The John A. Macdonald Retrospective 2-Book Bundle. Ged Martin
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over all prairie branch lines southward from the main line. Unless the Americans could be prevented from siphoning off its traffic, nobody “would give one dollar for the whole line east of Winnipeg.” This CPR monopoly was unpopular in Manitoba.
Macdonald was sixty-five in 1880, and running the government was a tough job. His overseas trip the previous summer had been delayed by severe sickness, with “cramps and spasms” that reminded him of the 1870 gallstones crisis. Macdonald was ill again in March 1880, and horrified his colleagues by talking about retirement. In April 1881, he asked Campbell to prepare documentation about British Columbia: “I intended to have done it myself but I am not up to the work.” Soon after, he collapsed: “strength gone and troubled with continued pain in the stomach and bowels,” he reported to Tupper. His Ottawa doctor suspected cancer and advised “that I had better put my affairs in order.” His sister Louisa was shocked by her brother’s appearance. “I never saw John looking what I would call old until this time.” For the third time in two years, he crossed the Atlantic, this time to seek medical advice. A London specialist pronounced him “free from organic disease” but insisted upon “a very rigid diet & complete rest.” (Macdonald was now seen as such an asset to the Empire that the doctor refused to charge a fee.) “I am slowly getting better but my strength does not return as I could wish,” he told Campbell in June 1881.
Nonetheless, he yearned to be back at his desk: “I have no pleasure nowadays but in work, & so it will be to the end of the chapter.” The chapter was never-ending, especially because the Pacific Railway and the development of Canadian industries were both long-term projects. It was vital to win another term in government and Macdonald’s “remaining ambition is to see that our policy is not reversed.” But to ensure that that the National Policy would be “safe from 1883 to 1888,” voters had to be persuaded that it was working. “You cannot plant the seed to-day and get the crop to-morrow,” he warned. Fortunately, times were good and, in 1882, he called an early election.
Although the Mowat Liberal government remained firmly entrenched in Ontario, Macdonald had a temporary advantage on his chief battleground by the early 1880s. After a quarter century of arrogant dominance, the Globe was under pressure. Although the Toronto Mail had struggled, Macdonald “actually wept” when he lost control over it to its creditors in 1877. However, his luck rebounded: run on business lines, the Mail soon rivalled the Globe in circulation and, until 1885, preached Conservative policies. Financially, too, the Globe was under challenge from an evening paper founded in 1876, the Toronto Telegram, which aggressively marketed want-ads and cut into the Globe’s advertising revenue. George Brown responded in 1880 with an expensive re-launch — at just the moment when a disgruntled ex-employee shot him. Brown died six weeks later. “I do not often read the Globe,” Macdonald remarked in 1882. It remained as hostile to him as ever, but it was a greatly reduced threat.
The 1881 census showed that Ontario was entitled to four additional parliamentary seats. Next year, in an episode nicknamed “Hiving the Grits,” Macdonald proposed extensive boundary changes right across the province. The original plan was to confine a small number of opposition MPs within overwhelmingly Liberal ridings, while a larger number of Conservatives would be elected by smaller majorities. However, the redistribution was modified when Macdonald’s backbenchers panicked at this high-risk strategy, and its overall effect is hard to assess. Essentially, the Liberals lost in Ontario in 1882 for the classic reason that they failed to win enough votes. The Conservatives outpolled them by 3,700 votes, just 1.4 percent, enough to net them a fifty-five to thirty-seven seat plurality. As Macdonald later joked, his boundary changes were a “gerrymander,” but Mowat’s redrawing of the provincial electoral map was a “readjustment”: in 1879, the provincial Liberals had won the Ontario election by less than 2,000 votes — 0.8 percent — which translated into a fifty-seven to thirty-one seat victory. “We meant to make you howl,” Macdonald allegedly told one of the Liberals who lost his seat, but his motive was strategic not sadistic: by protesting, his opponents likely talked themselves into losing. As usual, the Ontario Liberals forgot the rest of Canada, which cumulatively re-elected the Conservatives by 139 seats to seventy-one. Macdonald’s election for Lennox, his childhood home, was overturned for irregularities, and he represented Carleton, in the Ottawa hinterland. He felt “used up” by the “hard fight” across the province. But in Berlin (later Kitchener), seven-year-old Willy King watched the prime minister receiving a bouquet from a pretty girl and concluded that “politics had its rewards.” As William Lyon Mackenzie King, he would become the only Canadian leader to serve for longer than Macdonald himself.
Unwisely, Sir John A. Macdonald assured Parliament in 1883 that “not one single farthing of the cost of building the railway should fall on the older Provinces.” This was a reckless boast, since Stephen had already warned him that the railway was “going to cost a great deal more money than we calculated on.” Raising cash proved increasingly difficult. Far from reassuring investors, the government’s decision, in October 1883, to guarantee the CPR’s annual dividend only highlighted the project’s financial problems. On December 15, a desperate Stephen told Macdonald that there was “no way on God’s earth” that the Canadian Pacific could escape bankruptcy without a massive loan from the government. Legend claims that Macdonald told a late-night CPR delegation that they might as well ask him for the planet Jupiter: Cabinet and Parliament would never agree. He was roused at 2:00 a.m. by John Henry Pope with a blunt warning: if the Canadian Pacific collapsed, the Conservative party would follow within twenty-four hours. The story, told years later, is probably a conflation of different episodes, since Stephen thanked Macdonald “for the readiness which you have shown throughout to help us in every possible way.” The prime minister now had to persuade his own followers that the Canadian Pacific was going to cost another $22.5 million — roughly Ottawa’s annual revenue. Officially, it was a loan, but the security was the Railway itself. Parliament approved in March 1884, but Quebec Conservatives ostentatiously absented themselves during the debates. The price of their support was funding for the North Shore Railway, connecting Montreal and Quebec City but through thinly populated country north of the St. Lawrence. Maritimers demanded construction of the Short Line, a direct link to Montreal through northern Maine. The Canadian Pacific had run out of cash and Sir John A. Macdonald was exhausting his political capital.
“I bore the strain wonderfully well,” Macdonald told Gowan at the close of the “tedious & disagreeable session,” but he conceded that “it was a strain greater than I should like to encounter again.” To Campbell, he was more open. “My daily exhaustion is very great, although not so perceptible to others as to myself.” “I would leave the Government tomorrow,” he told Tupper, but for the fear that “Stephen would throw up the sponge if I did.” A summer break down the St. Lawrence was followed by a voyage to England, where his London specialist found “no flaw” in his basic health, attributing his indigestion to “work & worry.” The British elite welcomed Macdonald like a friendly potentate. He spoke for an hour at a banquet in his honour, a speech that one diner thought “would have been a very good one if it had been a little more condensed.” Queen Victoria invited him to stay overnight at Windsor Castle, and thought him “an interesting, agreeable old man.” He returned home to a massive demonstration in Toronto to mark his forty years in politics, followed — in January 1885 — by a celebration of his seventieth birthday in Montreal. Of course, the adulation could not continue.
It was not that the government had no warning of trouble in the West, but rather that too much alarming noise came from that troubled region. Although treaties had been signed with native people to extinguish Aboriginal title across the prairies by 1877, the “Indians” (as Native people were generally called) remained a source of concern. Macdonald uttered worthy sentiments. “The Indians are the aborigines — the original occupants of the country, and their rights must be respected.” But he distrusted “any philanthropic idea of protecting the Indian” especially by preserving “semi-savage customs.” “The whole thing is a question of management,” he pronounced, and “management” meant keeping Aboriginal communities quiet while settlers took over the West.
“Seedy looking old beggar, isn’t he?” commented a supporter