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Right from the beginning of his political career, John A. Macdonald offered voters a clear choice between a politics of wealth and a politics of identity. In 1844, when he published his platform in the Kingston Gazette, Macdonald declared: "In a young country like Canada, I am of opinion that it is of more consequence to endeavour to develop its resources and improve its physical advantages, than to waste the time of the legislature and the money of the people in fruitless discussions on abstract and theoretical questions of government." 1 Macdonald always took the view that quarrelling could not resolve Canada's differences but development might. He backed those arguments with a personal warmth and bonhomie that extended even to political opponents. Maybe Canadians really could get along! But Macdonald's platform had a built-in bias in favour of wealth that fuelled economic polarization in the "gilded age" politics of late-Victorian Canada. The growing gaps between extremes of wealth and poverty added new fuel to old tensions and made classic Macdonaldian accommodations anachronistic.
Macdonald's attack on identity politics rested upon an underlying appeal to a shared British civic identity. He backed Confederation on grounds that it would reinforce rather than loosen the bonds between mother country and colony, and he campaigned to the end on the slogan "A British subject I was born and a British subject I will die." But British identity, for Macdonald, did not go much deeper than the British formula for economic and political success: parliamentary supremacy, liberal economics and a property franchise. Under force of circumstance - the rise of American protectionism - he abandoned liberal economics without much obvious regret and introduced a protective tariff that enriched both government and party coffers. He celebrated the achievement of a national property franchise in 1885 as his greatest achievement.
Ambitious Canadian politicians learned an enduring lesson from Macdonald's arguments against identity politics. While Grit and Liberal rivals tended to ramp up their anti-Catholic and anti-French diatribes, Macdonald drew FrenchCanadian support by continually damping down such appeals. In 1856, in a famous letter to the editor of the Montreal Gazette, he read the riot act to the Anglo-Protestants of Montreal, telling them to stop being so damn superior, so much like Northern...