Prime Minister Stephen Harper takes part in a ceremony Sunday at Kingston City Hall to mark the bicentennial of the birth of Canada's first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Fred Chartrand Sir John A. Macdonald is often held to be the one indispensable Canadian, without whose influence this country probably would not have happened. Prime Minister Stephen Harper reiterated this view last week in an article for Postmedia News, and again Sunday in Kingston, celebrating the 200th anniversary of Macdonald’s birth. There’s plenty of evidence to bolster the argument, as far as it goes.
But a new collection of Macdonald’s speeches, Canada Transformed, edited by Sarah Gibson and Arthur Milnes, offers hints that the influence of the spare, energetic, indefatigable and gin-loving Scot extends well beyond Canada’s constitutional arrangements, to the national sensibility itself – for good and for ill. His strengths are ours. So are his flaws.
Case in point: We reflexively enjoy measuring ourselves against the United States. Parochial anti-Americanism is as deeply embedded in the Canadian psyche as hockey and doughnuts. And it turns out we come by this honestly. Macdonald’s speeches make clear that the fear of America was his go-to political lever. “We were liable,” he said in 1864, as he laid out the road map for Confederation, “in case England and the United States were pleased to differ, to be (cut) off, one by one, not having any common means of defence. I believe we shall have at length an organization that will enable us to be a nation and protect ourselves as we should.”
Macdonald was of course preoccupied with the American Civil War, at a time when it seemed England might come in on the side of the South. “The crisis was great, the danger was imminent, and the gentlemen who now form the present Administration found it to be their duty to lay aside all personal feelings, to sacrifice in some degree their position, and even run the risk of having their motives impugned, for the sake of arriving at some conclusion that would be satisfactory to the country in general,” he told the Parliament of the United Province of Canada in 1865.
In the foregoing we see both the genesis of anti-Americanism, and a typically Canadian espousal of compromise. Later in the same speech, Macdonald makes clear the extent to which he sought to avoid what he considered to be flaws in the American model. The monarchy, he argued, would confer greater stability than the U.S. had enjoyed, and a strong central government would offset the fractiousness inherent in the principle of states’ rights. What’s intriguing about this, aside from the arguments themselves, is that the same logic is applied to this day by Canadian monarchists and defenders of robust federalism. Here again, Macdonald’s thought forms part of the national DNA. It’s an astonishing achievement.
The narrative takes a darker turn when we examine the first prime minister’s egregiously racist views, including about Aboriginal People. In 1885, in an address to the House of Commons about the Northwest Rebellion, he articulated in one long passage the 150-year catastrophe that Canada’s relationship with First Nations would become. “We have had a wonderful success,” Macdonald declared, “but we still have had the Indians; and then in these half-breeds, enticed by white men, the savage instinct was awakened; the desire of plunder – aye, and, perhaps, the desire of scalping – the savage idea of a warlike glory, which pervades the breast of most men, civilized or uncivilized, was aroused in them, and forgetting all the kindness that had been bestowed upon them, forgetting all the gifts that had been given to them, forgetting all that the Government, the white people and the Parliament of Canada had been doing for them, in trying to rescue them from barbarity; forgetting that we had given them reserves, the means to cultivate those reserves, and the means of education how to cultivate them – forgetting all these things, they rose against us.”
Macdonald’s defenders point out that virulent racism such as this was common in Canada in the late 1800s, and so should not surprise anyone. Perhaps. But what of the extent to which similar views still obtain today, both in commonly expressed attitudes towards aboriginals among non-aboriginals, and in the law? The bigotry in Macdonald’s speeches is reflected in the 1876 Indian Act, in many places almost word for word. And the Indian Act remains the law of the land in 2015. Though no political party claims to like it, none has made an urgent matter of its abolition. How can that be, if we’re as evolved as we like to imagine?
All of which brings us to a guiding Macdonald trait that is notably absent in modern political Canada: For all his flaws, he was stunningly ambitious and bold. Can anyone imagine him, if he were alive today, settling for the status quo of a 150-year-old arrangement that has evident, serious flaws?
There are good reasons for our modern Constitution-debating-aversion, of course. But there is no denying the reproach implicit in a reading of these speeches, which de facto established Canada. The closest thing we had to a national ambition went away when Brian Mulroney’s Charlottetown Accord failed in 1992. A generation on, for better or worse, we’re still in the gopher hole, hiding out. Sir John, one suspects, would not have understood.
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