Sir John A. Macdonald(1815–1891)

John Alexander Macdonald was born on 11 January 1815 at Brunswick Street in Glasgow, the third child of a struggling Sutherland-born shopkeeper named Hugh Macdonald and his Inverness wife Helen Shaw. His father's business failed in 1820 and the family emigrated to Kingston in Upper Canada, where Hugh set up as a country trader in the back-settlements. John was schooled at the Midland District Grammar School in Kingston on the strength of family money found by relatives, then articled at fifteen to a Kingston lawyer named George Mackenzie. By twenty he was practising on his own account; by twenty-eight he was leading commercial counsel in the town. He stood for the Kingston seat in the Province of Canada legislature in 1844, won it, and held a seat in the Canadian parliament for the next forty-seven years.

Through the 1850s and early 1860s the politics of British North America was an impossibility. The Province of Canada was deadlocked along religious and linguistic lines; the Maritimes were drifting; American Civil War traffic across the unguarded border raised fears of invasion; British investors would not fund a transcontinental railway with the political structure as it stood. Macdonald, as Attorney General West from 1854 and co-Premier in three ministries between 1857 and 1864, slowly built the cross-bench coalition that could pass a federal settlement. The Charlottetown Conference of September 1864, the Quebec Conference of October 1864, and the London Conference of 1866 to 1867 were the three negotiations where he held the federal model together against provincial-rights pressure from every direction. The British North America Act passed in March 1867; the Dominion of Canada came into being on 1 July; Macdonald was sworn in as the country's first Prime Minister and knighted by Victoria within the week. He was fifty-two.

The promise that brought British Columbia into Confederation in 1871 was a transcontinental railway within ten years, and Macdonald's National Policy of protective tariffs from 1879 set the economic frame to deliver it. The Canadian Pacific Railway was completed at Craigellachie in British Columbia on 7 November 1885, three years ahead of schedule. The country was now physically one.

The country he was building in those years was not yet the country on the map. When he took office in 1867 the Dominion had four provinces, all in the east. Macdonald's government negotiated the acquisition of Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company in 1869 to 1870, bringing the prairies and the north under Canadian jurisdiction; brought Manitoba into Confederation in 1870 and British Columbia in 1871; raised the North-West Mounted Police in 1873 (the body that became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police); established the Supreme Court of Canada in 1875; and built the National Policy of tariffs and economic nation-building from 1879. The institutional architecture of the country that exists today was set under his hand.

He won three further general elections (1882, 1887, 1891) and died in office of a stroke on 6 June 1891, six days after his last Commons appearance. He was seventy-six. The Macdonald name in Canada is the name of the man who made the country: the architect of the federal state, the tactician who solved the impossibility of the 1860s, the prime minister who carried Confederation, the railway, and the institutional shape of the modern Dominion from a Kingston law office to a continental Parliament. The federal framework he built has held for over a century and a half. He is buried in Cataraqui Cemetery at Kingston; his birthday, 11 January, is observed across Canada as Sir John A. Macdonald Day by federal proclamation.