claims: in Quebec City, thousands of dubious voters allegedly included British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston and French Emperor Napoleon III. Premier Macdonald had carried legislation to create voters’ rolls, but these were not yet ready, and other abuses remained. Head argued that “a new election, under precisely the same laws, held within six to eight months of the last” would be equally unsatisfactory. However, Head was known to like Macdonald, and critics suspected a secret alliance between them. John A. himself angrily branded the charge of collusion “false as hell” but, in England, a senior civil servant suspected that Head was “too much under the influence of Macdonald.” Frustrated and furious, Premier Brown resigned on August 4.
“Government no. 3 pretty much identical with no. 1,” was Head’s laconic summary of the outcome of a turbulent week. However, there was one notable change: the former ministers mostly returned, but Cartier was now premier. John A. Macdonald had been unlucky in his eight months at the provincial helm, politically in the lop-sided election result, personally through the hammer blow of Isabella’s death. But politics is an unforgiving trade and, for all his efficiency, charm, and political cunning, John A. Macdonald had proved a disappointment in Canada’s highest office. Worse still, he had formally admitted his alcohol problem. His resignation on a trumped-up pretext had proved a ludicrous miscalculation, although it would become a slow-burn grievance in Kingston that his premiership had made the rival city of Ottawa Canada’s capital. Macdonald and Cartier remained allies but, down to 1867, the Montrealer was the senior partner. He was not pleased when Macdonald supplanted him as first prime minister of the Dominion.
The week of petty politicking played out in a bizarre finale. Somebody recalled that the law had been changed in 1857 to exempt ministers from fighting by-elections if they moved between portfolios within thirty days — a device to permit leisurely Cabinet reshuffles. Since Brown’s “Short Administration” had survived only forty-eight hours, the returning ministers were well within the timeframe, so long as they accepted fresh portfolios. On August 6, John A. Macdonald was sworn in to Cartier’s Cabinet as postmaster general. The next day, he resumed his old office as attorney general West. This was politics as a card game, and the episode was nicknamed the “double shuffle.” Some said the ministers had accepted their joke jobs just before midnight, waited till the clock struck and then picked up their Bibles to swear themselves into their previous portfolios. Victorians were shocked at the sacrilege. Macdonald later implied that the dodge was not his idea but, for the remainder of his career, enemies remembered the squalid pantomime of the double shuffle.
Building Parliament in Canada’s compromise capital Ottawa. His Kingston voters blamed Macdonald for backing the rival city.
Paradoxically, this shabby episode spawned an inspirational policy. Almost casually, the new ministry announced that it would ask the Maritime provinces to discuss how Confederation might “perhaps hereafter be practicable.” The initiative was both tentative and tactical. It was the price paid for recruiting Alexander Galt, a reputed financial genius (although he had problems with the concept of a balanced budget) and an early enthusiast for British North American union. Cartier also needed a big idea to trump Grit talk of a two-headed Canadian federation, and Macdonald likely recalled Nova Scotian enthusiasm for the wider union in London the previous year. Above all, raising the Confederation issue might permit delay over Ottawa. Quebec City’s campaign to become the permanent seat of government had argued that its central position between Canada and the Maritimes would make it the obvious capital of a united British North America. Discussing Confederation tacitly signalled to the Bleus that Ottawa might yet be dumped. However, the ploy was checkmated by the governor general’s threat to resign unless Cartier backed the Queen’s selection.
For Cartier’s new ministry, the union of the provinces was more an aspiration, perhaps even just a slogan, than a practical policy. There was potential for disagreement over the design of any such union: would it imitate the American federation, in which Washington shared its authority with state legislatures, or copy Britain, where a single Parliament at Westminster ruled the entire United Kingdom? Cartier wanted French Canadians to control their own autonomous unit, but Macdonald admired the British constitution, a preference confirmed by the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861. In 1858, this difference was papered over with the phrase “a bond of a federal character” — “bond” meant strong, “federal” meant weak. The initiative petered out in a round of dispatches and delegations, but the Confederation genie was out of the bottle, and the issue returned to the political agenda in 1864.
Macdonald’s disappointing premiership left his career curiously becalmed at the very top of politics. He claimed he was “unwilling” to return to office in August 1858, “but Cartier would not do anything without me.” His health was poor and, by November, it was “no secret” that he was planning to quit politics altogether. “Having been First Minister, he has no higher point to reach,” wrote a friendly journalist. The Grits launched a private prosecution to challenge the legality of the double shuffle. Macdonald faced massive fines if he lost the case. In fact he won, but the action was launched in the name of a man who was bankrupt, so he could not recover his costs. The Globe alleged that the thought of losing Macdonald created panic among “the hungry, unprincipled crew who call him leader.” But was he really indispensable? In July 1859, Macdonald discovered that Galt and Cartier had authorized a major bank guarantee without telling him. Angry that he had “not been consulted,” he drafted a resignation letter. Maybe he never sent it: the risk of acceptance was too great. In fact, Macdonald was probably not consulted because he had been adrift on a steamboat in Georgian Bay. He had joined an inspection tour — a political junket — sailing to Sault Ste. Marie, but the ship’s engines had failed and the helpless vessel drifted dangerously close to the rocky Bruce Peninsula. Even George Brown was shocked at how close Canada’s political elite had come to perishing. “Little as I owe them, I would not like them to go off in that way.” John A. Macdonald did not travel west again until 1886, when he rode the train to the Pacific.
Although there were further threats to quit in 1861 and 1862, Macdonald was remarkably tenacious in office. His “private affairs” were in such disarray that in November 1858, he appealed to an associate to be “a good fellow” and help him out of a “scrape” by hurrying a payment owed to him. John A. Macdonald picked his business associates badly. In August 1859, he arrived in Kingston to find his property seized for auction thanks to the default of a hard-up colleague whose finances he had recklessly underwritten. “I am quite unable to pay my own debts & meet this one of yours as well.” One observer wondered how “a man of so much intellect and versatility” could be “such a child” about money. A partner in a Kingston real estate development complained in 1861, “Macdonald has all but ruined me by his wretched carelessness.” Yet, despite his resolve in July 1862 to “set to work to make a little money,” Macdonald remained addicted to politics.
Isabella’s death had left him with sole responsibility for his son Hugh John. The Macdonald of the 1840s had delighted in playing with a young nephew, pretending to owe the little boy huge sums of money and emptying his pockets of coin to pay the imaginary debt. But the most popular politician in Canada now seemed too busy and remote to be a proper father to “Hughey.” Parenting responsibilities fell upon his sister Margaret, who had married a Queen’s academic, widower James Williamson. The childless Williamsons were “kind & judicious” in rearing the boy, and Macdonald’s letters sent praise and kisses, but somehow his staccato correspondence conveyed little affection for Hugh and not overmuch appreciation for the help of his in-laws. Hugh Macdonald became an insecure adult.
Meanwhile, Macdonald’s political career descended towards disaster.