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Updated: June 12, 2025
This defeat was entirely due to defection among the Lower Canadians. Of the Upper-Canadian members the Government had a majority of seven votes. Cartier was succeeded as prime minister by John Sandfield Macdonald, whose ally from Lower Canada was L. V. Sicotte.
Sir James Whitney, prime minister of Ontario from 1903 to 1914, who was a young student in Sandfield Macdonald's law office in Cornwall and shared his political confidence, assured the present writer that Ontario's first prime minister was not a Liberal in the real sense, his instincts and point of view being essentially Conservative.
But the Governor, considering, I suppose, that the scanty majority was led by Sandfield Macdonald, sent for him. All sides believed that it would be a ministry of a month. But this astute descendant of Highlanders managed to stay in for nearly two years: two years of no good: two years of plausible postponement of all that the Duke had been so loyally working for in the interest of Canada.
One result was the defeat in Ontario of Sandfield Macdonald's ministry in 1871. 'I find the country in a sound state, wrote Sir John Macdonald during the general elections of 1872, 'the only rock ahead being that infernal Scott murder case, about which the Orangemen have quite lost their heads. When order was restored the clever miscreant Riel returned to the settlement.
On this occasion Hincks resorted to a piece of strategy which enabled him to punish John Sandfield Macdonald for the insult he had levelled at the governor-general and his advisers at the close of the previous parliament. The government's candidate was Georges Étienne Cartier, who was first elected in 1849 and who had already become conspicuous in the politics of his province.
R. W. Scott, of Ottawa, had introduced legislation intended to strengthen the Roman Catholic separate school system of Upper Canada. In 1863, he succeeded, by accepting certain modifications, in obtaining the support of Dr. Ryerson, superintendent of education. Another important advantage was that his bill was adopted as a government measure by the Sandfield Macdonald ministry.
Though it did not pass without opposition, particularly from the Rouges under Dorion and from steadfast supporters of old ways like Christopher Dunkin and Sandfield Macdonald, the fight was only halfhearted. Not so, however, in the provinces by the sea. The delegates who returned from the Quebec Conference were astounded to meet a storm of criticism. Local pride and local prejudice were aroused.
It remained for the various provincial Cabinets to confer and to arrange a course of action. The omens pointed to union in the near future. But, as it happened, a new Canadian ministry, that of Sandfield Macdonald, had shortly before assumed office, and its members were in no wise pledged to the union project.
So Tuncan Greenfields and Æneas Sandfield drove my grandfather back to the jail, him with the post behind him in the wagon, so as he would be between it and the jail. Of course Tougal Stewart tried his best to have the bail declared forfeited; but old Judge Jones only laughed, and said my grandfather was a Hielan' gentleman, with a very nice sense of honor, and that was chust exactly the truth.
The point of the reply was that, as no legislation had been passed, there had been no session; and that this failure to follow custom was 'owing to the command which your Excellency has laid upon us to meet you this day for the purpose of prorogation. Sandfield Macdonald was an ambitious and vindictive man. He was wrong, too, in his interpretation of the constitution.
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