John A (24 page)

Macdonald ought to have been thoroughly enjoying himself. The boom made people happy, and happy voters are grateful voters. Yet time and again, Macdonald's naturally sunny nature seemed clouded by an undertone of dissatisfaction—as if he himself was wondering, “Is that all there is?” The frustration came through in comments he wrote to friends: “I find the work and annoyance too-much for me,” and, “
Entre nous,
I think it not improbable that I will retire from the Govt.” He even let down his guard enough to allow some of his pessimism to creep into letters to his family. To his sister Margaret, he wrote, “We are having a hard fight in the House & will beat them in the votes, but it will, I think, end in my retiring as soon as I can with honour” and to his mother, “We are getting on very slowly in the House, and it is very tiresome.” In 1859 the rumour spread that Macdonald intended to retire. Joseph Pope wrote of Macdonald, “I believe, [he] had fully made up his mind to get out.” The entreaties of Conservatives eventually
kept Macdonald at his post, but, as Pope wrote, “sorely against his wishes.”

Macdonald expressed much the same sentiments in public. At a formal dinner given for him in Kingston in November 1860, he lapsed into quite-out-of-character self-pity. “When I have looked back upon my public life,” he said, “I have often felt bitterly and keenly what a foolish man I was to enter into it at all (Cries of ‘No, no')…. In this country, it is unfortunately true, that all men who enter the public service act foolishly in doing so. If a man desires peace and domestic happiness, he will find neither in performing the thankless task of a public officer.”

One factor exacerbating Macdonald's pessimism was sheer loneliness. He lived in boarding houses, as, for example, jointly with a Mr. Salt on Toronto's Bay Street. In 1861 he wrote to his sister Margaret about his new apartment-mate, an Allan McLean: “He is a very good fellow but rather ennuyant and I will be glad when he goes. I am now so much accustomed to live alone, that it frets me to have a person always in the same house with me.”

His natural optimism was rubbed down further by the progressive weakening of his beloved mother, Helen. She died on October 24, 1862. Alerted by Louisa, Macdonald was at her side through her last days. She too was buried in the family plot at Cataraqui Cemetery. Of his own family, only Margaret and Louisa remained; also Hugh John, but by now he had become a detached son. From this time on, Macdonald had less and less reason to go to Kingston, and, inevitably, he became increasingly distanced from his own childhood and youth.

While Macdonald was subject to occasional depressions, this general mood of listlessness and pessimism was alien to him. His
usual philosophy of life is set out in a reply he wrote to a friend who had complained about financial problems. “Why man do you expect to go thro' this world with trials or worries. You have been deceived it seems. As for present debts, treat them as Fakredden [sic] in Tancred treated his—He played with his debts, caressed them, toyed with them—What would I have done without those darling debts said he.” Macdonald then described his creed: “Take things pleasantly and when fortune empties her chamberpot on your head—Smile and say ‘We are going to have a summer shower.'”

Not until later did Macdonald—by now without any real confidante—reveal a major cause of his sense of alienation and purposelessness. The occasion—to cite it here requires slipping out of the straitjacket of chronology—was a dinner in Halifax in September 1864, right after the close of the first Confederation conference in Charlottetown. During his speech, Macdonald turned confessional in a way that was most unusual for him. “For twenty long years I have been dragging myself through the dreary wastes of Colonial politics,” he told his audience. “I thought there was no end, nothing worthy of ambition, but now I see something which is worthy of all I have suffered in the cause of my little country.” By that vivid phrase—“twenty long years…through the dreary wastes”—Macdonald was coming very close to saying that his entire career had been an exercise in pointlessness.

Macdonald loved power for its own sake, and he loved the political game for itself, so it would be far too sweeping to conclude that he meant literally what he was saying. But there is hard truth in that analysis. Macdonald had not come into politics with any grand goal or vision, and after two decades in politics, a good half-dozen of them at the top of the ladder, he had yet to accomplish much that would linger after he left. During this time he had missed out on several chances to make real money or to
have a normal family life. Most particularly, Macdonald was failing in politics itself. Rather than the national harmony that should have resulted from his turning the Conservative Party into a centrist group, by forging a French-English alliance and by settling long-standing disputes, what had grown stronger over these same years was disharmony, division and sectarianism.

Religion was the “other” of these times. Almost every topic of public debate was dominated by and deformed by sectarianism. It was Canada's equivalent to the division then rapidly taking hold in the United States between the slave-owning South and the anti-slavery North. The Orange Order, its membership constantly augmented by new Irish Protestant immigrants, was becoming ever more explicitly anti-Catholic, and the moderate Ogle Gowan was steadily losing ground to the hard-liner John Hillyard Cameron. At the same time, the Catholics in Lower Canada were becoming ever more ultramontane, or authoritarian. In Toronto, Bishop Armand-François Charbonnel declared that any Catholic who possessed the vote but failed to use it to elect candidates committed to expanding separate schools was guilty of a mortal sin. Differences in religion multiplied those of race, and the reverse equally.

In particular in Upper Canada, there was an ever-rising anger at the political power exercised in the national legislature by Lower Canada's Canadiens, this in important part because of the very alliance that Macdonald had forged with Cartier and his bloc of
bleus.
As was rare, Macdonald's political antennae failed to function. He dismissed Representation by Population as “too abstract a question [for the public] to be enthusiastic about.” Rather, and as always in politics, appearance mattered far more
than fact, and the appearance here was that the minority—a defeated one, moreover—was now in charge.

The responses went far beyond mutterings in the various Orange Lodges. The
Globe
laid it out explicitly: “Our French rulers are not over particular, we are sorry to say, and we are powerless. Upper Canadian sentiment matters nothing even in purely Upper Canadian matters. We are slaves…. J.A. Macdonald may allow his friend to buy an office, he may even take a thousand pounds of plunder, if he likes; so long as he please Lower Canada, he may rule over us.” George Brown was even more intemperate: he railed in the
Globe
against “a deep scheme of Romish Priestcraft to colonize Upper Canada with Papists…a new scheme of the Roman hierarchy to unite the Irish Roman Catholics of the continent to a great league for the overthrow of our common [public] school system.”

Macdonald was by no means without sin himself. While he deplored sectarian strife with a vigour few other English-Canadian politicians matched, he also exploited it. In a letter to education reformer Egerton Ryerson, after mentioning a grant to the university that Ryerson favoured, Macdonald urged, “The Elections will come off in June, so no time to be lost in rousing the Wesleyan feeling in our favour.” He wrote to Sidney Smith, a Reformer he was trying to lure into his cabinet, “We must soothe the Orangemen by degrees but we cannot afford now to lose the Catholics.” It was in this letter to Smith that Macdonald laid down his often-quoted maxim of how to rule: “Politics is a game requiring great coolness and an utter abnegation of prejudice and personal feeling.”

Two solutions existed. One was Macdonald's policy of compromise, endlessly and exhaustingly pursued by guile, skill, outright deviousness and a sizable portion of self-interest. He still had Gowan on his side, and he had bought off the
bleus,
a great many them right-wing ultramontanes, by patronage. Despite its
patches and outright holes, the Liberal-Conservative Big Tent still stood.

A second solution existed. Known as the “double majority,” it amounted to a mechanical device for keeping Upper Canadians and Lower Canadians apart from each other politically. Up to a point, this system could work for regional matters, but national or province-wide measures became virtually impossible to put into effect. The solution merely papered over the problem, at the cost of making government paralysis all but inevitable and permanent.

Macdonald began by refusing to accept the double-majority rule. Gradually, he came to apply the rule he himself had spelled out in his legislature speech of 1854, of “yielding to the times” rather than engaging in “affected heroism or bravado”—and, also, of saving his political skin. He now proclaimed, “In matters affecting Upper Canada solely, members from that section claimed the generally exercised right of exclusive legislation, while members from Lower Canada legislated in matters affecting only their own section.” This compromise ceded the double majority in fact, if not officially. It worked, but at the cost of making the legislature largely unworkable.

Paralysis was never absolute, of course. Work began in Ottawa in 1860 on the construction of a complex of Parliament Buildings of exceptional grandeur—and cost. In 1859 Macdonald's finance minister, Alexander Tilloch Galt, enacted higher tariffs on British imports to preserve Canada's vital Reciprocity Treaty with the United States. British manufacturers protested furiously, but the Colonial Office endorsed Galt's schedule. Effectively, London thereby added full economic self-government to the political self-government already ceded to Canada. And the term “world class” began to be applicable to Canada. Besides the Grand Trunk as the world's longest railway, the Victoria Bridge, spanning the St. Lawrence at Montreal and a marvel of tubular iron, was the
world's longest; completed in 1857, it was opened officially in 1860 by a visiting royal prince.

The Parliament Buildings under construction, c. 1862. They were huge, dramatic and extraordinarily ambitious for so small a colony. They were also the one thing in Ottawa that everyone liked.

But the dominant, all-consuming issue in Canadian public life remained sectarianism. To increase the tension, Brown's call for Representation by Population had become unanswerable. The census for 1861 showed that Upper Canada now had 285,000 more inhabitants than Lower Canada. More and more Conservatives were coming to accept that Upper Canada had to be given more seats in the legislature, in proportion to its population. Cartier—naturally—was adamantly opposed to any change in the balance of seats between Upper and Lower Canada, and Macdonald had to stand in solidarity with him or lose his
bleu
supporters. Yet
rejecting Rep by Pop only magnified the fury in Upper Canada.