Things in History You Should Know: John Diefenbaker

Here is the spooky Halloween special I promised. Make sure you stare at the above picture for at least five minutes before attempting to sleep this night.

Gather ‘round the fire, boys and girls, and huddle close together. You thought you heard something in the bushes, Timmy? Man up, little boy. Don’t you know the wind when you hear it?

Now then. It was a dark and stormy night. For decades, the Liberals under Mackenzie King and Louis St. Laurent ruled over Canada with iron fists. All across the nation, the people cried out for change. Little did they know the cost this ‘change’ would bring.

Election season, 1957. St. Laurent – called ‘Uncle Louis’ by the fear-gripped populace – felt his stranglehold on power weaken with his increasing age. A grandfatherly demeanour was no longer enough and it was his bad luck to be up against a wild-eyed madman from the godless west.

But who was this ‘madman’ who captured the hearts of the people with his promises of rainbows and ponies for every child? Raised in a land called Saskatchewan, he dreamed of the day he would rise to seize the office of prime minister – by force if necessary, preferably by gilded words. His mother attempted to dissuade him of these notions by telling him that it was impossible for a western lad to become PM, as she knew the havoc her spawn might unleash. But he would not hear of it.

His course decided upon, nothing could steer him from it. Even then-sitting Prime Minister Laurier – who, as a Liberal, sensed the dark future this lad might cause – tried to push him away from politics when the lad gained an audience from him whilst selling him a newspaper. Diefenbaker brushed him off like he was so much lint and went to sell more newspapers to bolster his war chest.

And though the heavens struggled mightily against him by inflicting a German last name upon him and having him move to safe Liberal ridings, Diefenbaker struggled even more mightily back, until he became a Member of Parliament in 1940. He continued much as he did in the seatless years, fighting battle after battle in periodic leadership races. Arthur Meighen was old and crotchety (and a bit of a dick). He would be put to pasture sooner than later. So this proved true, as it did for the failed John Drew.

Thus we return to 1957, with its red scares and pipeline debate and all that petty nonsense. St. Laurent was rather more in the mood to retire early with a glass of warm milk than fight an election, but Diefenbaker? Ah, he fought dirty. And he had a power that St. Laurent didn’t: the ability to take advantage of the West’s collective Napoleon complex with the mighty force of populism. Against all expectations, he won. A minority government, yes, but he did win.

And you know what? He didn’t do too badly that first year. This was aided by the fact that the Liberals were still trying to puzzle out this brave new world in which, oh my stars, they were the opposition and in which they had a leader that was well under sixty. So Diefenbaker called an election because that uppity bowtie-wearing egghead Lester Pearson was clearly trying to undermine him. The Governor General was like, why the hell not?

The year was 1958. That’s right; Diefenbaker couldn’t even let more than a frickin’ year pass without another damned election. Being Prime Minister wasn’t enough for the likes of him. He had to have a sweet, sweet majority. He achieved this handily by promising the world – one in which he, as the fabled ‘Chief’ would stand at the right hand of the J-Man in ability to grant grace to the hope-starved masses and the frozen north would be transformed into a land of milk and honey. Then the Dark Times came.

The Canadian dollar lost parity with its American counterpart. Darkness descended and a plague of locusts overran the land. The Bill of Rights was introduced, which was like the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms if the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was completely fucking useless. The thought of language rights for francophones made him chortle like a whiskeyed-up schoolgirl. To trick people into believing that his reign was not an unmitigated disaster, he brought forth a woman cabinet minister, a native senator, and native voting rights upon the nation. Admittedly, this was pretty awesome.

But then... he scrapped the Avro Arrow. Because the man loved his America and wished for nothing more to complete the perfection of his life than to be BFF with President Eisenhower. (Kennedy, now, he could piss up a rope.)

The Canadian people slowly began to awaken to the hellish reality they had summoned forth, knocking Diefenbaker back into a minority in 1962 and into the humiliation of being leader of the opposition once more in 1963. Lester Pearson became PM and the long national nightmare was largely over, if one ignored the fact that Diefenbaker refused to leave. Like a decrepit zombie whose jaw had long since rotted off, he stalked the chambers of the House of Commons, shouting incoherently in debates. Maple leaves and Oh Canada? Ha! A real Canadian would stick with the red ensign and God Save the Queen until hell froze over the land. Old age conspired to put a stop to him in 1979.

But even death was not enough to free Canada from ‘The Chief’s’ tyranny, for his corpse-stuffed coffin was dragged across the country by train at taxpayer expense with pomp and ceremony! To do less would be an insult to his majesty, he felt.

If you listen closely to the howling wind on chill prairie nights, you might pick out his everlasting moan of “Everyone is against me except the people!” Don’t try too hard to do so, though – hearing those words have been known to drive men mad as they became more and more obsessed with discerning the statement’s logic.

Timmy, seriously, you’re cutting off the circulation in Beth’s arm.

Things in History You Should Know: Hal Kolger

Along the lines of the Queen Crisantha piece, here's another 'Things in History You Should Know' article set in the same world as 'Strike in the Shining City' and the upcoming Nanowrimo work, 'The Spell of Vesperia.' Incidentally, if you wish to sponsor me for that, please regard the Paypal button on the right of the page.

If there’s one thing anyone has noticed about a map of Norland, it’s that it’s big. Really big. ‘Very nearly the largest country in the whole damned world’ big. The thing one must remember, though, is that the map didn’t get so large by itself, nor did all the fiddly little lines and other bits get in there by themselves either. Someone had to explore about, armed with sophisticated instruments, amenable guides, and stuff to write it all down with. One of these someones was Hal Kolger, gentleman of fortune.

‘Twas the year 1117. The mother country of Spira was off warring the other mother country of Langpald (again; it was kind of their thing.) As such, the colonies were warring with each other too, because as much as they would’ve like to keep their noses out of it, the powers that were wouldn’t let them. Ursalia was no exception, for it was a Shulmanian and Shulmania was allied with Spira, QED. Enter Kolger.

We don’t know much about Kolger’s early years. Tradition has it that he was born in the coastal township of Blauenburg in 1086, the son of mariner parents, although there are some tasty indications that by ‘mariner’, they meant ‘pirates of a most criminal and bloodthirsty bent.’ Young Hal grew up all right, though, and by the time 1117 rolled around, he is not on record as having keelhauled anyone.

Nevertheless, he was disinclined towards soldiering on sea or on land so the man described as a ‘giant with a bonfire for a beard’ sought other opportunities to assist the war effort. Such as filling in those tantalizingly blank portions of the map. Find a place, claim it and its resources for your lords and masters, profit as a proud patriot. So he set out into the wilderness, accompanied by a Dakala woman known to posterity as Benathidt.

He kept a journal throughout the journey, writing in it every day and so well that it is known as one of the classics of Shulmanian literature – odd when you consider that none of his previous writings, if they existed, were considered important enough to preserve. He wrote of canoeing to the very source of the Maximilien River, traversing the Giant’s Spine Mountains, legging it across the seemingly endless prairies of Mesopelagia – all and a thousand more feats before finally setting his eyes on the Eila Ocean, near the site of modern day Arms of Gold. When he did so, he writes, he fell to his knees and wept, overcome by it all.

The Nelurians who had set up shop nearby sheltered and fed him, Benathidt, and their three month old son Willem before allowing them to hitch a ship ride in the general direction of home. They were cool like that.

By the time Hal and Benathidt stepped foot in Blauenburg again, it was four years since their initial departure. The war had ended. Hochelaga was now a Spiran colony, along with their original set of Rochilda and Cabotia, leaving Laurentia the sole remaining Langrish colony in Deralea. Hal was hailed as a hero, his journals immediately published for a most respectable sum and financial awards and medals showered upon him by Governor Brauer. As witnessed by the journals which he continued to maintain, Kolger revelled in it. Another son, Erich, arrived in 1123. He and Benathidt wed in the Shulmanian fashion shortly thereafter.

He was happy, wealthy, and honoured. And as everyone with a sense of dramatic narrative knows, that’s when everything went to hell.

First came the death of Erich when he was but two years old. The reason why is uncertain – Kolger’s journals stop at this time. Then Benathidt, the love of his life and without whom his journey west would not have been possible, was found washed up on the shore after a stormy night. Whether her death was an accident or purposeful is, again, uncertain.

The journals never resume, although written accounts of Kolger do. Town records report him stumbling through the streets at all hours of the day, mumbling and sometimes sobbing, drunk to a sickening degree. The situation deteriorated to the extent that Benathidt’s sister was given custody of Willem and leave to spirit him off to her own people, never to see his father again.

Hal Kolger eventually became a ward of the state and he didn’t last long afterwards. He hanged himself in his room (or rather, cell) one morning in 1130, a letter addressed to the long-dead Benathidt the only thing he left behind to explain himself. It didn’t explain much, except how much he wished she would visit him again.

The consequences of his journey outlived the man, the first of these being that the Dakala Tribe became very rich off of his still respectable estate and the sales of his journals. The second of these was tied into the fact that he was Ursalian, or rather, Shulmanian.

Shulmania, after founding Ursalia, had little interest in branching out on the Deralean continent. Nevertheless, by the ‘laws’ of exploration so far as Estelians were concerned, most of it had been claimed by Kolger on their behalf. Neither Langpald nor Nelura were in a position to commandeer this territory and Spira had no desire to piss off a long-standing ally. Thus the hundreds of tribes in between the two coasts went virtually unmolested until Norrish Confederation (with added Ursalia!) in 1245. The individual treaties took decades to hammer out, including those allowing the Great Railway to be built, outlining the conditions for Estelian settlement, and ‘requiring’ assistance in hunting wendigos. This did not stop the occasional armed scuffle, but nothing ever does.

Prime Minister Lark downed several bottles of whiskey and acquired most of her grey hairs because of this Kolger. He likely wouldn’t have felt that much pity, though.

Things in History You Should Know: Sir Matthew Baillie Begbie

A 'Thor is My Drinking Buddy' original! Are you feeling privileged yet?

Back in the early days of British Columbia – ‘early’ in this case being defined as after it became a colony and before it became a province – justice was a tricky thing to administer. Tensions, both racial and national, flared. The amount of land to cover wasn’t exactly compact, nor was it easy to traverse, what with all the mountains in the way. And people, being people, refused to stop committing crimes to make things easier for a poor, beleaguered law man.

Enter Matthew Baillie Begbie, the so-called Hanging Judge. Born at sea in 1819 to Scottish parents, he frittered away his first four decades in Great Britain – attending Cambridge, being a lawyer, and that sort of thing. He must have made a decent account of himself in that field, for when the Colony of British Columbia was formed in 1858, it was decided that he should definitely go be a judge there. (Fun fact: the man who introduced the bill in the British Parliament to make BC happen was none other than Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, of ‘it was a dark and stormy night’ fame. A robust literary career was no bar to politics in those days.)

It wasn’t a cozy desk job like he had back in London and it’s not certain why he accepted it. Most likely, he was the type of person to whom travelling hundreds of miles on horseback to hear a case sounded romantic. He rode about in his circuits, always holding court in full costume and often in his tent. And yes, there was some hanging involved, but not as much as you might think.

At the time, hanging was the only possible sentence for murder. Fifty-two murder trials were conducted during the colonial part of his stint, with thirty-eight convictions and twenty-seven actual hangings. (Begbie had asked for and got clemency for the remaining eleven convicts.) Nevertheless, the soubriquet stuck. Not that he didn’t take advantage of its intimidation factor, which was probably aided by his giant stature.

It also seems like he made it a personal policy not to be an asshole towards the locals, which was always a fine plan when they outnumbered the British in the area ten to one. He still insisted on having his trials be as British as possible, of course, but he made allowances such as switching out the oath on the Bible with something that would actually mean something to them and conducting the proceedings in their language. Did he use an interpreter? No. They were for the weak. He learned those languages, man.

Furthermore, those eleven convicts that he got clemency for were all natives and he could and did convict white men for crimes against natives using evidence from natives. This made him more progressive than approximately 95% of the English-speaking world of the time, give or take.

Now, how did Begbie get along with James Douglas, the governor of BC? It’s complicated. It seems as though most of the time, he dealt with the cranky old bastard quite well. He spoke up for a friend who wished to marry one of Douglas’ daughters and did not immediately get thrown out of the house. He served as a pallbearer at his funeral.

But Begbie made his true feelings be known at Douglas retirement party in 1864. Not only did he have the unmitigated audacity to plonk down beside the soon-to-be ex-governor whilst smoking a pipe – this was considered to be as rude as all hell even back then – he proceeded to give a speech about how he had hated every one of Douglas’ policies and he wasn’t the only one to think so. This didn’t go over well and he was booed into silence.

After BC joined up with the rest of Canada in 1871, Begbie was named its first chief justice of its supreme court. But four years later, during his first vacation in a very long time, Queen Victoria knighted him by surprise and he became Sir Matthew Baillie Begbie. Once he came back, he still rode his circuits and participated in what passed for progressive politics at the time (“I’ve got an idea, everyone! Let’s not be complete jerks towards the minorities and the poor!”). While he charmed the socks off of all the ladies, he never married. Perhaps he never met anyone who was so into horseback riding.

He died in Victoria in 1894 of cancer and buried at Ross Bay Cemetery. It is said that if you visit his grave on the night of the full moon, nothing much will happen. Maybe you’ll get rained on.

Things in History You Should Know: Pierre Trudeau

Today is the tenth anniversary of Trudeau's death. At the time, I'm not sure if I cared overmuch. Class was in session when the news broke and the option was given for those students overwhelmed by it all to go home and think about this great democracy. There may have been some genuine feeling among those who took advantage of it, but it was largely understood as an officially-sanctioned excuse to play hooky. I think I stayed at school.

I grew up and learned. I learned that history didn't have to occur more than a century ago to be interesting and that I damned well better know and understand the more recent stuff if ever I were to have a perspective beyond the previous week. I learned just how recently the national character of Canada consisted of reactionaries who seemingly longed for the heyday of the British Empire even as they struggled for a visible place on the world stage. Unless they were Francophones. Then they were just reactionaries. Don't ask about the First Nations.

That's not to say that all of Canada consisted of bigots and reactionaries. It's just that if you weren't, you were obviously a communist. Yes, I'm exaggerating, but not as much as I'd like.

Come the fifties, a sea change became apparent. First, you have Diefenbaker who was otherwise insane with his humble Bill of Rights. Second, you have Pearson with his bow tie and his student loans and social security and all sorts of other goodness. (Not to mention the bow tie. Bow ties are cool.) Third, you have... Trudeau, who among other things, made being Canadian something genuinely cool.

To think on this again makes me long for a Prime Minister with a sense of vision - someone who understands that we can go to so many wonderful places from here. Right now, we have a fellow who combines the worst worlds of fiscal irresponsibility and reactionary politics that seem like a throwback to the bad old days. We can do better and we will do better.

This article was originally published on December 9, 2009 in the University of Lethbridge student newspaper, the Meliorist. I was a week shy of graduating and being done with Alberta forever - hence my bitter tone towards the province. To be fair, anyone would feel like that after hearing Stelmach speak.

So read on. Toast to Trudeau afterwards if you're so inclined and hope that one day, I'll write a more fitting tribute to him.


~

Screw it. For what’s very probably my last article for this esteemed chronicle of news – hurrah for imminent graduation! – I’m going to piss off as many Albertans as possible. Because I will move away, and you will not find me.

That’s right. It’s Pierre Trudeau time. And I will start off by saying this: he was a better than average prime minister. If you wish to argue with me on this point, attempt to name a Tory PM that was better than him. Mulroney? Harper? Thor forbid, Diefenbaker? Sorry, Macdonald and Borden were the only awesome ones. So what did this chap do, in his multitude of years in office (1968-1979, 1980-1984, apologies to Joe Clark) to merit my relatively high opinion of him? Dude, I will tell you.

He made the world give two shits who the Canadian prime minister was. This was likely aided by Richard Nixon being the US president during a respectable chunk of his tenure, an ugly sort of man in every possible way. But even if Nixon had been a worthwhile human being, Trudeau had him bang to rights on the charm and wit front. Which is why John Lennon chose to hang out with him. (Nixon did get to talk football with Hunter S. Thompson, though.)

He rocked as Minister of Justice, which was what Lester Pearson, our nicest PM, made him in 1967. What on earth did he do in that position? Well, I’ll tell you! He legalized contraception and homosexuality, and shoved a foot in the door for the eventual legalization of abortion by making it legal to perform the act if the mother’s life was in danger. Oh, and he made it illegal for you to drive if you had one too many. All of this came from the massive Bill C-150, which also placed restrictions on harassing phone calls, gun ownership, and animal cruelty. Separate from all this, he further enabled one to leave one’s loveless sham of a marriage, should one please.

He was kind of bad ass. This was a man who just sat there calmly while separatists chucked bottles and rocks at him on the very eve of his first election as Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Party, while everyone went and hid like the sensible people children that they were. His successors in the party tended to exercise this trait as well, with Turner saving Diefenbaker from drowning and Chretien’s development of the Shawinigan Shake. Ignatieff must learn from these exalted examples if he is ever to become PM.

He introduced official bilingualism. Yes, this is a virtue. Whether we like to admit it or not, historically speaking, French language rights in this country – not just in Quebec, mind you – have been kicked repeatedly in the teeth. Frankly, having that bit of extra text on your cereal box or having that additional bit of a requirement if you intend to enter certain sectors of the federal bureaucracy is not an overwhelming sacrifice to redress this.

He engineered the patriation of the Constitution. It is a rather ridiculous thing that for 165 years after Confederation, we did not have the ability to tinker with our own constitution. Nay, we had to go all the way to the British Parliament and ask nicely, perhaps bringing along a tasteful gift basket with a nice selection of tea and biscuits. Regardless of the political circus that surrounded the process (Night of the Long Knives, anyone?), it was something that needed to be done if we were ever going to become independent from Britain on paper as well as in fact.

His newfangled constitution included the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Diefenbaker’s Bill of Rights of 1960, while well-intentioned, was toothless. True, it caused the dawn of judicial activism in Canada, bringing forth such terrible thing as full abortion rights and same-sex marriage and Native land claims. (Note: the word ‘terrible’ in the last sentence is sarcastic. I can hear your hands wringing, campus Right to Lifers.) Plus, it has been argued that such activism limits democracy in this fair country. However, I would argue that human rights should not be subject to the whims of the electorate because if history has shown us anything, it’s that the electorate haven’t been too great on that count. Pity about that notwithstanding clause, though.

Oh yes, National Energy Program – the implementation of this is a legitimate gripe, no matter how well-meaning it was, although it may have sheltered Canada as a whole from the worst effects of the global recession that was all the rage at the time. And there was the whole ‘invoking the War Measure Act’ thing with the FLQ Crisis. Still, my filthy lefty self can’t help but appreciate Trudeau, ginormous faults and all.

And as a final, I’d like to say this: the brands of small ‘c’ and big ‘c’ conservatism to be found in this province are rubbish, the tar sands are rubbish too, ‘feminism’ is not a cuss word, and your wind is far too apt to cause shenanigans (such as making me feel like frickin’ Shackleton whilst out walking last weekend). But what the hell, Alberta beef is still delicious.

Farewell, all! I head now for hillier climes.

Things in History You Should Know: Queen Crisantha

This is an attempt at writing one of my history articles about the world in which Strike takes place. It was fun times.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away – okay, Spira – us peasantry got it in the teeth a plenitude of times. And it wasn’t all that long ago, being more like a century and a half, give our take. Yet now we live in a happy fun world where the colonies are their own nations, parliaments reign supreme, and the nobility don’t have a whole mess of privileges with which to lord it over us lesser folk. And who do we have to thank for this?

That’s right. Crisantha fuckin’ Landrell. Queen Crisantha, that is.

Nevertheless, democratic reformer types don’t just magically spring fully-formed from the foreheads of the nobility. Sure, there had been revolutions, both peaceful and violent, springing up pretty much all over the Estelian continent and a suitably idealistic young noble might possibly, without further provocation, take up the cause of the downtrodden. Might, but not likely.

The key element here is the Shulmanian Revolution, in which that country, its last emperor having got himself killed through act of horse and his remaining relatives being so distant they might as well be on another hemisphere, decided that elections might be worth a try. Thus so did Abelard von Aschenheim became their first president, a couple of generations before Crisantha got started. Why is this relevant, you may ask? Well, it just so happens that Crisantha’s mother was a cousin of his. And that Crisantha was sent over to Shulmania in her youth to go get educated. And who was in charge of her education? Come on, now. You can figure this out.

So you have this young noblewoman, who’s next in line to inherit her father’s duchy of Belsworth and who also, incidentally and through the most technically correct interpretations, has more of a right to the throne than the then-queen Lucina did. And she’s off in foreign parts, getting her head stuffed full of ideas.

Now, if you’re a sensibly minded monarch, you’ll leave that branch of the family well enough alone and find some nice little cause they can distract themselves with. Queen Lucina was hardly sensible. In fact, most historians say, she was downright crazy. She had the Duke of Belsworth arrested, along with Crisantha’s younger brother Tiberian, and told the whippersnapper to stay out of the country, lest she have the two executed.

Too bad the prison conditions were so lousy that the duke died. Also too bad that rumours of torture, involving said duke and her brother reached the newly-fledged Lady Crisantha’s ears in not-far-enough-off Shulmania. (These later turned out to be true.) And you better believe that she declared it on. Or the 13th century equivalent thereof.

She got herself an army. This was easy enough, considering the Shulmanian Congress had already voted to support her and oh, incidentally, there were a lot of people down south in Spira that thought she might possibly make a better queen than Lucina. Wholesale oppression of the lower – and middle classes, who had quite the percentage of the nation’s wealth in their ample pockets – had that effect. Rebellion had begun.

It lasted an entire year, fracturing the country like a mirror that got a rock tossed at it. Brother against sister! Parent against child! Pristinian against Nelurian! (Although as those last two were foreign, no one was really paying attention to what they had to say about it.) Long story short, the ‘Belsworths’, as they were called, were victorious, despite more than their fare share of near finishes.

Crisantha celebrated her nineteenth birthday on February 29, 1211, the very day she was crowned. And your parents thought you were precocious. The former Queen Lucina was executed just afterwards and she was lucky enough to watch the whole, wonderfully choreographed coronation. Her last words were recorded for posterity; alas, they’re but a string of expletives.

Then the nobles who supported her got a nasty shock: she really meant her grand speeches of reform and democracy and egalitarianism. She stripped her former fellow dukes and duchesses of most of their privileges, particularly those of tax avoidance and their hogging of almost all of the seats in the House of Commons, not to mention all of the laws that gave them a free pass for almost any offense committed against someone of a ‘lesser’ class. Good thing the middle class supported her, then – the uppers wouldn’t lend her money anymore.

She carried along those lines for the rest of her days, fitting in a couple of scandalous affairs to spice up the quiet times. Counter-rebellions were quashed, including that headed by the late Lucina’s brother, Asher. (We don’t know what happened to him – if he died in battle or was captured, it was never reported.) Then she died in 1291, so peacefully as to annoy all of her enemies and having already declared that the monarchy was to be a strictly ceremonial position from that point onwards.

In interest of full disclosure, one of her grandchildren did have the unmitigated gall to attempt a coup, as did some other scions of the royal line over the years. And for some of the colonies, most famously Abelia, the transition towards self-government didn’t come fast enough for them, leading to their own rebellions to gain their independence. (This hasn’t prevented them from wanting to snatch independence from others for the sake of some sweet, sweet land.) And, yes, she didn’t do it alone – many of her prime ministers, including Evelyn Godsmark, did much of the grunt work in getting her reforms passed through Parliament in the first place.

It couldn’t have happened at all, though, if it wasn’t for one young woman on a revenge kick. Now that’s a moral for the ages.

John A. Macdonald and the Pacific Scandal

A nonfiction piece, done in the vein of Things in History You Should Know.

In 1873, John A. Macdonald was not in a happy place. He’d been serving as Canada’s first prime minister for six years by that point and he quite liked the gig – that, and the drinking. He’d accomplished much in that time. He’d put down rebellions. He’d weathered through the murder of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, a dear friend and drinking partner. To the original four provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, he’d added British Columbia, Prince Edward Island and the entire Northwest Territories, which was so huge, they eventually carved out three extra provinces and two territories from its magnificent bulk. And now that he already fulfilled his main goal of creating a country that spanned the continent, he was already enacting schemes of keeping it together.

Exhibit number one, the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), which would connect all of the provinces together without venturing into American territory.

So Macdonald had a great, nation-building, media-friendly project on the strength of which he could and did win the 1872 election. What could he possibly do to screw it up? Send a telegram to a railway promoter by the name of Hugh Allan begging for more campaign money. Have a paper trail indicating that said Allan contributed about a third of a million dollars to the campaign, which to put it in today’s terms, was holy crap, a lot of money. Reward Allan the contract for the CPR post-election. Have a Liberal Opposition that’s hell-bent on getting in power one of these days and ready to spend a respectable chunk of change for a copy of the telegram.

Which are promptly published in all the right Liberal newspapers.

Thus we come back to Macdonald, in the August of 1873. He was facing an inquiry in less than two weeks. His finances were in shambles. His young daughter, Mary, was suffering from a mysterious condition that swelled her head and debilitated her body – it would later be known to be hydrocephaly. He walked out of his summer home in Trois-Rivières and disappeared for an entire weekend.

What is known is that he spent this time going on the mother of all benders, heading off to Montreal and elsewhere while his wife, Agnes, wondered where the hell he had got to. What isn’t known is whether he merely fell into the river in a drunken stupor or if it was an attempt at suicide. The papers started speculating… then stopped.

Then Macdonald sobered up. Relatively speaking.

He survived the royal inquiry, but when Parliament met again in October, it was done. Previously loyal MPs had revolted, Macdonald could no longer pretend to have their support, so he resigned as Prime Minister. He just barely held on as leader of the Conservative Party.

Alexander Mackenzie of the Liberal Party took over from that point, calling an election in 1874. He won this despite making it as un-fun as possible – secret ballots never did have the thrill of danger and pressure of peers as the old method did. He engaged on a program of electoral reform and having the CPR finance its own damned self. But there were two things working against him. One, solidness and dependability are admirable traits for a stonemason, which he formerly was, but the public demands a touch more zing in their prime ministers. Two, economic depression, which was, of course, entirely the fault of him and his inclination for freer trade with the States.

Macdonald took advantage of both with bells on in the election of 1878. The matter of ‘zing’? Easy for him to take care of. Ugly though he was, drunk though he may be at times, Macdonald was a walking ball of charm. The matter of the economy? Oh, he had a plan for that. First, you get that railway built. Second, you used that railway to ship people westward to the Prairies to homestead. Third, you shipped – grains and foodstuffs eastward, manufactured goods and niceties westward. A simple, pat plan in which the States hardly needed to be dealt with at all. It was called the National Policy and the voting population deemed it good.
He never left office after that.

The railway was eventually built, several years overdue and millions of dollars over-budget, but the National Policy did seem to work. He’d held onto power despite the matter of Louis Riel’s second rebellion over in the west, which ended with Riel’s execution and the whole of Quebec being righteously ticked about that. He even made a solid go at giving unmarried women the vote, but was, alas, defeated in that.

John A. lived to see his son, Hugh, become an MP in the 1891 election, but died in office later that year. Considering his recurring poor health, the drinking, and the century, seventy-six was not a bad age to make it to.

Of course, because of his failure to groom a successor, the Conservative Party wouldn’t recover from his death for another generation. Canada would just have to deal with the Liberal PM Wilfrid Laurier, who was almost as stylish as John A. and less prone to silly little scandals. It seemed to work for him.