The John A. Macdonald Retrospective 2-Book Bundle. Ged Martin

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СКАЧАТЬ to placate New Brunswick politician John Costigan, by promoting his son, a post office clerk in Winnipeg. “We can’t make him a Cabinet minister (which he wants) & must help the son.” In fact, Costigan gained his objective in 1882, although an alcohol problem limited his usefulness. Both Costigan and another Irish Catholic, Frank Smith, threatened resignation over patronage issues, and Macdonald dared not call their bluff. He had blocked one of Tupper’s appointments in 1879, and for two years his Nova Scotian colleague refused to speak to him. Appointed a minister in 1882, Joseph-Adolphe Chapleau proved greedy for patronage. Macdonald felt that he was “comparatively harmless” inside Cabinet, a theory shattered during the 1887 election when Chapleau threatened to bolt the campaign unless given exclusive control over government appointments in the Montreal area. The prime minister surrendered. When Pope’s death vacated the Railways portfolio, with its massive patronage, Chapleau was “crazy to get it.” Macdonald dared not offend the Quebecker by appointing a rival, so he took the job himself — an absurd addition to the workload of a seventy-four-year-old prime minister. Macdonald tried to persuade one of his ablest Ontario supporters to join the Cabinet: D’Alton McCarthy was a fine debater and effective campaigner. But McCarthy refused to leave his lucrative law practice for what Macdonald admitted was “the thankless & inglorious position of a Canadian Minister.” The appointment, in 1888, of the thirty-two-year-old Charles Hibbert Tupper was a gesture to his father, whose faults he energetically magnified. The prime minister returned one of his importunate letters with the scribbled advice: “skin your own skunks.” Even Sir John A. Macdonald had difficulty managing this disparate team. As the years passed, it became steadily harder to imagine anybody replacing him.

      Macdonald offered simple advice to these who feared that the 1879 tariff would make imported foodstuffs more expensive: “use no American flour … but eat Canadian flour, on which there was no tax.” He invariably linked the tariff to the construction of the transcontinental railway: when Western settlers complained that Canadian goods were more expensive, he sarcastically offered them “the glorious privilege” of importing American manufactures duty-free — so long as they could be transported by toboggan. Linking tariff and railway made political sense in Canada, but it caused problems in Britain. The Pacific Railway needed British investment capital, but British manufacturers objected to Canadian import duties — after all, their taxes paid for the navy that defended Canada. Hence Macdonald visited Britain in 1879 and 1880, defending the National Policy to politicians and angry businessmen.

      Crossing the Atlantic in 1879 enabled Macdonald to accept membership of Britain’s Privy Council, a political Hall of Fame dating from the sixteenth century. The distinction had been offered after the Treaty of Washington, but with a hint not to collect it until the Pacific Scandal died down. Sworn in by Queen Victoria, Macdonald became the first “Right Honourable” colonist in the overseas Empire. Britain’s veteran prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, invited “the Canadian chief” to an overnight stopover at his country house. Disraeli found his visitor “gentlemanlike, agreeable, and very intelligent, a considerable man,” noting with approval “no Yankeeisms” in his speech, “except a little sing-song occasionally at the end of a sentence.” Soon after, Macdonald assured Disraeli of Canada’s “pleasurable excitement” at actually being mentioned in one of his speeches.

      This cloying sentiment disguised a nationalist agenda. Macdonald dismissed people who argued for Canadian independence as “fools”: standing alone, the Dominion would be overwhelmed by the Americans. But he wanted to move towards partnership with Britain. He talked freely with a British royal commission on defence issues in 1880, predicting that Canada would raise its own small army to share imperial responsibilities, although his insistence upon strict confidentiality kept his evidence secret for seventy years. Macdonald also persuaded the reluctant British government to accept an official Canadian representative in London: he urged the title “Resident Minister” but the imperial authorities preferred the vaguer term “High Commissioner” — an office held first by Galt and then by Tupper. But Macdonald made no commitment to shed Canadian blood in imperial wars: when Britain entangled itself in Sudan in 1885, he flatly refused to help.

      As in 1872, the government wished the Pacific Railway to be built by a heavily-subsidized private company. In 1880, Macdonald chose a syndicate headed by Montreal banker George Stephen. At first, this seemed an odd choice, for Stephen was running a north-south railway linking Winnipeg to the United States — while Macdonald’s aim was an all-Canadian, east-west route. However, Stephen had profited from his Minnesota project through selling railroad land grants to settlers, and he saw the potential of similarly developing the Canadian West. Stephen came to depend upon Macdonald’s personal support, further obligating the prime minister to stay in office. Relations with Stephen’s business partner, Donald Smith, were less easy: Smith had deserted the government in 1873 and, five years later, Macdonald had denounced him as “the biggest liar I ever met!” But Macdonald believed that politicians “cannot afford to be governed by any feeling of irritation and annoyance,” and eventually the two men buried their hatchet. The Canadian Pacific Railway company (CPR) was launched in 1880, with a promised subsidy of $25 million and twenty-five million acres (10.11 million hectares) of land.

      By 1880, Canada was likely to build some form of railway to the Pacific. Even the unenthusiastic Liberal government, with its pessimistic, piecemeal policy, had constructed one section from Lake Superior towards Manitoba, and another in mainland British Columbia. As Macdonald commented, since Mackenzie had built “two ends of a railway, we must finish the middle.” But he was determined that the line must also run north of Lake Superior, giving central Canada a direct link to the prairies. If the transcontinental railway began at Thunder Bay, it would be accessible by Great Lakes shipping only in summer. “But for you,” Stephen wrote Macdonald in 1884, the railway would have been “simply an extension” of the American railroads in winter, “in short, not a Canadian Pacific Railway at all.” But Stephen’s price for tackling the unpromising Canadian Shield was CPR control over all prairie branch lines southward from the main line. Unless the Americans could be prevented from siphoning off its traffic, nobody “would give one dollar for the whole line east of Winnipeg.” This CPR monopoly was unpopular in Manitoba.

      Macdonald was sixty-five in 1880, and running the government was a tough job. His overseas trip the previous summer had been delayed by severe sickness, with “cramps and spasms” that reminded him of the 1870 gallstones crisis. Macdonald was ill again in March 1880, and horrified his colleagues by talking about retirement. In April 1881, he asked Campbell to prepare documentation about British Columbia: “I intended to have done it myself but I am not up to the work.” Soon after, he collapsed: “strength gone and troubled with continued pain in the stomach and bowels,” he reported to Tupper. His Ottawa doctor suspected cancer and advised “that I had better put my affairs in order.” His sister Louisa was shocked by her brother’s appearance. “I never saw John looking what I would call old until this time.” For the third time in two years, he crossed the Atlantic, this time to seek medical advice. A London specialist pronounced him “free from organic disease” but insisted upon “a very rigid diet & complete rest.” (Macdonald was now seen as such an asset to the Empire that the doctor refused to charge a fee.) “I am slowly getting better but my strength does not return as I could wish,” he told Campbell in June 1881.

      Nonetheless, he yearned to be back at his desk: “I have no pleasure nowadays but in work, & so it will be to the end of the chapter.” The chapter was never-ending, especially because the Pacific Railway and the development of Canadian industries were both long-term projects. It was vital to win another term in government and Macdonald’s “remaining ambition is to see that our policy is not reversed.” But to ensure that that the National Policy would be “safe from 1883 to 1888,” voters had to be persuaded that it was working. “You cannot plant the seed to-day and get the crop to-morrow,” he warned. Fortunately, times were good and, in 1882, he called an early election.

      Although the Mowat Liberal government remained firmly entrenched in Ontario, Macdonald had a temporary advantage on his chief battleground by the early 1880s. After a quarter century of arrogant dominance, the Globe was under СКАЧАТЬ