[A Canadian leader] must have graduated as a horse thief or at least have distinguished himself as having chiselled a municipality or robbed a Railway Company.
Alexander Mackenzie to a Liberal MP after the 1878 election
The telegrams arriving in Ottawa early in the evening of September 17, 1878, were encouraging but also worrying. The Conservatives were doing well in Nova Scotia, if less so than Charles Tupper had forecast, but the Liberals were coming on strong in New Brunswick. Then came the astounding news: John A. had gone down in his own seat in Kingston, after thirty-four years. Mrs. Eliza Grimason, a Kingston tavern owner and Macdonald’s most devoted supporter, advised Macdonald to tell voters there “to go to the divil.”*
Soon afterwards, the news became even more astounding: the Conservatives were decimating the Liberals, not just in Quebec (forty-seven of its sixty-five seats) but even in rural Ontario, where they eventually captured three-quarters of the province’s eighty-eight seats. Combined with a customary sweep of the West, Macdonald’s majority would be even larger than Mackenzie’s “Scandal” victory of four years earlier. It was larger than the estimate Macdonald had made to Agnes when she asked him in mid-campaign whether she should prepare to move their household back to Ottawa from Toronto. “If we do well,” he said, “we shall have a majority of sixty; if badly, thirty.” The fact that she had to request this information confirmed how little she now shared his political life.
Better organization was one reason for this success. Macdonald had laid down a firm rule of “no splits,” wherein two or more Conservative candidates contested the same riding. “Let us not, like the hunters in the fable, quarrel about the skin before we kill the bear,” he quipped. The party had formed a Workingman’s Liberal-Conservative Association to capitalize on Macdonald’s coquetting with organized labour, and for the moment it had its United Empire Club.
As mattered a great deal, only the Conservatives had anything new to say. As Governor General Dufferin reported to London, Cartwright’s dictum that “this is no time for experiments” had left luckless Liberal candidates without “a few sweet morsels to take home to the electorate.” Macdonald, in contrast, had been able to talk endlessly about what the National Policy would do. “We will not be trampled upon and ridden over, as we have in the past, by the capitalists of a foreign country,” he promised, and, to emphasize the damage already done by the lack of his National Policy, “I have seen the poor men returning from Hay’s manufacturery in Toronto, with their heads hanging down in despair, a miserable half-dollar in their pockets.”
Best of all, the Conservatives had Macdonald while the Liberals had Mackenzie. The hapless Liberal leader could not believe he had been rejected in favour of the culprit of the Pacific Scandal; as he put it in a letter to one of his MPs, what Canadians seemed to want was a leader who “must have graduated as a horse thief or at least have distinguished himself as having chiselled a municipality or robbed a Railway Company.”
Macdonald’s National Policy of high-tariff protectionism may or may not have been the right idea. It was, though, exactly what he needed to regain office—a strong idea at a time when Canadians were looking for something to haul them out of a depression. (photo credit 20.1)
The closest equivalent to the 1878 outcome would be, almost exactly a century later, the re-election of Pierre Trudeau. Macdonald and Trudeau both defied a cardinal rule of Canadian elections: a government is always the author of its own defeat. In 1878, as in 1980, Canadians wanted to have back their chastened favourites far more than they wished to heave out the incumbents. On both occasions, Canadians didn’t so much re-elect an old leader as recreate him. They parallel those public figures—Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Muhammad Ali, as examples—whose careers first soared, then crashed, then reascended. The second time around, they became in a certain sense the property of the public, which had chosen freely to forgive and embrace them again. Thereafter, they became co-dependents with the public: Macdonald, after 1878, went on to win three successive elections, even though two were held in the middle of a depression. Trudeau, while he stepped judiciously aside after a single second term, later re-entered the arena to oppose the Meech Lake Accord, triumphing handily. Essentially, after 1878, Macdonald became a political immortal.*
Alexander Mackenzie was replaced by Edward Blake, brilliant but cursed with zero emotional intelligence. One formidable rival still remained, but a circumstance both tragic and absurd soon increased even further Macdonald’s near immunity from serious political threat. George Brown had left active politics forever after his defeat in 1867, but he remained a major political force through his ownership of the Globe, his wealth, his intelligence and his high reputation—renewed by his initial success in negotiating a Reciprocity Treaty with the United States.
On March 25, 1880, a Globe employee, George Bennett, who had been discharged by a foreman, came to Brown’s office seeking a certificate of service. Brown told him to get it from the foreman. Bennett, who had been drinking, produced a revolver. Brown fearlessly seized hold of him, but the gun went off and wounded his thigh. Bennett was subdued by other workers, and a doctor pronounced the cut superficial. After four days, though, it became inflamed. Brown’s condition steadily deteriorated and, on May 9, 1880, he died. Macdonald’s response showed him at his competitive worst; he was never able to bring himself to recognize the magnitude of Brown’s role in achieving Confederation. The rivalry outlived both men. After Brown’s death, his wife, Anne, who detested Canada, moved back to her native Scotland. After Macdonald’s death, Lady Macdonald went to Scotland several times on holiday. In the small town of Oban, their carriages sometimes crossed in the streets. Neither ever acknowledged the other, in a mutual salute to their dead spouses.
Macdonald didn’t hurry to savour power again. He lingered in Toronto, using the comparative respite to write a raft of letters, among them one in which he gloated to a friend, “I resolved to reverse the verdict of 1874, and have done so to my heart’s content.” To compensate for the loss of Kingston, he arranged for by-elections in a Manitoba riding and in Victoria, BC—neither of which he had ever visited. He won both and chose the West Coast. He called on Dufferin and received his customary “very gushy” welcome; as Macdonald repeated later to Tupper: “the warmest wish of his heart was gratified by his having the opportunity of charging me with the formation of a Ministry.” He was sworn back into office on October 17, 1878.
Macdonald’s most important political task was to form a cabinet. Completed a month later, the new ministry contained almost no fresh faces. The old warhorses, Leonard Tilley, Charles Tupper, Alexander Campbell and Hector-Louis Langevin, were all back.* Bad luck was a factor. Thomas White, an accomplished journalist running the Montreal Gazette, had just lost his third election in a row, while D’Alton McCarthy, an exceptionally able lawyer, passed up Macdonald’s offer because his practice was so lucrative.† Still, it was an uninspired cabinet, even for a prime minister who once joked that his ideal ministry would be composed of “highly respectable parties whom I could send to the penitentiary if I wished.” One important newcomer was John Henry Pope, a Quebec farmer, rugged in his looks and plain in his speech, with a first-class mind. The most interesting appointment belonged to Macdonald himself: as minister of the interior he would be responsible for western development—another clear indication of where his priorities lay.
He was now sixty-four. “I am in good health, but have not quite regained my strength,” he wrote to his sister Louisa. He could still work hard, but his old resilience and stamina had begun to ebb. “I kept up wonderfully well but for the last fortnight of the Sessions had to speak frequently [on] several long Bills,” he explained in a letter to Alexander Galt in 1880. “This with no rest at night till morning used me up.… I still feel the reaction.”
It was around this time that Macdonald became an old man. As Louisa put it to her brother-in-law, James Williamson, in May 1881, “I never saw John looking what I would call old until this time. His hair is getting quite grey.” References to liver problems now occur regularly in his letters. In mid-1879, he went down with a bout of cholera, telling Louisa, “The doctor took vigorous steps and has pulled me through, though very weak.” Far more alarming was his sudden, unexplained collapse while attending Sunday service in St. Alban’s Church in March 1880. His response—more probably Agnes’s response—was to take longer holidays at Rivière-du-Loup,* where he had bought an attractive cottage, Les Rochers, looking out on the St. Lawrence. He also slipped away more often to Britain, sometimes on business but also to consult medical specialists. The doctors could find no causes for his ailments except as the legacies of a long, hard life.
While Macdonald’s days of excessive drinking were well behind him, he would still occasionally crash. One such occasion was like a flashback to his old, carefree days. Soon after the election, Dufferin returned to England, eventually achieving his long-sought post as viceroy of India. His replacement was the Marquess of Lorne and, incomparably more exciting, his wife, Princess Louise—a daughter of the Queen. She was the most intelligent of Victoria’s brood, but also the most difficult. Among other reasons for being difficult, she, like her mother, was far more passionate than she appeared, but, unlike her, was married to a homosexual, causing her never to have a child but to indulge in many affairs.* On the train journey to Halifax to greet the ship bringing the Lornes to Canada, Macdonald consumed a great deal of brandy, and he continued to binge while waiting at the elegant residence of the lieutenant-governor. With Their Excellencies about to arrive, a luckless secretary was sent to call Macdonald to duty and, finding him flat on his bed, pleaded with him to get up. Macdonald half-rose, pointed at the hapless man and pronounced, “Vamoose from this ranch.”
In the 1878 election, Canadians seized their first chance since sweeping Macdonald out of power to sweep him back in again. The Toronto Telegram commented shrewdly, “Unless he does some mad thing he will be in office until the close of his career.” (photo credit 20.2)
In Ottawa, Macdonald’s home was now a large, attractive house called Stadacona Hall in the Sandy Hill district, rented from a lumber baron. There, the small family (still including Agnes’s brother, Hewitt Bernard) reassembled. The greatest beneficiary of the new arrangement was Mary, by now close to ten years old. Before, her father had often been away, shuttling between Ottawa and Toronto and doing the rounds of the picnics. In a letter written in October 1877, she told him achingly, “The house seems so dull and lonely without you, and I miss my evening stories very much.” (Mary would have dictated this letter; only later, once typewriters were available, did she learn to write her own letters, doing so with painful slowness but almost never misspelling a word.) Now Macdonald would come home at the end of each day to tell her a story or to recount some outrageous political incident. The Macdonalds organized children’s parties for her. In a cruel comment that may not have been intended, Lucianne Desbarats, the wife of the Queen’s printer, compared Mary in her diary to “a large rag doll with an oversized head being carried around among gay and active children.” E.B. Biggar, in his Anecdotal Life, has a poignant description of the young guests preparing to leave one party, at which point Macdonald “quietly persuaded them to stay a little longer. When they resumed the dance, he leaned over to his daughter’s chair and said, ‘You see Mary, they want a little more of your society, and a little dancing by the way.’ ”
Mary (in the armchair), with a visiting friend. To Macdonald, she was “Baboo,” to whom he read stories and gave funny accounts of his daily doings as soon as he arrived home from the office. (photo credit 20.3)
The family member who changed the most as a result of their return to Ottawa was Agnes. Early on in her diary, she had admitted, “My love of Power is strong.” Back again in real power, and savouring it because she had not expected to regain it, she yielded more and more to this second love. The image of Lady Macdonald as bossy, bullying and moralistic, ruling social Ottawa with “a rod of iron,” takes its form from this time.* It was during this period that she called John Thompson, the minister of justice, a “pervert” because he had abandoned the Presbyterianism of his birth for the Roman Catholicism of his wife. Similarly, she sent Finance Minister George Foster into social exile when he married a divorced woman—a sentence commuted only after Macdonald’s death when she lost her power. Yet the lighter “Agnes” character never vanished. Many years later, then a widow living in England, she answered questions in a day book belonging to Mary titled, “Confessions, Opinions, & Autographs of my Friends.” To the printed question what country she would like to live in, she answered, “No Man’s land”; to whether dress affected character, “Only one’s bank account”; to the best sovereign in Europe, “The Gold Sovereign,” to the ideal girl of the period, “A glorious creature, in tight skirts,” and the ideal man, “Another glorious creature—who smokes.”
During her long reign over Ottawa society, Lady Macdonald had only one rival—Princess Louise. These two strong-willed women loathed each other. At the theatre one evening, when Louise rose in the royal box to accept the crowd’s applause, she discovered to her fury that Lady Macdonald had risen beside her to share it. Gossip about their rivalry became so widespread that Macdonald had to write a plaintive letter to Lorne, begging him to bring it to an end. A reply from Princess Louise conceded as little as possible: “You must know in how many ways I admire Lady Macdonald and think her a worthy example to every wife.”†
That Macdonald ruled again meant that Lady Macdonald again reigned. The younger, more girlish Agnes was increasingly replaced by a sterner, and plumper, consort who ruled Social Ottawa with “a rod of iron.” (photo credit 20.4)
At the same time, Lady Macdonald fulfilled all her obligations as chatelaine to the last impeccably folded napkin. Thompson, while he detested “that mole-catcher of a wife,” as he called her, admired the formal dinners she organized on Macdonald’s behalf, and he preserved a menu card that captures the kind of dinner fare she served in the Macdonald house: oysters on the half-shell; consommé; fish or lamb cutlets; and, for dessert, cabinet pudding, charlotte russe, lemon ice or fruit. From Eliza Grimason, who would dearly have loved that responsibility herself, she earned the praise of “looking after him” and the further compliment that “Lady Macdonald keeps her own cow, and hens, and they make their own butter.” * Nevertheless, she now looked the part of someone wielding a rod of iron: once statuesque, she had thickened into rotundity; her hair had turned pure white, although she was not yet forty-five years old; and she seldom wore any jewellery other than a small crucifix.
Hugh John, who remained in Toronto, was once again separated from the family. The emotional breach between him and his father over his marriage had healed, however, and Macdonald quickly became besotted with his grandchild, Daisy. Hugh John continued to run the law practice, the bulk of its business coming in as a tribute to the firm’s sleeping partner in the national capital.
To add to Macdonald’s contentment, return to power meant an end to financial stringency. He had his prime ministerial salary again, as well as the interest on the trust fund the Toronto financier David Macpherson had organized to help support him, and a share of the law firm’s earnings. At the same time, the Macdonalds’ expenses had grown; no public funds were provided for all the entertaining they did, and the cost of care for Mary increased as she grew older. Still, it was easier now for Macdonald to take holidays in Britain, where he enjoyed the theatre, scoured London for interesting books and took delight in buying fashionable clothes—especially colourful silk ties and stovepipe hats.
The demands of work could not be postponed. The most exigent for a new prime minister was patronage. Macdonald stalled one claimant for a position in the post office in Stratford by saying, “We find every crevice and cranny in every Department has been filled up by the Grits.” He wasn’t being evasive; he believed that all governments had a right to appoint their supporters to public positions—and that new governments, his own included, should not turf out their predecessor’s choices. He told one disappointed MP that he was “unwilling to remove a civil servant for working for the Government of the day.” Intriguingly, Macdonald over time lost much of his zest for the patronage game. In 1882 he wrote to the Gazette’s Martin Griffin, “I am bored to death by people applying for judgeships and senate-ships,” and suggested the journalist write an article saying that after making checks in Ottawa he was certain the government would “look with disfavour on any pressure, personal or political, in favour of an individual.”
Macdonald’s agenda was of course far heavier than it had been in opposition. Two items topped the list: the transcontinental railway and the National Policy. The latter had won him the election, so he moved on it first.
Shortly after he returned to Ottawa, Macdonald received a letter from Goldwin Smith warning that he had stirred up “exaggerated expectations” about what higher tariffs might accomplish. His main point, Smith elaborated, was that he and Macdonald viewed the problem differently: “You regard Canada as part of the British Empire, I as a community of the New World,” he said, but in his opinion only “free access to the markets” of the United States could “materially improve its economic prospects.”
Macdonald had certainly exaggerated the beneficial effects of high tariffs. The deed had still to be done, and it wasn’t easy. The challenge for the government was to come up with a new schedule of tariffs—a task for which there was little expertise within Canada. Fortunately, Macdonald had the right man nearby—Leonard Tilley, now minister of finance. Once a successful druggist, subsequently the premier of New Brunswick, a Father of Confederation and a cabinet minister from 1867 onwards, Tilley possessed qualifications for the job that only the able but erratic Alexander Galt could match. His first cabinet post had been as minister of customs, and in 1873 he had briefly held the finance portfolio. While never popular with the public—he was a teetotaller with a streak of self-righteousness—Tilley was widely respected for his honesty and competence. In his main speech in the budget debate of March 1879, he expressed the core issue in a phrase that passed straight into the Canadian political vocabulary: “The time has arrived when we are to decide whether we will simply be hewers of wood and drawers of water.”
Tilley set about his task with dispatch. He recruited a talented staff—a journalist, John MacLean, who had published Protection and Free Trade, one of the few Canadian works on the subject, as well as several officials who had worked with him while he was premier of New Brunswick. He also inveigled back a former Nova Scotian, Edward Young, who had headed the U.S. Bureau of Statistics. Together, they worked exceptionally hard for close to four months preceding the budget. Tilley himself laboured so hard he developed serious eye strain and had to rest for several days in darkened rooms.
Tilley’s objective was straightforward: “To select for a higher rate of duty those [items] that are manufactured in the country, and to leave those that are not made … at a lower rate.” Easy to say; difficult to do. Macdonald had not helped matters by his breezy declaration: “We will make every manufacturer, every industry, produce the evidence of what is necessary for the purpose of protecting them in their present struggle into maturity.”
The group developed an elaborate classification system going, roughly, from a tariff rate of zero on goods not made in Canada, to 10 per cent on slightly processed goods, to 30 per cent on finished articles. As an example, while the duties on finished textiles went as high as 34 per cent, there were no duties at all on textile machinery, while duties on woollens varied according to differences in weight and in type—Union Tweed, Black Supers or Maramatters, for instance. A major complication was the ferocious lobbying by businessmen. During the pre-budget period, Governor General Lorne reported to London that “everyone who has ever raised a pig or caught a smelt wants protection for his industry.”
Finally the task was done. Tilley, who continued as finance minister until 1885, later needed to tinker with only a few of the initial duty rates. In 1890, he wrote proudly to the statistician Young, “It was well built.… Unlike nearly all the U.S. tariff acts, it did not require subsequent legislation to correct errors or omissions.”
Broadly, the changes doubled the average tariff rates, from 15 per cent to 30 per cent. Although high, these tariffs were not as stratospheric as those already in effect across the border; while duties on cotton clothing were 30 per cent in Canada, they went as high as 70 per cent in the United States, and the charge on pig iron was more than three times as high there. Sensibly, all settlers’ effects could come in duty free, as could fish, fish oil and seal oil from Newfoundland.
From the start, Macdonald had understood one aspect of the National Policy that was critical to its success: this was that once done, it could not be undone for a long time. The high tariffs would encourage investment in new plants and machinery. If tariffs were then cut sharply, those investments would be devalued and would never be repeated. The effect of the policy, he said, was that “a permanent fixture is certain.” In 1882, when calls were raised in the Commons for a reduction of the tariff on sugar beets, Macdonald responded, “We must make the policy a permanent policy.” Otherwise, businessmen would cease to invest in Canada.
Macdonald’s direct contribution to the implementation of the National Policy was secondary, although he had to reassure the British government that its manufacturers would not be hurt by the new tariffs that would apply to all imports. In a memorandum to the Colonial Office, he managed to argue with a straight face that one of the National Policy’s purposes was to “promote trade with Britain”—a “buncombe” argument he fabricated out of concern that lobbying by British firms might persuade the Colonial Office not to approve the program. Pressure was exerted, but the colonial secretary eventually sent the message that London accepted that “the fiscal policy of Canada [is] a matter for decision by the Dominion legislature.”
In Britain a year later, Macdonald was accosted by a delegation from the Manchester Chamber of Commerce asking for a reduction in the new duties as they applied to British goods. “The chief difficulty,” he explained in an interview with the Times, “was that England had nothing to give Canada by way of reciprocity,” because it was “the sole exception in adhering in principle and practice to free trade under all circumstances.” That Macdonald of all people should have used so dismissive a phrase revealed how strongly he felt about his policy. It also showed a new and more calculating tone in his attitude towards the Mother Country.
As he implemented the National Policy, Macdonald benefited from the most critical element of all: he had enacted it at exactly the right time. By mid-1879 it was clear that the Long Depression was lifting. Everyone’s spirits improved, and businessmen and artisans began to look around again for new opportunities.
For several years afterwards, the Canadian Manufacturer, the organ of the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association, reported ecstatically as new plants were announced: “Score another for the N.P.,” it exulted, “More Fruit from the N.P. Treaty,” and “The N.P. does it.” And it wasn’t just cheerleading. From 1878 to 1884, the number of labourers employed in Ontario and Quebec doubled, as did the total value of their wages. Entire new industries appeared—tableware, cutlery and clockmaking. The policy did have one unintended consequence. Many of the new companies were American owned—Singer, Edison, Westinghouse, Gillette, International Harvester—so, while they created jobs, they also competed with Canadian-owned companies and brought no head offices here. Historian Michael Bliss made the most judicious review of the National Policy’s achievements in his book Northern Enterprise: “Although it neither created nor sustained Canadian manufacturing in any general way, the National Policy moulded both the structure of the Canadian economy and the course of debate about the society’s future for many generations.” It may not have made Canadians richer, that is, but it made them more Canadian.
The debate on the National Policy ended at the end of April 1879. Not long afterwards, the parliamentary session concluded, freeing Macdonald to make his first trip “home” in the years since he had last held office. After assembling a full agenda of business and pleasure activities, he and Agnes crossed the Atlantic in the middle of the summer.
* Macdonald’s surprising defeat in Kingston confirms that “all politics is local.” In the preceding years, he’d moved his law office from Kingston to Toronto, less and less often went there and had lost touch with its people.
* The implications of Macdonald’s quick and easy return to power were recognized at the time; a new Toronto newspaper, the Telegram, forecast: “Sir John has a long lease of power, and unless he does some mad thing he will be in office until the close of his career.”
* Tilley had stepped down early as lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick to re-enter politics.
† The law firm that McCarthy founded continues today as McCarthy Tétrault. In his day, McCarthy became famous for his attacks on French Canadians; the firm’s website does not mention this point.
* One other prime minister who holidayed regularly in Rivière-du-Loup was Louis St. Laurent.
* In this respect Princess Louise did behave herself while in Canada, though in few others. She spent as much of her term in England as she could get away with. Her view of Canadians was once described as “entirely picturesque … much the same as she felt for the Cascapedia salmon.”
* The use of the phrase in reference to Lady Macdonald comes from a no less bossy, moralistic and strong woman of the time—Lady Aberdeen, the wife of a future governor general.
† Lorne did as asked, but without enthusiasm, sending back the note “If it is worthwhile to contradict such reports, there is no foundation whatever for the statements made.” In 1880, Louise used a sledding accident as an excuse to leave Canada permanently.
* This was several years later, when Mrs. Grimason came to Ottawa to be shown around Parliament by Macdonald and to have tea at Earnscliffe with Lady Macdonald.