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
To 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.”*63 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 underestimated. 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.*64 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.
While Macdonald was doing nothing in the least new by distributing patronage, he used it in a radically new way. He employed it systematically as a tool to build and nurture the Conservative Party as an effective and ongoing institution. Unlike amateurish predecessors in all parties, he aimed not simply to please supporters by dishing out jobs, contracts, appointments and emoluments, but to make more Conservatives, both by solidifying the gratitude of those who were already members of the party and by attracting newcomers. He distributed patronage in sophisticated ways that derived from his understanding of human nature. He urged one candidate to “keep the Whitby Post Office [position] open until after the election” because “it may be valuable to have the office to give away.” He urged another to make the same kind of appointments before the election to make gratitude certain, but with no public announcements and the winners being told “they will be appointed immediately after the elections” so as to encourage them to “work harder for your return.” Over time, he became progressively more adept. Local members had to give their approval to patronage choices; those favoured had to have proof of having worked for the party; and no one could get a post by displacing an incumbent.
Perhaps what was most original about Macdonald’s system was that he was entirely open, and entirely unapologetic, about what he was doing. He made little attempt to pretend that his purpose was good government rather than the good of the party. And he made certain that his own supporters understood his rules. When party members in Toronto complained they weren’t getting their share of goodies, Macdonald retorted, “As soon as Toronto returns Conservative members, it will get Conservative appointments.”
It wasn’t all crass. If patronage was not about good government, in the sense of getting the best people in the right posts, Macdonald did care about the well-being of individuals. Some of his choices really amounted to charity. He wrote to one official, “De L’Armitage is dying of congestion of the liver or some such devilry and is obliged to give up his Rifle Company. He wants much to retain his rank. Pray do this for him & break his fall.” And, to a cabinet minister, “I have a letter from Noel wanting the Notaryship of the Bank. Can you give it to him[?] Poor fellow, he wants it badly enough.”
In truth, Macdonald didn’t so much systematize patronage as personalize it. For his system to work, he always had to be there at its centre, with his winning personality, his remarkable range of contacts, his exceptional memory for names and deeds, his incomparable knowledge of politics and the governmental apparatus, and, far from least, his uncommon ability to work extremely hard at high speed. At the same time that he was creating a national, centrist party, he was creating a Macdonald party.
Besides doing all this, Macdonald had yet one more substantial job: he had to run the country. For all practical purposes he had being doing that since mid-1854, when he functioned behind the facade of MacNab, just as he now functioned behind the facade of Taché. Within a few years of reaching the top, Macdonald had concocted solutions to two deeply divisive sectarian disputes that had bedevilled Canadian politics for more than a decade—the Clergy Reserves and separate schools. He then went right on to dispose of a third, entirely new issue that was almost as polarizing as the first two—the location of a permanent capital. All three involved an exercise in accommodation and compromise for the sake of national harmony.
The first of the conflicts to develop concerned the Clergy Reserves. By virtue of the Constitutional Act of 1791, one-seventh of all the land in Upper Canada had been reserved for “the clergy,” with the revenues allocated to the established Anglican Church and, later, to the Church of Scotland (by coincidence, Macdonald’s own church). All other churches, the Roman Catholic and the newly expanding Protestant denominations, were exceedingly unhappy to be excluded from this support. Brown in particular was outraged, because this system violated his cherished “voluntary principle”—that each church should be supported entirely by its own believers. Proposals for reform had always splintered on the rock of opposition from Tory Conservatives, the great majority of whom were Anglicans.
Macdonald’s solution gave something to everybody. The Clergy Reserves would be secularized, and the funds allocated to municipalities for the support of public schools. The incumbent clergy of the Anglican Church and the Church of Scotland, though, would continue to receive payments until they died. When Macdonald first introduced legislation to deal with the Clergy Reserves, in October 1854, his strongest critics were his own Conservatives. But Brown, in a speech of exceptional generosity, agreed that a genuine advance had been made, even if it was still insufficient. The Tories who protested were now isolated.
Macdonald’s two speeches in support of this legislation are among his most expressive. In a rare departure from the practical and the immediate, he used them to speak directly about the public interest and how it should be advanced. He was shrewd enough to say little about the details of how he proposed to dispose of the Clergy Reserves fund, talking instead about how the political process itself ought to work. Macdonald talked, that is to say, about the art of compromise.
He made his first comments on October 27, 1854, during a debate about a private member’s bill to regulate religious holidays. After Brown delivered a strong speech criticizing what he saw as special treatment for Roman Catholics, Macdonald addressed the wider issue of religious tolerance. “It was of the very greatest importance for the mutual comfort of the inhabitants of Canada to agree as much as possible,” he declared, “and the only way they could agree was by respecting each other’s principles, and as much as possible even each other’s prejudices. Unless they were governed by a spirit of compromise and kindly feeling towards each other, they could never get on harmoniously together.”*65
Ten days later, Macdonald spoke directly on the Clergy Reserves legislation. His bill had been attacked, he remarked, both by those who opposed any changes to the existing system and by those who opposed continuing payments to incumbent clergy. The effect, he said, would be “that the agitation will still be kept up. On the one hand, the ‘drum ecclesiastic’ will be beaten at every election, the worst feelings would be excited…whilst others would be constantly attacking the charge of paying the salaries of these ‘drones’ as these people would be called.”
Compromise was the only solution. “There is no maxim which experience teaches more clearly than this, that you must yield to the times. Resistance may be protracted until it produces rebellion.” Macdonald continued, “I believe it is a great mistake in politics and in private life to resist when resistance is hopeless. I believe there may be an affected heroism and bravado in sinking with the ship, but no man can be charged with cowardice if, when he finds the ship sinking, he betakes himself to the boat.” He then returned to his theme: “I call on the hon. gentleman [Brown] and upon the Church whose interests he advocates, to yield. I call on them to cease this agitation. They may smart under a sense of wrong and may feel they are deprived of rights, but…one thing is clear that the blow must fall, that secularization must take place. Why then resist against all hope? Why continue to agitate the public mind? Why not yield to inevitable necessity?” Macdonald won this battle against sectarianism by a comfortable margin of 62 to 39 votes. With the Clergy Reserves of Upper Canada settled, Macdonald moved on to deal with Lower Canada’s issue of its quasi-feudal seigneurial system, which gave the seigneurs ownership of the land and left their censitaires as landless tenants. Other legislation in 1854 abolished the seigneurial system.*66
Another year, another battle. The issue this time was separate schools. Pressure for them to be supported by public funds came from the Irish Catholics, whose leader was the newly appointed bishop of Toronto, Armand-François Charbonnel, a hard-line ultramontane. Macdonald crafted legislation that met the bishop roughly halfway. The largest bloc of Upper Canada members were now the populist Grits, deeply mistrustful of anything Catholic and ardent believers in what was known as the “double majority” parliamentary convention—that no legislation affecting Upper Canada should be passed unless it was approved by a majority of Upper Canadian members. (Likewise for Lower Canada, in reverse.)
Securing legislative approval would be difficult. To manoeuvre himself into position, Macdonald concocted a clever and partially plausible argument. “He should be sorry,” he told the House, if a legislature, “the majority of whose members were Protestants professing to recognize the great Protestant principle of the right of private judgment, should yet seek to deprive Roman Catholics of their power to educate their children according to their own principles.”
Nevertheless, the legislature’s majority of Reform and Grit Protestants had every intention of doing just that. Macdonald, though, had spotted a loophole in the “double majority” rule that gave these members their de facto veto. This was that while Upper Canada members had to approve legislation affecting their own territory, no one had ever said that this opinion needed to be expressed by the majority of all elected Upper Canada members rather than just the majority of those in the House when the vote was called. Macdonald waited until the final days of the 1855 session, and as soon as many of the Reformers and Grits had left for home he introduced a bill to extend the privileges of separate schools, much as Bishop Charbonnel had demanded. To the belated fury of the now shrunken opposition, the measure was brought quickly to a vote. It passed by a clear majority of the members present, many of them being Canadien members in alliance with Macdonald.
Macdonald subsequently justified his tactic on the grounds that the alternative was to withdraw all public funds from an established institution, the separate schools. Such a draconian solution could work only “if they [the opposition] could make the world all of one way of thinking…yet he doubted very much if things would go on one bit better on that account.” This was gamesmanship: Macdonald had won, but the cost of his victory was to further inflame sectarian rage.
Macdonald experienced more success with another issue that was potentially sectarian rather than explicitly so—the choice of a single permanent capital.*67 One point was certain: whichever city or hamlet was chosen, either the English Protestants of Upper Canada or the French Catholics of Lower Canada would be furious. Indeed, feelings on the issue were so strong that more than two hundred votes on it were taken in the Legislative Assembly.
There are two particularly good stories about how Ottawa got picked: that Queen Victoria threw a dart at a map, or that Lady Head, the governor general’s wife, made a sketch of the view from what is now Parliament Hill and showed it to an impressed Queen. Common to both stories is the point that the Queen made the choice—and she, of course, could do no wrong. In fact, Macdonald concocted the Queen’s intervention in conjunction with Sir Edmund Head. He and Head had become close, in part because their Toronto houses were near each other, but more because Head, an academic, found in Macdonald an intellectual kin rare in the colony. Head, who favoured Ottawa on the grounds that it was “the least objectionable” of all the contenders, first sent a message to the Colonial Office that “it would not be expedient that any answer be given for 8 or 10 months.” Only after a delay that cooled everyone’s tempers did the Palace send its reply: Ottawa was indeed Her Majesty’s choice. Macdonald got the deed done while appearing to have had no part in it.
He wasn’t yet finished with it, though. On July 28, 1858, while the House was debating an address to the Queen on the subject, a Canadien member moved a cleverly worded motion that opposed not the choice of Her Majesty—an unimaginable act—but the objective suitability of Ottawa. Most of the customarily tame bloc of bleus broke away from their alliance with Macdonald, and the errant motion was passed 64 to 50. This defeat put the life of the Taché-Macdonald government in peril. Brown, overexcited, moved a motion of adjournment to give everyone time to think. The bleus realizing now how they could make up for their disloyalty, streamed into the House to vote en masse against Brown’s routine motion. Macdonald’s hold on power was thus restored. One day later, however, on what he chose to call “an insult offered to the Queen,” Macdonald and his ministers resigned.
Governor General Head now invited Brown to form a government. He agreed and did so. Just two days later, though, Brown was out and Macdonald was back again in power. These events were so unprecedented, and so surreal, that a legend grew that Macdonald had planned all along to lure Brown into a trap and there to crush him. Brown indeed was crushed, but he trapped himself; Macdonald had merely closed the gate over Brown’s prone body.
Brown’s miscalculation was that once he’d agreed to replace Macdonald’s government, the parliamentary rules of the day required all the incoming ministers to resign and regain their seats in by-elections. While his ministers were temporarily absent, Brown would lose his majority in the House. To survive, he had to have an election, which, under the circumstances, he was virtually certain to win. However, as Head had warned Brown when he first called on him, the preceding election had taken place only seven months earlier; to avoid back-to-back elections, Head advised Brown that he had to reserve the right to invite the just-resigned Macdonald to try to form an alternative new government. On Monday, August 2, Brown lost a vote in the House. He asked Head for a dissolution so an election could be called. Head refused. Brown resigned immediately, a bare two days after having taken office.
One of the earliest Canadian newspaper cartoons (c. 1858 ) mocking Macdonald’s political trickery in the “double shuffle.” Signed “H.R. in Toronto,” it may have been drawn by the English cartoonist John Doyle—whose grandson, Arthur Conan Doyle, created Sherlock Holmes.
All observers now assumed that the same cycle would drag down Macdonald as soon as he attempted to form a cabinet. Macdonald, though, had already found his loophole. He had all his old ministers re-sworn again, but each in a new portfolio. (Macdonald’s new post was postmaster general.) A day later, he switched his ministers back to their original portfolios, thereby avoiding the need for any of them to resign. No Reform lawyer was able to find any specific illegality in this double shuffle.
As Macdonald later said teasingly about Brown, “Some fish require to be toyed with. A prudent fish will play around with the bait some time before he takes it, but in this instance the fish scarcely waited till the bait was let down.” The consequences of this political commedia dell’arte were that Macdonald got Canadians a capital that began its life behind the protection provided by the Queen, Brown got humiliated and Macdonald came away with a reputation for political knavery.*68 While absurd in itself, the incident marked the start of Macdonald’s ascent to the status of a political legend. At this instant he gained another political asset at least as valuable: he secured the most important ally he would ever have: George-Étienne Cartier.
When the paths of Macdonald and Cartier first crossed, Macdonald paid him little attention. In a letter to a friend on January 27, 1855, he mentioned, in a review of his Canadien members, that “[Joseph-Édouard] Cauchon will prove a valuable man from his energy & talent” and that “[François-Xavier] Lemieux brings the whole strength of the Quebec district with him.” Of Cartier, he said only, “He will represent the Montreal section…which was wholly without a representative.” In his next reference, in February, Macdonald was somewhat more positive: he reckoned that Cartier was well suited to his portfolio of provincial secretary, “which only requires industry and method, both of which he has to a remarkable degree.” He still de scribed Cauchon as “the ablest French-Canadian in the House” a few days later, his skepticism returning, Macdonald described Cartier as “active—too much so.”*69 A guess at why they didn’t click immediately would be that Cartier, who could be full of himself, may have failed to give Macdonald due deference in their earlier encounters.
Cartier was exactly what Macdonald needed as French lieutenant: he commanded a disciplined bloc of French-Canadian members and was a national figure in his own right. As important, he quickly became Mac donald’s principal link with Mont real’s powerful community—over whelmingly anglophone—of businessmen and financiers.
George-Étienne Cartier. Macdonald praised him as “bold as a lion.” Their French-English alliance revived that of Baldwin and LaFontaine. It was the foundation on which Confederation was built.
Cartier has slipped to the margins of Quebec historical consciousness: the one-hundredth anniversary of his death, on May 21, 1973, passed almost without notice.†70 It didn’t help that Cartier once described himself as “an Englishman who speaks French.” He bought all his clothes in London; he subscribed to ten English magazines, but none from France. He was a passionate monarchist, declaring that the Conquest “saved us from the misery and shame of the French Revolution” and naming one of his daughters Reine-Victoria. Anglophilia aside, it is a fact of life that Quebecers generally lose their hearts to wounded heroes, such as Henri Bourassa or René Lévesque, rather than to winners—Cartier, Laurier, Trudeau. Yet Cartier was wholly and completely a Canadien. He was never happier than when belting out voyageur songs at his regular and raucous conversations; when introduced to the Prince of Wales, he broke into a French-Canadian chanson. In 1834 he was the first secretary of the new Société St-Jean-Baptiste, of which the slogan was “Nos institutions, notre langue, nos droits.” He was one of the Patriotes during the 1837–38 uprising.
Cartier’s near disappearance from the memory of his own people isn’t justified by the legacy he left them. Montreal in the mid-nineteenth century was Canada’s most important city—really its only one. Nevertheless, Toronto posed a substantive threat to Montreal’s dominance. It had an incomparably richer hinterland in the dark soil of southwestern Ontario, attracted many more immigrants and was close to booming American cities such as Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse. Yet Montreal would keep ahead of Toronto as Canada’s metropolis for a full century after Cartier’s death—until the 1970s, when the respective population counts of the two cities at last switched around. This lead was based on a political-industrial alliance, for which Cartier largely created the template. In his fine biography George-Étienne Cartier: Montreal Bourgeois, Brian Young writes that “his career demonstrates the power of railways in 19th century Montreal,” and he goes on to describe Cartier as playing a leading role “in the transformation of Montreal civil society and in the imposition of fundamental social, economic and legal institutions.”
Intuitively—he was in no way an intellectual—Cartier understood that the Empire of the St. Lawrence no longer depended on the great river and chain of inland lakes but on the newfangled railways, those slim, arrow-straight, year-round transportation systems. “The prosperity of Montreal depends upon its position as the entrepôt of the commerce of the West,” he said. “We can only maintain that position if we assure ourselves of the best means of transport from the West to the Atlantic.” The Grand Trunk, then the world’s longest railway line, had its headquarters in Montreal. The company was there, bringing with it Canada’s first wave of industrialization, because Cartier was the Grand Trunk’s solicitor for eighteen years. During most of that time, he was also a senior cabinet minister. Cartier piloted the Grand Trunk’s charter through the legislature in 1854; later, he functioned as the company’s lobbyist, protecting it from what were called “the evils of competition.” As a result, Montreal became the country’s industrial and financial centre, with the Bank of Montreal as its fiscal fulcrum. Above all, it had Ottawa as its patron. It would take separatism to turn Montreal into a second-tier city.*71
Born in 1814, a year ahead of Macdonald, Cartier came from a family, for three generations, of merchants. He himself became a lawyer. He had excellent connections (including in the Catholic Church) and considerable charm. He drank enough to be convivial but with none of Macdonald’s escapist intensity. He could also be intimidating: he was known to bully servants and he issued several challenges to duels. On one occasion, he and his opponent actually fired shots, both missing—almost certainly deliberately.
Cartier was a force of nature. He was short (five foot six inches), stocky, immensely strong, indefatigable (he often put in fifteen-hour days, and one of his speeches lasted seven hours in English, after which he repeated it in French). His self-confidence was boundless. When a Conservative member criticized him for not consulting widely, he answered, “That is quite correct, I do not consult anybody in making up my mind.” When another member observed that Cartier “never sees a difficulty in anything,” he answered, “And I have been generally pretty correct.” He was fastidious about his dress, usually wearing a long black Prince Albert coat and a silk hat. He flirted a lot. “Feo” Monck, the sister of the governor general, recorded in her diary that when she asked Cartier his favourite occupation, he answered, “The activity of the heart.” His mistress, Luce Cuvillier, a smoker of cheroots and, even more daringly, a wearer of trousers, was a great admirer of Byron and George Sand. She and Cartier lived openly together and travelled together, most often to London. In his will, he praised Luce’s “sagesse et prudence” and left her six hundred dollars—a sizable sum—in his will.*72
First elected in 1848, he joined the cabinet in 1855. After Taché retired, the government became the Macdonald-Cartier administration, with Cartier as attorney general for Lower Canada. As part of the contortions that ended the 1858 “double shuffle,” the supposed new government was titled the Cartier-
Macdonald ministry. Macdonald described the bloc of Canadien members who kept him in power as his “sheet anchor.”
Character drew Macdonald and Cartier together. Both were bold—“as bold as a lion” was Macdonald’s own description of Cartier. Neither was daunted by difficulties or defeats. Both loved Britain: Cartier’s retirement plan was “to settle myself in London.” Both feared the United States. About patronage and election funding, their views were identical, with Cartier being the less restrained of the two by a wide margin. He was well known for paying ten dollars for a vote, although for Irish votes he offered “a barrel of flour apiece and some salt fish thrown in for the leaders.”
If Macdonald and Brown were a pair of rivals for whom few, if any, equivalents exist in Canadian history, Macdonald and Cartier were a pair of allies with few peers. They fought together for just under twenty years, 1854 to 1873; had they not stood side by side, there could have been no Confederation.
Politics, though, had not, yet, become Macdonald’s whole life. His other life, his personal one, was dipping down now to one of its lowest points.