Being prime minister is a thankless job. These surely would have been the thoughts of Canada’s Father of Confederation on this date in 1885 had he happened to read the Brantford Expositor newspaper. An unknown editorialist at the Ontario paper fired quite a salvo at old Sir John A.
“It would be for better for Canada if Sir John Macdonald had never been born,” he wrote in editorial. “The man exercises an unaccountable fascination over people who might well be expected to despise him. He is no orator. When he gets upon his legs be mumbles and repeats his sentences yet Tories will strain their ears to catch every syllable and they will laugh at and treasure old jokes of his that would not be tolerated by a circus audience.”
And the newspaper was just getting warmed up. “The proof that he has systematically bribed newspapers, manufacturers and speculators with the people's money is as plain that two and two make four but men who are honest in their business relations and who would themselves scorn to give or take bribes have no condemnation for Sir John,” the diatribe continued. “He will drink, and curse and swear, and tell smutty stories at rate that would ensure his popularity with a band of cowboys, but ministers of the gospel who know his habits and character will shut their eyes and smile as if the rules of morality and decency by which ordinary citizens are bound had no applicability to the Tory leader.”
Sir John A., of course, would have the last laugh and win two more general elections.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.