Premier Event

Set squarely on York Avenue, a secondary thoroughfare running southwest to northeast through Winnipeg’s downtown, is a ten-storey modernist building constructed in the late 1950s. Designed by an Icelandic-immigrant architect and erected by one of the city’s Belgian-immigrant construction firms, it was for a decade the city’s tallest structure, used primarily as a home for government and administrative offices. A variety of services still occupy it, yet few people, if asked today (or even sixty years ago), would be able to identify the person for whom it is named: John Norquay. One of the first premiers of Manitoba, Norquay also has a mountain named after him in Banff, Alberta, as well as a town in south-central Saskatchewan, though the latter’s website contains scant reference to its eponym.

As someone who went through the K–12 school system in Winnipeg from the mid‑1960s to the mid‑’70s and picked up some Manitoba history along the way, I grew up knowing about the Riel Rebellions, the Winnipeg General Strike, and the Manitoba Schools Question, a national political issue generated by Thomas Greenway, Norquay’s better-known successor. However, with apologies to my excellent high school history teacher, if you’d asked sixteen-year-old me in 1974 who John Norquay was, I’d likely have said it was the guy (we did not then say “dude”) who built that tower downtown.

Norquay’s obscurity was made marginally less profound in October 2023, when a provincial election turfed a deeply unpopular Conservative government and brought Wab Kinew and his New Democrats to power. While there was considerable excitement at the assumption of the premier’s office by Kinew — an affable author, educator, and musician — the greatest buzz concerned the new leader’s identity. It was quickly noted that at long last, Canada had its first Indigenous provincial premier. But he wasn’t. Kinew is undoubtedly Canada’s first provincial premier of First Nations descent, but the earliest Indigenous premier was the previously forgotten Norquay (or, if one counts the 1870 provisional government, Louis Riel).

Understandably, there has been an efflorescence of interest in the earlier premier, and it has been wonderfully satisfied in a book that could not have been better timed if it had been planned that way: Gerald Friesen’s brick of a biography, The Honourable John Norquay. Weighing in at over 600 closely printed pages, a quarter of which contain notes and bibliography, the book is the first full-length treatment of Norquay’s life and political career, which turns out to have been a great deal more interesting than one might have expected.

 Friesen has spent a good chunk of his career studying his subject, having previously authored a lengthy entry on him in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Even with that entry, Norquay has been underserved historiographically. Although Friesen had no previous biographies of any substance to draw upon, he made use of a book on Norquay’s ancestors by the historian Ellen Cooke, who had planned to write a full biography of him but never got around to it. Cooke did, however, take custody in 1946 of a large cache of papers, left in family hands for half a century after the premier’s death in 1889. Forty years later, she donated the collection to the Archives of Manitoba, which are housed in a former concert hall a stone’s throw from the Norquay Building. Friesen, a professor emeritus in the University of Manitoba’s history department, is careful to give credit to Cooke’s work in preserving this material, without which a biography of such depth would have been inconceivable, and to the archivists who curated and catalogued the documents before they were made available to the public. That said, anyone who has ever faced a vast collection in an archive will know that without prior narratives to steer one’s own search, the work of turning thousands of papers into a coherent and readable narrative is akin to wandering through an unfamiliar forest at dusk while trying to draw a map.

Norquay’s life was significant in its own right, but Friesen also provides a crash course in early provincial government, both in Manitoba and as it relates to federal political issues. The shadow of Sir John A. Macdonald, here neither deified nor villainized, looms over the proceedings; Canada’s first prime minister was occasionally a supporter but just as often a canny opponent of a sometimes difficult premier who himself entertained national ambitions that would never be realized. Eventually Norquay became more a liability than an asset to Macdonald, who helped engineer his one‑time ally’s ouster from power in 1887.

Born on May 8, 1841, near St. Andrews, within the Red River Settlement, Norquay was Métis or, as the ethnicity was called then (without the noxious scent the term now carries), “half-breed.” At a time when people were shorter-lived — Norquay himself would not see his forty-ninth birthday — and infant or childhood death was common, young John came into a family that included three elder sisters (one of whom would die soon after) and might have included an elder brother had the boy not died in early infancy several years earlier. Quickly identified as having intellectual potential, John became a protégé of David Anderson, the Anglican bishop of Rupert’s Land, who oversaw the young man’s classical education.

Contrary to the popular understanding of Canadian Métis people as invariably francophone and Catholic, Manitoba’s Métis community was divided along both linguistic and religious lines. Norquay came from the Protestant, English-speaking side, though he grew up switching among several tongues, including Bungee, which Friesen describes as “a variant of Scots English, Inninumowin (Cree), and Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwa), with a little French, Norn, and Gaelic added.” Primarily a farmer and fisher, Norquay avoided involvement in Louis Riel’s first rebellion, on the eve of Manitoba joining Confederation in July 1870, but within a year or two, aged barely thirty, he found himself embroiled in provincial politics.

Invited into Adams Archibald’s cabinet in 1871, Norquay ran unsuccessfully for Canada’s parliament the following year; while this would be his only attempt to secure a seat in the Commons, he frequently petitioned for non-electoral federal offices throughout the next two decades, often motivated by monetary pressures as much as by ambition. By 1874, he was leader of what amounted to a provincial opposition, though party lines were much more fluid at the time. While Norquay’s affiliation nationally was with the Conservatives, much of his early support came from Manitoba Liberals rather than the old guard Tories of Winnipeg. By 1878, he had become premier, and an election a few months later returned him to government with the support of a majority of legislators in the small assembly.

Back then, power depended less on party-line votes than on personal relationships, and these could sour quickly. Nor was “identity” in the way we understand it as crucial a factor: Norquay soon lost the support of a French, ultramontane Catholic Métis faction headed by Joseph Royal, who allied himself in a strange-bedfellows way with Thomas Scott, a transplanted Orangeman from Ontario. By the end of Norquay’s premiership in December 1887, provincial party lines had hardened along the federal divide of Liberals versus Conservatives, and Norquay, more a pragmatic and transactional deal maker than an ideologue or firm party man, found himself outmanoeuvred in the new environment, no longer helped by Macdonald, whose support he had lost.

During the nine years in between, however, a great deal happened on Norquay’s watch. Provincial boundaries were established (not without legal wrangling), and Manitoba expanded from its original “postage stamp” size. Railways were built, including the Canadian Pacific Railway’s stretch through Manitoba. In fact, the rail line would prove perhaps the thorniest of problems for Norquay. Because of it, he took frequent trips to Ottawa to represent a province chafing under the notorious monopoly clause that the CPR magnate George Stephen (as close to a Machiavellian villain as one finds in Friesen’s account) had insisted upon with the federal government, and which the prime minister was determined to protect. Norquay found himself squeezed between loyalty to Macdonald and his own ambitions for a national profile, on one hand, and the discontent of his own constituents, on the other; meanwhile, in the wings stood Greenway, another Ontario transplant and the rising architect of a fiercer, Liberal‑dominated resistance.

Norquay also fell afoul of his own lifestyle ambitions. Personally generous, he was a less competent businessman than he thought he was — and bad at keeping his personal finances in order. This weakness led him onto some ethically thin ice. While the line between public and private interests was fuzzier 150 years ago than now, the public still recognized an impropriety when it saw it (as Macdonald himself knew from his five-year exile from government over a more famous brouhaha, the Pacific Scandal of 1873). A combination of failed business ventures and a lavish Winnipeg residence put Norquay in debt. And although he was cleared in a series of events involving shady land deals and sketchy accounting practices with respect to public funds, some damage was done. He also had to contend with opposition from inside and outside his ranks, including his former cabinet colleague Corydon Partlow Brown (for whom Corydon Avenue, a major Winnipeg artery, is named), who became an informant for Macdonald.

With Norquay’s inability, after several increasingly desperate efforts, to secure adequate funding for the north-south Red River Valley Railway — a project his government had banked on — the premier found himself politically isolated. He was soon deserted by Macdonald, who had reasons of his own for wanting that railway to fail; the prime minister was angry with Norquay for participating in the first ever premiers’ conference in Quebec City in October 1887, a gathering that Sir John had refused to attend. By December, Norquay had also lost the support of his cabinet colleagues, and his time as premier was over. Although railroaded out of power, he survived as opposition leader and as an MLA, but in many respects, he was a broken man, selling insurance to make ends meet. Extremely corpulent but in generally good health, he died barely eighteen months later, after a brief illness, on July 5, 1889.

Gerald Friesen does a commendable job of weaving several different overlapping stories into a compelling and lucid account, and the result is as rounded an understanding of John Norquay the person as is likely possible. The book is often a little heavy in detail, and, as can happen in any biography, the author sometimes appears to be a defender rather than a chronicler of his subject’s life. It’s clear that Friesen respects and even admires the man. Still, he is candid and judicious as to both Norquay’s flaws and his many positive characteristics, which included personal loyalty (not consistently repaid by those who received it) and benevolence. The premier was a formidable if often overconfident retail politician and orator, and he presided over a progressive decade in Manitoba’s history. His somewhat flexible ethics in monetary matters were less obvious to some contemporaries, given the looser rules around conflicts of interest. Norquay could also be quite naive in dealing with more experienced politicians, Macdonald most of all; he consistently overestimated his own powers of persuasion, especially outside the province. The federal political playground was a rough one, which he seems never to have entirely understood. But Norquay was an important figure in both Manitoba’s and Canada’s early development. Having long had his own building, mountain, and town, Canada’s first Indigenous premier finally has a biography that does him justice, warts and all.