John A. Macdonald Biography
Our sense of John A. Macdonald as the father of the country is so strong that it is hard to think of him as a young politician. He was first elected before he was thirty and led a government before he was forty, but it is the second half of his career, the prime ministerial years from 1867 to 1891, that fixed his image for posterity.
A child immigrant from Scotland, he grew up around Kingston, Ontario and became that city’s representative in the colonial legislature in 1844. Well before Confederation, he had mastered the legislative process and honed his leadership techniques. He was a late convert to the Confederation movement and a skeptic about federalism, but once he joined in, his organizing skills and procedural mastery made him a key participant and then the first prime minister of the new nation.
As prime minister, Macdonald was a connoisseur of power. He knew how to acquire it: by relentless campaigning, by ruthless use of patronage, and by skillfully negotiating through the complicated mix of interests that defined the new nation and its politicians. He also knew how to use power. All his government’s policies – the acquisition of the northwest, the transcontinental railroad, the National Policy of tariff protection, the skillful negotiations with Britain and the United States – were designed both to strengthen the infant nation and to shore up the role of Ottawa and of his Conservative Party.
Macdonald applied those talents as prime minister from 1867 to 1873 and again from 1878 until 1891, so successfully that, when he died, many Canadians could imagine no one else as prime minister. He had ceased to be merely a brilliant party politician and come to incarnate the nation itself. “Canada is a hard country to govern,” he once said, and nobody did it better.
More information
- CBC's Greatest Canadians Profile
- CBC Archives (1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5)
- Canadian Encyclopedia (1 | 2)
- Library and Archive Canada
