Macdonald’s son, Hugh John, 1871. He survived a haphazard upbringing and a quarrel with his father to become a Winnipeg lawyer.

       Courtesy of Topley Studio/Library and Archives Canada/PA-025352.

      One problem in Macdonald’s life remained as serious as ever: he was drinking too much and too often. “If ever there was a man in low water,” the journalist W.F. Maclean recalled, “it was Sir John as I saw him one day in the winter of 1875.” He watched Macdonald “tottering” down Parliament Hill, “others passing him with a wide sweep.” There was an embarrassing episode in the House of Commons one February evening that year: the Mail’s Ottawa correspondent attempted “to veil the facts” in his report, but Macdonald’s “condition was well known.” Mackenzie deplored Macdonald’s “vehement language” and there was “intense anger” among Conservative MPs. A few days later, Mackenzie dismissed another late-night tirade with the comment that Macdonald “appeared to be speaking under some unusual excitement.” In 1876, while on a speaking tour of western Ontario with Charles Tupper, he stayed at Patteson’s hobby farm near Ingersoll. “Sir John got very drunk at dinner” and insulted Tupper, driving Agnes to walk out in protest. “She had a good deal to put up with,” Patteson recalled.

      There are many legends of “John A. drunk” but, by definition, “John A. beating the bottle” generated few anecdotes. Yet, in the mid-1870s, Macdonald overcame his alcohol problem. In May 1877, Lord Dufferin noted that he “could drink wine at dinner without being tempted to excess, which hitherto he has never been able to do.” Macdonald survived the 1877 session without a single binge. In 1878, when he fell asleep during an all-night debate, Conservative MPs queued up to denounce the Globe’s allegation that he was “drunk in the plain ordinary sense of that word” — denials they had never dared offer before. Joseph Pope, Macdonald’s secretary from 1883, insisted that the problem was resolved “long before I knew him.” In 1884, a British statesman called Macdonald “a singular instance of a successful man of great ability and industry who is subject to fits of drunkenness” but added: “I believe he has been more sober lately.” Shattered by grief at her mother’s death in 1875, Agnes had persuaded Macdonald to join the Anglican Church, another landmark in distancing himself from his Scottish heritage. However, it was digestion, not religion, which triggered reformation. Macdonald told Dufferin that “his constitution has quite changed of late,” implying that his metabolism could no longer cope with alcohol. Had he failed to tackle the problem, Macdonald could hardly have achieved another dozen years as Canada’s prime minister.

      In 1876, almost by accident, the Conservative party found both the new policy and the fresh organizational base needed to win elections. Coming into office in 1873, the Liberals were doubly unlucky: the high-spending Macdonald government bequeathed them a deficit and the world economy took a downturn. The Mackenzie years became associated with gloomy recession, and Macdonald was tempted to adopt a magic-wand policy to get the country moving again. The inspiring idea, called the National Policy, was tariff protection, using duties on imports to create jobs in Canada. Its adoption as a key party plank meant rejecting an intellectual consensus, imported from Britain, in favour of free trade. As the world’s leading industrial power, the British preached the virtues of the level playing field, importing food and raw materials duty-free, or imposing low tariffs that made no distinction by country of origin. In Britain, free trade had become what we now call “politically correct”: it was not only stupid but wicked to support protection — and British intellectual hegemony dominated Canadian discourse. Free trade, Macdonald complained in 1876, had become not just a religion but a superstition: Liberal contributions to economic debate consisted of “long quotations from political economists.”

      However beautiful free trade theory, it did not fit Canadian circumstances. Four million Canadians lived alongside forty million Americans, who ruthlessly used tariffs to develop their own industries. In 1874, George Brown, Mackenzie’s special envoy, negotiated a draft Reciprocity Treaty in Washington, to replace the agreement the Americans had killed in 1866. The pact provided for cross-border free trade in both natural products and manufactures, but the U.S. Senate contemptuously refused even to put it to the vote. As the continental recession set in, American manufacturers treated Canada as a “sacrifice” or “slaughter” market, dumping their overstocks at cheap prices, sacrificing their profits but slaughtering their Canadian competitors. As Macdonald said in 1876, “we have played that conciliatory game long enough”: Canadians should treat Americans “as they treat us.”

      There was a second reason why, as Macdonald had argued as far back as 1860, it was “useless to discuss the abstract principles of Free Trade and Protection” in Canada. Britain had a broad revenue base, raising government cash from goods and services taxes and income tax. These were abominations to Canadians: they only succumbed to income tax under wartime pressure in 1917, while potential revenue-raising areas such as tavern licences belonged to the provinces. Hence the Dominion derived about sixty percent of its income from import duties — double the proportion in Britain. “We must trust to our customs, therefore, as the principal source of our future revenue,” Macdonald stated in 1876. Britain could afford free trade; Canada could not.

      Canada’s over-reliance upon import duties caused problems in funding the government when trade fell off. In 1874, Finance Minister Cartwright raised the overall tariff to 17.5 percent, so that anybody importing $100 of foreign goods paid $117.50 for them. But, as doctrinaire free traders, the Liberals refused to vary the rates to help Canadian producers. However, back in 1858, Macdonald’s provincial ministry had experimented with a different approach. As he explained, “we took off the duties on the necessaries of life which the poor man uses … we increased those on articles of luxury, which the rich man buys” and “we raised the taxation on those goods which our own mechanics can manufacture … to give them incidental protection.” “Incidental protection” became a coded term: free trade might be best in theory but, since Canada had to operate a revenue tariff, it should be tweaked to help Canadian producers.

      The 1876 budget proved