George etienne cartier biography of donald

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His Work for Canada and His Services to Montreal

AN ADDRESS

DELIVERED BEFORE THE
CANADIAN CLUB OF MONTREAL

April 7th, 1913

BY

JOHN BOYD

Author of The Memorial History of the Life
and Times of Sir George Etienne Cartier

(To be issued in connection with the
Cartier Centenary Celebration, 1914)

Issued by the CARTIER CENTENARY COMMITTEE
MONTREAL
1913

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The accompanying address has been registered in accordance
with the Copyright Act by John Boyd.

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FOREWORD.

The great interest that has been aroused in the Cartier Centenary movement was shown by the large gathering which assembled at the Canadian Club luncheon in the Sailors' Institute on Monday, April 7th, 1913, to hear Mr. John Boyd speak on "Sir George Etienne Cartier, His Work for Canada and His Services to Montreal." The speaker's references to the work that Cartier had accomplished for Canada, and especially to the great services that he rendered to the City of Montreal, were enthusiastically applauded by the large audience of representative business men.

The accompanying address which includes a summary of Sir George Etienne Cartier's career and achievements is but a preliminary to the Memorial History of the Life and Times of Cartier which is now being written by Mr. John Boyd, and which will deal exhaustively not only with Cartier's career but also with the whole period covered by that career, one of the most memorable periods of Canadian history. The work will be published next year under the auspices of the Cartier Centenary Committee in connection with the great commemorative celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of Cartier's birth.

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SIR GEORGE ETIENNE CARTIER

His Work for Canada and His Services to Montreal.

(AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BY MR. JOHN BOYD BEFORE
THE CANADIAN CLUB OF M

Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir George Étienne Cartier: Close friends and Fathers of Confederation

Yesterday was Sir John A. Macdonald’s 201st birthday. To mark the occasion, I thought I would explore his friendship with Sir George Étienne Cartier. The two were both Fathers of Confederation, but were once actually on opposing sides in Canadian politics for a period of time. So how did Macdonald and Cartier come together and how did their unlikely lifelong friendship impact the future of the country?

John Alexander Macdonald was born on January 11, 1815 in Glasgow, Scotland. His family moved to Kingston, Upper Canada when he was five years of age. By the time he was nineteen, Macdonald was running his own law practice. During the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837, Macdonald fought on the side of the British loyalists. He was also a successful businessman before he entered politics. Macdonald was elected to the Kingston Town Council as an alderman in 1843. For a more detailed look at Macdonald’s life, both the good and the bad, please refer to this post.

According to historian Donald Creighton, Macdonald was described as both “puzzling and disarming” and that “he obviously enjoyed politics, just as he enjoyed every other part of life.” Macdonald was a hardworking, hard-drinking politician. One would think that alcoholism would be counter-intuitive, but contemporary John Langton noted that “[Macdonald] can get through more work in a given time than anybody I ever saw, and do it well.” He was a high functioning alcoholic and that is part of the reason his drinking got a pass. The other is that alcoholism was considered to be part of his charm. He drank too much and talked too much, but Macdonald knew it and “the knowledge of these habits strengthened the impression of easy-going conviviality.”

George Étienne Cartier was born on September 6, 1814 in Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu, Lower Canada. Cartier was

The public career of George-Étienne CARTIER lies at the heart of the industrialization of the Canadian economy in the 19th century. The following excerpt from the biography of John YOUNG, businessman, entrepreneur, and politician, summarizes the economic issues in which Cartier took an interest as well as the typical activities and concerns of the Montreal business class at that time:

“John Young was one of the best-known public figures in Montreal in the mid-19th century. He shared the assumption of his fellow merchants that the St Lawrence was potentially the most advantageous commercial outlet from the west, and their aspiration that Montreal thrive on this trade, but he had different views as to how the goal could best be achieved. He championed free trade and the Caughnawaga canal with the persistence and fervour of an evangelist. In his later years he supported the commercial annexation he had so strongly opposed in 1849.

“Despite the attacks and ridicule lavished upon him by his fellow businessmen, who feared his projects and his pen, Young was in many ways representative of his class, place, and time. He was a businessman in the export-import trade, an entrepreneur in a number of railway and telegraph ventures, a land speculator, and a dabbler in other ventures. Businessmen of this type assumed that the prime role of the state was to improve the climate of enterprise by building the necessary facilities, providing assistance for others, and following the ‘right’ policies.”

The economic climate was also characterized by the emergence of a French Canadian business class. Among Quebec’s prominent francophone businessmen in the period after confederation was Guillaume BOIVIN, a Montreal shoe manufacturer:

“Boivin seems to have begun his career in Montreal in a rather modest way. In 1871 he had a medium-sized business with 45 emplo