An impression of enormous reserves of latent force …
British diplomat Lord Frederick Hamilton on Macdonald
Early in 1885, in a conversation with his long-time associate Alexander Campbell, Macdonald remarked, “We must let in new blood to the system.” That was an understatement. All his most important ministers—Leonard Tilley, Charles Tupper, Hector-Louis Langevin and Campbell himself—had been around from the beginning; others, such as John Henry Pope and David Macpherson, were in poor health. The government itself had expressed no new ideas in the decade since Macdonald concocted his high-tariff National Policy. Campbell had told Macdonald bluntly not long before how poorly his government was performing: “The constant giving way to truculent demands and our delays and the irritation and mischief they produce are in everybody’s mouth.”
Macdonald’s age and indifferent health were major causes of this decline: he was now measuring his pace and shortening his stride in every way possible, including ever-longer afternoon naps. He even turned down an invitation from Governor General Lord Lansdowne to go fishing: “I have been too-long engaged in Catching, or trying to Catch, ‘loose fish’ to enter into a competition with Salmo Salar,” he explained. His legendary optimism was clouded now by occasional displays of bleak pessimism, as in his querulous comment to George Stephen about western attempts to build local lines to compete with the CPR: “Don’t be disgusted at the ingratitude of the Manitobans. I have been long enough in public life to know how little of that commodity [gratitude] there exists in this world.”
As so often, Macdonald’s trigger for action was political necessity. The last election had been held in 1882, and the next one could not be delayed beyond 1887. The omens were not good: both of the large provinces were now held by the opposition—by Oliver Mowat in Ontario and Honoré Mercier in Quebec. In Nova Scotia a separatist movement was stirring, and in Manitoba, Conservative premier John Norquay was fast losing his hold on power. Macdonald had no choice but to recruit new talent.
His interests went a good deal further than partisan politics. From the mid-1880s on, Macdonald began for the first time to think beyond nation-building itself to the kind of nation he ought to be trying to build. He did so even though a series of events beyond his control was now radically altering the national agenda: deep sectarian divisions threatened to tear the country apart; soon afterwards, the Liberals would suddenly embrace cross-border free trade, even consider an outright economic union. To Macdonald, these measures challenged Canada’s very existence. So he once again readied himself for a fight. He might be an old volcano, but he was by no means extinct. Getting a better cabinet was just his first step.
Back then, cabinet-making was a good deal more difficult than it is today. The number of portfolios was fixed, first at thirteen, then at fourteen—unlike today, when all kinds of new posts are invented to create cabinet spots for promising newcomers or to satisfy overlooked regions and interest groups. Nor was it acceptable then for portfolio responsibilities to be chopped and changed to fit the available talent.
Macdonald began the task soon after he returned from his sojourn in Britain, in January 1886. He once even went so far as to consider committing the ultimate Canadian political heresy: as he told a colleague, “I think we must choose men for their qualifications rather than for their locality.” He didn’t take that risk, and in payment for past loyalties during the Riel crisis, he left untouched the cabinet’s most glaring weakness—his francophone ministers, Adolphe-Philippe Caron, Joseph-Adolphe Chapleau and Hector-Louis Langevin. All three now lacked lustre back home. He did, though, recruit four promising newcomers.
Among the quartet was Thomas White, a capable journalist and long his protégé, whom Macdonald slotted into the beleaguered Interior Ministry. George Foster was another; Macdonald had overheard him giving an eloquent lecture on temperance while visiting Kingston, and shortly afterwards, this New Brunswicker found himself in the cabinet, eventually becoming finance minister. It was as a lover, though, that Foster made his most considerable mark in the history books. A bachelor in his mid-forties, he suddenly married Adeline Davies, a divorcee—and it was this couple that Lady Macdonald exiled from Ottawa society. The third was Charles Hibbert Tupper, the son of the old warhorse Charles Tupper. He began badly, when he importuned the prime minister to find a job for a constituent and received the testy reply, “Skin your own skunks.” Before long, however, Macdonald was praising the son to his father, saying, “His only fault—if it be a fault—is that he would like to carry all his reforms in a day—but I was young once myself, altho’ it was a long time ago.”
Macdonald’s most important recruit was John Thompson—a later prime minister. As a lawyer, Thompson had been appointed to the Nova Scotia Supreme Court and was greatly admired for his judgments. Once in Ottawa, he would accomplish, twice over, the near impossible. He bested the formidable Edward Blake, winning decisively their first encounter in a debate in 1886 on the government’s handling of affairs in the North-West. As well, he was not intimidated by Macdonald, arguing uninhibitedly with him at cabinet meetings, with neither taking their disagreements personally.
Thompson had flaws. Intelligent and respected for his integrity, he had none of Macdonald’s understanding of human nature. He had another, more serious political defect: raised a Presbyterian, he converted to the Catholic faith of his wife, Annie. That prompted Lady Macdonald to call him openly “a pervert.” Macdonald considered naming Thompson his successor but feared that Ontario would never accept him.*
To improve his cabinet, Macdonald belatedly recruited some newcomers. John Thompson, the new justice minister, was the star, able enough to best Edward Blake in debate. Annie Thompson had good political instincts, warning her husband that, if executed, Riel would become “a martyr.” (photo credit 32.1)
Macdonald snared Thompson with great deftness. Charles Tupper’s latest return to London as high commissioner had created an opening in the cabinet for a Nova Scotian. Macdonald persuaded Alexander Campbell, his minister of justice, to move over to the Post Office, a demotion that Campbell never forgave. That response inspired Macdonald to one of his great insights about human nature: when Joseph Pope observed that Campbell owed Macdonald for many past favours, he replied, “That is just why he hates me. There are some people in the world who resent nothing so much as a sense of obligation.”
Thompson rejected the first offer, but Macdonald’s careful reading of his letter prompted him to quote Byron’s Don Juan to a colleague: “A little while she strove, and much repented, / And whispering ‘I will ne’er consent’—consented.” Macdonald guessed right. Annie Thompson made up her husband’s mind for him by asking whether he really wanted to spend the rest of his life among the “sere old crows” on the bench. After a by-election was opened up by a promise to the incumbent Liberal of a spot on the bench, Thompson was sworn in as minister of justice.
To the public and everyone else in the government, only Macdonald ever mattered. Canada’s system of presidential prime ministers, often assumed to be a modern invention, can be traced back to him. Certainly he believed that his powers were near presidential. In an 1890 letter to John Schultz, Riel’s one-time opponent in Red River, who was now considered so respectable as to be appointed lieutenant-governor of Manitoba, Macdonald laid down the law: “The Premier is in fact the ministry, and should there be any difference of opinion between him and any member of the cabinet, his advice must prevail with you.”*
On several occasions during his long political career, Macdonald had shown genuine, but often little-recognized, originality in his understanding of the nation’s character. For example, his original call for the Mounted Police to be composed of a “co-mingling” of Europeans and Aboriginals, and his fine distinction about how to treat the Mother Country—that Canada owed Britain support if it was under direct threat, but not when it got itself into difficulties by some colonial venture. What was different after the mid-1880s was that Macdonald was now consciously searching for ideas about what to do.
Macdonald possessed the capacity for this creativity because, although often pragmatic and opportunistic, he was also capable of being subtle and protean. One of the most perceptive comments ever made about him was by Archibald McLelan, an otherwise unremarkable cabinet minister from Nova Scotia, who in a letter to Macdonald in 1889 said that a phrase his father sometimes applied to those he admired also applied to Macdonald: “There are wheels in that man’s mind that haven’t been yet moved.” Lord Frederick Hamilton, a senior British diplomat who met Macdonald several times while in Ottawa, reached the same conclusion: “He conveyed an impression of enormous reserves of latent force behind his genial manner,” he wrote in his diary. While Macdonald most times hid his intellect so as not to distance himself from voters, the capaciousness of his mind shone through in the breadth of his reading and the quickness of his wit. He once told Joseph Pope that had he been able to have a university education, he would probably have “entered the path of literature and acquired distinction therein.” Perhaps so; perhaps not. What is certain is that, late in his life, he put into motion some of the unused wheels in his mind.
He had already extended the franchise to Indians without their having to lose any of their rights—an idea that became a permanent part of Canadian law only three-quarters of a century later. The interest he had taken in the Salvation Army reflected his readiness to try to figure out how to connect to the poor and the dispossessed. His most imaginative idea, already referred to briefly, was not merely progressive but revolutionary—how best to extend the vote to women. For reasons difficult to comprehend, this story has disappeared entirely from the country’s history books. It’s time to get it back into the national chronicle.
When Macdonald introduced the Franchise Bill in the Commons in January 1885, it set off a filibuster that went on for months, with Opposition MPs reading out passages from books such as Robinson Crusoe to keep the obstruction going. Their skepticism was merited. Ostensibly a nation-building measure to make the federal government rather than the provinces responsible for the administration of national elections, the bill’s real purpose was to transfer to the Conservative Party a large slice of patronage—such as the jobs for returning officers. Tucked into the body of the bill was a clause that was even more contentious than that of extending the vote to Indians: it provided for extending the vote to women.
Ever since, this initiative has been quite unknown or dismissed.* A 2007 pamphlet, A History of the Vote in Canada, by the chief electoral officer, described it as “a sacrificial lamb” concocted by Macdonald to get his hands on all the election patronage. That analysis makes no sense; in the 1880s, the notion of votes for women was so outlandish that Macdonald would not have gained any bargaining advantage from it. In Canada, few women espoused it; in Lady Macdonald’s opinion, “Those silly women … do more harm than good, as women generally do when they put their dainty fingers into the political pie.”† Nor could the initiative win Macdonald any votes: while some women might be grateful, far more men would be outraged. Opposition MPs argued that it “would make women coarser” and that “the majority of Canadian women are more proud to be known as good mothers than as good voters.”
An alternative explanation exists for why Macdonald took up the cause of votes for women, and at a time when scarcely a man espoused it but for John Stuart Mill: he actually believed what he was saying, even though politically its principal effect would be to cause many to look on him as an aging eccentric. This analysis doesn’t exclude political considerations, which always were near the top of his priorities. According to Pope, Macdonald believed that “women, as a whole, were conservative.” Beyond any question, they strongly favoured him. As Globe editor John Willison saw it, because “women know men better than they know themselves, and better than men ever suspect, there was among women a passionate devotion to Sir John Macdonald such as no other leader in Canada has ever inspired.”
The case that he meant what he said rests upon what he actually said. During the debate, on April 27, Macdonald commented that he had long hoped “that Canada should have the honour of first placing woman in the position that she is certain, after centuries of oppression, to obtain … of completely establishing her equality as a human being and as a member of society with man.” By this phrase, he was telling MPs not only that women deserved the vote but, as was truly revolutionary, that they deserved equal treatment in every aspect of public life. He went on to tell them, “It is merely a matter of time.” Indeed, a half-century before the famed Persons Case of 1929 that established legal equality between the genders (in respect of appointments to the Senate), Macdonald, in the proposed enabling clause he wrote himself, declared that “Persons means men … and women who are unmarried or widows.”
Macdonald’s limitation of the vote to widows and spinsters—on the grounds that married women’s votes would be decided for them by their husbands—makes his proposal seem a minimal concession when viewed from today’s perspective. But it was carefully calculated, deriving from his governing maxim, “Never refuse a step in advance.” In fact, this limitation already existed in law in Ontario, although only in municiple elections.* More usefully, it reassured MPs they would not have to cope with demanding wives who held different political opinions from their own.
In the event, nothing happened. Macdonald’s own bleu Quebecers were adamantly opposed, and it was reckoned that only four Conservatives were ready to vote for him. After a one-day debate, Macdonald withdrew the measure. He didn’t forget the idea, though. In 1890, he circulated a memorandum among his ministers, asking in which provinces women were able to vote in municipal elections, how many actually voted and whether they could be members of school boards and of institutions such as the Guardians of the Poor. Clearly, he was working up to giving a speech on the subject.
Ultimately, it’s unprovable whether Macdonald meant what he said about votes for women. It is puzzling that, having introduced the measure and spoken eloquently in favour of it, he then withdrew it quickly, the likely explanation being that he never wasted time on causes certain to be lost. The cardinal fact is that he made the attempt, even though it offered him no conceivable political benefit—indeed, the exact opposite. He was both right and far ahead of his time in attempting to extend the vote, initially, to some women, and in his judgment that its advent was a mere matter of time. Two facts are unquestionable: he was the first national leader in the world to attempt to grant women the vote, and because of him Canada’s Parliament was the first in the world to debate the issue.* Perhaps the reason why this extraordinary initiative has vanished from the country’s history books is shame that Canada had the chance to be a global social pioneer but let it slip by. Instead, the suffrage equality crown was won by New Zealand in 1893, with Canada delaying until 1918.
Macdonald’s most interesting train of speculative thought can be dated back to a letter he wrote to Sir John Rose in London on October 12, 1880. He noted then that “there is now and always has been a prejudice in the minds of the people of Canada against corporations holding large properties.” There was, he continued, “a general feeling that these companies lie on their oars and … allow their lands to be increased in value by the combined action of the Government and the settlers.” Change had to happen; “Property has its duties as well as its rights,” and “vested rights must yield to the general good.” He finished by saying, “I might write an essay on this subject.” Sadly, he never got around to it.
Nevertheless, Macdonald sensed the way the future was beginning to take shape. From the mid-1880s on, radical social and economic change was becoming visible in Canada. A rural society at the edge of a wilderness was beginning its transition to an urbanized, industrial society. In no way was the change as dramatic as that under way in countries such as the United States, Britain, Germany, France and Japan. Still, industries were getting larger, especially in Montreal, Toronto and Hamilton, and some were already large, such as Massey, the agricultural implements manufacturer. The National Policy helped, while the CPR created a national market for the first time. Companies employed an ever-growing new class of workers, of artisans and “mechanics,” who, unlike the yeoman farmers Macdonald had always known, possessed technical expertise and espoused collective goals.
This new class of urban, industrial workers effected far-reaching social and economic change. Between 1870 and 1890, Canada’s urban population increased from 18 per cent of the national total to 35 per cent. Alarming new creeds such as communism and socialism were starting to be discussed. Religious leaders began to think not only of the heaven that awaited everyone, but of the hellish conditions many urban dwellers lived in on earth. Their concern would develop into the social gospel, a major national political force throughout much of the twentieth century. As the General Conference of Methodists put it, all Christians had “a duty … to make all proper efforts to secure the most satisfactory economic conditions through appropriate legislation.”
Unions also began to revive. In 1883, the first meeting of the Trades and Labour Congress was held. The most powerful union for a time was the American-based Knights of Labor, which combined evangelical Christianity and unionism, generating working-class pride and solidarity across regions and religions. Despite this inclusiveness, the Knights strongly criticized the influx of Chinese workers.
There was strong opposition to these new ideas and ideals. Goldwin Smith argued that “injustice is human … it is idle, for any practical purpose, to assail it as an injustice.” The view of the Nation was that poorhouses (on the British model) “are a step towards creating a pauper population with all its attendant misery, disease, and crime … all sexes, ages, and vices mixed together like a rank, unwholesome, world.” The predominant view remained that the unemployed were not “honest” but idle, and that helping them only injured them by making them dependent on the state.
Macdonald’s response, late in 1886, was to set up the Royal Commission on the Relations of Labour and Capital. In one respect it was unique, not only at the time, but in all Canadian history. With seven of its fifteen members drawn from labour, it was Canada’s most worker-oriented national inquiry ever. Its high-minded objectives were to improve the “material, social, intellectual and moral prosperity” of workers, but its actual accomplishments were sparse. Only one of its recommendations was ever implemented—to create a new national holiday, Labour Day. Yet it laid a foundation for the future. Its core conclusion was that “to offer a very large percentage of workers the smallest amount of wages appears to be the one fixed and dominant idea [of employers].” And it made the shrewd point that “there is no bond of sympathy existing between the capitalist of the large mill and his employees, such as prevailed when smaller works were the rule.” It also made a number of shocking findings: that child employees, girls as well as boys, were regularly beaten in cigar factories in Montreal; that eleven-and-a-half-hour days were common in cotton mills; that rest periods were rare in most factories and that employees commonly ate while continuing with their work.
The report, published in 1889, totalled 734 pages—a length Macdonald no doubt found intimidating. Still, he was able to edge matters forward a few short steps. The next year, the right of unions to strike was strengthened, and an amendment to the Criminal Code protected female employees from seduction by their bosses. But Macdonald’s general inattention to the report is revealed in the plaintive letter he received from one commission member: “You are too busy a man, Sir John, to be able to read the report. Will you not, in justice to us, ask some trustworthy friend to read it?” Still, Canada’s slow long march towards becoming a welfare state began with this inquiry into capital and labour that was biased, deliberately, towards labour.
Perhaps the most remarkable example of Macdonald’s readiness to allow his imagination to take flight is contained in a letter to his old friend Judge James Robert Gowan in January 1886. Gowan had taken a hard line on Quebec’s turn towards nationalism in response to Riel’s execution. Macdonald replied soothingly that there might be much in what he said about Quebec matters, but then took off in a quite different direction. “Looking at them [Quebecers] from a patriotic rather than a party point of view, is it not to be regretted that the French should [not] be more equally divided between the two existing parties?” Before the Riel affair, he wrote, “they went nearly all one way and altho’ it was my way—it was not particularly wholesome … their unanimity had to be paid for.”
In an uncanny prefiguration of how Canada’s political future would unfold, Macdonald was saying that it would be far better for the country if Quebecers supported both parties rather than supporting one overwhelmingly. He had no idea how complete the tilt away from the Conservatives would be nor how long it would last, but he sensed that national harmony depended on both races being represented in the two national parties.
If in some ways Macdonald saw the future more clearly than most people did, in others he remained behind the times. An unexpected effect of his Franchise Act of 1885 was that it handed no electoral advantage to the Conservatives. Voters, it seemed, wanted elections to be for them, and not just for the parties. Canadians were becoming converts to democracy and were less ready to assume that the version that existed below the border was mere mobocracy.
Heresies began to be uttered out loud. In 1883, the Toronto News explained that democracy was “nothing but a government of the people, by the people, for the people.” By 1890, the Victoria Times had declared, “Democracy is upon us. We cannot get rid of it if we could. We must, therefore, make the best of it.” Macdonald’s opinion remained that democracy in the form of universal franchise was unsound in itself, because it gave electoral power to those with no stake in the system—to those who owned no property. Equally damning, it was the way Americans did things. In 1890, he wrote to Colonial Secretary Lord Knutsford, urging that “the monarchical idea should be fostered in the colonies, accompanied by some gradation of the classes.” He added the explanation that Canadian annexationists used advances in democracy to argue that “our national sympathies are with the Americans.”
On other matters, Macdonald embraced the wrong side of history. He continued to chase election funds in the wrong places as avidly as he ever did—from companies doing business with the government. The evidence comes from a letter written to him by George Stephen, the former president of the Canadian Pacific Railway, on July 29, 1890, which was uncovered by historian Michael Bliss while he was researching his 1974 book, A Living Profit. Although the letter is extraordinary, it has been almost entirely ignored. Stephen complains to Macdonald that the government is ignoring him and that “in almost every transaction we have had with the Govt. arising out of this contract, we have been taken advantage of and duped and deceived in the most cruel manner.” He is particularly annoyed that Joseph Hickson, the general manager of the rival Grand Trunk Railway, has been promised a “subsidy for the Toronto and Ottawa line” even “without doing anything”—without having sent money to the Conservative Party.
Then comes the almost unbelievable paragraph: “On the other hand, you know that I have personally & otherwise thro [Railway Minister] Pope, alone spent over one million dollars since 1882.” According to Stephen, the CPR poured more than $1 million—in today’s currency at least $30 million—into the Conservative coffers over an eight-year span. Moreover, this largesse was provided by Stephen alone (as he emphasized), strongly implying that the full tally was even higher.
This largesse was staggering, not only in itself, but even more in the context that the electorate in the late nineteenth century was only around 400,000 and campaign expenses were simple and small. It’s possible Stephen exaggerated in a bout of self-pity, but no reply from Macdonald exists, and this enormous figure was never mentioned again in any other correspondence. Whatever the exact amount, it is obvious that the CPR functioned like a cornucopia cascading cash into the Conservative coffers.
Back in 1882, after he secured the charter for the transcontinental railway, Stephen wrote to Macdonald, “The Canadian Pacific Railway is in reality in partnership with the government.” This partnership was not just about getting the railway built but about making certain that Macdonald’s administration remained the government forever. Clearly, Macdonald had learned nothing from the disaster of his first attempt, a quarter-century earlier, to create a company able to build the railway. He was very lucky that Stephen’s letter from 1890 never surfaced in his own time. What would have happened then is unknowable, but Macdonald certainly would not have apologized for what he had done. He believed that the national interest justified a mutually beneficial government-business partnership. As he once said, “The Conservative party in England does not repudiate the actions of the brewers and distillers and the Association of Licensed Victuallers in electing candidates in their interest, and we do not repudiate or reject the influence of the railway interests.” On another key issue, Macdonald wasn’t behind the times but just plain wrong: on how best to contain the arrival of ever-larger numbers of Chinese workers into Canada’s west coast.
By the standards of the day, Macdonald was liberal on most matters of race. All his political life he sought harmony between the French and the English. His views about the proper treatment of Indians—“the original owners of the soil” in his repeated phrase—were far more liberal than most. He also took it for granted that blacks in Canada had the same rights as anyone else, telling one correspondent, “There should be no reason why the red man … should not have the same privileges as the British subjects either White or Black.” In 1882, when blacks were attacked by a crowd of whites and fought back, he came down strongly on their side, telling his justice minister, “The Judge was I think wrong in excluding evidence as to the Cries of the Whites … such as for instance Hang the Niggers … and [the blacks] might naturally think it necessary to cut their way through.” He actively sought Jews as immigrants, and praised his representative in London, Alexander Tilloch Galt, for persuading the Rothschilds to sponsor Jews fleeing from pogroms in Russia to come to Canada: “You have made a great strike by taking up the Old Clo’ cry and going in for a Jew immigration into the North-West.”
All of this derived from Macdonald’s conviction that no distinction should be made among Canadians except where racial distinctions existed in the law itself, as in the case of Aboriginal peoples or of francophones in terms of their education and religion and language. Neither did he accept that any distinction should be made, again in terms of the law, between those who had long lived in the country, such as descendants of United Empire Loyalists, and newcomers, such as Hungarians, Icelanders, Moravians, Mennonites, Jews and blacks.
His attitude towards outsiders was decidedly different, though. He made a sharp distinction between those he believed could assimilate, such as Jews, and those he believed could not—blacks (other than those already here) and Chinese. When a senior Jamaican politician visited him in Ottawa to ask about the island’s possible entry into Confederation, Macdonald wrote to Francis Hincks on September 18, 1884, “Commercial union would be valuable, but I dread the political union which a union opens to us—The Negro question, defence, &, &.” He treated as warily a similar expression of interest in union by Barbados.
In the 1880s, the newcomers who were stirring national debate were the Chinese workers in British Columbia. Some had come up from California in the mid-1870s, but the real influx took place in the mid-1880s, especially once construction of the CPR created a demand for large numbers of unskilled labourers along the line through the Rockies, where, unlike on the prairies, there was no local population to fill the available jobs. In all, some seventeen thousand Chinese worked on the railway. The great majority were temporary workers from Guangdong province who had left their families at home and come to the “Golden Mountain” to earn enough money to buy land when they returned, in the hope of escaping their hereditary status as indentured peasants.
The first demand for the number of Chinese to be reduced or the influx stopped entirely was made in the Commons as early as 1878 by the former BC premier Amor de Cosmos. Year after year, comparable resolutions were moved and defeated. Only when the CPR construction teams entered the Rockies did the issue become urgent. After the company had itself arranged for additional workers to be brought in from China, Macdonald’s position became “Either you can have this [Chinese] labour, or you can’t have the CPR.” He disallowed a succession of bills passed by the BC legislature to restrict immigration. And he rejected calls from trade unions across the country, including from a mass rally in Hamilton by the Knights of Labor, for the importation of labour to end. The accusations at the heart of the clamour: that the Chinese reduced the general level of wages, and that they competed for jobs sought by Canadians in coal mines and by Indians in berry picking and fish cleaning in British Columbia.*
The Chinese paid a high price for their striking success as railway workers. About four thousand of them died, many from malnutrition because of the unfamiliar Canadian food they were offered. They also endured injuries and died as a result of these, because few medical facilities were provided for them. Macdonald refused to halt the immigration of Chinese temporary workers, despite demands he do so, because he feared that without this supply of labour the railway’s construction would stretch out for years, multiplying the risk of bankruptcy for the CPR.
All along, though, Macdonald had a second concern he felt strongly about. In 1882, he told the Commons, “I share very much the feeling of the people of the United States and the Australian colonies against a Mongolian or Chinese population in our country as permanent settlers.… I believe it is an alien race in every sense, that would not and could not be expected to assimilate.” Two years later, he elaborated on this view: “They are not of our people, they are not of our race; they do not kindly mix with us.” The following year, he was even more blunt: “It is not considered advantageous to the country that the Chinese should come and settle.… It may be right or wrong, but the prejudice is universal.”
While commonplace at the time, these opinions were not universal. Even in British Columbia, where the prejudice was most explicit, the Victoria Colonist noted that the Chinese were “the most orderly and the most sober” in the town. Queen’s University principal George Monro Grant declared that “discrimination based on race, colour, creed or sex” was “contrary to the spirit of Christianity.” Still, there was massive, open prejudice and anti-Chinese rioting in British Columbia. Even in Toronto, where few if any Chinese workers came, the News compared them to “a yellow-skinned, almond-eyed, long-haired, swarm of grasshoppers.” Even Grant’s moderation derived from his concern to maintain trade ties to China.
Until the rail line was finished, Macdonald temporized, resorting in 1884 to the device of setting up a Royal Commission to study the issue. Co-chaired by Joseph-Adolphe Chapleau, one of his own ministers, and by John Gray, a well-regarded BC judge, its findings were strikingly moderate. The Chinese were “not an inferior race,” but were first-rate workers. Even though their presence in large numbers in a province with only thirty thousand European settlers had provoked “irritation, discontent and resentment,” equilibrium could be restored by “moderate restrictions” rather than by a U.S.-style outright ban on all Chinese immigration. It is highly probable that the commission was saying what Macdonald wanted it to say.
In the mid-1880s, Macdonald enacted Canada’s first-ever explicitly discriminatory legislation in the form of a head tax on Chinese workers. As the Grip cartoon shows, though, most Canadians wanted far harsher action. (photo credit 32.2)
Published in May 1885, the commission’s report was denounced by the BC press as “absurd” and “a farce.” At a mass rally in Victoria, protestors carried banners reading, “No Yellow Slave Shall Eat Our Children’s Bread.” Macdonald at last acted. He decreed that Chinese immigrants—more accurately, temporary workers, except for very small numbers—would not be excluded, but there would be legislation to “Restrict and Regulate” their entry. Future arrivals would pay a head tax of fifty dollars, and there would be a limit on the number allowed on any incoming ship. The new law sharply reduced the inflow of Chinese workers, from 4,000 in 1885 to just 214 in 1886, with the total continuing to decrease until 1890, when it rose to 1,000. The later Laurier government increased the head tax to a prohibitive five hundred dollars, and in 1923 Canada followed the United States with a complete exclusion of immigrants from China.
Most Canadians wanted far harsher measures. Their demands do not alter the fact that Macdonald implemented Canada’s first explicitly discriminatory, race-based regulation—and that he did it twice over: at the same time as he imposed the race-based head tax he amended the original definition of “Person” in the Franchise Act to exclude those of “Mongolian or Chinese race,” so withdrawing the vote from them. Here, he was discriminating against immigrants already in Canada rather than acting against temporary workers. He did so for the sake of votes in British Columbia, but also because he genuinely believed that Chinese would never be more than “sojourners” in Canada. It has taken most of a century to prove Macdonald wrong.
By the end of the 1880s, Macdonald was less than a fortnight short of his seventy-fifth birthday, and his burst of intellectual energy had run its course. Piled up on his desk were files about sectarian hatreds, separatism in Nova Scotia, nationalism in Quebec, alienation in the West, the never-ending depression and the beginnings of talk about the need not merely for cross-border free trade, but for an outright economic union with the U.S. To Macdonald, this last proposal could end only in political union. For the remaining years of his life, he applied all his available energy to trying to stamp out the political fires that now stretched across Canada, or that came at it from the south.
* After Macdonald’s death, Thompson made it to the top post in 1892, but he died suddenly two years later during a trip to Britain. Had he survived, Canadian political history might have been radically different.
* Probably because it had been his pre-Confederation title, Macdonald often referred to himself as “premier” rather than his official title of prime minister.
* A rare exception, really the only one, is the 2009 master’s thesis by Colin Grittner, “A Statesmanlike Measure with a Partisan Tail.” His title comes from the shrewd headline description of the Franchise Act in the Montreal Daily Star, of May 16, 1885.
† A group of women in Toronto figured out how to get their fingers into the pie: they formed a book club, but as soon as they closed the door they switched to discussing the suffrage, confident that no man would ever enter a room filled with women talking about novels.
* These radical ideas weren’t new to Macdonald. Earlier, in February, 1884, in a kind of warning of what he intended to ask MPs to accept, he’d used a Commons debate on Indian affairs to tell them, “By slow degrees, the idea of placing woman on an equality with man has grown in the civilized world,” adding that he didn’t know whether this was true also among Indians.
* The debate in Ottawa was limited and uninformed by the standards of the public discussions of “the women question” going on in the United States and Britain during the 1880s.
* Chinese workers typically received wages at half the level of those received by whites doing similar work. As a result, Chinese domestic servants were in high demand in Victoria.