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| Sir John A. MacDonald |
Another couple of Canadians, also famous, are memorialized in sculpture at the Ottawa airport: Sir John A. MacDonald and Sir Wilfrid Laurier. The costuming is equally interesting. The striations in the trousers of Sir John A. reminded me of pin-stripes but they were too wobbley for that. Leo mentioned corduroy and I knew he had hit it on the nail.
I don't think I noticed the curly hair of Sir John A. in the history books of the 1940's.
"They were collaborators," Mary went on to say. "That is how Canada became a dominion, one working with English Canada and the other working with French Canada.
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| Sir Wilfrid Laurier |
Arta
One little correction -- it is not Laurier, it is Cartier in the second photo.
ReplyDeleteAnd now...
More than you wanted to know about MacDonald, Cariter, and Joint-premiers.
(source: wikipedia of course)
Joint Premiers of the Province of Canada were the leaders of the Province of Canada, from the 1841 unification of Upper Canada and Lower Canada until Confederation in 1867.
Following the abortive Rebellions of 1837, Lord Durham was appointed governor in chief of British North America. In his 1839 Report on the Affairs of British North America, he recommended that Upper and Lower Canada be united under a single Parliament, with responsible government. As a result, in 1841, the first Parliament of Canada was convened.
Although Canada East (the former Lower Canada, now Quebec) and Canada West (the former Upper Canada, now Ontario) were united as a single province with a single government, each administration was led by two men, one from each half of the province.
This form of government proved to be fractious and difficult, leading to frequent changes in leadership — in just 26 years, the joint premiership changed hands eighteen times, with twenty different people holding the office over the course of its history.
The best-known premiership has arguably been the Macdonald-Cartier ministry, which governed the Province of Canada from 1857 to 1862 (except for four days in 1858 when power was briefly ceded to the Brown-Dorion government). It was during their ministry that the first organized moves toward Canadian Confederation took place, and John A. Macdonald himself became the first Prime Minister of Canada in 1867.
Macdonald-Cartier has survived in Canada as a geographic and institutional name, which has been applied to high schools in Ottawa, Sudbury and Saint-Hubert, the Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport and the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge linking Ottawa with Gatineau. "Macdonald-Cartier Freeway" was also the historical name of Highway 401.