Was Sir John A. our Best PM?
by Richard Gwyn
Of all of our 28 Prime Ministers since Confederation, we really remember just two: John
A. Macdonald and Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
This doesn’t mean that all the others (actually fewer than 28 in all because several
served twice) are forgotten.
Wilfrid Laurier will always be admired for his elegance and eloquence. Mackenzie King
always gets a high rating for leading Canada through the transition from an agricultural
society to an urbanized, industrial one and for creating a modern civil service.
Lester Pearson will never be forgotten for his achievements in peace-keeping and with
the Maple Leaf flag, and, far from least, for having won the Nobel Peace Prize. Even if
John Diefenbaker disappointed, a memory endures that he stirred up a somnolent
country and dared to challenge it with a Northern Vision.
Macdonald and Trudeau, though, stand apart from the rest. Both in a certain sense are
still alive. Both still stir emotions, and of all kinds-- of admiration and of anger, of love
and hate, of respect and of condemnation. We are interested in both, and feel strongly
about both.
Each is that Canadian rarity, a hero; each is also to quite a few Canadians, a villain—
Macdonald for executing Louis Riel, Trudeau for imposing the War Measures Act.
About Trudeau, the finest insight about him was that observation by the authors
Christina McCall and Stephen Clarkson that, “He haunts us still”.
Of Macdonald, it could be said: “He taunts us still”. Every good portrait of him captures
the amused, sardonic look with which he gazes outwards while calculating how to
manipulate and seduce anyone watching into becoming a Conservative.
There are parallels between their careers. Both lost just one election and then was
returned to office at the first available opportunity by an electorate relieved to get their
hero/villain back.
Neither could be fitted into the formula of a typical Canadian. With Trudeau, this was
more obvious: he always seemed as if he would be happier talking to some
incomprehensible European intellectual, or to a silent Buddhist monk, than to any actual
Canadian.
Macdonald broke an even more important Canadian rule. He had no interest in
pretending to be respectable and proper. He not only drank but he did this openly and
entirely unapologetically, once putting down a heckler by saying-- quite correctly-- that voters preferred, “John A. drunk to George Brown sober”.
There were parallels in their policies. The purpose of each was to build Canada. For
Trudeau, this meant patriation of the constitution and the Charter of Rights and
Freedoms, and bilingualism, and multiculturalism.

For Macdonald this meant Confederation itself, and afterwards the National Policy of
high tariffs to foster manufacturing here, and creating the NorthWest Mounted Police,
(today, the RCMP), and, above all, by fulfilling his impossible dream of a transcontinental railway. Besides building Canada, both were determined to save it. Trudeau’s life-long mission was to ensure that Quebec did not leave Canada.
Macdonald’s equivalent was to make certain that Americans did not take over Canada,
nor-- an equal threat as he saw it-- that Canadians did not slip southwards by reaching for cross-border free trade before Confederation had, in his phrase, “hardened from gristle into bone”.

Of the pair, time has actually been kinder to Macdonald than to Trudeau. Both were
widely loved in their day and the funerals of both were occasions for national mourning.

Trudeau, though, remains a controversial figure in contemporary terms while Macdonald
stirs kindlier thoughts and a readiness now to revel in his humour and his humanity
(academic historians do tend to be censorious about him).

Macdonald’s birthday—the evidence is unclear whether it actually was on January 10th
or 11th—will be celebrated this week in places as far apart as his home-town of Kingston and Vancouver. After writing this piece I will go down to Hamilton to talk to a group now staging its third annual event, while a fellow biographer, Charlotte Gray, will be doing thesame in Orillia.

Elsewhere, quite a few individuals across the country will, on the 10th or the 11th, raise a glass to Macdonald. More of us ought to do the same for Trudeau; except, of course, he drank very little.

Richard Gwyn is the author of the new, prize-winning, biography: John A; The Man Who
Made Us, of which he is now working on the second volume. Among his earlier works
was a biography of Trudeau, The Northern Magus.