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Photo by National Archives of Canada/CP

Macdonald was nominated and elected the first prime minister but realized the new country needed a national purpose beyond not being American. He soon unveiled his “national policy,” which consisted of setting up more provinces, imposing a tariff that would facilitate the creation of a manufacturing industry, and most ambitiously, building a transcontinental railway that would connect the new country and be the spine of it. This was an immense undertaking: the Americans were pursuing the same objectives but they could lay track on farmland and gentle hills all the way to the Rocky Mountains and had a huge capital market to finance their railways. Canadian Pacific was largely built upon the rock of the Canadian Shield, and Canadian financial markets could finance only about a quarter of the costs. The financial centres of New York and London, where funds would have to be raised, were heavily influenced by forces connected to competing American railroads. Macdonald got his entire program through, and was followed by 15 years of Wilfrid Laurier extending rail service in the country and incentivizing immense waves of immigration. Macdonald and Laurier, prime ministers for 34 of Canada’s first 44 years as a Dominion (there were five prime ministers in the other 10 years), built a credible country, able to play an important and distinguished part in the First World War.

Other prime ministers were more than placemen. Robert Borden took the country through the First World War (though he used the English majority to impose conscription on French Canada). Mackenzie King ran always as a figure of French-English conciliation, and got the country through the Second World War without a major split, running a very distinguished war effort, and even taking the lead in urging president Harry Truman and British prime minister Clement Attlee into the Cold War after the Igor Gouzenko affair broke in Canada in 1946. Louis St. Laurent presided over peace and prosperity in the Fifties, Lester Pearson was a wide-ranging reformer. The only reason Pierre Trudeau entered public life was to defeat the Quebec separatists, and he did it when no one else could. Brian Mulroney tried unsuccessfully to complete the constitutional process but did succeed in putting through free trade and in moving the basis of federal income from taxes on income to taxes on goods and services, both vital achievements. Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin eliminated the federal deficit and passed the Clarity Act, making provincial secession more complicated after almost losing the 1995 Quebec independence referendum. Stephen Harper tried to shrink the public sector durably by reducing HST. Other leaders governed too briefly to leave much of a mark.