MACDONALD, HIS LEGACY AND MY TIME CAPSULE
Arthur Milnes and his wife, Alison, embarked upon a special project to mark Canada’s sesquicentennial year: A time capsule. But rather than filling it with things from around their home in Kingston, the pair have reached out far and wide to people, places and institutions with any connection to this country. The responses, whether from small towns or celebrities, have been overwhelming. This is the latest in a series of columns on his Canada 150 time capsule by Arthur Milnes.
• I remember the day on which my lifelong interest in Sir John A. Macdonald began.
It was 1988 and I was in a student apartment on Colborne Street, Kingston, which I shared with my lifelong friend from Scarborough, Tom Harrison.
Tom was out and for some reason I began flipping through the pages of Donald Creighton’s twovolume biography of Macdonald that my dad had “lent” me before I headed off to university.
I soon arrived at the part where Creighton described Sir John’s final speech to the Commons before his government fell — rightfully — due to the Pacific Scandal in 1873.
“I leave it with this House with every confidence,” he said. “I am equal to either fortune. I can see past the decision of this House either for or against me, but whether it be against me or for me, I know, and it is no vain boast to say so … that there does not exist in Canada a man who has given more of his time, more of his heart, more of his wealth, or more of his intellect and power, as it may be, for the good of this Dominion of Canada.” I read on. By that evening I had learned that only five years later Macdonald was back in power. And by the time he died he had united Canada by a band of steel that bound Atlantic to Pacific. I was hooked. Around the same time I also read Wilfrid Laurier’s tribute to his fallen foe, Macdonald of Kingston.
“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,” Laurier said. “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.”
In recent years I have been saddened as Macdonald has been taken out of the context of his times by some and his reputation besmirched. I believe this retroactive application of today’s beliefs on him and many other historical figures is just plain wrong.
However, I also, thanks to Macdonald’s BNA Act, believe in the fundamental right of anyone to disagree with me. And as long as they do it peacefully and without violence, folks, again thanks to the BNA Act, are welcome to protest Macdonald and me today.
This thing called Canada, in fact, is advanced citizenship. I will always celebrate that. And I was pleased, but not surprised, to note that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — using words that could have been spoken by my old boss, Stephen J. Harper, or any of the prime ministers, Liberal or Conservative, who followed Sir John — invoked Macdonald in Trudeau’s address on Confederation 150 day this summer.
“In 1867,” Trudeau thundered from Sir John A.’s Parliament Hill, “the vision of Sir GeorgeEtienne Cartier and Sir John A. Macdonald, among others, gave rise to Confederation — an early union, and one of the moments that have come to define Canada.”
Prime Minister Trudeau then went on to invoke the building of the CPR as an example, then and now, of Canadian nation-building and this nation’s greatness before each other and the entire world.
Justin Trudeau’s words about our greatest prime minister — John A. Macdonald of Kingston ( joined by Laurier in the truly great PM sweepstakes) — were also proudly placed in my Time Capsule.