Statue of Limitations

Until recently, Sir John A. Macdonald was among the most honoured Canadians, celebrated as the key founder and long-term prime minister of the confederated, transcontinental nation. Textbooks and biographies sang his praises. His statues studded public places across the dominion, while schools, airports, streets, and highways bore his name.

But much changed during the past two decades as Macdonald came to be redefined as the alleged father of Canadian racism, deemed guilty of hateful rhetoric and genocidal policies toward Indigenous people. Down have come the statues. Buildings and roads have received new names. Macdonald’s sins now replace his accomplishments in textbooks and popular histories. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission endorsed the genocide charge against him, and the Canadian Historical Association disavowed him. Men set up on pedestals as nineteenth-century heroes pay a heavy price, recast as villains for a self-congratulating present. This great fall troubles Patrice Dutil: “It’s hard to imagine a reputation being trashed so hatefully, so suddenly, and so thoroughly.”

A pre-eminent historian and political scientist, Dutil has written or edited a dozen books, primarily biographies of prime ministers or narratives of pivotal elections. The founding editor of this magazine, he now serves as a professor of politics and public administration at Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a senior fellow at both the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. In his lucid new book, Dutil rehabilitates Macdonald by offering a microhistory that focuses on the year 1885, which the author considers “a turning point in his life, and also a crucial one in Canada’s evolution.” Amping up the drama, Dutil insists that 1885 posed an existential threat to the fragile new dominion, which survived only because of Macdonald’s shrewd leadership.

Dutil does not actually confine his story to a single year, as chapters often range backwards in time to consider Macdonald’s earlier career, including the framing of Confederation two decades before. Dutil aptly casts Macdonald as a resourceful pragmatist and canny opportunist who mixed and matched conservative and liberal philosophies to maintain power as prime minister. “Ideologically, Macdonald was an odd bird,” Dutil writes. The prime minister mainly sought to accelerate economic development, including the westward expansion of settler colonialism. A thorough nationalist and patriot, he worked to preserve Canada from American domination and, perhaps, annexation. At the same time, Macdonald’s government claimed greater autonomy and demanded more respect from the United Kingdom, which he profusely honoured even when subtly defying it. Adopting “a hard-headed, realistic position,” the prime minister balked at the imperial overseas ventures promoted by hotheads in Toronto and London. Seeking economic independence, he championed the National Policy, which protected industries and fisheries. To knit together a long nation strung perilously along a border with the powerful Americans, Macdonald pushed the construction — and financing — of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Dutil hypes up the policy crises faced by Macdonald throughout 1885, labelling them as “apocalyptic” threats to Canada. Many chapters have ominous titles: “The Red Horse of Discord,” “The Black Horse of Famine and the Indigenous Peoples on the Prairies,” “The Pale Horse of Smallpox,” and “The Month of Traitors.” Dutil insists that “1885 was easily the most difficult year of Macdonald’s long political career and the most consequential in the history of the young country he led. Both the prime minister and his nation would survive and both are, to a great extent, defined by that fateful year.”

In fact, most of the issues were annoying but manageable. Once again, access to fisheries became a flash point for tensions with the Americans. Once again, both nations temporized, making do with another short-term patch that failed to address the fundamental question of reciprocity in cross-border trade. In another perennial crisis, the Canadian Pacific Railway needed more capital, which Macdonald helped broker with government guarantees for another bank loan. The British government wanted military help for an empire-building adventure in Sudan, but Macdonald offered only some volunteers.

Only one file posed any serious trouble: Louis Riel, a charismatic but increasingly delusional agitator, had returned from American exile to galvanize discontents among the Métis and some First Nations near the South Saskatchewan River. Distrusting one another, these groups had clashing priorities: the Métis sought larger land grants, while First Nations wanted to keep their homelands and freedom of movement. Claiming to have become a divinely inspired prophet, Riel dazzled many but troubled many more — including most Catholic priests and bishops.

In March 1885, Riel declared an independent republic, organized a few hundred men as a militia, seized the settlement of Batoche, Saskatchewan, and cut telegraph lines. Clashing with the North-West Mounted Police, his men suffered five dead while killing a dozen government men. In an even more provocative move, Riel rallied some Cree men to attack the new settlements. Macdonald organized a counterattack led by a veteran British officer, Major General Frederick Middleton. In May, Middleton routed Riel, who surrendered. While tragic for the families of the eighty victims of the brief war, the North-West Resistance hardly rises to any apocalyptic threshold as a military conflict. It pales, for example, when compared with the civil wars that tore apart Mexico and the United States during the 1860s, killing hundreds of thousands in both cases.

The real trouble for Macdonald came after Riel surrendered and faced trial. To save his life, Riel’s lawyers tried to argue that he was insane, but neither their client nor Macdonald would cooperate. Eager for his day in court, Riel insisted on the rationality of his mind and cause. Determined to hang Riel, Macdonald manipulated ambiguous reports from three doctors to assert the forty-one-year-old’s competence to stand trial. The episode was Macdonald at his worst: all too clever in the short term, with inadequate attention to the larger consequences. The citizens of Quebec and Ontario had joined in suppressing the rebellion, but they were divided over the rebel’s fate. Irritated by Riel’s challenge to his authority, Macdonald sided with the Ontario hard-liners who demanded his death.

Convicted of treason and denied clemency, Riel died on the gallows on November 16. The rush to deadly judgment appalled many Québécois, who came to empathize with the Métis as fellow francophones and Catholics subjected to repression. Riel became a martyr destroyed by anglophone persecution. Despite the firestorm of criticism, Macdonald withstood the furor, securing a majority in Quebec — and in the whole nation — during the general election of 1887. But in the much longer term, Macdonald has lost to Riel in the court of public opinion, particularly in Quebec.

Dutil’s characterization of 1885 as an apocalyptic, existential crisis is overstated. Indeed, that framing for the book distracts from his real purpose: to vindicate Macdonald against “smear campaigns” by modern critics. Wary of judging past leaders by modern moral standards, the author insists that Macdonald “was a man of his time, and yet far more progressive than the vast majority of his fellow citizens.” Instead of creating and fomenting racism and male supremacy, Macdonald tempered the worst excesses of others.

For example, Macdonald promoted legislation in 1885 to broaden the electorate, primarily by loosening the property requirement to vote. The prime minister even wanted to extend political rights to some First Nations and many women. Most members of Parliament bristled at — and blocked — female suffrage. Ever the pragmatist, Macdonald retreated to save his primary goal: gaining the vote for more white men. In search of support, he also mollified British Columbia’s delegation by accepting the province’s ban on citizenship for Chinese immigrants. The legislation passed in a form that reflected “a democratic, if racist, reality.” The new law increased the male electorate by 43 percent, and Macdonald celebrated: “I consider the passage of the Franchise Bill the greatest triumph of my life.” Dutil applauds Macdonald for trying to improve the low standards of his peers: “Alone among Western governments, he had done what was possible to educate public opinion. . . . In sum, the prime minister did his best, in a hostile environment, to be as fair as possible to Chinese migrants.” But no principle could tempt him to forsake his political power.

Above all, modern critics charge and convict Macdonald of destroying traditional cultures while inflicting genocide through mass starvation. The critique makes Macdonald uniquely responsible for dispossessing, marginalizing, and shattering many Indigenous communities. In response, Dutil shows that Macdonald was but a small part of a massive westward movement by thousands of settlers, who built Canada while devastating existing communities.

During the 1870s, settlers and professional hunters decimated the great bison herds of the plains, depriving Indigenous people of a prime resource for sustenance and trade. Thousands faced starvation. Macdonald wanted to save their lives, assuring Parliament, “I stated that as Christian men we could not afford to let these people starve.” But he also confronted a persistent budget deficit and a public loath to provide free relief to anyone. Canada’s ramshackle federal government struggled to get food to the starving many, most of them scattered over thousands of square kilometres without roads. Dutil concedes that the Macdonald cabinet botched the delivery of food relief to the Cree and Assiniboine led by Payipwat, in particular. The operation “was poorly planned and badly executed” and “stands as one of the darkest pages in Canada’s history.”

While favouring short-term food relief, Macdonald insisted that, ultimately, Indigenous people had to save themselves by becoming farmers. He asserted that the government had a dual responsibility: to keep them from malnourishment but also to make them work. “It was the duty of the Government to see that the Indians were not allowed to fatten in idleness,” he told Parliament. The sudden transition to a sedentary way of life was daunting for any people on the northern Great Plains, where the growing season rarely lasted for three months. Adopting farming was hardest and cruellest for those who had lived well on that land for centuries by hunting and gathering. When First Nations faltered in the forced transition, Canadians (like Americans) blamed the victims. Many were keen to take Indigenous territory, but almost no Canadians respected their culture and autonomy.

To accelerate assimilation, Macdonald’s government promoted the now infamous residential schools. Considering Indigenous adults to be irredeemable “savages,” the schools took away their children for indoctrination in “civilization,” alienating them from ancestral ways and kinship connections. In “central training industrial schools” they would “acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men,” Macdonald declared. His government also confined members of western nations to their reserves, unless granted a pass to travel by a federal official. To hasten the cultural destruction, Macdonald’s administration banned many spiritual ceremonies. Dutil concedes that such policies were arrogant and badly implemented. By disrupting families and communities, the residential schools became “a shameful chapter.” But the author dwells on Macdonald’s “good intentions” (however misguided) as the bottom line for assessing him. Readers will have to decide whether goodwill suffices to absolve bad and inept deeds.

Mounting a broad and eclectic defence of Macdonald’s Indigenous policies, Dutil rejects the most lurid accusation: that his government practised genocide by withholding food relief to starving First Nations. Dutil also reiterates that the Americans were much worse, routinely massacring Indigenous people while encouraging squatters to steal their lands. The United States confined most American Indians to reservations even grimmer than those of Canada. Indeed, many voted with their feet, fleeing northward to the relative security of Canada. Dutil also depicts Macdonald as morally superior to his Liberal opponents, who regarded any expenditure to help Indigenous people as a waste of taxpayers’ money. Liberal leaders thought it best to encourage them to die off. Although Macdonald disdained Indigenous cultures, he considered First Nations capable of becoming “civilized”— a favourite term of nineteenth-century Canadians and Americans. Macdonald’s most intemperate words about “savages” came in the heat of parliamentary debate with Liberals who said even worse.

At its best, Sir John A. Macdonald & the Apocalyptic Year 1885 transcends our modern, simple-minded insistence on sorting leaders into heroes and villains. In general, Dutil illuminates Macdonald as living fully within a complex era that deserves historical explanation rather than a priori dismissal on moral grounds. He helped build a Canada that benefited thousands of settlers and immigrants — but did so at a harsh cost to Indigenous communities. Macdonald was much more interesting and important than any hero or villain. Dutil includes a trenchant epigraph from the American journalist I. F. Stone: “History is a tragedy, not a morality tale.” But his relentless defence of Macdonald sometimes slips into a morality tale framed by the prime minister’s modern critics. That slippage loses sight of the tragedy in Macdonald’s life. For all his political genius and humane goals, Macdonald could succumb to his own demons, including an excessive fondness for playing political games and a glib tongue that, at his worst, slid into racist stereotypes. As a result, Macdonald won his elections but, in this century, is losing his reputation.

At times, Dutil strains to explain away any criticism of Macdonald. Yes, he concedes, hundreds of First Nations people died of hunger — but not the larger numbers that would signal a true genocide. Indeed, on a national scale, the Indigenous population grew modestly during the 1880s. Dutil suggests that we should not blame Macdonald for those who died of disease in grim circumstances: “They lived in poverty, were underfed and poorly housed. For most of the inhabitants of Canada, this was normal: again, this is tragic, but not unexpected.” Dutil also points to the many white children who died in eastern factories and to the immigrants who succumbed from dangerous work on the railways. Dutil miscalculates with this move, for two other wrongs make no right. Most readers will feel no better about Indigenous losses from learning about other atrocities in nineteenth-century Canada.

By throwing up a few too many strained defences, Dutil obscures his best case: for Macdonald’s genius as a leader who cherished and defended Canada. No one was better at managing and soothing the clashing ambitions and resentments of anglophones and francophones. Macdonald helped Canada avoid the pogroms, civil wars, and secessions that afflict many other nations with stark ethnic and religious divides. Consistent in his respect for French Canadians, Macdonald protected their constitutional rights against an often strident majority of English-speakers. While masterful at building electoral majorities, leading Parliaments, and distributing patronage, Macdonald cherished open debate and respected the legislative rights of the minority. He believed in parliamentary democracy as much as he celebrated Queen Victoria. In public, he projected a sunny optimism about Canada’s future that helped to make it all so for millions of people.

I have come to a greater appreciation for Macdonald as I watch my own country devolve into authoritarianism, intolerance, and stupidity. It’s no longer so clear that Macdonald loses if judged by contemporary moral standards — if we mean the standards now practised at the top of the United States. Gaining by contrast, he seems fundamentally honourable and decent — despite his flaws. As I watch the American news, I would rather raise a statue to Sir John A. Macdonald. But I will settle for a toast, which he would have appreciated more.