1 week Ago By National Post
Those who recognize his name today likely know he was assassinated in downtown Ottawa in April 1868. Those who knew Thomas D’Arcy McGee when he was alive — friend and foe alike — would have been familiar with the bold vision he had for Canada. Those who don’t know about McGee should take a moment to discover the words of the man born 200 years ago this day (April 13).
Thomas D’Arcy McGee came from a Catholic family based in County Louth on the east coast of Ireland. He lost his mother when he was eight years old and sailed for the United States when he was only 17, desperate to find a firm footing in a rapidly changing world. Smart and energetic, young McGee found work as a budding journalist in Boston, where an Irish community thrived.
McGee revealed himself as an Irish patriot, eager to see Great Britain’s grip on Ireland weakened. He even wrote that the United States should absorb Canada. By his early 20s, McGee had found a voice.
He discovered his identity as an Irish nationalist after less than three years in Boston and in 1845 returned to the Emerald Isle. He wrote for Young Ireland’s The Nation and seemed to impress audiences with his eloquent voice and his tireless dedication to the nationalist cause at a time when the potato crop — a food source on which more than a third of the population absolutely depended on for sustenance — was failing. He joined the Irish Confederation in 1848 and was on the organizing committee of the failed rebellion.
McGee, under threat of arrest, shuttled back to the United States and settled in New York, home of another vibrant Irish community. He was exposed to a wide variety of opinions in that intellectual hub and soon caught himself having doubts about Ireland, the United States and Great Britain. The potato famine had exposed grave socio-economic realities and the easy solutions of his youth no longer cottoned to reality.
He turned to ultramontanism, a Rome-centred Catholicism, as a shield to the harshness of American life. It was a sturdy protection against the unforgiving anti-Irish sentiment that dominated the American metropolises. He also turned to Great Britain with a kinder predisposition and reconsidered Canada — a land he increasingly appreciated for its tolerance.
He moved his family to Montreal in 1857, started a new paper, the New Era, and threw himself into politics. He caught the imagination of his new countrymen and within a year the 32-year-old was elected to Parliament. The man who had once condemned Canada as a country destined to join the United States now advocated protective tariffs against the Americans, an accelerated program of infrastructure building, and enhanced immigration.
John A. Macdonald fell for him and soon included McGee in his cabinet as minister of agriculture, immigration and statistics. McGee’s economic policies were not tools merely to build wealth.
Instead, they were instruments to bring about a new culture, perhaps even a new country. He called it a “New Nationality” — a union of progressive forces that would temper ardent ethno-religious identities in order to foster a strong country where both law and order could thrive. He raged against the Protestant extremists as much as he railed against the Fenian Catholics who still lived to weaken Great Britain by way of harming Canada.
McGee was now a man whose political views featured a patchwork of the emotions he felt, the battles he experienced and the ideas he championed with a head-turning eloquence. “This is a new land,” he reasoned, arguing that Canada — a Canada that would extend from coast-to-coast — was a place where virtue and talent could thrive. In a landmark speech he gave in early 1865 — months after he had participated in the pro-Confederation meetings at Charlottetown and Quebec City — he argued that Canada had to protect itself from the American threat.
“We are in the rapids and must go on,” he declared. “Our neighbours will not, on their side, let us rest supinely.” Canada had to strengthen its ties to its enduring friends, even Great Britain.
His words still hold a prescribing strength to us, eight generations later. “We should strengthen the faith of our people in their own future, the faith of every Canadian in Canada,” he declared. “This faith wrongs no one; burdens no one; menaces no one; dishonours no one; and, as it was said of old, faith moves mountains.
” The salvation of this country, in his eyes, lay in “the pure patriotic faith of a united people ...
we cannot stand still; we cannot stave off some great change; we cannot stand alone.” McGee called for change. He knew that while Britain remained a friend, there were strong pressures for Canada to assume its own direction.
He also recognized that as the American Civil War came to an end and Washington was eyeing northern territories such as Alaska, the threats from the United States required a strong response. McGee offered a solution, his “New Nationality,” a country with a renewed sense of purpose built on economic strength but also one of conviction that mankind could be bettered by bold new ideas of unity, civility and purpose. His undying words ring true today as clear as the church bells that had inspired his ideas in his earlier days.
National Post Patrice Dutil is a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the author of Ballots and Brawls: The 1867 Canadian General Election. The time Canadians fought off an American invasionFifteen Canadian Stories: The man who was hanged for killing Thomas D’Arcy McGee.
