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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ was staged more to showcase Macdonald as a benign ruler than to engage with Native grievances. At brief stopovers, Agnes enthusiastically worked the crowds, chatting to women and children. At Calgary, which Macdonald predicted would become “a large metropolitan city,” she spent several hours at a social event, meeting “all the ladies who desired to have a chat with the cleverest and most popular lady in Canada today.” As their train headed through the mountains, Agnes insisted on riding on the cowcatcher. To the alarm of officials and the terror of Joe Pope, Canada’s prime minister joined her for a 200-kilometre stretch. Macdonald “said but little at the time,” but in 1891 he wrote of his pride at “looking back from the steps of my car upon the Rocky Mountains fringing the eastern sky.”

      On July 24, the waters of the Pacific Ocean lapped at his feet as he left the train at Port Moody. Then it was on by steamboat to Victoria, where Macdonald was greeted by a band playing “See the Conquering Hero Comes.” A torchlight procession escorted him to a long-vanished hotel, which ruthlessly overcharged for his three-week visit. Tired from travelling, he initially discouraged formal events but quickly became a familiar figure sauntering the downtown streets. But Victoria had elected him to Parliament in 1878, and a delayed welcome ceremony in a packed theatre enabled him to express his thanks. He called his journey “the realization of all my dreams.” On August 13, Macdonald formally inaugurated Island’s railway to Nanaimo, which he also predicted would become a “great city.” That evening, they sailed for the mainland, mesmerized by Mount Baker, “radiant in the southern sky, catching and reflecting the light … after the sun had disappeared below the horizon.” New Westminster was disappointed at receiving only an overnight visit, while the mayor of the recently founded city of Vancouver arrived to express his regret that it had burned down six weeks earlier.

      Then followed the long journey home, more speeches, even an appearance at a Conservative convention in Winnipeg. As his train headed across northern Ontario on August 31, 1886, somebody realized that his return to Ottawa would coincide with a massive Liberal rally in the capital addressed by provincial premier Oliver Mowat and federal opposition leader Edward Blake. Local Tories were hastily summoned to a welcoming reception, but the Globe crowed that it was a poorly attended “side show.” Sir John A. Macdonald had returned to the trench warfare of Canadian politics.

      8

      1886–1891

      You’ll Never Die, John A.!

      If he had quit politics immediately after his return to Ottawa on August 31, 1886, Sir John A. Macdonald would have ended his career on a high note. In Victoria, he had called the completion of the transcontinental railway “the fruition of all my expectations”: surely he was now entitled to bow out? Four years earlier, when a friendly heckler had shouted, “I hope you will never get old,” he had modestly replied, “I must make way for others.” In 1886 he was seventy-one — high time to act on his promise to “make way for younger and stronger men.” Ideally, the fall of 1886 would have seen an orderly transition to a new leader who could meet Parliament that winter and seek a fresh electoral mandate soon after.

      It did not happen, and it was never likely. Far from announcing his retirement, Macdonald was planning his thirteenth general election. The central theme of the last five years of his life was his inability to leave public life. His Dominion was like a house with a smouldering basement fire: smoke and flames erupted in room after room, province after province. There would be no second trip to British Columbia, no more comfortable visits to Britain. Far from being confident of Canada’s future, he felt foreboding. “We have watched the cradle of Confederation,” he had remarked to Campbell the previous year, “& shouldn’t like to follow the hearse.” Only one possible nation-building target remained. As Gowan commented in 1888, bringing Newfoundland into Confederation “would be a grand capping stone to your original conception and a glorious close to your career in public life.” But Macdonald was not inspired by the prospect. “Newfoundland will not come in just now,” he replied in September 1888, “and I am not very sorry.” Sir John A. Macdonald holds the record as Canada’s oldest serving prime minister — a record unlikely to be broken. But his achievement also represented systemic failure: even in his seventies, with his main work achieved, he could not escape from the burden of leadership.

      Rejecting Macdonald’s 1867 vision of Dominion supremacy over submissive provinces, Mowat’s Ontario government had challenged Ottawa in a series of cases before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, Canada’s ultimate constitutional court. In 1883, a battle over the billiard table in Archibald Hodge’s Toronto tavern had prompted the London judges to declare that provinces were “supreme” within their own spheres of jurisdiction. Even Macdonald now occasionally used the term “Federal Government” instead of “Dominion.” Although he was astutely aware of “the opposition cry that we are centralizing everything,” he remained determined to “protect the Constitution from invasion” by resisting “unworthy concession” to provincial demands. But Mowat had made Ontario a semi-sovereign body within Canada. Worse still, in Nova Scotia, the Liberals won the 1886 election by threatening to secede from the Dominion altogether.

      Macdonald’s problems were exacerbated by the Riel case. Defying Conservative policy, the Toronto Mail embarked on an anti-French and anti-Catholic campaign which threw the Irish vote to Mowat in the December 1886 Ontario election. The following year, Macdonald launched yet another Toronto newspaper, the Empire, but with limited success. Riel’s ghost also contributed to a major setback in Quebec, the election of a nationalist Liberal government, led by the unscrupulous adventurer Honoré Mercier.

      Conservative defeats in the two largest provinces were an unlikely prelude to a successful Dominion campaign. A cautious politician would have waited until later in 1887: Macdonald defiantly sent Canadians to the polls in February. He knew he was criticized for being “too bold – but boldness won the day.” Macdonald gambled that Ontario voters distrusted Mercier and would back a strong leader in Ottawa. The 1885 Franchise Act had created separate Dominion and provincial voter qualifications: Mowat’s 1886 provincial victory — narrow enough in the popular vote — was no longer a pointer to the outcome of a federal election across Ontario. Liberals charged that the government packed voters’ lists with its own supporters. Indeed, voter numbers jumped by almost 40 percent over 1882, but the Conservative share of the poll in Ontario rose by just 0.3 percent. In Kingston, which Macdonald recaptured, the increase was from 1,686 to 2,728 — but he won by a mere seventeen votes. “We should have been beaten if we had not gone to the Country when we did.”

      The seventy-two-year-old prime minister felt “used up” by the campaign, but fresh challenges soon erupted. The fisheries clauses of the 1871 Treaty of Washington, which had permitted the Americans to fish along Canada’s Atlantic coasts, lapsed in 1885. The Americans resented Canadian efforts to exclude them from inshore waters, and retaliated by claiming the Bering Sea as a private extension of Alaska. Unlike 1871, Canadians — Thompson and Tupper — led the tough negotiations which began in Washington in November 1887, backed by a senior British politician, Joseph Chamberlain. Shocked that the Americans attempted to treat Canada like a “country defeated after a great war,” Chamberlain dismissed their negotiating team as “dishonest tricksters.” “The Yankees are very bad neighbours,” Macdonald lamented in January 1891.

      No handover of power was possible until his two able lieutenants, Thompson and Tupper, returned from Washington, but in March 1888, Macdonald told Gowan, “we must make room for others,” adding, in June, “I must shortly go.” Yet, in contrast to earlier scares, his health seemed good. In particular, he looked well — “& shiny,” Agnes noted in 1886. “I am in good health,” he reported in 1887. In February 1889, Gowan found him “looking as young as ever,” and Macdonald himself thought his health was “surprizingly good.” In a sartorial gimmick, he had taken to wearing light-coloured suits and a jaunty white top hat, СКАЧАТЬ