An Unsentimental Portrait

Upon finishing Richard Gwyn’s excellent biography Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times, I know our first prime minister much better. Surprisingly, I like him less.

Gwyn himself admires Macdonald and describes those qualities that attracted Macdonald’s contemporaries and Canadians more generally to him: his generosity of spirit; his ability to move easily among kings and paupers; his extraordinary skill in negotiation whether in Charlottetown or in Washington; and, of course, his exceptional wit. Who can resist Macdonald’s famous political analysis: “they prefer John A. drunk to George Brown sober”? Or his comment when his colleague George Foster married an apparently inappropriate woman: “beneath the belt, there is no wisdom”?

Macdonald was simultaneously charming and charismatic, a rare and invaluable political combination. He possessed, as Gwyn remarks, “the priceless political asset of being distinctive,” with his red...