The first task of Scottish emigrants to the New World
was to acquire a home and means of livelihood. As soon as it was
accomplished, many of them, accustomed to years of struggle for economic
and political freedom in their own land, began to turn their attention
to public affairs.1 Politically articulate Scots made their
appearance in the British colonies which are today Canada towards the
end of the eighteenth century. In 1789, James Glenie, a brilliant St.
Andrew's graduate recently turned lumberman in New Brunswick, was
elected to the Colonial Assembly. There he rapidly came to the front by
his fearless attacks on what he called the "Governor's pitiful Junto"
for their system of land granting, their policy in military matters,
their favouritism toward the Anglican Church, and their obstruction of
measures passed by the Assembly. He lost support, however, when he went
so far as to attempt a vote of censure of the governor, and the popular
movement which he had begun collapsed for want of a leader when he left
New Brunswick. Glenie was far from being the "violent Democrat and
Jacobin" that the government had labelled him. He and his supporters had
been motivated less by principle than by envy of the power and patronage
of office. Yet they had made some claims concerning the constitutional
rights of an assembly which were forerunners of the Reformers' claims of
the next century.2
In the politics of Quebec in the same period, a Scot
from Edinburgh, Dr. Adam Mabane, was prominent on the side opposing
reform. After arriving in 1760 in the lowly position of surgeon's mate
in the army, he had risen steadily in his profession, and in 1764
Governor James Murray had made him a councillor and a judge in the Court
of Common Pleas. "Possessing marked ability, a strong character, and a
warm Scottish heart," Mabane was one of the individuals with the most
weight in the administration from these first civil appointments until
his death in 1792.3 With his natural
sympathy for the French Canadians, and his suspicion of the British
merchants in Montreal and Quebec whom he regarded as republican
innovators, he was the favoured adviser not only of Murray but also
eventually of the next governor, Guy
Carleton, and of his successor, Frederick Haldimand, who both believed
in conciliating the French. Mabane left a dual imprint on Canadian
politics. He was a reactionary who opposed immigration into Quebec and
supported the old system, including seigneurialism. His warnings of the
dangers in American democracy and of the need for resistance to
political change were echoed in later Toryism. At the same time, as the
chief builder of the "French party," Mabane expressed the vague hopes of
French-Canadian nationalism which were given substance by the
French-speaking reformers in the Assembly after 1791. Thus "the two
parties to the constitutional struggle of the nineteenth century shared
the political heritage of this half-forgotten leader. "4
It was clear even in the late eighteenth century that
the Scots' experience with the English at home would affect their
thinking on what should be done about practical questions arising in
Canada. When Chief Justice William Smith ruled in 1786 that under the
Quebec Act no British-born subject had lost his right to English law, he
implied that all those born in Quebec since 1763 came under English law.
Not only the French Canadians were horrified, but also Scottish
officials such as Mabane in Quebec. To him, used to Scottish law, it was
completely illogical to assert that British subjects must have English
laws.
Similarly the career of Adam Lymburner, a Kilmarnock
Scot who had become one of the wealthy Quebec merchants so much disliked
by Mabane, exemplified the influence of the Scottish political
background. When amendment of the Quebec Act was being considered
following the Loyalist influx into the interior west of Montreal,
Lymburner went twice to England as the trusted delegate of the British
mercantile minority and the few French Canadians who favoured
constitutional revision. In 1788 he urged on the British government the
granting of an assembly in which representation would be apportioned "parmi
les anciens et les nouveaux sujets."5
In 1791 he pleaded with the British government not to divide Quebec into
two separate provinces. As a merchant he foresaw that the division would
create problems in the commerce of the St. Lawrence valley and disputes
"très dangereuses à
la tranquillité et sécurité."
As a Scot he maintained that the difference in religion and civil law
between the two parts of the province was not a reason for division.
Such a difference was not "de grande consequence," he argued, using the
analogy of his native land: the laws of Scotland were not those of
England but were "presque les memes comme ceux de France."6
But these Scots in the early period of Canada's
history, political-minded though they had been, were actually just
leaders of groups or local factions. The words "politician" and "party"
can be applied only loosely until after 1815 when the colonies first had
conditions favouring the emergence of political parties in the modern
sense: rapidly enlarging populations, maturing societies and economies,
and particularly expanding communications which, made possible the
spread of political ideas and the discussion of political problems. This
chapter on the Scot as political!.
which must be highly selective because of its length,
will concentrate on the nineteenth century, the time when the bases of
the important Canadian political traditions were laid and also when
persons of Scottish origin were more readily distinguishable than they
are in the twentieth century. And the emphasis will be on the Scots who
were in the political arena as elected members in the lower houses and
on the issues which engaged them. The many Scottish governors and
members of upper houses would constitute a chapter in themselves.
I
As men began to align with Tory and Reform parties,
or their successors, the Conservatives and Liberals, Scots ranged
themselves, with all the vigour and intensity of their nature, on both
sides. Glengarry County in eastern Ontario is a predominantly Scottish
area which illustrates this political cleavage. From the days of the
original settlement by Scots Loyalists and the later immigration of a
disbanded Highland regiment under its chaplain, Alexander Macdonell, the
county was Conservative. Macdonell, as well as becoming the first Roman
Catholic Bishop of Upper Canada, was a Legislative Councillor who stood
resolutely against the Reformers to the point of co-operating with the
Orangemen. It is not surprising, then, that the Glengarrian community of
Maxville reminisces about staunch Conservatives like James Burton who
"fought many strenuous battles. .. against those terrible Grits." But
Maxville also remembers unswerving Liberals such as Malcolm J. Fisher
who believed in "the political infallibility of Gladstone, Blake and
Mowat," and James Ferguson who was "too generous to decry the
Conservatives the right to enter within the pearly gates" but felt that
"any of that ilk who gained such a favour would be located in the north
east corner of Heaven - the most forbidding location."7
Since the Scots took their politics with such
earnestness and such elan, some of the most entertaining, if disorderly,
election contests occurred when the opposing political parties nominated
Scottish candidates. In 1841 the Canada Company brought the prestigious
James McGill Strachan into Huron County to oust the individualistic Dr.
William "Tiger" Dunlop, a descendant of Robert the Bruce. The "Tiger,"
as a Canada Company officer, had promoted the settlement of that western
part of the Company's tract in Upper Canada, but had become increasingly
critical of the Company's policies. The story of the Huron election is a
medley of bonneted Highlanders, marching children, blocked roads,
military aid rushed from London to quell the threatening battle, a
partisan returning officer, and finally investigation by a select
committee which declared Dunlop the victor according to the "legal"
votes.8
While it is easy to see the political
enthusiasm of the Scots, it is more
difficult to identify the factors which determined their party
allegiance. Many nineteenth century emigrants left the
British Isles with liberal political ideas formed by events there, but
they did not necessarily stay of the same mind in the different
environment of America. For many Scots, as for English and Irish,
migration had a conservatizing effect. Patrick Shirreff reported after
his tour of North America that "a feeling of toryism pervaded most
people in the Canadas" with whom he had come in contact; he believed
that men usually changed from being Whigs "after sharing the pickings of
Tory governments."9 Adam
Fergusson also, on his visit to Upper Canada, was assured by the
solicitor-general that "however turbulent or discontented individuals
may have been prior to their arrival in the province, comfort and plenty
soon work wonders."10 In each colony there were Scots who
grew more conservative as they attained prosperity or office. In Nova
Scotia, Alexander Stewart, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister
and himself a proficient lawyer, led a popular attack on the governing
clique in the 1820s while he was the member for Cumberland; then, after
being appointed an Executive Councillor, he turned to a defence of the
Tory system with its checks against too much democracy. And earlier, in
the young colonies of the late eighteenth century and the first years of
the nineteenth century, Scots had had little reason to be political
reformers since they practically controlled the governments: for
example, John Fraser, William Grant, Hugh Finlay, James McGill, John
Richardson, John Young, James Stuart, in the councils of Lower Canada;
and John Munro, Robert Hamilton, Alexander Grant, John McGill, Thomas
Scott, William Dickson, James Crooks in those of Upper Canada. In fact,
in the latter province around the turn of the century, Scots so
predominated in the government that it was called "the Scotch faction"
or "the clan."11
Nevertheless, as the 1820s and 1830s wore on,
numerous Scots manifested varying degrees of reformism and radicalism.
They found inspiration in Jacksonian democracy to the south and the
liberal movements in Britain and Europe. But most of all their own
independent spirit reacted against the privileged oligarchies which were
entrenched in British North America, controlling the government, the
church and the economy, and overruling the wishes of the people
represented in the assemblies. Scots who settled at a distance from the
colonial capitals tended to develop a deeper feeling of separateness and
of dissatisfaction with government policies. Although geographical and
economic groups were never homogeneous politically, the division between
the hinterland and the metropolis, between the farmer or fisherman and
the urban classes, was reflected in the opposition of the Scots in Cape
Breton to the Council of Twelve at Halifax, and of those in the western
peninsula of Upper Canada to the Family Compact at Toronto.
Religion was also a strong determinant of party
orientations. The Scot in nineteenth century Canada was affected both by
the religious disputes of his native country and by the religio-political
controversies on this side of the ocean. Here the Church of Scotland and
the Church of England were very similar in their conservatism and social
respectability, their urban character and their belief in a strong tie
between church and state. Generally the Scots who belonged to either of
these churches were Tories, whereas the Reform supporters came from the
Dissenting churches with their special grievances such as the clergy
reserves in Upper Canada or the government's refusal of an endowment to
Pictou Academy in Nova Scotia. The Academy was a Presbyterian
institution for higher learning founded in 1816 by the scholarly Thomas
McCulloch, a Secession Church minister and educationalist from
Renfrewshire. The Provincial Assembly's continuing inability to get its
bill for a permanent grant passed in the Council pointed up the faults
in the system of government and gave rise to a reform movement led by
the Pictou Secessionists. Their organ for open criticism of the
government was the Colonial Patriot, a weekly begun in 1827 and
edited by Jotham Blanchard who had been a pupil of McCulloch. For the
Scots of the area who adhered to the Church of Scotland, however,
McCulloch's views were too radical. The Kirkmen sided with the Council
of Twelve and in 1831 launched another weekly, the Pictou Observer, as the mouthpiece of Scottish conservatism. So strong was the
politico-religious discord in Pictou that at one point the sheriff built
a fence ten feet high across the main street to keep the contenders
apart.12
The two Pictou weeklies demonstrate not only the
interconnection between the religious and the political convictions of
the Scots, but also the relation between politics and the founding of
newspapers, a sizable number of which were managed or edited by Scots.
Unlike the modern "independent" press, these papers took sides openly in
the political conflicts of the day. G.M. Grant has remarked that at that
time "it was almost impossible to be an editor without being a
politician."13 For a populace without
telephone, automobile, radio and television, newspapers were about the
only means of public information and were very influential. Indeed,
Joseph Howe, who began as a mild Tory and became the leading Maritime
Reformer, credited his conversion to the "Pictou Scribblers." 14
Family was another component in the partisanship of a
Scot. If he was born of a Liberal or a Conservative father in Canada, he
was likely to maintain the same party connection and hand it on to his
children. Some of the families became virtually
political dynasties. The well-educated John Young of Falkirk,
Scotland, settled in Nova Scotia in 1815 with his sons William and
George; they were all to be famous in the affairs of that province.
John, whose "Letters of Agricola" published in the Acadian Recorder
stimulated the improvement of agriculture, represented Sydney in the
Assembly for twelve years. George, a writer like his father, founded and
edited the weekly Novascotian in Halifax, and was one of the
first reporters of the proceedings of the Provincial Assembly. He and
his brother were associates with Howe in the Reform opposition which
worked successfully for a system whereby the government would depend for
tenure on its command of a majority in the elected House and would thus
be responsible to the people. William, a shrewd lawyer who would be
the distinguished Chief Justice of Nova Scotia for the
last twenty years of his life, was chosen Liberal leader in 1854 and
elected premier in 1859. Throughout the 1850s he was active in the
discussion of the topics vital to Nova Scotians: reciprocity with the
United States, the public school system, and integration of the
provinces by a maritime or larger union.
The Laird family had a similarly long relationship
with the politics of Prince Edward Island. The father, Alexander, a
Scottish farmer of high character who migrated from Renfrewshire in
1819, represented Queen's County for sixteen years. He was a Reform
colleague of George Coles, the head of the first "responsible" ministry
in the Island. Both of Laird's sons rose to be Liberal ministers too -
Alexander in the province and David at Ottawa. The latter, the founder
of the Charlottetown Patriot, spoke out against the Quebec scheme
for federal union in 1864 because it did not provide for settlement of
his province's perennial land problem or for communications with the
mainland. In 1873 he was a member of the delegation which, having
reached agreement on these matters with the Dominion government, brought
Prince Edward Island into Confederation. Taking his seat as a new member
in the House of Commons just at the time of the Pacific Scandal, "Dour
Davie," always "the keeper of an alert Presbyterian conscience,"15
proceeded to denounce the government
of John A. Macdonald for its lack of morality. His maiden speech
resulted in instant Cabinet rank as Minister of the Interior under
Alexander Mackenzie, and that was followed by appointment in 1876 as the
first Lieutenant-Governor of the North West Territories - a big step
from his Island home.
But some Scots politicians did not keep to the party
affiliation of their families. Oliver Mowat, who by the 1890s was the
Grand Old Man of the Canadian Liberal party, was the son of the
Caithness immigrant, John Mowat, one of the leading Conservatives in
Kingston. Some other Scots changed their political opinions several
times during their careers. William McDougall was one of these. A smooth
and capable politician, but prone to take up with each new movement, he
began as a radical at mid-century, modified to become one of the
foremost Liberals in the decade preceding Confederation, endorsed
representation according to population as the remedy for the united
Province of Canada, and then abandoned it for the principle of the
double majority when he accepted office in the government of John
Sandfield Macdonald and L.V. Sicotte in 1862. After 1867 he stayed on in
the "coalition" ministry at Ottawa, in 1875 was elected to the Ontario
Legislature as an Independent, and in 1878 returned to the House of
Commons as a Conservative. "Wandering Willie" had been a source of
embarrassment to his earlier Reform coworkers; he was an uncertain
colleague of John A. Macdonald also. As the dispute over the northwest
boundary of Ontario dragged on, he warned Macdonald that if it were "not
soon disposed of," he and the other Ontario politicians who had seceded
from the Liberals would be compelled to make their "peace with Blake &
Co." 16 Still, Mowat and McDougall were exceptions. The pattern among
Scottish politicians was usually one of hereditary party identification
and fervent party loyalty.
II
In the rapidly changing provinces of the early
nineteenth century, the small ruling elites were sure to be challenged
by Scots and others who wanted governments more popularly-based and
responsive to public opinion. In Upper Canada the Constitution of 1791
and the frontier environment, in which not many people had the time and
the aptitude for office, had combined to produce a government by the few
- the so-called Family Compact. The most powerful member of the Compact
was John Strachan, the indomitable little Aberdeen schoolmaster who had
come to Kingston in 1799 without money or influence, considering
provincial politics "hardly worth notice,"17 but who had gone on to dominate for two decades the
Legislative and Executive Councils. Imbued with characteristic Scottish
concern for religion and education, Strachan became the first Anglican
Bishop of Toronto, trained a whole generation of future political
leaders in his own schools for the "sons of gentlemen," presided over
the first provincial Board of Education, and began two institutions of
higher learning - King's College and Trinity College. His political
design for the province was essentially conservative: Upper Canada
should be a balanced society in the Burkean sense with aristocratic
leadership and an established church, and should be strongly identified
with the British Empire and loyal to Britain. Yet his anti-democratic
concept of government was entirely compatible with material progress.
Strachan and his colleague William Allan, another transplant from
Aberdeen, were both interested in the promotion of ambitious projects in
land settlement, banking and canal-building. Allan exemplified the
purposeful Scottish businessman in politics. As merchant, first
President of the Bank of Upper Canada, Canada Company commissioner,
first Governor of the British America Assurance Company and first
President of the Toronto Board of Trade, he was the Compact's principal
link with the commercial and financial world.
At the same time in Upper Canada, political
radicalism was given an impetus by Robert Fleming Gourlay and reached
its peak with William Lyon Mackenzie. The careers of these two Scots had
many likenesses. They were the same egotistical, cantankerous and
aggressive type, born muckrakers, fearless in exposing political abuses
and unrestrained in their harangues against the government. Gourlay
began innocently enough after his arrival from Fifeshire in 1817 by
seeking statistics on economic conditions so that he might write a guide
for emigrants. But his questionnaire to the settlers also invited their
opinions on what was retarding provincial progress. Even at this stage
Strachan sensed the strain of radicalism in Gourlay: "the man was a
dangerous incendiary."18 The Compact's
suspicions were fully aroused when Gourlay organized a series of township meetings at which petitions to
Britain would be drawn up and representatives chosen for a provincial
convention. In Tory eyes such activities savoured of subversion and
republicanism. When prosecutions of Gourlay for criminal libel failed,
he was tried under the alien clause of the Sedition Act of 1804 and
banished from the province.
Similarly Mackenzie, of humble Dundee background,
seemed harmless at the outset. His biting editorials in the Colonial
Advocate made that weekly the main anti-government organ in the
1820s. Nevertheless, he was the spokesman not of radicalism but of
agrarian conservatism in his attacks on the Compact's economic policies.
Like the rest of the Reformers, Mackenzie seems parochial and
reactionary when his insistence upon economic retrenchment is compared
with the forward-looking provincial schemes of the Scots in the
government. In his political views in the 1830s, however, he swung
decidedly to the left. The Seventh Report of the Select Committee on
Grievances which he chaired in 1835 was an omnibus condemnation of
Compact rule. While he was increasingly convinced that fundamental
constitutional change was necessary and that there was no hope of
obtaining it by appeals to London, he was also coming to admire the
American elective system. By 1837 he was proclaiming in his new paper,
The Constitution, that Upper Canada would achieve real
self-government only by resort to arms and separation from Great
Britain. "The clan Mackenzie was at war again with England," comments
Mackenzie's biographer.19
As in the Gourlay incident, the oligarchy equated
democratic reform with disloyalty, this time with some justification. In
his disillusionment with Britain, Mackenzie had said, "I am less loyal
than I was." Gourlay, on the other hand, had been no rebel. He
thoroughly disapproved of the Mackenzie uprising, and was in fact one of
the early proponents of a union of British North America in order to
bind it closer to the mother country. The government contained the
threat posed by Mackenzie almost as easily as that by Gourlay two
decades earlier. Mackenzie's extremism had split the Reform movement and
alienated the moderates; in the end he led a mini-rebellion and like
Gourlay was exiled. Some years before, Thomas Talbot, dismayed at the
Reform sympathies among the Highland settlers in his tract north of Lake
Erie, had predicted that they would become "most inveterate Rebels."20
In 1837, however, Mackenzie's help came not from the Scottish
Presbyterians in the western peninsula but from sections of the province
settled largely by Americans. The option offered between Strachan,
stability and the British connection on the one side, and Mackenzie,
violence and "Yankee" republicanism on the other, made very clear the
conservative bias of the great majority of Scots as of other Upper
Canadians.
Although the province would have had a more tranquil
history without the assertive Scots, Strachan, Gourlay and Mackenzie,
the three with all their faults had been sincere in pursuing what they
thought was best for Upper Canada. Strachan, if too high-handed and too
exclusive in his point of view, perhaps "the most imperious and obdurate
tory who has left his stamp on Canadian history,"21 had done much for cultural and economic advancement and
had established the Tory political tradition which would carry forward
into mid-century Conservatism. Gourlay and Mackenzie, for their part,
had established a radical Reform tradition emphasizing anti-privilege
and anti-monopoly, American democratic principles, the separation of
church and state, and economic policies to serve an agrarian society.
Gourlay had prepared the stage for the Reform leaders of the 1820s by
making the different communities of Upper Canada aware that they had
common grievances which called for common political remedies, and by
supplying Reform editors and assemblymen with a martyr, for the
conservative forces had over-reacted in their proceedings against him.
Mackenzie's rebellion along with that in Lower Canada ultimately cut
through the political confusion in the colonies by prompting Lord
Durham's investigation, the first step towards the peaceful democratic
revolution of the 1840s. In the long view of political development,
there is surely a place for the agitators like Gourlay and Mackenzie who
rouse attention to political ills, even though they themselves are not
of the stuff to devise the remedies. W.L. Mackenzie King, at any rate,
found great satisfaction in thinking of his grandfather as a "true
patriot" who had struggled for the "rights of free men."22
In Lower Canada the "state of things" culminating in
rebellion in 1837 was characterized by Lord Durham as a "struggle, not
of principles, but of races."23
Although in large measure Durham was right, a glance at the divergence
among the Scots alone tempers the impression left by his Report that the
English-speaking population of the province was all on one side, and the
French-speaking on the other. Scots, it is true, were powerful in the
British-controlled councils. The "Scotch party" was another name for the
Chateau Clique which managed affairs as the Compact did in Upper Canada.
Also, Scots were active in the English-language Tory press, especially
in Montreal where both the Gazette and the Herald crusaded against the
French popular party. The bilingual Gazette was bought in 1822 by Thomas
Andrew Turner of Aberdeenshire. Publishing it in English only, he made
it the organ of the commercial interests in the city. The Herald had a
series of Scots associated with it: William Gray and Mungo Kay as
founders, to whom John Strachan advanced some of the necessary money;
Archibald Ferguson and Robert Weir as subsequent owners; Dr. Alexander
Christie and Adam Thom as editors. The paper's bias was especially
strong under Thom, a lawyer and schoolteacher, who wrote the abusive
"Anti-Gallic Letters" and advocated severe punishment for the rebels of
1837-38.
On the other hand, there were Scottish editors and
members in the canadien-dominated Assembly who worked with the
French Canadians for reform. The best-known was John Neilson, a man well
informed on the currents of political thought in the western world and
respected for his integrity. He had come from Kirkcudbrightshire in 1790
as a protege of his uncle, William Brown, owner of the
bilingual Quebec Gazette, and later inherited the journal. Under
his direction for over half a century, it was one of the principal
papers in the province. Neilson, as a member of the Assembly after 1818,
evinced a liberalism "of a sober and sedate cast,"24 which led to warm friendship and close political
collaboration with the French-Canadian leader, Louis-Joseph Papineau.
For some years Neilson had prestige in the French party as high as that
of Papineau. On two occasions the Assembly sent him to England as their
very effective representative: in 1823 with Papineau to oppose the
proposed union of the Canadas, and in 1828 with Papineau's cousin, Denis
Viger, and Au-gustin Cuvillier to urge that the Assembly should have a
larger voice in the government of the colony. In the early 1830s,
however, the moderate Neilson, who still thought that the Constitution
of 1791 could be made to work without radical change, drew apart from
the extremist Papineau, who like Mackenzie in the sister province had
come to believe an elective council and other amendments essential.
Neilson's editorials in the Gazette after 1834 made "des attaques tres
dures contre le parti cana-dien."25 But the Scot, whom
Papineau had termed "tout bon canadien," was deserting les patriotes or
the Papineau radicals, not the French-Canadian cause as he conceived it.
After the rebellion, since Neilson considered that the projected union
of Lower Canada with Upper Canada would be dangerous to French rights
and society, he headed a movement, which included the French clergy, for
the maintenance of the Constitution of 1791.
Outside the cities, too, there were Scots who sided
with the French. A "fiery, flaxen Celt,"26 the merchant William Henry Scott of Saint-Eus-tache west
of Montreal, represented Deux-Montagnes in the Assembly from 1829.
Although an adamant Presbyterian, he had the confidence of the Roman
Catholic French Canadians. Feeling their grievances against the ruling
cliques his own, he gave steadfast support to Papineau until the very
eve of the rebellion. Then he vacillated, and finally, in spite of
pressure and threats, refused to lead the local patriotes. Moreover, he
and his younger brother Neil tried to dissuade Dr. Jean-Olivier Chenier
who was resolved on using arms. The Scotts, however, had had such close
assoca-tions with the patriotes that they were compromised in the eyes
of the authorities and were imprisoned. Yet William, though less
moderate in disposition than Neilson, had had a moderating effect on the
events at Saint-Eustache by failing to join in the insurrection. Amury
Girod, the adventurer who prodded the local
patriotes on to military action, wrote in his diary for December 5,
1837: "Depuis que Scott nous a abandonnes, les habitants sont sans
courage."27 The French case in Lower Canada obviously had not
been presented by that race alone.
The Atlantic provinces did not have the racial
division of Lower Canada or the bitterness engendered in Upper Canada by
the alien question and clergy reserves to breed radicalism and
rebellions. Each colony, however, had its own inequities and Scottish
settlers who worked for reforms.28 In
winning two notable victories of the first half of the century
representative government in Newfoundland and responsible government in
Nova Scotia - Scots had conspicuous roles. Soon after coming to St.
John's from Kirkcudbrightshire in 1808, the public-spirited Dr. William
Carson began criticizing naval rule. He demanded that Newfoundland be
governed like a typical British colony by governor, upper house and
popular assembly. For a quarter of a century he kept the issue of
representative government alive through pamphlets and letters in the
Newfoundland Patriot, a Reform paper which he set up. A Liberal party,
predominantly Roman Catholic, gradually gathered around the Protestant
Carson in the Assembly granted by Britain in 1832. The alliance was not
unlike that of Neilson and Scott with the French Catholics in Quebec. In
Nova Scotia, the Loyalist Joseph Howe was the outstanding Reformer, but
several others in the embryonic Liberal Party were Scots: William and
George Young, the sons of "Agricola"; Beamish Murdoch, the author of a
history of the province, and S.G. W. Archibald, a learned lawyer from an
old and respected family, who were moderate Reformers of the 1820s; Hugh
Bell and James McNab, both of whom in 1848 entered the first
"responsible" government in Nova Scotia; and especially William Annand.
Annand, the son of a well-to-do Banffshire merchant, had a lengthy
career alongside Howe, from the 1830s when he entered the Assembly,
through to the 1860s when with Howe he vehemently opposed Confederation.
The Novascotian, edited by Annand from 1843 and widely read in the
province, was in the van of the Reform movement during the struggle for
responsible government; and the Morning Chronicle, founded by Annand in
1844, was the vehicle for Howe's "Botheration Scheme" letters and other
vigorous anti-Confederation articles in 1865.
Between these Reformers or Liberals and James William
Johnstone there was a long political duel in Nova Scotia. Johnstone,
Jamaica-born but of a lineage going back to the estate of Annandale in
Scotland, was talented and striking in appearance, an excellent
constitutional lawyer and the champion of the large Baptist denomination
in the province. When the old council was reconstructed in 1838,
Governor Sir Colin Campbell acted wisely in choosing a man with such
qualifications as chief adviser. By the 1840s, Johnstone was recognized
as the leader of a second political party which the Liberals called
"Tory." Yet Johnstone, in spite of his aristocratic instincts, was not
opposed to reforms. He believed that government should be responsible to
the people in that the executive should not continue if it lost the
confidence of the Assembly. But he did not agree that the ministers
should be members of that Assembly, where they would dominate
policy-making and themselves be exposed to undesirable political
pressures. In the 1850s Johnstone outdid the Liberals by favouring the
democratic electoral practices of simultaneous voting and full manhood
suffrage. As first minister until 1848, leader of the opposition from
1848 to 1857 and 1860 to 1863, and premier from 1857 to 1860 and again
in 1863, he established the Conservative Party in Nova Scotia on a progressive base. The Scots in the Maritime provinces did
not agree politically any more than Scots elsewhere. But they had in
common that they were dedicated and extraordinarily durable politicians.
III
With the achievement of responsible government
towards the middle of the century, the Tories and Reformers in the
Maritimes thus merged almost imperceptibly into Conservatives and
Liberals, whereas in the united Province of Canada a variety of
political groupings appeared. Out of these, two new parties were
fashioned. They did not represent a division between right and left like
the Tories and radicals, but were centrist combinations. After
Confederation they would evolve into Canada's first national parties -
the Conservatives and, a generation later, the Liberals. Since each of
these parties owed its beginnings to Scots in Canada in the 1850s, the
politicians of that province merit attention.29
On the Canadian Assemblies of the 1840s and 1850s,
the Scots were bound to leave their mark because of their numbers and
their individual strengths. The veterans of the pre-rebellion era who
were members would now play out the last acts of their careers in a
province adjusting to the union of Upper and Lower Canada and to the
idea of responsible government. Among the old-timers were Neilson and
William Scott, still enjoying the trust of constituencies in Canada East
though they had defected from the patriotes. Neilson was not
reconciled to the union or willing like Louis LaFontaine to make common
cause with the Reformers of Canada West led by Robert Baldwin. On the
contrary, Neilson agreed with Viger and Papineau that la survivance could best be achieved by separatism. It was to strive for repeal of
the union that Neilson participated temporarily in the united
Legislature and directed the editorials in the Quebec Gazette in
the 1840s.30 Back, too, from
Canada East were Robert Christie, the Gaspe merchant who had been
expelled from the Assembly five times by the popular party between 1829
and 1834 because he had slighted the Reformers; and James Leslie, a
Montreal merchant and old Reformer, who accompanied LaFontaine into the
first responsible ministry in Canada in 1848.
From Canada West as well there were two Scots whose
paths had crossed many times - Colonel Allan Napier MacNab and the
amnestied Mackenzie. Not only had they had fierce encounters in the old
Assembly, but also it was under MacNab's leadership that the militia had
easily dispersed the Mackenzie rebels in 1837. Although a man of great
ambition and of business and political prestige in the Hamilton area,
MacNab had never made his way into the inner circle of Strachan's
Compact at Toronto. By the 1840s he was at last one of the main Tory
leaders. As such he led a frenzied attack on the Rebellion Losses Bill
of 1849, charging that it indemnified treason in Lower Canada, and in
extravagant statements stigmatizing the whole French-Canadian race as
rebels and aliens. Yet in the political flux of the early 1850s, even a
vehement Scot like MacNab found himself setting aside some of his
prejudices and forming a partnership with the French Canadians. From
1854 to 1856 he headed a ministry with A.N. Morin and in 1856 with E.P.
Tache. MacNab is usually depicted as attaining this high office only by
seniority and as being a liability to his party in the 1850s because he
was a demagogue without real ability and with political views of the old
order.31 His famous remark, however,
that "my politics now are railroads" suggests that, as far as economic
developments were concerned, he was very much in tune with the political
philosophy of the decade. His forte, like that of some other Scottish
politicians, had always been in projects for the commercial prosperity
of the young province - roads, canals, steamship companies, railways.
Mackenzie was less attuned to the new age. Unruly as
ever, he re-entered political life in 1851 as the member for Haldimand,
and launched another paper to berate the government - the Weekly
Message, unsuitably named for it came out only when he could find
the funds. He never accepted the union or the principle of responsible
government. Perhaps this attitude was natural in one so thoroughly an
independent as Mackenzie, one whom it is impossible to imagine at the
head of a department in a collectively responsible cabinet.
Paradoxically, though, he helped to condition the working of the new
type of government when, as Chairman of the Committee on Public Accounts
1854-55, he made certain that the ministers discharged their
responsibility to the Assembly in spending the public money.
Other Scots such as the two Macdonalds were just
beginning their political careers. John Sandfield Macdonald, a native of
Glengarry County who had become a lawyer of repute in Cornwall, entered
the Assembly in 1841. Proud and sensitive, he would prove a somewhat
difficult member in Reform ranks. But with his Highland blood and the
Gaelic tongue, he wore well in eastern Ontario for thirty years. The
Kingston lawyer, John Alexander Macdonald, did not leave political life
from his election as a Tory in 1844 until his death in 1891. He would be
criticized at times for opportunism and procrastination. Nevertheless,
"Old Tomorrow" would be acknowledged as a superb party tactician and the
most charismatic of all the Scots in Canadian political history. At
first he had a strong rival among the young Tories in John Hillyard
Cameron, an eminent Toronto lawyer, who had influence in the Church of
England and the Orange Order as well as connections with the Toronto
British Colonist edited by another Scot, Hugh Scobie. Cameron,
however, remained with MacNab on the dogmatic right wing of the party
whereas Macdonald adapted to the moderating currents of the 1850s. Two
others who embarked on politics - Alexander Campbell in the Legislative
Council, which was elective after 1856, and Alexander Morris in the
Assembly - would hold office under Macdonald after Confederation, which
each had a hand in initiating. The moderate Morris, a son of William
Morris, the member for Lanark from 1820 to 1836 who had
been the Church of Scotland's champion for a share in the clergy
reserves, was the go-between who helped to bring about the Great
Coalition in 1864. The urbane Campbell, who accompanied Macdonald to the
Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences, was one of the official "Fathers"
of Confederation.
Among other new Scottish members in the Canadian
Assemblies was John Young, a Liberal Montreal businessman, who was a
member of the Hincks-Morin ministry which replaced the faltering
Baldwin-LaFontaine ministry in 1851. Concerned as other business
politicians were in the 1850s with improving commerce and
transportation, Young favoured free trade and an intercolonial railway.
On the other hand, the Toronto Liberal, Isaac Buchanan, one of the
wealthiest merchants in Canada West, supported a protective tariff and
the Great Western Railway which was designed to tap the trade of the
American midwest. Buchanan was linked with the early career of the
forceful George Brown, who was to be John A. Macdonald's greatest
adversary. Strongly sympathetic to the Free Church, Buchanan backed the
Toronto Banner, begun in 1843 as the Free Kirk journal under
Peter Brown and his son George. But the latter, a British Whig in
background, found the religious paper less challenging than the
political controversies of the province. In 1844 he founded the Toronto
Globe as the organ of the Baldwin Reformers. Brown's stirring
editorials coupled with modern publishing methods steadily advanced the
circulation of this paper. In 1851 he started the other side of his
political career when, reacting against the "state churchism" of the
Hincks government, he was elected as an independent Reform member for
Kent in the southwest corner of the peninsula.
During the years between the achievement of
responsible government and Confederation, this imposing array of Scots
had plenty of scope for their varied talents and political beliefs in
the many shifting party alignments in the Province of Canada. After the
triumph of moderation and of biracial co-operation in achieving
responsible government in 1848, political extremes had quickly
reappeared. It looked as if the Tory forces on the right might be
reconstructed on a platform of friendly separation from Great Britain.
The majority of the signers of the Annexation Manifesto issued in
Montreal in 1849 were big business Tories, among whom were a number of
Scots - Peter Redpath, David L. Macpherson, D. Lome Mac-dougall, James
Ferrier, John Rose, and Alexander Tilloch Galt - all connected with the
financial, commercial or railway interests of the city. They took this
step not because they were inherently disloyal, but because, discouraged
by the depression of the late 1840's, they resented Britain's apparent
desertion of her colonies in moving toward free trade, and her upholding
of the Rebellion Losses Bill. Tory annexationism so motivated died with
the return of prosperity and did not become a party policy. At the same
time, Scots not satisfied with the Baldwin-LaFontaine brand of
liberalism or moderate reform took part in a revival on the radical left
in both parts of Canada. In the East, Galt, the clever son of the
Scottish novelist John Galt, allied himself with le parti rouge,
while in the West a small band of advanced Reformers meeting in the
Toronto office of William McDougall organized the Clear Grits. Of the
eight or nine men who were the leaders of the original Clear Grits, four
were Scottish Canadians. Two of these were young radicals - the lawyer
McDougall and Edinburgh-born David Christie, an affluent farmer. The
other two - the businessman James Lesslie, a native of Dundee, and the
Sarnia lumberman and shipbuilder Malcolm "Coon" Cameron - represented
continuity with the rebellion years. Lesslie had been labelled by Sir
Francis Bond Head a "notorious rebel" and had been imprisoned in 1837.
Since 1844 he had kept Mackenzie's ideas before the public in the
Toronto Examiner of which he was the proprietor and editor.
Cameron had been a radical assemblyman since 1836. Blunt and confident,
he was very popular in western Ontario, where he represented at
different times Kent, Lambton and Huron. He threw himself into the
temperance movement and was the introducer of the first prohibition
measure in the Canadian Legislature. Like many Scottish politicians he
founded political newspapers - the Bathurst Courier at Perth in
eastern Ontario, and at Goderich the Huron Signal, which he put
under the able editorship of his friend, Thomas McQueen, a native of
Ayrshire.
On February 14, 1851, the North American,
McDougall's new paper instituted to be the mouthpiece of the Clear
Grits, published their platform. It called for secularization of the
clergy reserves, retrenchment in government expenditure, biennial
parliaments, abolition of property qualifications for parliamentary
representatives, application of the elective principle to all government
offices, extension of the suffrage, and vote by ballot. The platform was
a mixture of the earlier radicalism of Mackenzie, contemporary British
Chartism, and North American frontier democracy. To Brown it amounted to
American republicanism. He disapproved of the Clear Grits as much as he
did of the Hincksites. In the very section of the province from which
the Grits derived their strength the independent Reformer soon had his
own following. In 1853 the Globe became a daily paper and began
to be the "Scotchman's Bible" from Toronto westward. It won Brown
lifelong political friends in two fellow-Scots Archibald McKellar of
Chatham, too jovial to make a discreet politican but efficient in
organization, and Alexander Mackenzie, thoroughly upright and reliable,
the self-educated Perthshire stonemason who was now a rising contractor
in Sarnia. Brown had other firm friends in western Ontario in William
Notman, a Free Church Scot and Reformer who sat for Middlesex and later
for Wentworth North, and Adam Johnston Fergus-son Blair, the member for
Waterloo and later for South Wellington whose father had originated the
Scottish settlement of Fergus. Brown did not have strength, however, in
eastern Ontario, the domain of the moderate Roman Catholic Sandfield
Macdonald, who had more rapport with the French Liberals of Canada East
than with the Presbyterian voluntaryist Brown.
Thus, with the high Tories MacNab and Hillyard
Cameron, the moderate Tory John A. Macdonald, the British Liberals Brown
and Alexander Mackenzie, the virtually independent Reformer Sandfield
Macdonald and independent radical Lyon Mackenzie, the rouge Galt,
and the radical Grits Lesslie, Malcolm Cameron, McDougall and Christie,
Scots were prominent in all the political fragments resulting from the
break-up of the old Tory and Reform parties in the 1850s. But along with
the divisive tendencies there were centripetal political forces
activated by some of these same Scots. Professor Donald Creighton has
unfolded the development of John A. Macdonald's idea of a "great,
middle, constitutional party" to achieve which it would be necessary to
build friendly relations with the French Canadians and to liberalize the
"old Conservative programme" in Canada West. These objectives Macdonald
did, in fact, accomplish in the broadly-based coalition of 1854 between
the conservative bleus of Canada East, the Tories and liberal
Conservatives of Canada West, and the conservative Liberals of both
sections. MacNab was the nominal leader from the West, but Macdonald was
his heir apparent. In 1856 the latter succeeded to the leadership.32
The great bi-racial
Liberal-Conservative party of the future had been born. Macdonald's
adroitness in winning men to his party of the centre can be seen in his
overtures to Galt:
You call yourself a Rouge. There may have been at
one time a reddish tinge about you, but I could observe it becoming
by degrees fainter. In fact you are like Byron's Dying Dolphin,
exhibiting a series of colours - "the last still loveliest" - and
that last is "true blue," being the colour I affect . . . pray do
become true blue at once: it is a good standing colour and bears
washing.33
Yet the Toryism of Strachan, MacNab and Hillyard
Cameron did not die. It remained "a strong constituent element in the
party, without which Liberal-Conservatism would have lost its essential
character."34
Although Macdonald's success in uniting political
groups in 1854-56 further weakened the Reformers, the other powerful
Scot, George Brown, would begin the task of rebuilding them. The gradual
rapprochement between the Brownites and the original Clear Grits is
described by Brown's biographer, Professor J.M.S. Careless.35 The disunity in the Reform press at least was
ended by 1855 when the Globe absorbed both Lesslie's Examiner and
McDougall's North American. Opposition to separate schools,
representation by population, and westward expansion -persistent themes
in the Globe - were issues on which the Grits and Brown agreed. By the
time of the Reform Convention in Toronto in 1859, the original Clear
Grits, though still possessing their power base in agrarian western
Ontario, had been transformed into a Grit-Reform Party under the
leadership of an urban and professional group dominated by Brown and his
metropolitan paper. This party was as middle-of-the-road and respectably British as were the
Conservatives; it, too, linked with the business community, had a major
concern for material development. In the legislature Brown now had the
assistance of McDougall, a former political foe, as well as of newer
members, notably the canny lawyer Mowat. The latter had entered politics
with a victory in 1857 over J.C. Morrison, also of Scottish descent, one
of the moderate Liberals enticed by Macdonald into the Conservative
ministry.
Still, Brown's Reformers were very decidedly a
sectional party. Not until they became associated with the movement for
Confederation was it clear that they, like John A. Macdonald, could
enter into a harmonious working relationship with Canada East. The two
days' Brown-Dorion administration in 1858 had hardly been a test.
Confederation was also the issue which led the new Conservative and
Reform parties in Canada to join forces with the rising Conservative and
Liberal parties in the Maritimes.
The main Fathers of Confederation from Canada, except
for George E. Cartier and D'Arcy McGee, were Scots. Their contributions
have been fully recognized: Macdonald's efforts to establish a strong
central government and his genius in reconciling differences amongst the
delegates and in conveying his own vision of a nation a mari usque ad
mare; Brown's decisive step in joining his political opponents,
Macdonald and Cartier, in 1864 which alone made possible the Great
Coalition, and his expositions of the constitutional details of a
federal union both at the conferences and through the Globe;
Gait's expertise in effecting the financial terms under which the
provinces would enter the Dominion; and Mowat's and McDougall's work on
the division of powers between federal and local legislatures. Not
nearly so well-known are the Scottish politicians from the Atlantic
provinces who were associated with Confederation.36
In New Brunswick, which was the key province since it
connected the Canadas and Nova Scotia geographically, two men of
Scottish extraction gave valuable aid to the Liberal premier, Samuel
Leonard Tilley, in obtaining finally a verdict favourable to
Confederation. The first was the eloquent and elegant lawyer, John
Hamilton Gray, a Conservative, who, after attending the Charlottetown
and Quebec Conferences, had a firm belief in union and began a series of
public meetings with Tilley to explain the scheme to New Brunswickers.
But Gray went down to defeat along with the Tilley government in 1865
when the people of the province renounced Confederation. Gray was right
when he assured George Brown that the setback was transitory. The man
who had much to do with reversing the results of 1865 was the headstrong
and energetic Peter Mitchell, a Reform lawyer and lumber merchant whose
parents had come from Scotland. Hand in hand with Lieutenant-Governor
A.H. Gordon, who had been instructed by Britain to use every means
possible to carry Confederation, and aided by Canadian money and a
fortuitous Fenian raid on the border, Mitchell engineered the sweeping
defeat of the anti-Confederate government in 1866 -
thereafter being dubbed by his enemies "Bismarck" Mitchell.37 He headed the new government which hastened
to carry through the legislature a resolution for union contingent upon
the building of an intercolonial railway.
In Nova Scotia the Conservative premier, Dr. Charles
Tupper, also faced with strong opposition to Confederation, had urgent
need of support from both parties to prevent a hostile vote. The polite
but firm Scottish Canadian, Robert B. Dickey, a Conservative delegate at
Charlotte-town and Quebec, was not won over to the Quebec terms. His
place at the London Conference was given to a strong unionist, John W.
Ritchie, a member of a Scottish family in the province distinguished
throughout the century in politics and law. But most important to Tupper
and the Confederate cause was the calm, cool Adams George Archibald, of
Scottish descent and irreproachable character, an assemblyman since 1851
and Howe's successor as Liberal leader. At Quebec Archibald was on the
special committee which arranged the financial resolutions; and it was
his consistent support of Confederation which kept it from taking on the
complexion of a Conservative party scheme in Nova Scotia, for other
leading Liberals followed Howe in opposition to it. For instance, A.W.
McLelan, a level-headed, practical Scot, was afraid of the financial
consequences for his native province; and Hugh McDonald, a lawyer of
Scottish lineage in Inverness county, went with Annand and Howe to
England in 1866 to affirm that the people should be consulted before the
Constitution was changed. Archibald's reply to such arguments was to
refer to the union of Scotland with England on which there had not been
an appeal to the people. The Scots then, like the anti-Confederates in
Nova Scotia now, had feared that the smaller state would be swamped by
the larger. But, Archibald declared, this had not happened; instead,
"Scotchmen could take their place with Englishmen in any part of the
world."38
In Prince Edward Island the Conservative premier, the
other John Hamilton Gray, a retired army officer of Glasgow descent, had
been caught by the spirit of a great new nation at the Charlottetown
Conference, of which he was chairman. But in December, 1864, realizing
that he could not convey his enthusiasm to the Islanders, he resigned
office. Professor Waite maintains that, although the loss of Gray, "a
strong man politically," was serious, the opposition of the people to
Confederation was such that no party could have taken up the cause and
survived, and nothing any man could do would have altered their
attitudes.39 Until 1873 the province
was controlled by the anti-Confederates. Typical of their belief that
the Quebec Resolutions were not fair to the Island's small population
either politically or economically was the Liberal, Andrew Archibald
Macdonald, who at Quebec had contended unsuccessfully for the
appointment of senators by the provincial legislatures and for equal
representation for each province in the Senate in accord with the
American example.40
Thus the Scots in the eastern provinces included
opponents to union just as the Reformer Sandfield Macdonald and the
Conservative Matthew Crooks Cameron stood aloof in Canada West, while
the Scottish Protestant Witness run by John Dougall raised its
voice in Montreal against Confederation. On the other hand, the Maritime
Scots who were unionists had set aside party differences and staked
their political futures on Confederation. At the conferences they had
mostly upheld the rights of the provinces, especially the smaller
provinces. In comparison with the Canadians they had had a small impact
on the negotiations. Their major contributions had been in their own
bailiwicks as they attempted to overcome the reluctance and suspicions
of the people. They failed in Prince Edward Island until 1873; but they
had been among the forces which carried New Brunswick and Nova Scotia
into the Dominion in 1867. Archibald and Mitchell were rewarded by
places in Macdonald's first ministry. An Ottawa post was one of the ways
in which provincial politicians would coalesce into the national parties
after Confederation.
IV
In the last third of the century, Canadian
Confederation "only yet in the gristle" had to harden "into bone."41
During this critical time newspapers still
expressed the opinions of the parties, and again a number of the
politically powerful editors had Scottish blood: John Cameron, the
founder of the London Advertiser and the Toronto Liberal, who took over
the editorship of the Globe after the Browns, and who in turn was
followed by John S. Willison; John Ross Robertson of the Toronto
Telegram; A.H.U. Colquhoun of the Toronto Empire; P.D. Ross of the
Ottawa Journal; Hugh Graham (later Lord Atholstan) of the Montreal Star;
and J.J. Stewart of the Halifax Herald. Though the daily paper published
in the large urban centres was now the main forum for political
discussion, the weekly still held sway in some smaller communities.
Here, too, there were Scots editors with frank political leanings, such
as M.Y. McLean of the Huron Expositor in Seaforth or Robert Sellar of
the Gleaner in Huntingdon, Quebec.
In this period, while the political creation of 1867
was being tested, only about 16% of Canada's population gave their
ethnic origin as Scottish. Yet for a generation the new national
government was headed by Scots -the Conservative John A. Macdonald and
the Liberal Alexander Mackenzie. During his first ministry, a coalition
which rapidly took on a Conservative complexion, Macdonald realized his
goal of a nation extending from ocean to ocean.42 He rounded out the Dominion territorially by adding the
Provinces of Manitoba, British Columbia and Prince Edward Island, and he
combated the repeal movement in Nova Scotia by granting "better terms"
which won over Howe and McLelan. Only Newfoundland resisted his
expansionist programme. But the young nation already had problems which
Macdonald would have to face in the future. In Nova Scotia the
provincial government was still controlled by the anti-Confederates
under the obdurate Scottish premier,
Annand. Perhaps Sir John Bourinot was right in suggesting that Annand
saw his chance at leadership when the last of his rivals in the party
reconciled themselves to the union.43
At any rate Annand, becoming vituperative towards Howe, his former
friend and idol, continued to charge that the province had been wronged
by the way in which it had been forced into Confederation. This
last-ditch campaign to release Nova Scotia ceased with Annand's
premiership in 1875, but the seeds of secessionism would spring up again
in the next decade. As for the West, Macdonald's handling of the Red
River rebellion in 1870 left a legacy of racial and religious bitterness
in Canada, and his promise to British Columbia of a railway involved the
government in negotiations with financiers which led to the "Pacific
Scandal" of 1873 and resignation.
Mackenzie, who succeeded as prime minister for the
next five years, epitomized the good qualities often attributed to Scots
- intelligence, industry, conscientiousness, rectitude, and the inner
strength which comes from profound faith in God.44 With Scottish grit he served the country until his death
in 1892, seldom absent from his seat in the Commons, faithful to his
committee duties even though a throat malady made it increasingly
difficult for him to speak. In administration he stood for honesty,
economy and efficiency. If these are criteria of good government, Canada
has never been so well governed as in the Mackenzie interlude of the
1870s. In his way, too, Mackenzie was a nation-builder. His government's
discussions with Great Britain through Edward Blake, the Minister of
Justice, on such matters as the Supreme Court Act, the prerogatives of
the Governor-General, the treaty-making power, and authority over
extradition and merchant shipping, advanced Canada along the path
towards national autonomy within the Empire. Mackenzie's railway policy,
slower-going than the Conservatives, but realistic in view of the small
population and capital in the country, resulted in considerable
stretches of completed road. Yet it aroused the anger of British
Columbia which thought it a repudiation of the agreement to build a line
to the coast within ten years. Mackenzie's greatest disadvantage,
however, was the economic depression which just coincided with his term
in office. To Canadians, discouraged in the hard times, the strait-laced
prime minister with his careful programmes seemed unimaginative and
uninspiring, while his aversion to bestowing the accustomed partisan
favours heightened his image as a parsimonious Scot. The people rejected
him in the elections of 1878 and, forgetting the Pacific Scandal, swept
back into power the dynamic Macdonald who promised benefits to all parts
of the country through his "National Policy."
Macdonald, prime minister again until 1891, devoted
himself to uniting the country economically through protective tariffs
to encourage industry, a transcontinental railway, the populating of the
prairies, and the promotion of trade on an east-west axis. The
completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885 was his most dramatic
achievement. It took great faith in the future of Canada to embark on
this vast undertaking, and great resolution to persevere with it in face
of the immense problems in construction and financing. Macdonald was
fortunate to secure the aid of a sagacious group of men, all Scots by
birth, for the syndicate with whom the contract was made to build the
railway: George Stephen of the Bank of Montreal, his cousin Donald A.
Smith, who had first-hand knowledge of the West, the wealthy businessmen
Duncan McIntyre and Robert B. Angus, and John Rose, formerly Macdonald's
Finance Minister, who was now a member of a London banking house. The
skilful chief engineer, Sandford Fleming, was also a Scot.45 When Macdonald died, the Liberal leader, Wilfrid
Laurier, rightly paid tribute in the Commons to his statesmanship, his
patriotism, and his great gifts in the "supreme art of governing men"
and in the "intricate management of a party."46 In
Macdonald's hands, the organized and disciplined national political
party had been made a unifying agency in the far-flung country with its
disparities in resources and development, languages and creeds.
Meanwhile the Liberals could not compete in national
organization. Brown before 1867 had not been able to make the unionist
cause a bond to tie the Liberals in British America together, as
Macdonald had with the Conservatives. Nor had Mackenzie succeeded in
welding the loose alliance of provincial Liberal parties over which he
presided. Still, in the provinces strong men arose whom Laurier would
merge in the 1890s into a compact national Liberal party. One of these
was Andrew George Blair, a New Brunswick lawyer of Scottish ancestry and
high reputation, who found only six Liberals in the provincial assembly
of 41 members when he was elected to it in 1878. Five years later under
his leadership the Liberals had the majority. Blair remained as Premier
of New Brunswick until Laurier called him to head the busy Department of
Railways and Canals in 1896, and was noted as a progressive though
cautious administrator. Another Scottish premier, the veteran Mowat of
Ontario, was invited by Laurier into his "ministry of all the talents"
in 1896 as Minister of Justice.47 Mowat
had the prestige of having given his own province since 1872 sound and
just government, including the deft handling of several thorny
Protestant-Catholic problems. Moreover, he had already helped to
strengthen the federal Liberal party by influencing its convention in
1893 to approve a revenue tariff. This platform healed the divisions on
fiscal policy which had plagued the Liberals nationally, gave electors
an acceptable alternative to the Conservative National Policy, and was
one of the major factors in Laurier's victory in 1896.
George Bryce felt that the large number of Scotsmen
occupying "representative positions of trust" in the world could be
accounted for by "the interest in national affairs, so general among
Scotsmen."48 Scottish Canadians had, if
possible, more zest for politics after Confederation than before, since
now there were both federal and provincial elections to be fought. Not
just among leading men in the parties, but among the grassroots Scots as
well, political interest was a vital part of everyday life. Letters passing between Scottish friends
made frequent mention of public figures and events. If the writers were
Liberals, a common theme was righteous indignation at Conservative
tactics:
We had some excitement at our election. We did
not expect any opposition in our County but the Tories got a man out
of the Lunatic Asylum to oppose Mills and took us all by surprise.
Half of our party did not know there was any opposition, and
consequently would not go near the polls if not roused to action. I
was counting I drove my team about forty miles election day after
voters. However, we got our man elected with over 500 majority but
the way the Tory party acted in our County this election was just as
disgraceful as the selling of the Pacific Railroad Charter to Sir
Hugh Allan.49
Reinforcement for the Liberals' sureness of their own
higher political morality - as if any were needed - came in letters from
friends in Scotland:
In reading the paper you kindly sent me I was
very much struck with the extraordinary amount of corruption and
jobbery that obtains in the Canadian Government. I hope the leader
of the Reform Party will soon gain the victory. I thought that when
you had the government in your own hands that you would be
perfection. If Ireland when it gets Home Rule will do no better it
will be a bad job.50
Political interest, however, was not enough to
solidify provincial parties either in New Brunswick or in the new
western provinces of Manitoba and British Columbia in the nineteenth
century. In the other old provinces, coherent modern parties did
develop, often under Scottish leaders such as the Conservative Simon
Hugh Holmes and the Liberal George H. Murray in Nova Scotia, or the
Conservative Neil MacLeod in Prince Edward Island. Even the
French-speaking province of Quebec had a premier with a Scottish name in
the Conservative John Jones Ross (1884-87). But, above all, it was
Ontario under Mowat which effectually dispelled the notion abroad at the
time of Confederation that political parties would have no place at
provincial level in the new Dominion.51
Though performing on a smaller political stage than
Macdonald, the wary Mowat was as skilful in the craft. He had the same
faculty for sensing the aspirations of the people, and he understood
equally well the brokerage function which a strongly-organized and
broadly based political party can fulfill in reconciling conflicting
interests. The opposition cried "ascendancy" and "exclusiveness" because
of the number of Scots in Mowat's cabinets. But it was primarily because
they were efficient and hard-working that the premier appointed such men
as James Young, a businessman from Galt who had been the publisher of
the Dumfries Reformer; the scholarly Adam Crooks and buoyant
George W. Ross, the first two Ministers of Education; the Roman Catholic
Christopher Findlay
Fraser, who directed Public Works for twenty years;
the meticulous Alexander McLagan Ross, Provincial Treasurer; and John
Morison Gibson, the author of several social welfare bills. Mowat and
his colleagues took over the moderate Brownite Reform tradition of
Canada West, and gave it new emphases to suit the needs of a province
which was moving rapidly into the industrial age and which, with the
acquisition of the disputed territory to the northwest, doubled in size.
The many social and economic services added by the Ontario government
under Mowat, together with its victories in several constitutional
disputes with the Dominion, destroyed permanently the concept of the
Fathers that the provinces would be no more than large municipalities.
And the stability parties achieved in Ontario over the twenty-four years
of his premiership was evidence that responsible government by party
would obtain in the provinces as at Ottawa.
V
Although the Scots had had their faults and failures
as well as their strengths and successes, they had, as parliamentarians,
been connected in impressive numbers with every important Canadian
political development of the formative nineteenth century. Never so
numerous in the population as the English or the Irish, they had
nevertheless played significant parts in originating the Tory and
radical traditions, in shaping the Reform movements which preceded
responsible government in the Mari-times and Canada, in building the
provincial Conservative and Liberal parties before 1867, and in moulding
the political policies in the new nation both federally and provincially
after 1867. In the events leading to Confederation they had been
constructive leaders. Also, a remarkable number of Scots had been
managers or editors of influential newspapers; they had understood the
power of the press in that century in diffusing opinion on political
questions. As late as 1908, Goldwin Smith remarked: "The voting is in
Parliament, but the national debate is in the press."52
In evaluating the qualities which the Scots brought
into Canadian politics, it would be correct enough to include courage,
stubbornness, diligence, competence, astuteness, resourcefulness, and
even colour, wit, humour and eloquence. But these, after all, were not
unique to Scottish politicians. More distinctive were their combinations
of qualities. They had the capacity at the same time to dream dreams and
to be practical, to emphasize stability and to promote economic and
social progress, to hold firm views of their own and to co-operate with
others of a different political or religious stripe. Possibly there was
an instinct inherited, as some writers have surmised,53 from
ancestors in the days of the "Auld Alliance" between Scotland and France
which helped them to be effective politically in the cultural dualism of
Canada. Noteworthy, too, were their high levels of education - lawyers
predominating - and of adaptability. The latter enabled them to move
throughout the century with the growing country, the
changing concepts of government, and the altering nature of the
political party.
Finally, whichever party label the Scots chose to
wear, they were, on the whole, men who sought the middle course
politically and the British mode of action. Gourlay and Strachan, John
A. Macdonald and Alexander Mackenzie, were equally "loyal." Neilson, the
Archibalds, Johnstone and Blair were typical of the Scots of the centre.
The name of Canada's first national party, which had been fathered by a
Scot, was "Liberal" Conservative, and the temperate Reform principles of
Brown and Mowat were modelled on those of British Victorian Liberalism.
Even though a few Scots had moved farther to the left or the right, the
Toryism of MacNab was only relatively "High," the extremism and
republicanism of William Lyon Mackenzie was rejected by his fellow
countrymen, and the Clear Grit radicalism and Americanism of McDougall
and "Coon" Cameron were soon watered down. This essential moderation and
Britishism of the Scots who occupied such a large place in the
mainstream of Canadian public life in the nineteenth century passed into
the political tradition of Canada.
Richard Van Loon, in analyzing the ethnic origins of
Canadian members of Parliament and cabinet ministers, has commented on
the continuing "Scottish proclivity for gaining the seats of the mighty"
in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Persons of Scots
derivation had declined to about 12% of the population by the census of
1941. Yet from 1896 they had been the largest ethnic group in the House
of Commons -constituting over one-quarter of its membership - and in the
administration. According to Van Loon, 20% of Wilfrid Laurier's cabinet
appointees were Scottish Canadians, 13.3 of R.L. Borden's, 26.9 of
Arthur Meighen's, 23.9 of W.L.M. King's, and 28.6 of R.B. Bennett's.54
As in the nineteenth century, a number of Canadian
Scots have gained political prominence at both provincial and national
levels. The best known of the Scottish-Canadian politicians is William
Lyon MacKenzie King, descendant of the "old rebel" William Lyon
Mackenzie and of a Scottish officer of the Royal Horse Artillery, and
the man who held the office of prime minister longer than any other
politician in the British Commonwealth. Thomas Alexander Crerar, active
in western farm politics, was appointed Minister of Agriculture in the
Union Government (1917-19), led the National Progressive Party
(1921-22), and served in King's Liberal government as Minister of
Railways (1929-30) and Minister of Mines (1935-45). Charles Stewart, the
Premier of Alberta (1917-21), became King's Minister of the Interior
(1921-30). The Scots-born Ian Alastair Mackenzie, Provincial Secretary
in British Columbia in 1928, accepted in succession the federal
portfolios of immigration (1930), national defence (1935-39), pensions
and national health (1939-44), and veterans affairs (1944-48). Simon
Fraser Tolmie, the Minister of Agriculture under both Borden and Meighen
(1919-21, 1926), returned to British Columbia as the provincial
Conservative leader and premier (1928-33). James G. Gardiner, the
Saskatchewan premier (1926-29, 1934-35), headed the Canadian Department
of Agriculture under King and Louis St. Laurent (1935-57). Similarly,
Stuart Sinclair Garson left the premiership of Manitoba (1943-48) for
the post of Minister of Justice under St. Laurent (1948-57), and Hugh
John Flemming, the premiership of New Brunswick (1952-60) for the post
of Forestry under the Conservative government 1960-63). Angus
L.Macdonald interrupted his tenure as premier in Nova Scotia (1933-40,
1945-54) to aid King as Minister of National Defence for naval services
(1940-45). Thomas C. Douglas, a native of Falkirk, Scotland, went from
the CCF premiership of Saskatchewan (1944-61) to the national leadership
of the New Democratic Party (1961-71).
Since about 1940 there has been a growing tendency
among parliamentarians to call themselves simply "Canadian" or
"British." Nevertheless, the Scottish penchant for politics is still
clearly identifiable in the House of Commons of 1975, headed as it is by
the Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Pierre Trudeau, whose mother
was Grace Elliott, and enlivened by former prime minister John George
Diefenbaker, who acknowledges his descent from the Highland emigrants to
the Red River Valley in 1813. Many other members are of Scottish stock:
for example, Allan Joseph MacEachen, Minister of External Affairs; John
Carr Munro, Minister of Labour; Mitchell W. Sharp; J. Angus MacLean,
former Conservative Minister of Fisheries (1957-63); and Donald MacInnis,
Conservative member from Cape Breton.
In the last half-century a new component has entered
Canadian political history. After World War I paved the way for the
participation of women in politics, the pioneers at Ottawa again were of
Scots blood: Agnes Campbell Macphail, the first woman elected to the
House of Commons (1921), and Cairine Mackay Wilson, the first appointed
to the Senate (1930). Today, Flora Isabel MacDonald, a native of Nova
Scotia who represents the Conservative riding of Kingston and the
Islands, is the first woman seriously to compete for the leadership of a
major national party. The presence of women with such ability and spirit
as these promises enrichment of the Scots political tradition in Canada
in the coming years.
NOTES
1. The four volumes of W.J. Rattray, The Scot in
British North America (Toronto: Maclear, 1880) contain considerable
information about Scots in Canadian politics but this, like the material
in works on the Scots in Canada, is mainly useful for biographical
background. Political analysis must be drawn from other sources, such as
those indicated in subsequent notes.
2. S.D. Clark, Movements of Political Protest in
Canada, 1640-1840 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1959), pp.
158-164, 166-167; W.S. MacNutt, New Brunswick: A History 1784-1867
(Toronto: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 100-117.
3. A.L. Burt, The Old Province of Quebec,
Carleton Library Series (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968), I, 77.
4. Hilda Neatby, "The Political Career of Adam Mabane," Canadian Historical Review, xvi (1935), 150.
5. See "Instructions . . . à
Adam Lymburner," Bulletin des Recherches His-toriques, XXXVII (1931), 691.
6. Louis Francois Georges Baby Collection, Public
Archives of Canada, Adam Lymburner
(Londres) à J. Perrault l'aine, 5
Janvier 1791. Copy of original in the Archives of the University of
Montreal.
7. Maxville Women's Institute, History of Maxville
and the Community (Maxville, 1967), pp. 50, 51,53.
8. Robina and Kathleen M. Lizars, In the Days of
the Canada Company 1825-1850 (Toronto: Briggs, 1896), pp. 236-280.
9. Patrick Shirreff, A Tour through North America
(Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1835), p. 104.
10. Adam Fergusson, Practical Notes Made during a
Tour in Canada, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1834), p. 115.
11. W. Stewart Wallace, The Family Compact,
Chronicles of Canada, xxiv (Toronto: Glasgow, Brook, 1915), p. 4.
12. George Patterson, History of the County of
Pictou (New Glasgow, N.S., 1877), pp. 321-363.
13. G.M. Grant, Joseph Howe, 2d ed. (Halifax:
A. and W. MacKinlay, 1906), p. 28.
14. D.C. Harvey, "The Intellectual Awakening of Nova
Scotia," Historical Essays on the Atlantic Provinces, G.A.
Rawlyk, ed., Carleton Library Series (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,
1967), p. 117.
15. M.O. Hammond, Confederation and Its Leaders
(Toronto: McClelland, 1917),p.309.
16. John A. Macdonald Papers, PAC, McDougall to
Macdonald, April 11, 1881.
17. John Strachan: Documents and Opinions,
J.L.H. Henderson, ed., Carleton Library Series (Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart, 1969), p. 21, Strachan to Dr. James Brown, March 31, 1801.
18. George W. Spragge, ed., The John Strachan
Letter Book: 1812-1834 (Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1946),
p. 163, Strachan to Colonel John Harvey, June 22, 1818.
19. William Kilbourn, The Firebrand (Toronto:
Clarke, Irwin, 1956), p. 160.
20. U.C. Sundries, PAC, Talbot to Secretary George
Hillier, March 19, 1824.
21. Aileen Dunham, Political Unrest in Upper
Canada 1815-1836, Carleton
Library Series (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,
1963), p. 53. Cf. Gerald M. Craig, Upper Canada: The Formative Years
1784-1841 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966), p. 170.
22. J.W. Pickersgill, The Mackenzie King Record,
I, (1939-1944) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960), p. 565.
Cf. Wilfred Campbell, The Scotsman in Canada: Eastern Canada
(Toronto: Musson, n.d.), p. 335 ff.
23. Lord Durham's Report, Gerald M. Craig,
ed., Carleton Library Series (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963), p.
23.
24. Helen Taft Manning, The Revolt of French
Canada 1800-1835 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1962), p. 161.
25. Andre Beaulieu et Jean Hamelin, Les Journaux
du Quebec de 1764 a 1964 (Quebec: Les Presses de l'Universite Laval,
1965), p. 212. See also Mason Wade, The French Canadians 1760-1967,
rev. ed. (Toronto: Macmillan, 1968), I, 138-144, on the division in
the popular party between the followers of Papineau and of Neilson.
26. Joseph Schull, Rebellion: The Rising in French
Canada 1837 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1971), p. 94.
27. Aegidius Fauteux, Patriotes de 1837-1838
(Montreal: Les Editions des Dix, 1950), p. 373.
28. A general background for the reform movement in
the Maritimes is found in W.S. MacNutt, The Atlantic Provinces
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968). Edward Manning Saunders,
Three Premiers of Nova Scotia (Toronto: Briggs, 1909) is detailed on
J.W. Johnstone.
29. For general discussions of the politics of the
Province of Canada consult: J.M.S. Careless, The Union of the Canadas
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972); and Paul G. Cornell, The
Alignment of Political Groups in Canada, 1841 -1867 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1962).
30. On this stage of Neilson's career see: Racism
or Responsible Government: The French Canadian Dilemma of the 1840's,
Elizabeth Nish, ed., "Issues in Canadian History," ed. Morris Zaslow
(Toronto: Copp Clark, 1967), pp. 2-5, 23,
31-34, 94, 102, 118-119,173-174.
31. E.g., J.C. Dent, The Last Forty Years: The
Union of 1841 to Confederation (1881), Carleton Library Series
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972), pp. 40, 248, 256. A more
favourable view is taken in: Carl F. Smith, "The Political Career of
Allan Napier MacNab (1825-1836): A Study in Detemination," M.A. thesis,
University of Guelph, 1971.
32. Donald Creighton, John A. Macdonald: The Young
Politician(Toronto: Macmillan, 1952), pp. 174-237. Cf. James A. Roy,
The Scot and Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1947), pp.
104-105.
33. O.D. Skelton, The Life and Times of Sir
Alexander Tilloch Galt (Toronto: Oxford, 1920), pp. 229-230,
Macdonald to Galt, November 2, 1857.
34. Creighton, p. 238.
35. J.M.S. Careless, Brown of the Globe
(Toronto: Macmillan, 1959-1963), I, 195-237, II, 13-14; and "The Toronto
Globe and Agrarian Radicalism, 1850-67," Canadian Historical Review,
XXIX (1948), 14-39.
36. Scattered references are found in such works as:
Lorne C. Callbeck, The Cradle of Confederation (Fredericton:
Brunswick Press, 1964); Donald Creighton, The Road to Confederation
(Toronto: Macmillan, 1964); W.L. Morton, The Critical Years
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1964); W.M. Whitelaw, The Maritimes
and Canada before Confederation (1934; reprinted Toronto: Oxford
University Press, 1966).
37. George Stewart, Canada under the
Administration of the Earl of Duf-ferin (Toronto: Rose-Belford,
1878), pp. 240-241.
38. J.C. Dent, The Canadian Portrait Gallery
(Toronto: Magurn, 1880), I, 88.
39. P.B. Wake, The Life and Times of Confederation
(2d ed.; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), pp. 180, 183,
191-192.
40. [A.A. Macdonald], "Notes on the Quebec
Conference, 1864," Canadian Historical Review, i (1920), 35-37.
Macdonald was one of the few who kept notes of the proceedings at
Quebec; he reported his own speeches in some detail.
41. Correspondence of Sir John Macdonald, Sir
Joseph Pope, ed. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, n.d.), p. 165,
Macdonald to John Rose, March 5, 1872.
42. On Macdonald as Prime Minister, see Donald
Creighton, John A. Macdonald: The Old Chieftain (Toronto:
Macmillan, 1965).
43. Sir John G. Bourinot, Builders of Nova Scotia
(Toronto: Copp Clark, 1900), p. 82.
44. On Mackenzie as Prime Minister, see Dale C.
Thomson, Alexander Mackenzie: Clear Grit (Toronto: Macmillan,
1960), pp. 169-343.
45. John Murray Gibbon, Scots in Canada
(Toronto: Musson, 1911), pp. 137-138.
46. Canada, House of Commons, Debates, 1891,
pp. 884-887.
47. On Mowat's career see: A. Margaret Evans, "The
Mowat Era, 1872-1896: Stability and Progress," Profiles of a Province
(Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1967), pp. 97-106; and "Oliver
Mowat: The Pre-Premier and Post-Premier Years," Ontario History,
lxii (1970), 137-150.
48. George Bryce, The Scotsman in Canda: Western
Canada (Toronto: Musson, 1911), p. 328.
49. Private collection, MacLaren Family Papers,
Donald McLaren, Kent County, to Robert MacLaren, Huron County, Ontario
(author's greatgrandfather), January 31, 1874. The reference is to David
Mills who was returned as the member for Bothwell in the federal
elections of January 22, 1874.
50. MacLaren Family Papers, Robert Fergusson,
Stirling, Scotland, to Robert MacLaren, June 6, 1892.
51. Martin Robin, ed., Canadian Provincial
Politics (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1972), passim.
52. Quoted in Alexander Brady, Democracy in the
Dominions (3d ed.; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), p.
568.
53. John Murray Gibbon, Canadian Mosaic
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1938), p. 109; Roy, Scot and
Canada, p. 109.
54. Richard Van Loon, The Structure and Membership
of the Canadian Cabinet, Report no. 8, Royal Commission on
Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1966), pp. 44-48.