John A (16 page)

In the contest between them, Macdonald had one decisive asset. As he had written to Strachan, he enjoyed “friendly relations with the French.” By contrast, Brown had far too often denounced “French domination,” either personally or through the pages of his
Globe,
and the Grits were even more virulent in their criticism of the French. Macdonald saw this door of opportunity opening before him, and through it he slipped.

Where Baldwin and LaFontaine had left off, Macdonald now took over. In part, his plan was of course pure opportunism. It was also, though, the product of an idea about Canada's very nature that was uncommonly imaginative and generous. Indeed, it's not easy to identify any leading English-Canadian politician, all the way down to the 1960s (when the rise of separatism in Quebec caused everyone's mind to focus wonderfully), who came close to matching the vision of the country that Macdonald expressed at this time.

Macdonald didn't go in for grand ideas or for the “vision thing.” He expressed his understanding of Canada's nature in colloquial language in a private letter, one written to a correspondent who disagreed with almost everything he was saying. There was no benefit to Macdonald in this exercise, therefore. He wrote it in order to think out what it was that he actually believed.

This remarkable statement, often quoted but most times only in summary form, is contained in the letter Macdonald wrote in January 1856 to Brown Chamberlain, the editor of the Montreal
Gazette.
Typically, he began with a joke. He had been lax, he admitted, in replying to Chamberlain's earlier letters, so “I have
hunted up your old letters, so that you see I
cherish
them, if I do not reply.” Next came some gossip. Then, without any peal of oratorical trumpets, Macdonald set out some of the most insightful passages in all Canadian political prose.

 

The truth is you British L[ower] Canadians never can forget that you were once supreme, that Jean Baptiste was your hewer of wood and drawer of water. You struggle like the protestant Irish in Ireland, like the Norman invaders in England, not for equality but
ascendancy.
The difference between you and those interesting and amiable people is that you have not the honesty to admit it. You can't and won't admit the principle that the majority must govern. The Gallicans may fairly be reckoned as two-thirds ag-st one third of all the other races who are lumped together as
Anglo-Saxon.
Heaven save the mark! Now you have nearly one-third if not quite of the representat-n of Lower Canada, & why is it the misfortune of your position that you are in a minority & therefore can't command the majority of votes. The only remedies are immigration and copulation and these will work wonders.

…No man in his senses can suppose that this country can for a century to come be governed by a totally unfrenchified Gov-t. If a Lower Canada 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 usually do—generously. Call them a faction and they become factious.

Supposing the numerical preponderance of British in Canada becomes greater than it now is. I think the French would give more trouble than they are now said to do. At present, they divide, as we do, they are split up in several sections, & are governed more or less by defined principles of action. As they become smaller and feebler, so they will be more united, from a sense of self-preservation they
will act as one man & hold the balance of power…. So long as the French have 20 votes, they will be a power & must be conciliated.

 

Then came some political gossip, followed by his customary jaunty ending. “I scarcely think you can read this scrawl. It is written by the light of one dip & my eyes are rapidly becoming irascible. Good night to you.”

Even all these decades later, after such an overflowing abundance of books, of learned articles and speeches and conferences and colloquia, all explaining what it is that Quebecers really want, it is hard to identify an analysis that comes nearer to understanding the way Canada is defined by the political dynamic between a threatened minority and a casually confident majority than this exposition, written late at night by a guttering candle and tossed into the mail without a single word or sentence altered. Much that is in it—the invocation to “respect their nationality” as an obvious example—is as relevant today as it was then. Such a capacity for understanding and generosity would be uncommon under any circumstances, but especially in an unsentimental and pragmatic power-seeking politician. A comment about Macdonald by Pope is relevant here, namely that there was “an entire absence of prejudice in his large and liberal mind.” He took people as they were, with all their faults and frailties, and almost never judged them or moralized about their failings.

Macdonald also exploited people for his own partisan purposes when their religion or culture or language might be of use to him. His goal wasn't to preserve the French fact in Canada for its own sake, but rather to achieve national harmony so the government could get on with its business—and, as doesn't need to be added, to gain and retain power. In mid-nineteenth-century Canada, though, it took an unusually large and liberal mind to conceive that government itself had to function so as to accommo
date, year in, year out, the inescapably conflicting interests of the two European peoples—or nations—who made up the national political community.

There was another, seldom-appreciated reason why Macdonald understood French Canadians so readily. He wasn't an English Canadian himself. He was a Scottish Canadian.

Macdonald himself was a member of a small, threatened people. Between Scots and French there had been the Auld Alliance of the two of them against the English; but that was now history. Current, though, was the fact that the Scots, like French Canadians, had their own religion, their own educational and legal systems, and even, if growing weak, their own language. So they were at ease in each other's company. French-Scottish marriages were common, in contrast to their scarcity among the English and the Irish. André Siegfried, who came over from France to survey Canada much as de Tocqueville did in America, wrote in his 1907 work,
The Race Question in Canada,
“They [Scots] manifested a real goodwill towards the French, and the latter were the first to recognize it.” And Wilfrid Laurier once said, “Were I not French I would be honoured to be a Scot.”
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It's hard to doubt that when Macdonald looked at Lower Canada, he sometimes saw Scotland.

About Macdonald's personal command of the French language itself there is uncertainty. The evidence is mixed. George-Étienne Cartier's assistant, Benjamin Sulte, wrote in his memoir
that “Macdonald was fond of reading French novels—he always kept them close at hand.” No supporting evidence for this claim exists, and Sulte may have chanced upon a French novel on Macdonald's desk that actually belonged to his second wife, the creditably bilingual Agnes. The historian Ged Martin has reported that a unilingual Canadien member, François Bourassa, claimed to have had a number of conversations in French with Macdonald while the two whiled away the time in the legislature.
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Yet the Montreal lawyer and journalist François-Xavier-Anselme Trudel commented in an article published in 1887 that Macdonald knew not a word of French. The probability is that Macdonald in fact spoke very little French (the Bourassa story may just have been family myth) but could read it comparatively well—not to the level of being able to enjoy French novels but sufficiently to comprehend the letters that, for instance, Étienne-Paschal Taché, twice his co-premier, regularly sent him in French.

The Big Tent that Macdonald was out to erect was thus to be held up by four supports: Conservatives willing and able to be reasonably progressive; Reformers looking for a sanctuary; a dependable bloc of Canadiens; and Macdonald himself, as master builder and circus barker. Once set up and shown to be durable, this became the political edifice that almost every one of Macdonald's successors down to today would attempt to emulate.

In the fall of 1853, the Hincks-Morin government entered its death throes. Hincks became the subject of press stories that he and the mayor of Toronto had refinanced the city's debt by a private manoeuvre that earned them each ten thousand pounds. The press hounds kept on sniffing and came up with reports about railway stock that Hincks had picked up for a song and some bargain-priced government land he had profited from.

The inevitable election finally came in June 1854, after Hincks had lost two successive confidence votes in the legislature. In the election, Macdonald, for the first and only time in his career, made the corruption of his opponents his central theme, coining the phrase that Hincks and his ministers were “steeped to the lips in corruption”—an exercise in verbal cleverness he would come to regret because it would be quoted back at him. He won handsomely in Kingston. Across Upper Canada, though, the Conservatives did comparatively poorly, in part because Macdonald was known to be friendly towards the French—the Orange Order, had, by this time, turned against his key Orange ally, Ogle Gowan. As an additional handicap, the Conservative leader for whom people were actually being asked to vote was not Macdonald but Sir Allan MacNab—a decent old duffer and military hero of the 1838 Rebellion, but indiscreet enough to say “all my politics are railroads” at the same time that he was president of the Great Western Railway and leader of the opposition. MacNab was a figure out of the past. “The party is nowhere, damned everlastingly,” Macdonald wrote despondently to Alexander Campbell after the election. At that very point, Hincks lost yet another confidence vote and suddenly resigned.
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MacNab was now called in by the governor general to form a new government. A lot of baling wire went into its assembly. All the Canadien ministers who had served under Hincks were kept in their posts. There were six newcomers—three Conservatives, with MacNab at their head, and three Reformers, to give some credence to the Liberal-Conservative label. Macdonald, as the new attorney general for Upper Canada, held the cabinet's most important portfolio. And of these two principal figures, MacNab was for show and Macdonald was for real.