Sir John A.

Sir John Alexander Macdonald was a rascal and a drunk, and he took bribes. Yet he remains our greatest national hero, because, notwithstanding his flaws, he believed, he endured, and he accomplished.

Sir John connived, cajoled and charmed four small, weak, quarreling colonies to form a new nation. From the outset he imagined a great country from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic, the second largest geography on the planet. With two distinct founding nations and multicultural (Sir John himself spoke Gaelic), it was above all to be distinct from the powerful and boisterous republic to the south.

He reached out to draw in British Columbia, a Pacific colony nearly twelve hundred empty miles away. Keeping his promise to East and to West, he threw a railway across a wild continent of muskeg and mountain. It was, in those times, a financial and technical feat roughly equivalent to a manned expedition to Mars. To do so, he sold his soul to the devil of dark finance. But the railway was built.

He stared down a popular secessionist movement in Nova Scotia and later brought its leader into government. With Sir Georges-Etienne Cartier he created and normalized the English-French partnership which defines us. He largely crafted the British North America Act, creating a mostly federal system with a significantly different tilt from that of the United States. The model has served us well, mostly.

Typical of Sir John, he created a federation as centralized as he could, but called it “confederation” to appease those who (correctly) feared that their colonies were losing their powers to the centre. Using the language of “confederation” was courageous and risky– it was just a year after our powerful southern neighbour had concluded a savage, soul-searing civil war with the Confederate States of America.

He led a lonely and dysfunctional family life and drank heavily. He was often drunk in Parliament. But in the matter of his singular passion, he burned with a pure and focused light. This is what we call integrity.

As his life was coming to an end he wrote, “My sins of omission and commission I do not deny; but I trust that it may be said of me in the ultimate issue, ‘Much is forgiven because he loved much,’ for I have loved my country with a passionate love.”

True leaders are made of this.

Happy Canada Day!

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