By Patrice Dutil, January 8, 2026
Sir John A. Macdonald, whose 211th birthday will be marked on January 11, is often treated today as a problem to be managed rather than a statesman to be understood. In public debate, he appears either as a heroic founder beyond criticism or as a symbol of historic injustice best removed from view. Both approaches miss something essential. For much of the 20th century, Macdonald was neither untouchable nor disposable. He was a central reference point in how Canadian conservatives understood their own tradition – and their responsibilities in government.
Early biographies of Macdonald emphasized his pragmatism above all else. He was portrayed as a gifted tactician, a coalition-builder, and a politician who survived by compromise rather than conviction. The fact that he ran on a “Liberal-Conservative” ticket in 1867 and until 1891, demonstrated this vividly. On this view, Macdonald left no clear ideological legacy – only the practical achievement of Confederation itself. Conservatism, such as it was, seemed accidental.
That interpretation changed as Canada entered the age of mass democracy, economic crisis, and regional fragmentation. Faced with socialism, populism, and continental liberalism, conservatives went looking for roots. They found them in Macdonald. Confederation was reinterpreted not simply as a constitutional bargain, but as a conservative achievement: a political order designed to balance democracy with stability, local autonomy with national authority, and popular government with durable institutions.
At the centre of this reimagining stood the National Policy. Twentieth-century conservatives treated Macdonald’s tariffs, railway building, and western expansion as evidence that conservatism had never been synonymous with laissez-faire. Macdonald understood that markets alone do not build nations. Economic life, left entirely to abstraction and ideology, could just as easily dissolve social bonds as strengthen them. The state, properly directed, was a nation-building instrument – capable of integrating regions, anchoring sovereignty, and managing social change without surrendering to class warfare.
This reading mattered because it offered conservatives an alternative to both socialism and libertarianism. During the inter-war period and the Great Depression, Macdonald was invoked to justify active government without revolutionary ambition. The creation of the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission and the Bank of Canada attested to this. Conservatism, in this tradition, accepted intervention not to remake human nature, but to preserve political order and national cohesion. It was a politics of stewardship, not utopia.
Macdonald’s imperial outlook was also reframed. Rather than being seen as a colonial subordinate, he was cast as a constitutional realist who understood the value of inherited institutions. Empire, in this telling, was not about domination but about law, parliamentary government, and strategic independence – particularly from American influence. This allowed conservatives to connect Macdonald to a broader defence of sovereignty and national distinctiveness, even as Canada’s formal imperial ties faded.
Yet these twentieth-century reconstructions were selective. Like many national founders, Macdonald was remembered for what later generations needed him to be. His record on supporting Indigenous communities and ensuring a distinct Canadian voice in foreign policy was rarely foregrounded in celebratory accounts, mostly because they were undocumented. He functioned less as a moral exemplar than as a symbol of continuity – a reminder that Canada had been built deliberately, through politics, not inevitability.
By the mid-twentieth century, Macdonald had become a conservative touchstone: proof that Canada’s political tradition valued moderation, institutions, and national unity over ideology and abstraction. But this consensus did not survive the cultural and historical revolutions of the 1960s and after. New scholarship focused on some of the darker consequences of 19th-century nation-building. As moral judgment displaced political interpretation in the 21st century, Macdonald’s usefulness as a unifying symbol collapsed.
Today’s arguments over statues and street names often assume that Macdonald’s reputation was always contested in the same way it is now. It wasn’t. For decades, conservatives argued over how to interpret him, not whether to erase him. They treated history as a source of instruction, not merely accusation.
Recovering that older approach does not require whitewashing Macdonald’s failures or injustices. But it does require a recognition that Macdonald was an innovative policy entrepreneur who pursued a national purpose. Macdonald mattered because he demonstrated that nations are made by political choice, institutional design, and hard compromise – not by moral purity or ideological certainty.
If Canadian conservatism is to recover a sense of purpose that will rally a voting majority, it could do worse than to remember why Macdonald once mattered to it – not as a saint, but as a statesman who understood that governing means building, preserving, and sometimes restraining, rather than endlessly tearing down.
Patrice Dutil teaches politics and public administration at Toronto Metropolitan University and is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. His recent books include Sir John A. Macdonald and the Apocalyptic Year 1885, and Ballots and Brawls: The 1867 Canadian General Election.
