Inaugural SJAM Dinner - Remarks by Brian Lee Crowley

Standing on the shoulders of giants:

Speaking notes for Brian Lee Crowley’s talk to

The Inaugural Sir John A. Macdonald Dinner

Ottawa, 21^st November 2019

The esteemed organiser of tonight’s event, Bob Plamondon, has kindly asked me to say a word in celebration of the contribution of Sir John A. Macdonald to Canada’s ascent from what Voltaire so dismissively called quelques arpents de neige--a few acres of snow--to what is, by almost any measure, one of the leading countries of the world.

Those who think that Sir John’s only legacy to Canada is a few contested statues around the country and a poor likeness on the 10-dollar bill do not understand that the very warp and weft of this country are made up of threads drawn from this man’s strategic and tactical genius. Out of the unpromising materials of thinly-populated and mutually antagonistic British colonies unloved by London and coveted by Washington, riven by racial and linguistic disputes, he distilled the ideas, politics and institutions that today place us at the forefront of the nations of the world. We are his legacy and he lives on in us.

In his magisterial history of Canada, Conrad Black does not exaggerate when he asserts that, had Canada not been so small at the outset, Macdonald’s feat would have undoubtedly won him the acclaim history accords to the other great statesmen of the 19^th century: Lincoln, Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone, Salisbury, Cavour and Bismarck. There is still time for history to be revised, and not to erase Sir John but to elevate him to the esteemed position that is his due. Much as he admired the United States and its founders’ vision (he carried his copy of the Federalist Papers with him to the conferences that led to Confederation) he saw the weaknesses of their creation, not least in the sanguinary civil war that had just wracked their great republic. Chief among those defects was a constitution that gave too much power to the states and too little to the federal government with the result that the centre could not hold, or would not have without the leadership of Abraham Lincoln in the face of southern secession.

To make a nation out of British North Americans, therefore, he knew that he had to create for them the instruments of nationhood and not merely project into the future the local and parochial interests of the individual colonies. Accordingly he defended the idea of a powerful national government and parliament that would represent and unite all Canadians and be the instrument of the construction of a national consciousness, national pride and national action. He had to compromise and accept the creation of provinces independent of Ottawa, but if you read the actual text of the British North America Act he clearly won his point and Ottawa was intended to be by far the more powerful agent of Canadians’ political will.

Many forces have watered down Sir John’s wine but even in that insipid tipple you can still detect the full-bodied flavour that fuelled this man and his vision--to employ a metaphor the great man himself would have enjoyed.

And those politicians who have known how to tap into Canadians’ desire to rise above petty regional squabbles and articulate what Canada could be if it transcended parochialism have often found themselves richly rewarded. That is one of Macdonald’s lurking legacies.

But there was more. He didn’t just want a nation. He wanted a nation that would preserve and promote a way of life that he believed had proven its superiority over all others. That meant embracing a society of freedom. Peace, Order and Good Government are not boring and uninspiring; they are the wellspring of progress. The constitution “similar in principle to that of the United Kingdom” promised by the BNA Act was one based on the freedom of the individual, limited government, an independent judiciary, the rule of law and a powerful civil society, a society that Sir John knew reached all the way back to the Magna Carta and beyond in an unbroken chain of custody which he, and we, have inherited. Those who think the Charter somehow introduced rights into Canada fail to grasp how deeply infused our founding institutions were with those values, thanks in large part to Macdonald.

It is perhaps inevitable that the passage of time dims the appreciation of even the most prodigious feats and it is therefore fitting that we should turn, for a moment, to Sir John’s contemporaries for a just appreciation of the scale of the triumph which was Confederation, achieved under his leadership. He was the embodiment of the proposition that Canada is much more than mere partisan contention over petty issues. His party was aptly named the LiberalConservative Party, and in pursuit of his vision of a pan-colonial nation in British North America he brought into his coalition French-speakers and English-speakers (including his indispensable partner, Sir Georges-Etienne Cartier), Protestants and Catholics, recent arrivals and Canadiens de vieille souche. Perhaps most impressively, he brought in George Brown, one of the towering founding figures of the Reform and later Liberal Parties. And having brought this finest flowering of the diverse colonies together he alternately whipped and cajoled, urged and pleaded, bullied and conciliated until they delivered the new nation.

Speaking of our history makes me think that there might be reason to dwell for a moment on those who seek not to celebrate Sir John but to expunge his name from schools and monuments. Those seized of this idea see our history as a caricature filled solely with racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism, militarism, genocide and environmental destruction. These are never weighed, however, against our impressive record of constitutional evolution, our incredible feats of nation-building infrastructure and institutions, our reconciliation of contending cultures, languages and religions and our tradition of sacrifice to preserve the values that we thought most important.

It is easy to criticize the past and the decisions made there. But it is a conceit of each and every generation that it alone is free from poor judgments, intellectual shortcomings and historical myopia. Rare is the succeeding generation that agrees.

Looking solely at our past errors is not the right standard by which to measure Canada or Sir John A. and their great achievements. Remember, poverty, squalor, filth, disease and intolerance have been humanity’s lot since the beginning; taken together they are not the exception but the default condition of human beings. Only a handful of societies have figured out, slowly and painfully, the institutions and behaviours that allow people to escape these ills.

Canada is at the forefront of those nations and it is thanks to our history of successful struggle against the worst human afflictions that our critics can look back in horror at how things used to be. It is the progress made possible by the economic, social and, yes, moral advances of our forebears that has allowed us to enjoy peace, order and good government in generous measure.

Confederation itself was no exercise in crude majoritarian triumphalism, but an exquisitely wrought compromise between contending cultures, languages and religions that has made us one of the longest-enduring political orders on the planet. We have constantly expanded our notion of rights in response to genuine wrongs and real grievances. Canadian blood and treasure were expended in righteous struggles such as the Second World War and Korea because when the world called, we were not found wanting. As we have become wealthier we have worked to improve our environment, our education and our social supports.

This generation is the one called upon to right the many wrongs done to Indigenous peoples in our history. In this regard, I am inordinately proud that my institute is best known for its work on how Indigenous people, industry and governments can work collaboratively to break down the obstacles to full Aboriginal participation in the modern economy. In so doing we are not running counter to our namesakes’ inheritance, but rather modernizing it in accordance with the evolution of Canadians’ thinking.

Like the American Founding Fathers, Sir John A. and our other founders were inspired by a vision of human freedom and flourishing, but being imperfect human beings their prejudices prevented them from understanding the potential of every human being to benefit from the rights and freedoms they so rightly extolled. The subsequent history of both countries has been shaped in part by the struggle to enlarge the circle of those rights and freedoms to all: women, oppressed minorities, Indigenous people and others. Americans fought a civil war, not to repudiate their founding, but to extend its benefits to those wrongly excluded.

Every time we expanded the franchise, enlarged the circle of immigration, enhanced minority rights and, most recently, sought reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians, we have done so using language, concepts and aspirations that informed Confederation. That is why the argument of those previously excluded had such moral force: They appealed to concepts such as rights and equality that have long been part of our heritage but were imperfectly understood and applied. A balanced view of our past acknowledges the imperfections of what was done but also the soundness of the vision that inspired it and the effort made to fix our errors. We cannot change the past, but it does not require us to despise our past to say that our job is to ensure past mistakes shall not be tolerated on our watch.

True patriots love Canada because it has made us (including those who have come to join us from other countries) who we are; and who we are, for all our flaws, is a standard to which much of the rest of the world rightly aspires. Sir John A. was neither angel nor devil, but a fallible human being who accomplished great things. He is owed our thoughtful, measured thanks.

Having defended Sir John and his historical achievements from his detractors, let me return for one final moment to that past to remark that even those who grew to oppose him politically-- as politics moved on from the relative unity of the founding to the everyday contention that is the stuff of politics--knew that without Sir John, the country whose future they so energetically debated would not have existed and their debt to him transcended all partisanship.^[1] It is thus fitting that the definitive word this evening on Sir John’s legacy should come to us from Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s eulogy delivered in the House of Commons:

For my part, I say with all truth his loss overwhelms me, and it also overwhelms this Parliament, as if one of the institutions of the land had given way. Sir John Macdonald now belongs to the ages, and it can be said with certainty that the career which has just closed is one of the most remarkable of this century.^[2]

And he continued…“It would be premature at this time to attempt to anticipate what will be the final judgment of history upon him, but there were in his career and in his life features so prominent that already they shine with a glow which time cannot alter. It can be asserted that, in the supreme art of governing men, Sir John Macdonald was gifted as few men in any land or in any age were gifted... The fact that during all those years he retained unimpaired not only the confidence, but the ardent devotion and affection of his party, is evidence that, besides those higher qualities of statesmanship to which we were the daily witness, he was also endowed with those inner, subtle, undefinable graces of soul which win and keep the hearts of men.

As to his statesmanship, it is written in the history of Canada. It may be said without any exaggeration that the life of Sir John Macdonald, from the date he entered Parliament, is the history of Canada.”