The John A. Macdonald Retrospective 2-Book Bundle. Ged Martin
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Send Riel to an asylum and Quebec would demand his release. Fail to hang him, and Ontario would punish the Conservatives at the polls. Basically, Ontario demanded Riel’s neck for a crime for which he was never tried, the shooting of Thomas Scott. Macdonald assumed that Riel’s religious delusions would neutralize sympathy in Catholic Quebec — but any government campaign to publicize them would have strengthened the case for reprieving him as a madman. Quebec ministers believed Riel’s execution would soon be forgotten in their province. “The Riel fever will I think die out,” Macdonald wrote a month after the hanging. In fact, the “Riel fever” divided Canadians deeply and enduringly.
It was presumably the triumph of the transcontinental railway and not the tragedy of Riel that motivated a Guelph teenager to write to Macdonald on November 18, 1885: “Take the advice of a thirteen year old Tory & resign.” Aged seventy and with his greatest work completed, surely he should have heeded Robina Stewart’s counsel? “I have done my work and can now sing my Nunc Dimittis,” he wrote, alluding to the Anglican prayer: “Lord, now lettest thy servant depart in peace.” But Macdonald had earned a lap of honour, his first and only journey through western Canada. On July 10, 1886, he quietly left Ottawa by special train for a seven-week tour, accompanied by Agnes, his secretary Joseph Pope, a tame journalist, two servants, and a police bodyguard. His wheelchair-bound daughter, Mary, came too: she was left for treatment at Banff’s hot springs while her parents travelled on to the Pacific.
At short notice, Conservative activists gathered to hail their chief, and trackside communities organized civic welcomes. A young Tory at Winnipeg’s train station broke off cheering to comment to a friend, “Seedy-looking old beggar, isn’t he?” After a side trip through the wheatlands of southern Manitoba, “Canada’s grand old man” was greeted with “deafening cheers” at Brandon. Looking “fresh and vigorous,” Macdonald delivered “a short impromptu speech well seasoned with his native wit.” Carberry presented him with a huge sheaf of wheat. Gleichen hosted a meeting with the Blackfoot nation, in recognition of the loyalty shown by Isapo-Muxica (Crowfoot) during the rebellion: the event was staged more to showcase Macdonald as a benign ruler than to engage with Native grievances. At brief stopovers, Agnes enthusiastically worked the crowds, chatting to women and children. At Calgary, which Macdonald predicted would become “a large metropolitan city,” she spent several hours at a social event, meeting “all the ladies who desired to have a chat with the cleverest and most popular lady in Canada today.” As their train headed through the mountains, Agnes insisted on riding on the cowcatcher. To the alarm of officials and the terror of Joe Pope, Canada’s prime minister joined her for a 200-kilometre stretch. Macdonald “said but little at the time,” but in 1891 he wrote of his pride at “looking back from the steps of my car upon the Rocky Mountains fringing the eastern sky.”
On July 24, the waters of the Pacific Ocean lapped at his feet as he left the train at Port Moody. Then it was on by steamboat to Victoria, where Macdonald was greeted by a band playing “See the Conquering Hero Comes.” A torchlight procession escorted him to a long-vanished hotel, which ruthlessly overcharged for his three-week visit. Tired from travelling, he initially discouraged formal events but quickly became a familiar figure sauntering the downtown streets. But Victoria had elected him to Parliament in 1878, and a delayed welcome ceremony in a packed theatre enabled him to express his thanks. He called his journey “the realization of all my dreams.” On August 13, Macdonald formally inaugurated Island’s railway to Nanaimo, which he also predicted would become a “great city.” That evening, they sailed for the mainland, mesmerized by Mount Baker, “radiant in the southern sky, catching and reflecting the light … after the sun had disappeared below the horizon.” New Westminster was disappointed at receiving only an overnight visit, while the mayor of the recently founded city of Vancouver arrived to express his regret that it had burned down six weeks earlier.
Then followed the long journey home, more speeches, even an appearance at a Conservative convention in Winnipeg. As his train headed across northern Ontario on August 31, 1886, somebody realized that his return to Ottawa would coincide with a massive Liberal rally in the capital addressed by provincial premier Oliver Mowat and federal opposition leader Edward Blake. Local Tories were hastily summoned to a welcoming reception, but the Globe crowed that it was a poorly attended “side show.” Sir John A. Macdonald had returned to the trench warfare of Canadian politics.
8
1886–1891
You’ll Never Die, John A.!
If he had quit politics immediately after his return to Ottawa on August 31, 1886, Sir John A. Macdonald would have ended his career on a high note. In Victoria, he had called the completion of the transcontinental railway “the fruition of all my expectations”: surely he was now entitled to bow out? Four years earlier, when a friendly heckler had shouted, “I hope you will never get old,” he had modestly replied, “I must make way for others.” In 1886 he was seventy-one — high time to act on his promise to “make way for younger and stronger men.” Ideally, the fall of 1886 would have seen an orderly transition to a new leader who could meet Parliament that winter and seek a fresh electoral mandate soon after.
It did not happen, and it was never likely. Far from announcing his retirement, Macdonald was planning his thirteenth general election. The central theme of the last five years of his life was his inability to leave public life. His Dominion was like a house with a smouldering basement fire: smoke and flames erupted in room after room, province after province. There would be no second trip to British Columbia, no more comfortable visits to Britain. Far from being confident of Canada’s future, he felt foreboding. “We have watched the cradle of Confederation,” he had remarked to Campbell the previous year, “& shouldn’t like to follow the hearse.” Only one possible nation-building target remained. As Gowan commented in 1888, bringing Newfoundland into Confederation “would be a grand capping stone to your original conception and a glorious close to your career in public life.” But Macdonald was not inspired by the prospect. “Newfoundland will not come in just now,” he replied in September 1888, “and I am not very sorry.” Sir John A. Macdonald holds the record as Canada’s oldest serving prime minister — a record unlikely to be broken. But his achievement also represented systemic failure: even in his seventies, with his main work achieved, he could not escape from the burden of leadership.
Rejecting Macdonald’s 1867 vision of Dominion supremacy over submissive provinces, Mowat’s Ontario government had challenged Ottawa in a series of cases before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, Canada’s ultimate constitutional court. In 1883, a battle over the billiard table in Archibald Hodge’s Toronto tavern had prompted the London judges to declare that provinces were “supreme” within their own spheres of jurisdiction. Even Macdonald now occasionally used the term “Federal Government” instead of “Dominion.” Although he was astutely aware of “the opposition cry that we are centralizing everything,” he remained determined to “protect the Constitution from invasion” by resisting “unworthy concession” to provincial demands. But Mowat had made Ontario a semi-sovereign body within Canada. Worse still, in Nova Scotia, the Liberals won the 1886 election by threatening to secede from the Dominion altogether.
Macdonald’s problems were exacerbated by the Riel case. Defying Conservative policy, the Toronto Mail embarked on an anti-French and anti-Catholic campaign which threw the Irish vote to Mowat in the December 1886 Ontario election. The following year, Macdonald launched yet another Toronto newspaper, the Empire, but with limited success. Riel’s ghost also contributed to a major setback in Quebec, the election of a nationalist Liberal government, led by the unscrupulous adventurer Honoré Mercier.
Conservative defeats in the two largest provinces were an unlikely prelude to a successful Dominion campaign. A cautious politician would have waited until later in 1887: Macdonald defiantly sent Canadians to the polls in February. He knew he was criticized for being “too bold – but boldness won the day.” Macdonald gambled that Ontario voters distrusted Mercier and would back a strong leader in Ottawa. The 1885 Franchise Act had created separate Dominion and provincial voter qualifications: Mowat’s