Had There Been No Macdonald

Had there been no Macdonald, it’s all but certain there would not be a single Canadian reading this article or others like it, never mind raising a celebratory toast to him on the 200th anniversary of his birth on Jan. 10 or 11 (the records of his father and of the local Register Office in Glasgow, where he was born, differ). That’s because had there been no Macdonald, there would have been no Canada for anyone to be a citizen of. Under Macdonald’s leadership as prime minister (1867-1873 and 1878-1891), the country was extended from sea to sea, giving at last a certain geographical coherence. Macdonald also led Canada to achieve the National Dream, a railway the entire way from eastern Canada to the West Coast. The railway, together with Macdonald’s
He paid a price for being such a good politician. Our academic historians have commonly written him off as merely a clever and cynical operator with no idea except the importance of gaining power and holding on to it for as long as possible. The experts have been dead wrong. Consider that Macdonald was the first national democratic leader in the world to try to extend the vote to women, introducing such legislation in the Commons in 1885. He got nowhere, but he described the future exactly, warning MPs it was “certain” that the female would “completely establish her equality as a human being and as a member of society with man.” That’s a description of the gender equality we’ve at last achieved, more or less. His argument for how English-Canadians had to accept the distinctiveness of French-Canadians despite the fact that they were a minority would not be matched by any English-Canadian politician for a century. It was: “Treat them as a nation and they will respond as free people usually do, generously. Treat them as a faction and they will be factious.” It took until 2006 for us to recognize Quebec as a