Macdonald’s funeral united Canadians in grief. The massive procession leaves Ottawa’s Parliament Hill on its way to Kingston.

      Listening from the gallery that June day in 1891 as Canada’s parliamentarians delivered emotional tributes, was a Halifax lawyer, visiting Ottawa on legal business. In 1911, Robert Borden would lead the Conservatives to victory, their first success in two decades. In twenty-four years, Macdonald won six elections — albeit narrowly in 1872. It took the Tories another 120 years, until Stephen Harper in 2011, to win their sixth majority government in the post-Macdonald era (plus a seventh in a wartime coalition sweep in 1917). Louis Riel had not risen from the grave, as he had foretold, but his ghost drove a wedge between the Conservatives and Quebec. Initially, Macdonald was philosophical about this: “from a patriotic rather than from a party point of view, it is not to be regretted that the French should be more equally divided,” he wrote in 1886. But throughout the twentieth century, French Canadians were not “equally divided,” and the Conservatives paid the price for their weakness in Quebec with six federal minority governments between 1926 and 2008.

      Macdonald himself ceased to be a potent political symbol. In his magnificent two-volume biography of 1952–55, Conservative intellectual Donald Creighton re-launched him as a Tory-nationalist icon, but the failure of the Diefenbaker government once again made Sir John A. a dated symbol, his British knighthood and his waving of the “Old Flag” irrelevant to the new bicultural Canada. In 1988, the next successful Conservative leader, Brian Mulroney, tore up the remnants of the “Old Policy” and took Canada into a continental trade deal, the strategy that Macdonald had denounced as treason a century before.

      Academics talk of the “Macdonaldian” constitution, a centralizing straitjacket imposed in 1867, which crumbled against the reality of Canada’s size and diversity. The picture is exaggerated. Macdonald intended the Dominion to be boss, but he never conspired to destroy the provinces — indeed, it was his constitution that the judges reinterpreted on looser, federal lines after 1883. Canada still endures the tensions between Ottawa control and provincial autonomy that first emerged in Macdonald’s time, with the scope of government now extended into the wider battlefields of external relations, health, and welfare. Macdonald’s 1867 constitution has changed much in spirit. No provincial legislation has been disallowed since 1943, the last British governor general went home in 1952, while the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms shifted the balance of authority between Parliament and the courts. Yet Canada remains one of the few countries to be governed for a century and a half through the same basic document. Its truly “Macdonaldian” quality is its adaptability and capacity for compromise.

      “There was in him some indescribable charm that acted by presence, seemingly without means or argument,” commented a supporter. Macdonald’s brother-in-law once remarked, “no one can know him long and not like him.” Brown and Cartwright would have disagreed, but thousands of Canadians responded to his rare combination of “vivacity in social life linked to the coolest deliberation in affairs political.” Yet the good humour and the approachability masked a complex personality. Macdonald’s life was driven by his mother’s determination that her surviving son should wipe out the humiliation of emigration. His father’s continued business setbacks in Canada schooled him to cope with the mixed fortunes of politics. He would refer to “my usual desire to make the best of a bad state of things,” urging voters that “we can’t have all we want, and we must endeavor to get as nearly what we want as possible.” He was in politics for the long term, not the quick fixes that some opponents naively thought possible. “My plan in life is never to give up,” he wrote in 1864; “if I don’t carry a thing this year I will next.” His lonely schooldays left him with an enduring competitiveness. He fought, for the government, in 1837, a traumatic experience that he rarely mentioned, and he blamed that rebellion on an arrogant elite. In 1873 he boasted that “the old Family Compact tried to keep me down, but they couldn’t.” He was a moderate Conservative who fought extreme Tories, a compromiser who cried, as in 1885, “let us have peace.” Once, in 1881, even Macdonald’s sharpest critic had offered a sympathetic insight. “Putting the best possible construction on his political motive,” observed the Globe, “it has been to carry on the government of the country somehow or other.” Sometimes, governing Canada required dubious expedients.

      In his forties, with his wife bedridden, his workload overwhelming, and his finances in trouble, the pressures triggered a midlife alcohol problem that intermittently erupted over two decades. But to remember someone who contributed so much to Canada merely as a drunk not only distorts the memory of John A. Macdonald but also dishonours the country that he did so much to create. Macdonald was not permanently intoxicated and his achievement was impressive even in the years when he struggled with his infirmity. As a later governor general, Lord Minto, commented, it is appropriate to recall Macdonald’s alcohol problem if only because “he completely triumphed on this weakness.”

      We cannot know whether Confederation would have happened if he had never left Scotland, whether Canada would have expanded westward and built a railway to the Pacific had there been no John A. Macdonald. But, equally, we must not assume that others would have filled the gap with the same combination of personal skills and political judgment. “I have committed many mistakes,” he admitted in 1882, “… there are many things I have done wrongly, and many things I have neglected that I should have done.” Honest about his failures, he deserves the last word on his successes. “I have tried, according to the best of my judgment, to do what I could for the well-being of good government and future prosperity of this my beloved country.”

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