Free John A by Richard J. Gwyn Page B

appearance in the legislature thus was in its new temporary quarters in St. Anne’s Market in Montreal. There, he would begin to learn for the first time about the “other” Canada.

    In nineteenth-century Canada, the observation that all politics is local would have been treated not as an insight but as a banality. With occasional exceptions, such as the campaign to achieve Responsible Government or, later, Representation by Population, almost all politics was about local issues. Debates that engaged the general public were almost always those inspired by sectarianism—French versus English, Catholic versus Protestant, and sometimes Protestant versus Protestant, as between Anglicans and Methodists. Just about the only non-religious exception to the rule of the dominance of localism was the issue of anti-Americanism; it was both widespread and, as was truly rare, a political conviction that promoted national unity because it was held as strongly by the French as by the English.
    Almost all politics was local for the simple reason that almost everyone in Canada was a local: at least 80 per cent of Canadians were farmers or independent fishermen. Moreover, they were self-sufficient farmers. They built their own houses. They carved out most of their implements and equipment. They grew almost all their own food (tea and sugar excepted) or raised it on the hoof. They made most of their own clothes. They made their own candles and soft soap. Among the few products they sold into commercial markets were grain and potash. Few sent their children to school. They were unprotected by policemen (even in the towns in Upper Canada, police forces dated only from the 1840s). For lack of ministers or priests, marriages were often performed by the people themselves. Even the term “local” conveys a false impression of community: roads were so bad and farms spaced so far apart that social contact was limited principally to “bees”—barn and house raising, stump clearing and later, more fancily, quilting.
    Government’s reach in Canada was markedly more stunted than in England. While there had been a Poor Law there from 1597, the first statute of the Legislature of Upper Canada provided specifically that “Nothing in this Act…shall introduce any of the laws of England concerning the maintenance of the poor.” *24 The churches were responsible for charity, and in someareas for education. *25 It was the same for that other form of social activism, the Temperance Societies, commonly brought into being by the Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist churches. The unemployed were “the idle poor,” and no government had any notion that it should be responsible for their succour. Governments collected taxes (almost exclusively customs and excise duties) and were responsible for law and order, maintaining the militia, and running the jails, where the idea of rehabilitation as opposed to punishment was unknown. But without any income tax, there was comparatively little the government could do even if it wished. Consequently, the total spending on public charities, social programs and education amounted to just 9 per cent of any government’s revenues. To most Canadians in the middle of the nineteenth century, government was as irrelevant to their day-to day lives as it is today to the Mennonites, Hutterites and Amish.
    Because Macdonald was an avowed conservative, he was little different from almost everyone else; the other major party, the Reform Party (which changed its name over time to the Liberal Party), was at least as conservative as the Conservatives. Later, the populist Clear Grits arose in Upper Canada to advocate such disturbing American notions as the secret ballot and direct democracy. In mid-to late-nineteenth-century Canada, though, conservatism was as widely held a political attitude as liberalism would become a century later. It took a long while for things to change. In one