Christopher Dummitt: The redemption of John A. Macdondald

John A. Macdonald is back, just in time to celebrate what would have been his 211th birthday on Sunday.

It’s not just his statues and honorifics — though those are coming back too, most notably his now unboxed statue at Queen’s Park and the revived Prime Ministers Path project in Wilmot, Ontario.

It’s also the resurrection of a “Build Canada” ethos. There’s even a new civic group of that name committed to the idea that our nation isn’t just about saying “sorry” and being polite; it’s also a recognition that the country needs reinforcement and had to be built in the first place. It’s about cherishing values like “growth is good,” “bold beats safe,” and “success should be celebrated.”

There’s nothing like an existential threat to make you realize what really counts. Whether it’s a brush with death or terrible illness in your personal life, or a wildly unpredictable American president willing to upend international norms and impose American hegemony throughout the western hemisphere, moments like this can force a reassessment of what you can and should learn from your nation’s history.

Suddenly you might find yourself looking back to one of the most successful Canadian political leaders and asking not just, as we have been doing, how should I judge him? You might also want to ask: what can I learn from him? And not just him, but the era in which he lived.

The challenges of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Canada look a lot like those faced by John A. in the 19th century: the need to build national infrastructure, react to a protectionist and threatening America, stitch together an east-west national economy, and do all of this in a country where regional rivalries threatened to tear it apart.

In no way is this clearer than in the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was a wildly ambitious project to put tracks of steel across a continent, far in advance of settlement, crossing seemingly impassable mountainous terrain, linking the eastern part of British North America with the sparsely settled new province of British Columbia. That province had been convinced to join Canada in 1871 even though it might more logically have joined the United States, which had only just purchased Alaska in 1867.

When modern-day detractors of a pipeline from Alberta to British Columbia talk about there not being a “business case,” they should take a look at the CPR. There was absolutely no market case to build this rail line. Investors refused to risk their own capital. And when they did get on board, they wanted the line to run south of the Great Lakes, in America, to make it more viable. Macdonald’s government had to lure capital into the project.

So why did Macdonald push for it? It was, of course, to build the very nation we now call Canada — to create an east-west nexus of transportation and communication, to knit together the colonies of British North America into a continental empire.

It did not come without costs or compromises, without winners and losers, and without controversy. The project brought down Macdonald’s government in 1873 because of a corruption scandal that by contemporary standards (though not Trumpian standards) should have led to his retirement. Instead, Macdonald returned to power in 1878 with a new nation-building plan. After a severe depression in the 1870s and debates over free trade, he pushed a National Policy of immigration, railways, and tariffs — not just for revenue but to protect a Canadian economy.

You can debate all of this and more: the usefulness of those tariffs, the plight of Chinese labourers on the railway, or the impact on Indigenous peoples. What you can’t debate is the wild ambition and the overwhelming success of the project itself in ensuring Canada’s existence into the 20th century.

Reading accounts of the CPR’s history today can make you laugh at how much more ambitious the builders of that age were. Small groups of surveyors trekked through mountainous passes, relied on Indigenous guides, worked far from any familiar settlements, and made decisions that, by modern standards, were acted on with astonishing speed.

I write these words from Peterborough, Ont., which is supposed to be a stop on a future high-speed rail line linking Toronto to Quebec City. For decades, governments have talked about building this corridor. In different forms, Pierre Trudeau promised it, as did Jean Chrétien. Stephen Harper vacillated, and then Justin Trudeau assured us it would be built.

The younger Trudeau even established Crown corporations to plan and study it. One of his last actions in February 2025 was to announce that the line was now definitely going to happen. How did he prove this? By announcing funding to study and plan the route — not to build it. As of now, the proposal, still without construction funding, is to begin building in 2029. That’s a lot of promises: zero building.

Or consider Toronto’s now-infamous Eglinton Crosstown. First imagined as a subway expansion in the 1970s, construction even began before being cancelled. The plan was later resurrected as a light-rail line, interrupted during the Rob Ford era, and construction finally began in 2011. It was supposed to open in 2020. As of early January 2026, it still isn’t open.

In other words, Toronto has taken longer to build and open a 19-kilometre light-rail line than Macdonald’s Canada took to build nearly 3,500 kilometres of transcontinental railway across rugged terrain and mountains.

Build Canada indeed.

This year, in the face of what is clearly a national emergency, it’s worth reviving the tradition of marking John A. Macdonald’s birthday — not to excuse the past, but to recall what we might learn from it.

The smug certainty of recent years, with its statue-toppling ethos, missed a lot. It got many of the details wrong about who John A. was and what he stood for. Most importantly, it neglected to ask what we might now need to learn from our ancestors. We need their ambition, their vision, and perhaps even their foolhardy insistence that Canada should exist.

National Post

Christopher Dummitt is a historian of Canadian culture and politics at Trent University.