John A (20 page)

Macdonald so revered the law that in one respect he gave it precedence over politics—not always, but with reasonably respectable frequency. Less than a year after becoming attorney general, he had to fill an impending vacancy in the post of chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas. He wrote to an attractive candidate, “We are satisfied that these requirements are to be found in yourself and that no more worthy successor to Mr. Macaulay could be found.” The candidate was Robert Baldwin, the former premier and leader of the Reform Party, which was now in opposition. In the event, Baldwin turned down the offer.

“My only object in making Judicial appointments, is in the efficiency of the Bench,” Macdonald informed one cabinet minister.
He later told a Nova Scotia supporter that his test was “to consider fitness as the first requirement for judicial appointments…political considerations should have little or no influence.” He was protesting too much, but not entirely. Richard Cartwright, who loathed Macdonald, conceded in his
Reminiscences,
“Sir John was always anxious, as far as political exigencies would permit, to maintain the dignity of the Bench.” Pope, more predictably, wrote of his “solicitude for the high character of the Bench.”

A good example of Macdonald's practising what he preached was his appointment of Samuel Hume Blake to the prime judicial post of vice-chancellor of Ontario. He was the brother of Edward Blake, then the most prominent and effective of his Liberal opponents. To a colleague, Macdonald admitted that “Blake's politics make his appointment difficult,” but he alone was “of heavy enough metal to preside in the court.” As striking was his promoting William Johnston Ritchie as chief justice of the Supreme Court, a man who not only had been a Liberal but, in Macdonald's own words, “an anti-confederate and a strong one.” As he had done with Blake, Macdonald justified his choice on the grounds that “the Supreme Court is weak, and we can only feed it from above.”

Inevitably, Macdonald did not always practise what he preached about judicial appointments. As he explained to one supporter, the fact that Judge Ross of Toronto was a well-known Liberal made him highly desirable: “He is a Grit and it would be a good answer to the allegations of our opponents that only Tories are appointed.”

Macdonald could also be concerned about the dignity of the bench. Post-Confederation, after appointing Lewis Wallbridge, a Liberal, to be chief justice of Manitoba, he commented, “He will be a good judge…. It is so seldom one can indulge one's personal feeling with due consideration for public interest.” Macdonald
remained concerned, however, that the new appointee's blackened and stumpy teeth would impair his gravitas, and he asked a colleague to prevail on Wallbridge to get himself a new set of teeth.

Macdonald's interest in the law never slackened, and it extended to just about every aspect of it. He was particular about the details of the law. “Certainty of punishment, and more especially certainty that the sentence imposed by the Judge will be carried out, is of more consequence in the prevention of crime than the severity of the sentence,” he advised his friend, Warden John Creighton. He was as particular about the generality of the law. During the 1865–66 invasions of Canada by Fenians, or Irish Americans, public pressure developed for individuals to be arrested on mere suspicion of supporting the Fenians. Macdonald rejected the demands: “This is a country of law and order,” he said, “and we cannot go beyond the law.”

Without question, Macdonald loved the law. Politics, though, he worshipped. And that is where his thoughts and talents now turned.

 

ELEVEN

The Double Shuffle

Ah John A., how I love you. How I wish I could trust you. Reform-Liberal member during conversation with John A. Macdonald

T
o clamber the political ladder's last, short rung, Macdonald needed to ease his own leader, Sir Allan MacNab, from the top spot. His challenge, though, was a good deal more complicated than that. Given the rule that whoever commits regicide almost never succeeds to the throne, Macdonald needed to dispatch MacNab while leaving no impression of his own footprints on his departing leader's back.

MacNab, “the Gallant Knight,” had the round, red face and white whiskers of Charles Dickens' Mr. Pickwick. He was also a proud man, certain to react strongly against any suggestion of betrayal. Macdonald's solution was to get others to do the deed for him. In the spring of 1856, all three Reform ministers in the Liberal-Conservative cabinet resigned, claiming that the government no longer commanded their confidence. Shortly afterwards, Macdonald and the single other remaining Conservative minister resigned, ostensibly to maintain solidarity with their former
colleagues. MacNab was left with no choice but to resign himself. Racked by gout and in acute pain, he had himself carried into the chamber on a stretcher to cast his vote against his own demise. Immediately afterwards, a new Liberal-Conservative ministry was formed. Nominally, its premier was a Canadien, Étienne-Paschal Taché. Beside him, still in the attorney general portfolio he had held since 1854, was Macdonald. No one had any doubt that Auditor General John Langton had it right when he described Macdonald as “the recognized leader.”

Premier Allan MacNab, the Conservative leader whom Macdonald eased out so he could get to the top. He was famous for declaring, unapologetically, “all my politics are railroads.”

Macdonald protested his innocence. “Heap as many epithets and reproaches on me as you like,” he told the House, “but this I contend, that having performed my portion of the contract, having stuck to my leader, having tried every means of keeping the cabinet together, I had a right as a gentleman and a man of honour to go into a new government with a Speaker of the Legislative Council, or anyone else.”
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Taché, by creating the illusion that a new government had been created, had allowed Macdonald to switch leaders with a certain, minimal, decency. In a letter to Henry Smith, though, Macdonald dropped the pretence: “I might, as you know, have been Premier, & insisted on Taché's claims lest it be said that in putting McNab [sic] out I was exalting myself.”

However he had got there, Macdonald was now at the ladder's top.

The heights suited Macdonald. He performed there with a political skill never seen before on the Canadian political stage. It was from this time on that he set out systematically to develop the kind of organized centrist party that he had sketched out in his letter to John Strachan two years earlier about the need for a “material change” in the party to bring in “‘progressive' Conservatives” and Canadien members. By today's standards, the Liberal-Conservative Party was neither organized nor disciplined, and the tripod on which it rested—of Conservatives,
bleus
and fair-weather Reformers—was decidedly wobbly. Yet it was a genuinely centrist party and, by its interweaving of French and English, a genuine national party, the first since Baldwin and LaFontaine.

This Big Tent party would soon demonstrate that it possessed a quality then exceedingly rare in Canadian politics—durability. The Liberal-Conservative Party had this attribute because it was a distinctively Canadian political party. It was, that is to say, a party of compromise, of endless accommodation between its constituent groups, of wheeling and dealing, horse-trading, temporary alliances and pacts, disagreements and splits, and broken deals—most of which unravelled at some time or other and then had to be reassembled laboriously.

In this sense, what was most remarkable about Macdonald's achievement was not that he should have become Canada's first prime minister, on July 1, 1867. It was, rather, that long before then he should have become the country's first truly
Canadian
prime minister (or premier, as he was called then). Macdonald
fashioned a mould into which almost all successful Canadian political leaders have fitted themselves and their parties.

At the time, very few people appreciated the magnitude of Macdonald's achievement in keeping together, and maintaining on a more or less even keel, a party that encompassed such disparate elements as Conservatives and Tories, French and English, Orange Irish and Green Irish, Catholics and Protestants (and among the latter, the Anglicans who believed they were, and certainly should be, the established church, as well as grittier denominations like the Methodists). Most who followed politics in those days loathed “partyism,” or the notion of an organized, impersonal and bureaucratic political machine. Few appreciated then that in so inchoate and dispersed a country a national political party was one of the few instruments available to give it a spine. The journalist Goldwin Smith understood what was going on: while he abhorred what he saw as Macdonald's corruption of Canadian politics, he could not hide his admiration for Macdonald's irreplaceable skill in keeping together what Smith called a “crazy-quilt” of a country. (Wilfrid Laurier also understood, which was why, when his time came, he governed like a francophone Macdonald.)

Patronage; abundant and endlessly inventive political deviousness and guile; an exceptional understanding of human nature; a natural tolerance for the inescapable intolerances of groups and individuals—these were Macdonald's essential operating tools. Add to them another quality as critical as any of the rest: likeability. Some opponents—Brown, Cartwright, later Edward Blake—hated Macdonald with a ferocious intensity. But a vast number of people of all kinds—supporters and opponents, legislature members and rank-and-file Conservatives, voters and non-voters—liked him and gave him the benefit of the doubt even when he didn't deserve it. Other politicians were admired
and looked up to: Robert Baldwin, George Brown and the Patriote leader Louis-Joseph Papineau. But Macdonald alone was widely liked, and by quite a few was loved.

A great many people never called him “Macdonald.” Rather, it was “John A.”—even to his face—a signal of ease, familiarity, trust. Maybe he was a rogue, but he was
their
rogue. Among other Canadian leaders, only Diefenbaker gained the same familiarity, as “Dief,” and in his case the diminutive came almost as often from anger as from affection.

Macdonald worked hard at being liked, most especially by his own supporters. “I dare say you are very busy from night until morning, and again from noon 'til night,” Alexander Campbell, his ex-partner and now political crony, wrote to him. “That drinking with the refractory members is in your department, I take for granted. Another glass of champagne and a
story of doubtful moral tendency
with a little of the Hon. John Macdonald's peculiar ‘sawder' are elements in the political strength of a Canadian ministry not to be despised.” Macdonald distributed his “sawder” to all points of the compass. The best anecdote involves a passerby noticing Macdonald and a Reform-Liberal sitting together outside the chamber, with the opposition member's head resting on Macdonald's shoulder, as he remarked mournfully, “Ah John A., how I love you. How I wish I could trust you.” The best description of Macdonald's seductive allure was made—later—by a Liberal MP, W.F. Maclean, who, in a magazine article, wrote that Macdonald “had a wonderful influence over many men. They would go through fire and water to serve him, and got, some of them, little or no reward. But they served him because they loved him, and because with all his great powers they saw in him their own frailties.”

The importance of all the other assets that Macdonald deployed to keep together his coalition should not be underesti
mated. He was above all a politician who enjoyed politics immensely and who went at it with a zest and dedication matched by no other Canadian leader of his time.

Unique to Macdonald also was the fact that he loved the political game, absolutely revelled in it, for its own sake. He just had fun. The failing of one Conservative member, he complained to another, was impatience: “He destroyed one or two marvellous good plots of ours by premature disclosure.” And he counselled a supporter he was trying to recruit as a candidate (in the end, successfully) that conversations with the governor general, Sir Edmund Head, “will do you good, as you have a great game to play before long.”

From this time on, Macdonald sent out a stream of political letters—an absolute torrent of them. He gave advice to the editor of the pro-Conservative
Hamilton Spectator
on how to execute a reversal in policy: “It's a damned sharp curve, but I think we can make it.” He showered upon members and supporters what he called “good bunkum arguments” on how to deal with such dangerously popular issues as Rep by Pop. He kept in close touch with Conservative newspaper editors, often accompanying his comments with references to likely advertising and printing contracts. “Splits,” or more than one Conservative candidate running in the same riding and so dividing the vote, kept him in a state of constant agitation. In one letter to a supporter, Macdonald raged, “We are losing everywhere from our friends splitting the party. If this continues it is all up with us.” As well, he scouted for candidates, gave them advice and sometimes provided campaign funds (at times from his own pocket), although men standing for office were expected then to cover their own electoral costs. He kept in touch with important non-Conservatives such as the education reformer Egerton Ryerson, who might be able to influence Wesleyan Methodists to vote
Conservative (he did), and the leading Reformer Sidney Smith, whom he hoped to persuade to join the Liberal-Conservative cabinet (he did). And when elections approached, his advice to candidates was candid: “Canvass steadily and vigorously, yet quietly—get your own returning office, a true man selected.”

The fairy dust that Macdonald sprinkled over everything was, of course, patronage. There was nothing new in this. Patronage has fuelled Canadian politics from its earliest days. Macdonald's oldest preserved letter, dated November 22, 1836, was about patronage. “I am infinitely obliged to you for the hint respecting the clerkship of the peace,” the young lawyer wrote gratefully to a Macpherson cousin. He would remain silent, Macdonald wrote, until the incumbent had committed himself to leaving, “in which case I shall call upon you to exert your kind endeavours on my behalf.” As Macdonald's letter suggests, patronage flourished because, as is the case in all underdeveloped countries, secure, white-collar jobs were scarce, and because no criteria existed to determine who merited them, other than political favouritism. The political scientist S.J.R. Noel has used the term “clientelism” to describe the condition of mutual dependency that patronage involved—the client needing anything from a land grant to a railway charter to a soft job, and the patron needing votes, or perhaps just deference.
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Moreover, as Noel observed, clientelism was “long assumed to be a normal part of the political process because it was a normal part of practically everything else.” Patronage was a major issue in the Rebellions of 1837–38; it was also the prime issue in the fight for Responsible Government. The railway boom, which began shortly before Macdonald's political career, attracted extensive offers of patronage
simply because of the huge sums of capital involved. The promoter of the Great Western Railway, Samuel Zimmerman, claimed that at any time more members could be found in his apartment than in any room in the legislature.