Right Honourable Men: The Descent of Canadian Politics from MacDonald to Chrétien

By Michael Bliss

Updated with an insightful and controversial assessment of Jean Chrétien

Since first published in 1994, Right Honourable Men has remained the definitive source for Canadians wanting to know more about the quality of our leaders and the personalities behind the policies. Now, in this timely new edition, Bliss evaluates Jean Chrétien's record and asserts that he was actually a conservative prime minister -- as conservative as Mulroney himself. And Chrétien's legacy? A decade of squandered opportunities, national decline, and dashed hopes of real reform.

From the visionary Macdonald, the reckless Laurier, and the misunderstood King, to the flamboyant Trudeau, the vainglorious Mulroney and the wily Chrétien, Right Honourable Men defines the essence of political leadership in Canada, sets the standard for rating prime ministers, and provides a fascinating roadmap for our past -- and our future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Mar 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781443403429

Michael Bliss

Michael Bliss is University Professor of History at the University of Toronto and one of Canada's most distinguished historians. His eleven books include Plague: How Smallpox Devastated Montreal, which was shortlisted for a Governor General's Award, and William Osler: A Life in Medicine. He has won numerous Canadian and international awards, is a Member of the Order of Canada, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and has received Honorary Doctor of Letters degrees from McGill and McMaster universities.

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Introduction

Prime Ministers, Power,

and the Democratic Deficit

This is the second edition of an experiment in writing political history through biographical studies of Canada’s most important prime ministers. The first version, published in 1994, concluded with Chapter Ten’s essay on Brian Mulroney followed by an epilogue on the collapse of the Progressive Conservative Party. In this edition the epilogue is replaced by Chapter Eleven, a study of Jean Chrétien’s prime ministership. I also make minor alterations to several of the profiles and, in this new introduction, reflect on how ten years of Canadian history has affected my original conclusions. It has reinforced some of them and forced me to revise others.

The profiles are interpretative, analytical, sometimes anecdotal, and largely self-contained. You can dip into the book at the beginning, middle, or end, and you can ignore the rest of this introduction. But I use the careers of prime ministers as pegs on which to hang quite a bit of more general Canadian political history and a number of arguments about the thematic evolution of Canadian politics. I hope these chapters can be read profitably by everyone from secondary school students to political science graduates and that they will be read by all aspiring prime ministers.

Broad as I have tried to make it, my focus is necessarily limited. Many important themes and individuals are absent from these pages. Some readers will notice, for example, that the political left, as it presented itself through seventy years of the activities of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and New Democratic Party, hardly appears here. As Trudeau would say, tough. The CCF-NDP never attained power in national elections, and it seldom exercised the influence its adherents and court historians have claimed. Concepts of social justice and a welfare state for Canada, for example, were introduced to the national political agenda by Liberals, years before the birth of the CCF. The most important individual in creating the Canadian welfare state was not J.S. Woodsworth but the much-maligned Mackenzie King.

This is both history from the top down and a study of the great man in Canadian history (I neglect most of our failed, coffee-break PMs and a couple of the full-term second-rankers). Right Honourable Men is about the movement of history, politics, and power from the top down in society, as an elite-driven, deference-based British colonial system has matured into a sort of North American democracy. It is a study of how leadership has coped and failed to cope with the challenges posed by these and other developments.

While this is Canadian history from Parliament Hill, I am not a Hegelian and I do not believe that political leaders, least of all prime ministers of Canada, are personifications of the world spirit. Individuals do not change the course of history or move mountains with a snap of their fingers. Sometimes leaders are almost powerless against the tides of history. Other times, including perhaps the Chrétien years, they happily float with the tides, their only political principle being to take credit for the phases of the moon. Puzzling out exactly how and when and if specific prime ministers have actually changed Canadian history, have made Canada a different country, is one of the central tasks of these essays.

These chapters do not add up to a bottom line on governing Canada. There are no quick maxims, no easy recipes for what Brian Mulroney once called country running. It is absurd to believe that history or politics can be turned into a science. While broad historical patterns do recur, while some factors contribute to success or failure in almost every era, the river of history is constantly changing. Each generation faces new problems, calling for new responses. Every prime minister has been unique, hence the attraction and strength of a biographical approach. The two strongest prime ministers in Canadian history were Mackenzie King and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. What did they have in common? High intelligence, an abiding faith in popular sovereignty, and the integrated personality’s taste for solitude. But who can imagine Mackenzie King in buckskin, paddling his canoe through white water? Or Pierre Trudeau consulting a medium?

I subtitle these chapters the descent of Canadian politics for several reasons. This is a chronological presentation, organized around a descent through time, from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. As mentioned, one of my main themes is the gradual descent of power in our monarchical/parliamentary system. Sir John A. Macdonald did not like or believe in democracy and his approach to government reflected his principles. But democracy in the form of universal suffrage gradually came to Canada, and has continued to evolve.

There was a profound descent of power from legislatures to the courts and to the people in the constitutional reform of 1981–82 and in the October 1992 national referendum on the Charlottetown Accord. In 1994 I thought this descent would continue to have important ramifications. It is now apparent, however, that in Jean Chrétien’s Canada, the development of what has come to be called a democratic deficit blocked what I thought would be a continued devolution of power to Canadian citizens.

A more problematic connotion of descent is that of a decline in quality. Many, perhaps most, Canadians instinctively believe that has happened in our system of government. Where are the giants of old, the Macdonalds, Lauriers, Bordens, Trudeaus? Where are the leaders we yearn for in troubled times? Where are the visionaries? Why don’t better men and women go into Parliament?

I have mixed feelings about such grumbling. It’s true that neither Mulroney nor Chrétien stands highly in my prime ministerial rankings. Nor do I think that Joe Clark or John Turner or Kim Campbell or Stockwell Day had the capacity to do a significantly better job of governing Canada during the last two decades (Preston Manning will go down in history as the most interesting prime ministerial might-have-been from this era). It is certainly true, too, that Canadians have recently been more estranged from Parliament and the country’s national political elites. This is part of the concept of the democratic deficit. The leaders fell out of touch and we longed for better ones to govern us more wisely.

It does not necessarily follow that there has been a marked deterioration in the quality of men and women in politics. These pages say little about the evolving quality of Cabinet ministers or backbenchers, but my impression is that in recent years prime ministers have had better Cabinet material to work with, and better-educated, harder-working, more dedicated MPs to choose their Cabinets from, than Macdonald, Laurier, or Borden did. I think we are still attracting talented, idealistic Canadians into politics.

Many of them are frustrated, however, as are many Canadians, by the failure of our political system to enable them to maximize their talents in public service. Instead, the tight party discipline of Canada’s unreformed parliamentary system of government forces members of parliament to surrender or prostitute their individualism while at the same time concentrating power too highly in the hands of prime ministers. In their wielding of power and their reluctance to share it John A. Macdonald and Brian Mulroney were kindred spirits, as were Wilfrid Laurier and Jean Chrétien. In fact, Mulroney and Chrétien could have served as excellent senior ministers in those long-ago administrations.

The descent of Canadian politics since Macdonald’s day has been a tendency, both rhetorical and sometimes real, to devolve power from the political elites towards the people, who in turn expect reformed, higher standards of performance from their leaders. In 1994 I concluded that the Mulroney Conservatives had not evolved with the times and had been led by a man who was more of a throw-back than a modern-day mutant. I thought there was a real possibility that the Chrétien Liberals had evolved or would at least have been pushed into modernizing and democratizing our system by the Reform Party.

I was wrong. In the epilogue to the first edition of this book I had predicted that the 1990s would be a turning point in Canadian politics as the parties adjusted to meet the democratic aspirations of a politically informed and mature citizenry. As my Chrétien essay observes, this did not happen. Instead a logjam developed in the river of Canadian political history, much of it involving the Prime Minister and his values. By 2003 practically everyone in the country was frustrated, in various ways, by the blockage, and they seemed to look forward to its removal.

But, as I suggest in the final paragraphs of the Chrétien essay, it may also be that Canadian citizens are more content with their old-fashioned, over-centralized democracy than they appeared to be back in the more turbulent years of the early 1990s. I am now beginning to wonder if Canadians are nearly as interested in reforming their political system as they have become in manipulating it to advance their special interests.

What if the democratic deficit works both ways, and the people are just as responsible as the politicians for tolerating a flawed system of government? Give us our hand-outs, Jean and Paul, and we’ll hold our noses and deliver the votes. Maybe we don’t really care about aspiring to making a distinctive Canadian statement to the world, about excellence. Maybe our future is to be a small, hotel-like country in which small men and women, culturally very diverse, lead pleasant private lives, tolerating one another and paying enough taxes to keep the system going and avoid doctors’ bills.

This book originated during the first round of declining interest in Canadian politics in the 1970s and 1980s. After a burst of engagement in the early 1960s, many intellectuals of my generation, especially historians, turned away from national politics to other concerns. As I argued in a 1991 Creighton memorial lecture, Privatizing the Mind: The Sundering of Canadian History, the Sundering of Canada, the withdrawal of attention from the public or civic sphere had resulted in declining interest in the evolution and nature of Canada as a country. Mea culpa: having been trained in the grand old tradition of Canadian political history, I had always paid attention to Canadian politics but in my scholarship concentrated on other areas of our history.

The constitutional wars of the 1980s jolted me back to an appreciation of the central role of government in our national life, and the need to understand its evolution through time. I was struck repeatedly by the historical vacuum in which we talk about Canada and decided to write a book about the public life of the country. I organized it around prime-ministerial studies because in the 1990s no one else had reflected on Canadian political leadership in the way that Richard Hofstadter had years earlier for the United States in his classic study, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, or Peter Clarke had for Great Britain in A Question of Leadership: From Gladstone to Thatcher.

The first edition of Right Honourable Men received favourable reviews and sold well, more than justifying the effort put into it. A few insightful reviewers highlighted the linkages between the chapters, notably the emphasis on quasi-monarchical power gradually being tempered by a spreading democratic spirit. Canadians still do not realize how historically hostile their political elites have been to the advance of democracy in the modern world. On this continent, democracy, human rights, civil liberties, and the cause of freedom were advanced primarily by the United States. Canadian politicians followed only reluctantly and suspiciously, deeply distrusting ordinary people, deeply unwilling to share their power. Just think of the scandal of the Canadian Senate, its members appointed by the prime minister and completely unaccountable to the Canadian people.

Paralleling the interplay of elitism and democracy, these essays also reflect on how personal security or insecurity affected the governing styles of various prime ministers. I have been particularly struck by the problems that several of Canada’s self-made men, all Conservatives, had in trying to handle the stress of the highest office without having first become comfortable with their own success in life. The Progressive Conservative Party paid a high price for the kind of person it and its ideas attracted as leader in the twentieth century. Although the Liberals were ostensibly a party that believed in ridding society of social classes, Liberal leaders, even through the early Chrétien years, often had an almost aristocratic sense of class entitlement to govern.

Reviewers and many correspondents were most interested in my prime ministerial ratings. It happened that Right Honourable Men pioneered in the genre of rating prime ministers. After its publication, assessing the prime ministers became something of an industry among journalists and historians, a game anyone could play. While my rough ranking becomes evident enough as the chapters unfold, there is no harm in spelling it out here. All things considered, Canadians were best served by (1) Mackenzie King, followed by (2) a tie between Sir John A. Macdonald and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, (4) Sir Robert Borden, (5) Sir Wilfrid Laurier, (6) Lester Pearson, (7) Louis St. Laurent, (8) a tie between Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien, (10) Alexander Mackenzie, (11) John Diefenbaker; and then the others.

The very high estimation of Mackenzie King in these pages was surprising to many journalists and newcomers to Canadian history but not to political historians, whose own rankings usually put King on top for many of the reasons I outline. The dim view of Brian Mulroney in Chapter Ten was not so widely shared, except by ordinary Canadians. Historians have tended to be impressed by the Mulroney government’s free-trade initiative and its restoration of good relations with the United States after the trendy confusions of the Trudeau years. As well, the more the Chrétien years disclosed of Liberal slipperiness, arrogance, corruption, vendettas, and inertia, the better the Mulroney years began to appear in memory. On balance, too, the retired Prime Minister helped his historical cause by often appearing to be more statesmanlike, at least on global issues, than his Liberal successor.

Accordingly, it’s almost to my own surprise that after ten years I see no reason to revise the judgments in the Mulroney profile. While there were certain notable achievements by the Mulroney government, the greatest of these, the Canada–U.S. Free Trade Agreement, would have been championed by any Conservative prime minister, and perhaps even a John Turner government. In my view the Mulroney government’s successes pale by comparison with the damage it did to Canada by failing to rein in the deficit, by failing to begin reforming our political system, and, most important, by stupidly and repeatedly pouring the kerosene of the Meech Lake Accord on the dying embers of separatism. Brian Mulroney gave Canada Lucien Bouchard, who almost succeeded in destroying the country in 1995. If the separatists had won that referendum, both Jean Chrétien and Brian Mulroney would have shared the responsibility for the break-up of Canada. This is one of the reasons why I rank them about equally, far down my list in eighth place. Unlike the United Nations’ quality-of-life rankings (see the Chrétien chapter), the gap in the prime ministerial list between the top and the eighth rung is huge.

Canadian voters passed the harshest possible judgment on Brian Mulroney’s leadership when they almost completely destroyed his political party in the 1993 election. No other leader in Canadian history has left to his successor a party so desperately enfeebled. In fact, the ruination of Canadian conservatism that is part of the legacy of the Mulroney years continues to stand in the way of our knowing what Canadians really think of the performance of the Chrétien governments. After Brian Mulroney, Canada became a Liberal one-party state and continued to be one in an atmosphere of growing cynicism and corrosion. Although Mr. Mulroney felt free to comment on any number of issues in his retirement, he did little to promote healing of the festering wounds among the groups who aspired to present Canadians with an alternative to the Liberals.

In 1994 I wrongly thought that the descent of power in the democratizing Canadian political system would force the Chrétien government to be a reform administration. My judgment on this matter having proved to be a lapse into wishful thinking,* I have no prediction to offer about the course the Paul Martin government will take. Mr. Martin, a senior citizen at the time of assuming office, may address Canada’s democratic deficit, or he may not. The most disconcerting thought is that the declining interest in Canadian politics we saw in previous decades has entered a much more serious phase. The new Canada, such as it is, may not care what Paul Martin and his government do, so long as every hand-extended client gets a share of grants, subsidies, and other forms of princes’ favours. We may be retaining the worst of our continuities with the old Canada, while losing the best.

I hope I’m wrong again.

* Or partly an erroneous assumption that political systems are as responsive as economies to pressures for change and innovation. During the Chrétien years, for example, Canadian business and the workings of the Canadian economy changed almost beyond recognition. My 1987 history of Canadian business, Northern Enterprise, simply could not be updated the way this book has been. A whole new volume would be required to describe the several revolutions that have wracked the private sector in less than a single generation. Our public, political institutions are far more resistant to change.

1

MACDONALD

The Prince of Canada

Ahostile newspaper editor called the 1864 Charlottetown Conference on Confederation the great Intercolonial drunk. The image nicely fits with today’s popular view of John A. Macdonald as a whisky-soaked statesman, unhappy with the founding of a four-province Canada because he always had a thirst for a fifth. Macdonald’s scholarly biographer, Donald Creighton, helped convey that view to our generation by concluding that Canada’s prime minister in the high Victorian era was a throwback to the days of hard-drinking, hard-fighting political rogues: ‘the two bottle men,’ a Colonial Secretary called them, when one of the duties of the Secretary of the Treasury is said to have been to hold his hat on occasion for the convenience of the First Lord when ‘clearing himself’ for his speech. The Macdonald story we tell our students in history lectures is of the time he got drunk before a public debate and vomited on the platform while his opponent was speaking—only to recoup by remarking that this was just another case of a Liberal turning his stomach.

It may even have happened. Most men and most politicians drank a lot in those days, and Macdonald was a convivial fellow. The Confederation conferences were particularly convivial occasions. As Brian Mulroney told reporters in 1990, when he was comparing his tactics with the Meech Lake Accord to the methods of the Fathers of Confederation, the boys … spent a long time in places other than the library, eh? George Brown, Macdonald’s Liberal opponent and normally a much more sober politician, has left a famous description of the socializing at Charlottetown, which culminated in a four o’clock luncheon party aboard the Canadian delegation’s steamer, the Queen Victoria:

The members were entertained at luncheon in princely style. Cartier and I made eloquent speeches—of course—and whether as the result of our eloquence or of the goodness of our champagne, the ice became completely broken, the tongues of the delegates wagged merrily, and the banns of matrimony between all the Provinces of BNA having been formally proclaimed and all manner of persons duly warned there and then to speak or forever after to hold their tongues—no man appeared to forbid the banns and the union was thereupon formally completed and proclaimed!

Of course they had a harder fight than that to get the Confederation scheme accomplished, and Macdonald’s drinking habits didn’t help. In the last stages, as delegates prepared to gather in London, England, for a final conference, the Canadian government’s appearance was delayed for weeks, in part, according to the Globe, because Macdonald was drinking too much back in Ottawa to attend to the nation’s business. It is not known exactly why, during the London conference, he fell asleep in his hotel room one night with the candle burning, and was lucky to escape from the resulting fire with his life.

Historians know that the whole Confederation movement was a lucky escapade for the men who made it. Without any advance mandate these colonial politicians cooked up a plan of union, sold it to one another, got it through the Canadian legislature without any reference to the people, and rushed vague assenting resolutions through the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia legislatures during a Fenian scare from south of the border. The people of New Brunswick initially rejected the Confederation scheme in an 1865 election, but the pro-Confederation politicians connived with the British government to force a second vote the next year, and sent down large amounts of what Macdonald called the needful, i.e., cash, to help sway opinion. Nova Scotians felt particularly railroaded by their politicians, and in the first Dominion election, in 1867, elected one supporter of Confederation and eighteen opponents—a kind of Bloc Nova Scotia—dedicated to getting the province out of Canada. Macdonald had to pacify Nova Scotia with larger subsidies and a Cabinet position for the leading secessionist, Joseph Howe.

Sir John A. was Prime Minister of Canada from 1867 to 1874 and from 1878 until his death in office in 1891. During those years this master manipulator on the Canadian stage, The Wizard of the North, heaped fifth, sixth, and seventh provinces onto the original four, juggled regional and racial and religious interests, drew the world’s longest railway out of Canadian financiers’ hats, played a tariff card that turned from a joker into the ace of spades, and held the whole rickety contraption together with smoke, mirrors, and hidden wires.

Macdonald’s enemies and most of his supporters knew about the Tories’ fine silk threads of patronage, contracts, and party discipline. Macdonald’s governments rewarded friends and punished opponents. The Prime Minister and his lieutenants blatantly used all forms of patronage to support their power and build their party. As soon as Toronto returns Conservative members it will get Conservative appointments, he told his friends there, but not before. He installed favouritism as a central feature of the unwritten part of the Canadian constitution. Senatorships, janitorships, and all sorts of jobs in between went to loyal party men. Contracts were given only to the friends of the government, and, in return, they gave campaign funds to the party. Some of these funds were used in elections to buy votes (the going cash rate was about $10, the equivalent of about $200 in today’s currency). Government patronage and party funds supported Conservative newspapers, such as the Montreal Gazette, and the Toronto Mail and Empire. The adoption of a protective tariff or National Policy cemented a powerful and grateful block of manufacturers to the party. At election time the Canadian Pacific Railway, built with generous government help, turned itself into the Conservative party on wheels, supplying money and many good Conservative voters (while sending Liberals up the line to repair track).

As Macdonald grew old in power, becoming something of a national institution, opinion was about equally divided on whether his scheming and manipulation had been noble or cynical. To his admirers, including most of his biographers, the end of building a strong country with a strong national government that could keep a lid on the cacophony of interest groups justified all the means Macdonald used, and supports the judgement of him as a great statesman. Macdonald (when not drunk) is a really powerful man, an astute British governor observed during the Confederation movement. Better John A. drunk than George Brown sober, Macdonald himself once quipped.

The more critical view was best expressed by the president of the University of Toronto, Sir Daniel Wilson, who wrote that Canada’s first prime minister was

a clever, most unprincipled party leader [who] had developed a system of political corruption that has demoralized the country. Its evils will long survive him…. nevertheless he had undoubtedly a fascinating power of conciliation, which, superadded to his unscrupulous use of patronage, and systematic bribery in every form, has enabled him to play off province against province and hold his own against every enemy but the invincible last antagonist.

This dim view of Macdonald had not prevented Wilson and the university from awarding him an honorary degree. Professors, too, sometimes had flexible principles.

Macdonald was born in Scotland in 1815 and brought to the Kingston area of Upper Canada with his family in 1820. His father was a shopkeeper and miller. The boy became a lawyer and from an early age learned the art of getting ahead in government. In his first surviving letter, written in 1836, Macdonald thanks a friend in high places for the hint respecting the clerkship of the peace. If it becomes vacant, he adds, I shall call upon you to exert your kind endeavours on my behalf.

Broadening his ambition, Macdonald became a Kingston alderman in 1843. The next year he was elected to the legislature of the Province of Canada, running as a practical man interested in developing the resources of the young country. He had no use for the Conservative hard-liners of the 1840s, who were fighting to the end against responsible government. The old Tory Family Compact clique, he wrote, with little ability, no political principle, and no strength from numbers, contrive by their union and active bigotry to … make us and our whole party stink in the nostrils of all liberal minded people.

He called himself a liberal Conservative, a progressive conservative, and aimed to broaden the base of the party by bringing in all men willing to work for the progress of the united province. Many Upper Canadian Tories, and many English-speaking Protestants in Lower Canada, for that matter, were instinctively hostile to the motives and aspirations of the province’s substantial French-speaking Roman Catholic population, but Macdonald was happy to collaborate with them. An 1856 letter to a Montreal journalist contains one of his most important statements of principle:

No man in his senses can suppose that this country can for a century to come be governed by a totally unfrenchified Govt. If a Lower Canadian Britisher desires to conquer, he must stoop to conquer. He must make friends with the French; without sacrificing the status of his race or lineage, he must respect their nationality. Treat them as a nation and they will act as a free people generally do—generously. Call them a faction, and they become factious…. So long as the French have 20 votes they will be a power, & must be conciliated.

Even after he first became a minister, briefly in 1847–48, politics only took up part of Macdonald’s time. He devoted at least as much of his energies, perhaps more, to getting on in life. He was an active land speculator and company promoter, very much in favour of railway building, foreign investment, immigration, and other practical steps to increase the wealth of the developing province. He fell in love with a cousin on a trip back to Scotland and brought her to Canada, where they were married in 1843 and settled down to make a home and family. But Isabella Clark Macdonald suffered from one of the strange Victorian illnesses, something like chronic fatigue syndrome in our time, had a miserable life in Canada, and died in 1857. Macdonald had been a dutiful husband, although he had decided to stay in politics, and his law practice and private business affairs were given the least priority. At the end of long, troubled days, he often turned to bottled relief.

Upper and Lower Canada were united into a single province, Canada, in 1841, and later in that decade Reformers succeeded in pressuring Great Britain to grant responsible government to Canada and its other North American colonies. Then the Reformers stagnated and gradually disintegrated. In 1854 Macdonald was one of the architects of a new political alliance: of Conservatives with Reformers from Upper Canada to create the Liberal-Conservative Party; and of Liberal-Conservatives with the majority bloc of French-Canadian representatives from Lower Canada, the conservative or Bleu group. That administration evolved into his post-1857 partnership with George-Étienne Cartier as co-premiers of the still-dualistic Province of Canada. When the Macdonald–Cartier alliance seemed to have reached the end of the road in the badly deadlocked legislature of the early 1860s—no government could sustain even a drinking majority, people said—Macdonald and company entered another expansive coalition, with George Brown, the fiery editor of the Toronto Globe and leader of the Upper Canadian Reformers/Liberals, to push for Confederation.

By then John A. was known to be a slick operator and a survivor. Brown had once described Macdonald’s path as being studded with the grave-stones of his slaughtered colleagues. One of the opponents of Confederation accurately predicted that the coalition opened a yawning grave for Brown himself, the noblest victim of them all. By the time the Dominion of Canada was born in 1867, George Brown was, indeed, out of the coalition and out of office. Sir John Macdonald, KCB, stood alone atop the greasy pole as prime minister (no more co-premiers), and the only one of the Fathers of Confederation with a knighthood. Even Cartier’s nose was out of joint.

In reality Macdonald was much more thoroughly conservative and British than the image of a moderate pragmatist allows. We cannot understand his view of Confederation and his image of Canada without appreciating the depth and consistency of his conservatism. By the end of his life he had become a somewhat rigid, possibly reactionary Victorian.

The Scottish-born immigrant was British to the core. One muchquoted Macdonald comment about overwashed Englishmen, utterly ignorant of the country and full of crotchets as all Englishmen are was not so much a Canadian nationalist’s point of view as a Scotsman’s attitude. The Kingston area of Upper Canada was populated by recent emigrants from the British Isles and by families of United Empire Loyalists, refugees from the birth of the United States. They were living and working together on British soil.

As a young militiaman Macdonald had borne arms in 1837–38 against rebels and Yankees. He never came to know the United States well. He spent very little time there—a few trips to Georgia for his first wife’s health, a few months in Washington during difficult diplomatic negotiations, possibly some youthful wandering over the line as a minstrel. He usually took his summer holidays in Canada. His longer trips, for business and pleasure, were home to Britain. Despite the cost in money and time of transatlantic travel, Macdonald made the voyage regularly all of his life. If he had ever left politics, he would probably have retired to England, as did his friend George Stephen, the financier of the CPR.

Macdonald was an avid reader of British history, British fiction, British magazines, and British political writing. He met most of the leading British politicians of his time, was often entertained in their country houses, felt thoroughly at home in their company—and, in fact, was often mistaken for Benjamin Disraeli, to whom he had a strong physical resemblance. Not surprisingly, he disliked American politicians’ speaking styles; he disliked most aspects of the American constitution; he even disliked American spelling. Although he served for nineteen years as Prime Minister of Canada, Macdonald met only one President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, and only on a couple of perfunctory social occasions while Macdonald was in Washington as part of a British delegation.

He was intensely proud of his lifelong commitment to the British monarchy and Canada’s ties to the motherland. In that first 1844 election, in which he presented himself as a practical man, Macdonald also promised to resist to the utmost any attempt (from whatever quarter it may come) which may tend to weaken that union. In 1867 he wanted to name the new country the Kingdom of Canada, and often regretted that the British balked for fear of offending the Americans (Dominion was the compromise word). During his 1867 audience with Queen Victoria, Macdonald expressed to her Canada’s resolve to dwell under the sovereignty of your Majesty and your family for ever. In later years he opposed all talk of Canada ever becoming independent from Britain, suggesting instead that Canada would evolve as an auxiliary kingdom in the British Empire.

As prime minister, Macdonald spent years of his life worrying about American incursions into areas of Canadian jurisdiction. If the Yankees were not trying to get access to the Atlantic fisheries, then they were fishing in troubled waters in the rebellious Red River colony. They bought Alaska in 1867; did they have designs on the whole of Canada’s northwest? Would American railroads reduce the west to a U.S. hinterland before the CPR could be built? Would U.S. manufacturers dump products in Canada at slaughter prices, destroying Canada’s infant manufacturing industries? What a stroke of political genius it was to call a policy of tariff protection a National Policy. Who could oppose a National Policy without appearing to be a little disloyal?

Macdonald always suspected that his opponents were at least a little disloyal. He had been prepared to fight the Yankee-loving rebels in 1837 and he stood on guard for Canada for the rest of his life—never more than in his last campaign, in 1891, when he concluded that the Laurier Liberals, who were advocating unrestricted reciprocity or free trade with the United States, were complicit with American annexationists. Macdonald turned that election into a referendum on loyalty and Canada’s future:

As for myself, my course is clear. A British subject I was born—a British subject I will die. With my utmost effort, with my latest breath, will I oppose the veiled treason which attempts by sordid means and mercenary proffers to lure our people from their allegiance.

Some said the old scoundrel was wrapping himself in the flag as a last resort. Though he certainly understood the political benefits of raising the loyalty cry, all the evidence indicates that he also believed every word he uttered. On the loyalty issue, Macdonald’s principles and his political interests coincided.

Macdonald was no democrat. He and most of the other Fathers of Confederation identified democracy with American republicanism, rule by the ignorant masses, and breakdown. Owing to the introduction of universal suffrage … mob rule had consequently supplanted legitimate authority, said Cartier, who was even more conservative than Macdonald, of the United States during the Confederation debates, and we now saw the sad spectacle of a country torn by civil war, and brethren fighting against brethren. The Fathers of Canada’s Confederation were determined not to take that route. Not a single member of the [Quebec] Conference …, Macdonald reported, was in favour of universal suffrage. Every one felt that in this respect the principle of the British Constitution should be carried out, and that classes and property should be represented as well as numbers.

Most British North American legislatures still had an upper house, analogous to the British House of Lords, whose members were appointed to represent minority interests. Macdonald told the Quebec Conference in 1864 that the new country’s upper house, its Senate, ought to be composed of men of substance: The rights of the minority must be protected, and the rich are always fewer in number than the poor. It happened that the Province of Canada had been experimenting with an elected upper house. Macdonald, and most of the other Fathers, preferred to revert to appointment. Upper-house elections had been expensive and the best people had not come forward. The conservatism of the Fathers was beautifully expressed in Macdonald’s advice that they should follow the maxim of Upper Canada’s first governor, John Graves Simcoe, which was to plant in the New World an image and transcript of the British Constitution.

There was no room in the British constitution for the radical devices of direct democracy that a few opponents of Confederation suggested. Macdonald’s sense of constitutional propriety was particularly upset by proposals that an election or some other kind of vote should be held on the Confederation scheme. It would be unconstitutional and anti-British to have a plebiscite, he wrote a friend. If by petitions and public meetings Parliament is satisfied that the Country do not want the measure, they will refuse to adopt it. If on the other hand Parliament sees that the country is in favour of the Federation, there is no use in an appeal to it. Submission of the complicated details to the Country is an obvious absurdity. To the legislature he argued passionately that a popular vote on the matter would be a subversion of the first principles of British constitutional government. Only despots resorted to referenda, sometimes at bayonet point. In a free country the people’s representatives made up their minds:

Sir, we in this House are representatives of the people, and not mere delegates; and to pass such a law would be robbing ourselves of the character of representatives…. If the members of this House do not represent the country—all of its interests, classes, and communities—it never has been represented…. If we do not represent the people of Canada, we have no right to be here. But if we do represent them, we have a right to see for them, to think for them, to act for them … and if we do not think we have this right, we are unworthy of the commission we have received from the people of Canada.

Macdonald had actually been something of a johnny-come-lately to the whole idea of Confederation. Right up until the last moment in 1864 he was not enthusiastic about creating a new country. He had not shared the vision of a great British North American nation that a few dreamers and poets had expounded, but had concentrated instead on trying to make the Province of Canada work properly. Unlike some of his successors, he was temperamentally too conservative to be a constitutional activist. If there is one thing to be avoided, he declared in 1853, it is meddling with the constitution of the country, which should not be altered till it is evident that the people are suffering from the effects of that constitution as it actually exists.

The impulse to change in the Province of Canada had come from the Reformers (some of whom were starting to call themselves Liberals; others, the more radical, had been nicknamed Clear Grits—because there was no sand in their character, only clear grit) of the old Upper Canada. They were insisting on political realignment to give fairer representation—representation by population—to their larger and faster-growing section of the province. George Brown, the Reform leader, favoured Confederation partly because there would be rep by pop in the House of Commons. Also because—as everyone realized—the federal principle that would underlie the scheme would mean breaking up the Province of Canada so that on local matters the two sections, to be renamed Ontario and Quebec, could go their own ways.

In sharp contrast to Brown, who was the key man in proposing the 1864 coalition that got things rolling, Macdonald stood for the status quo until he realized that change was upon him: As leader of the Conservatives in Upper Canada, I then had the option of forming a coalition government or of handing over the administration of affairs to the Grit party for the next ten years, Macdonald explained to a follower. He climbed aboard the bandwagon, and soon led the band.

Experienced and smart, well read and better versed in constitutional law than most of his colleagues, he quickly became the chief constitutional expert of Confederation. Like most politicians in the British tradition, he did not like the idea of federations. The United Kingdom was a legislative union rather than a federation. One legislature, Parliament, under the Crown, governed all of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and the system seemed to work wonderfully. By contrast, the world’s most famous experiment in federalism, the United States of America, had fallen apart and into bloody civil war. Macdonald and many of the other Fathers repeatedly said that they would have preferred to bring all of British North America together in a legislative union, like Great Britain.

They realized they could not. The French majority of Lower Canada would never accept a union that did not provide them with the capacity to maintain their own distinctiveness. Maritimers were not likely to surrender control of their local affairs to a government centred a thousand miles away in the interior of the continent. And the Reformers of Upper Canada also wanted to run their affairs without too many French and Catholic legislators standing in their way. To protect the distinctiveness of its constituent communities the union was going to have to be a federation, with two levels of government.

The proposed federation drew on both British and American experience. In the central government, the House of Commons would be based on representation by population. The appointed Senate, however, would help protect the minorities from the masses, as the House of Lords did in Britain. It would also protect regional and local interests

Reviews for Right Honourable Men

[maunder_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting and readable. One of Canada's eminent historians evaluates and ranks Canada's Prime Ministers and finds most of them wanting. An intelligent discussion of what the role of a prime minister might be and is.