Sir John A. Macdonald and Brian Mulroney were two great prime ministers who helped make Canada into a magnificent country that we call home. Despite their apparent contradictions, reconciling their legacies is how Canada moves forward under a new, Conservative prime minister.
Macdonald led the infant Dominion’s first government in 1867, and he remains the second-longest-serving prime minister in Canadian history.
Of the Fathers of Confederation, he was the first among equals. Macdonald’s National Policy of high tariffs and his belief in railways as a nation-building tool laid the foundations for a strong and independent Canada. For him, there was no greater threat to Canada than the creep of the United States, and his life’s work was ensuring that our country was not snuffed out in its infancy.
The fact that Canada managed to expand from sea to sea, let alone survive in the wake of Manifest Destiny is nothing short of providential in its own right. Safeguarding the ongoing integrity of the country is a first-order priority for any government.
In 1988, more than a century after Confederation, Brian Mulroney led a more mature and secure Canada into free trade with the U.S. He also firmly reoriented the country with the democratic West during the Cold War, after years of Pierre Trudeau’s rapprochement and vacillation with the communist bloc.
By signing the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement that swiftly evolved into the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mulroney cemented our comparative advantage of sharing a border with the U.S. As a result, Canadians have a better standard of living and a healthier economy.
The nearly four decades of North American free trade were great years of rising material wealth and comfort that strengthened Canada and the well-being of its people. It is Mulroney’s greatest legacy, and there should be no reactive revisionism about that due to U.S. President Donald Trump’s belligerence and aggression.
Free trade is still worth striving for. Canada relies upon it as a resource exporter and an importer of manufactured foreign goods.
If the U.S. is retreating from continental free trade, Canada must look for new partners to fill the gaps. We should only do so in a principled fashion, and resist the temptation to expand our commercial ties with bad actors like China. There is no moral high ground to be gained by becoming friends with the 21st century’s worst totalitarian states.
A strong and independent Canada would be a major roadblock to the geographic domination sought by Russia and China in the Arctic and Indo-Pacific. They are already making incursions and flyovers into the north, and that territory must remain firmly Canadian.
Fortifying and building up the Arctic is the next great frontier of Canadian history, and is as important now as the railways were at the end of the 19th century.
At this point, Trump’s threats to annex Canada and make it the 51st state are more of a rhetorical irritant than a military threat, but it should be the motivation to create a Canada that stands on its own two feet without a helping hand.
There is no greater way to uphold Macdonald’s legacy than to ensure the country he brought into existence does not disappear from the Earth. Fighting against the internal subversive forces that have been waging war on his legacy should be another goal for conservatives.
Once the most honoured prime minister in Canadian history, Macdonald has been all but erased from the public space by vandals and cast as a villain by the federal government. To restore his legacy, however, the Liberals must be clobbered by the Conservatives in the upcoming general election. Macdonald and Mulroney excelled at this, and it will be a satisfying way to emulate both of them.
A new Canadian era will be ushered in by finally seeing off the Trudeau Liberals, and banishing their ghoulish great white hope Mark Carney into an opulent exile in New York or London. Their decade at the top has been disastrous: Canadians are poorer and Canada is a more expensive place to live, with national pride among younger Canadians lagging badly.
A country whose youth have no hope for the future, has no future. A terminal government whose primary motivation is keeping their jobs cannot be trusted to safeguard the country, let alone improve it
So much will have changed since the last Conservative government if they return to power. The assumptions held in 2015 for the future of Canada, North America and the world have been uprooted and tossed aside.
To reclaim the pride of being a secure, sovereign, and strong country, Canada must first recover from this lost decade of mediocrity-turned-misery. There is no better way to accomplish that than rebuilding our military, removing the petty restraints shackled upon our economy by bad government policies and aggressively seeking free trade with friendly countries overseas.
Canada has no great political philosophers, and the visions and thoughts of the prime ministers continue to redefine and shape our politics more than anyone else. Despite being two towering figures of Canadian conservatism, the legacies of Macdonald and Mulroney may seem difficult to reconcile.
Macdonald’s National Policy and Mulroney’s continentalism are things of the past, but what they both sought, above all, was national strength through independence and partnerships.
A friendly White House is no longer a guarantee, and with new leadership at the helm, this era is the next stage of Canada’s national evolution.
National Post