Today in Canada's Political History - May 30, 1882: Sir John A.’s famous speech to the Workingmen of Toronto

  • National Newswatch

Today is the anniversary of one of the greatest stump speeches ever delivered by a Canadian Prime Minister. It was 1882 and a federal campaign was raging and Sir John A. Macdonald of Kingston took to a Toronto stage to address the workingmen of the city.

The speech was vintage Macdonald; funny, partisan and so much more. He was repeatedly interrupted by cheers as he extolled the positive effects on his National Policy before his enthusiastic audience.

“I have carried out the policy which I believed now, was for the interest of the country. (loud cheers) I have carried out that policy, and the country has sustained me,” Canada’s first Prime Minister thundered. “And at the end of five years the manufacturers will have generated so much capital, while the workingmen, the skilled and unskilled labor that surround those varied industries, will have become so powerful, the capitalists will be linked together in associations, and workingmen will be bound together in trades unions, and they will fight the battle together. (loud cheers) Capital and labor will go hand in hand, and they will put down all attempts to make this country what it was before, a mere agricultural country, from which all skilled labor went to the United States to find employment, and that skilled labor will remain in the country. ("hear, hear")

It truly was a speech for the ages. And reading it today it will surprise no one that Sir John A. and his party received their third majority mandate when the ballots were counted a few days later.

You can read Macdonald’s speech at this link: https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/primeministers/h4-4035-e.html




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.