Sir John A. Macdonald: A Man of Faith

A statue of former Canadian Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald is pictured on Parliament Hill in Ottawa in a file photo. The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick

Commentary

“Like a king.” That’s how Sir John A. Macdonald was greeted in public in the 1880s. “Everybody loved him” and his presence could be “like an electric shock.” Yet the great man did not let the adulation go to his head. “No man was more deeply conscious of his own shortcomings,” said his personal secretary Sir Joseph Pope in his 1894 book “Memoirs of the Right Honourable Sir John A. Macdonald.”