If Sir John A. Macdonald Did Not Exist, Would Someone Invent Him Just to Hate Him?

He invented Canada but that's just not good enough for some people:

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: ...

(Sidebar: I'm going to stop you right there. Carney is an interloper, a carpet-bagger, a servant of China and his own greed. At least Macdonald built a railway so that he could try keeping the trains running on time.)

... 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.