None for the Ages

In 1978, near the end of Pierre Trudeau’s first stretch as prime minister of Canada, an aging expat poet from the Westmount district of Montreal asked, “What is the expression which the age demands?” Leonard Cohen was addressing, it must be said, neither his generation’s leaders nor its voters, but his fellow poets. Quietude, he counselled. North America had just seen a war unfold in Southeast Asia in real time, followed by a decade of disappointment and unease. “There is nothing you can show on your face that can match the horror of this time,” he wrote. “Do not even try.”

Politicians, the manager-actors of democracy, typically escape the responsibility of trying to express an era — but they are often held up as the expression of one. In a season fixated on a presidential election in the United States and speculating ad nauseam on a federal one at home, this has especially proven true south of the border. “The most persuasive case for Obama has less to do with him than with the moment he is meeting,” wrote Andrew Sullivan in the December 2007 Atlantic Monthly. “The moment has been a long time coming, and it is the result of a confluence of events, from one traumatizing war in Southeast Asia to another in the most fractious country in the Middle East.”

Obama, Sullivan argued, is the right person for the times, not so much for his abilities or his rhetoric, but because of his identity as a sincerely spiritual black man who opposed a war most Americans regret and the world loathes. He seems poised to unite a generational and ideological divide that has rent the US since Vietnam. No doubt the times demand such a leader. In the years following a spectacularly sinister act from without, America’s most cherished ideals have come under attack from within, thanks to Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and the Patriot Act.

North of the forty-ninth parallel, we are in a period of intense malaise, caught in the undertow of global and American crises, and threatening crises of our own. Our soldiers are waging our most aggressive military campaign since the Korean War, our government is tackling global warming with a playbook written in the oil sands, and our economy lurches toward recession. And yet our political culture seems stagnant, with a Prime Minister’s Office implementing its agenda under cover of a well-enforced insularity, and an Opposition campaigning primarily to be remembered as history’s most ineffective. At such moments, electorates tend to seek out pivotal leaders. This usually happens pell-mell.

But Canadians are fortunate to have been graced over the past few years with a surfeit of road maps, in the form of biographies and memoirs of our country’s past prime ministers. Two recent offerings, Richard Gwyn’s Charles Taylor Prize–winning John A.: The Man Who Made Us, and John English’s Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, dedicate their first volumes to establishing the backstories and early political lives of two very different figures who nestled into two very different eras. Brian Mulroney’s memoirs and Peter C. Newman’s The Secret Mulroney Tapes, meanwhile, attempt respectively to varnish and sand back down the legacy of a figure whose influence hangs over us perhaps even more than Trudeau’s.

We are long past the era when history was much believed to be Thomas Carlyle’s “biography of great men.” Instead, we look to biography in order to understand how a person and a people aligned during a given era. For biographers of Canadian prime ministers, this daunting task is made still more challenging by the spectre of Donald Creighton, the University of Toronto historian whose mastery of the form earned him two Governor General’s Awards for non-fiction, one for The Young Politician (1952) and the other for The Old Chieftain (1955), the two volumes of his biography of John A. Macdonald. The work has become a canon of one, and by unspoken law no one is permitted to publish a prime ministerial biography in Canada without acknowledging it in the introduction.

Born into a Scottish family led nominally by a striving but unfortunate father, and in spirit by a strong and doting mother, Macdonald was defined politically by struggles with Confederation, the cpr, and the Riel Rebellion, and personally by struggles with debt, alcoholism, a severely disabled daughter, and the tragic deaths of his son and first wife. Still, he met the world with a wit that found its equal among prime ministers perhaps only in John Diefenbaker, making him a much-loved figure among the farmers’ sons and daughters who inhabited the proto-country.

Creighton’s historical imagination is such that readers get a vivid sense not only of who Macdonald was, but who they once were. For instance, he recounts this tavern scene following the thirty-six-year-old Macdonald’s re-election to the parliament of Canada West in 1851:

Macdonald, cheerful, irreverent, elated with whisky and triumph, mounted the platform of Teddy McGuire’s saloon to address the crowd. He was back in his old district, joking with his old neighbours, talking to old friends and acquaintances who already rolled his stories, and escapades, and burlesques about their palates like a well-loved spirit. For five minutes or so they shouted with laughter while he imitated the ridiculous sing-song manner in which a poor worthy Quaker clergyman, well known in the district, used to intone his interminable sermons. A young man, Canniff Haight, who had driven the sleigh back from Picton, stood watching the platform, and the flaring lights of the hotel, and the laughing faces of the spectators. Long afterwards he remembered: and it was out of episodes such as these — at ferries and by roadsides, in hotels and village inns, in city halls and on rural hustings — that the incredible Macdonald legend began to grow.

Creighton narrates the rest of Macdonald’s life in similarly luxurious detail, framing the politician’s thrust toward Confederation as a philosophical response to the US Civil War and to a fear of American domination, but also to the personal connection he felt to the Crown. The biography reveals Macdonald as a man out not to capture people’s imaginations with grand historical sweep, but to find practical solutions to problems. Politics for Macdonald “found its raw material in the problems of a particular landscape and a particular people,” Creighton writes. “It was the task of a politician to work within the tradition, and to respect the limitations and exploit the possibilities of the medium.” Confederation and the cpr were in this sense primarily designs on a craftsman’s table.

In John A.: The Man Who Made Us, Richard Gwyn smartly avoids meeting Creighton in the realms of command or style, shifting instead to the veteran political commentator’s terrain of spare prose and astute interpretation. Where Creighton’s sympathy for Macdonald is unrestrained, Gwyn is even-handed. He challenges Creighton’s contention that Macdonald was an early advocate of Confederation, stating that the idea found its footing in a series of editorials titled The Future of Canada, by Confederation’s honorary poet laureate (and Macdonald’s drinking buddy), Thomas D’Arcy McGee.

Gwyn makes his case not by imagining McGee drafting away at his desk, quill in hand, but by explaining in his own fashion how McGee paved the way for Macdonald. “What was happening here,” Gwyn writes, “as happened so rarely in the pragmatic, provincial world of mid-nineteenth-century Canadian politics, was original thought and unleashed imagination.” His path to explaining how the Canadian people would have received this affront is equally analytical: “With McGee, the idea of Canada as something larger than the sum of its parts entered the public discourse. It was an idea, moreover, that all those who crowded in to hear McGee’s speeches applauded wildly, no matter whether they were Conservatives or Reformers or Grits, or entirely indifferent to all politics.”

It was also an idea that would have been unseemly coming from a leading politician, and Macdonald’s political gifts allowed him to understand this. “I am satisfied not to have a reputation for indulging in imaginary schemes and harbouring visionary ideas,” he said du