Curtain Call

I first opened Alastair Sweeny’s richly detailed biography while at home in Ottawa, on day 12 of the occupation of the city, February 8, 2022. Snow was falling gently and the distant past was a welcome place.

Thomas Mackay (pronounced Mac-EYE) arrived in what would eventually become Canada’s capital in the summer of 1826, when it was “a wilderness construction camp run by the British Army.” He was thirty-four years old. A stonemason from Perth, Scotland, he had learned from his father “the satisfaction of shaping stone to make it useful and good and even beautiful.” Having been head mason on the Lachine Canal, built on the Island of Montreal earlier in the decade, he would now become a principal contractor for the Rideau Canal.

Mackay had a stonemason’s face. A photograph of him in middle age shows the windswept mutton chops, high forehead, and steady and assessing gaze of a hands-on builder and contractor. “A good practical mason,” as the engineer John...