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declared that Canada should “so adjust our tariff for revenue purposes … to develop our resources, the duties falling upon the articles we ourselves are capable of producing.” Mackenzie sarcastically congratulated him on finding “a resting place which he may call a policy.” If everybody was to be protected, Mackenzie argued, nobody would gain. “If, on the other hand, only certain classes are to be protected, I want to know what the classes are.”
Of course, Macdonald, the skilled political operator, responded by hinting to every interest group that their products would receive protection, while their essential supplies would be imported duty-free. New Brunswicker Peter Mitchell ran in the 1878 election on the assurance that a Conservative government would impose no tariff on flour, a vital commodity in a timber province that grew very little of its own food. In mid-campaign, news broke that Macdonald had promised Ontario millers that he would tax American flour, and Mitchell lost his election. “I couldn’t help it,” Macdonald pleaded. “I was sincere when I told you what I did.” In a catch-all formula, the Conservatives offered “a judicious readjustment of the tariff” to “foster the agricultural, the mining, the manufacturing and other interests of the Dominion,” prevent emigration, restore prosperity, and force the Americans to grant Reciprocity. Sir John A. was expert at making people believe he would deliver what they wanted. As Lord Dufferin noted, Macdonald charmed politicians from Canada’s discontented Pacific province with promises that under the Conservatives, “every man in British Columbia should have a branch railway at his own door.”
Macdonald wrapped the transcontinental railway into the National Policy package: the railway would fill the West with settlers, who would become customers for central Canadian factories. He nicknamed it “N.P.” — sometimes whimsically interpreted as “no poverty” or “new potatoes” — arguing that it would build a cross-class alliance of factory workers, farmers, and capitalists. Macdonald had targeted working men since 1872, when newspaperman George Brown had reacted to the formation of a printers’ union by having its leaders imprisoned for conspiracy. Finance Minister Cartwright insisted that Canadians must “atone” for previous extravagance by “thrift and hard work;” Macdonald offered them hope. Cartwright warned that the recession was “no time for experiments”; Macdonald poked fun at “a Reform Government with nothing to reform.”
Macdonald’s almost accidental adoption of protection was followed by the equally fortuitous discovery of a new form of political campaigning. On July 1, 1876, he addressed hundreds of Dominion Day vacationers at a picnic at Uxbridge, sixty kilometres northeast of Toronto. A massive success, the picnic was the first in a series of outdoor extravaganzas through the summer months of 1876 and 1877, held across Ontario and even into the English-speaking Eastern Townships of Quebec. Privately, he called them “infernal things,” but they contributed powerfully to the John A. Macdonald legend. Unlike political meetings, which were generally all-male and potentially rowdy, picnics were family occasions for fun, friendship, and flirtation. In this benign environment, Macdonald mobilized his famous charm, shrugging off the Pacific Scandal with the plaintive protest that “he had worked for thirty years, and yet had not amassed wealth.” He exploited the presence of women, assuring the farmer’s wife that protection would help her sell eggs from her henhouse in the factory towns which, like those railways in British Columbia, would spring up in everybody’s neighbourhood.
Macdonald looks sad as he faces the 1878 election. Was his career a failure?
His magic touch as a speaker was captured by one observer, writing in 1883 after Macdonald had returned to office. “Sometimes, by a familiar word or two, you see him levelling distinctions between himself and the audience.” As a result, all those present — farmers, labourers, tradesmen — “feel that they and the prime-minister are assembled there on a common mission — the prime-minister only happens to be prime minister, and speaking then; anyone else, also, might have been.” Yet gradually, the crowd realized “that the speaker is the man who is doing their work the best.” Macdonald broke down barriers between himself and his hearers: “the I is lost in the we.” In 1876–77, when it still seemed unlikely that he would return to office, he varied the theme, praising audiences for their disinterested support for a politician who might never reward them. “How was it, he sometimes asked himself, that he without means, power or patronage … should be so received?” he mused, praising the “British fair play” of Brockville picnickers in 1877.
Macdonald’s critics claimed that he built up support networks by handing out jobs, and he was certainly ruthless in manipulating expectations of patronage, which often remained unfulfilled. But he could never have amassed the 133,633 votes he won across Ontario in 1878, and the still larger number in the rest of Canada, purely by dangling individual favours. If anything, the reverse was true: Macdonald inspired fervent support among people who felt nobly patriotic simply because they idolized “John A.” “There was nothing that his followers would not do or suffer for him,” and this devotion was “strong among those who had never even seen him.” But, in their turn, those dedicated and high-minded supporters felt entitled to rebuke and correct their leader for his human failings. “It is not because you are deemed faultless that this large Assembly has met to do you honour,” Macdonald was told at Simcoe in 1876. Modern spin-doctors would be horrified at riding officials telling their leader that “if you erred in the administration of affairs your errors were of judgment and not of intention.” However, Macdonald humbly accepted the reprimand, confessing to “acts of omission and commission which I regret” but consoling himself that his supporters accepted that “I was acting … for the interest of our common country.” Most politicians are judged by their deeds rather than their intentions: John A. Macdonald led a charmed life as a special exception.
Reviewing the political scene at the close of 1877, the Montreal Gazette noted that the picnics had raised Macdonald’s popularity to levels “few people could have anticipated,” and predicted that he would “sweep the country” at the upcoming general election. The claim, even from a friendly newspaper, would hardly have been credible two years earlier. One Conservative supporter who had mixed feelings about the come-back was the leader’s wife, who had spent the past two years home-making in Toronto. Agnes had to tread carefully. “My lord and master … simply lives to please and gratify me” at home, but Macdonald was “absolutely tyrannical in his public life,” snubbing her if she commented on political matters. In July 1878, she plucked up courage to ask whether the forthcoming election would take them back to Ottawa. “If we do well, we shall have a majority of sixty,” he replied; “if badly, forty.”
Canadians voted on September 17, 1878. On election night, veteran Liberal Luther Holton watched as telegrams flooded into a Montreal newsroom announcing a Conservative sweep — not by forty, nor sixty, but a majority of eighty seats. Eventually, Holton broke his silence with the comment: “Well! John A. beats the devil.” Macdonald had certainly vanquished two personal demons: he had overcome his alcohol problem, and his election victory drew a line under the humiliating Pacific Scandal. One setback clouded the victory: after thirty-three years as their MP, Macdonald was rejected in Kingston as the “Do-Nothing Deserter” who had moved to Toronto. He was quickly elected as absentee member for Victoria in British Columbia. Campbell consoled him, “if you were defeated in Kingston, you have been elected by the Dominion.”
7
1878–1886
The Realization of All My Dreams
When Canada’s first prime minister died in 1891, a sorrowing colleague claimed that the history of Canada for the previous fifty years was “the life of Sir John Macdonald.” That was an exaggeration, but during his final term as prime minister, Macdonald’s life and Canada’s history were closely entwined — perhaps too closely. The completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885 should have crowned his career, but the triumph was marred by Louis Riel’s Western uprising that same year. Far from departing the scene in triumph, he would spend the last five years of his life fire-fighting