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WORK TITLE: W.A. Mackintosh: The Life of a Canadian Economist
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Winnipeg
STATE: MB
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/economics/faculty-pages/grant.html
RESEARCHER NOTES: N/A
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of Toronto, B.A., M.A., Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Winnipeg, professor of economics.
AWARDS:Ontario Historical Society, Donald Grant Creighton Award, 2015, for W.A. Mackintosh.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Encyclopedia of Housing, Sage, 2012 and Immigrant Seniors, edited by D. Durst, Detselig (Calgary, Alberta, Canada), 2010.
Contributor of articles to journals, including Manitoba History, Canadian Public Policy, and Economics of Education Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Hugh Grant is professor of economics at the University of Winnipeg. His research focuses on economic history, labor, and health economics. He has published articles on physician pay, mandatory retirement, employee rights, university decision making, and the career of David A. Golden for such publications as Manitoba History, Canadian Public Policy, and Economics of Education Review. Grant earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees at the University of Toronto.
In 2015 Grant published W.A. Mackintosh: The Life of a Canadian Economist, the first biography of William Archibald Mackintosh (1895-1970), intellectual, economic theorist, federal bureaucrat, university principal, and public scholar. Grant discusses Mackintosh’s commitment to public service and adherence to the principles of reason and tolerance that contributed to his economic scholarship, government policy, and university governance. The book earned Grant the Ontario Historical Society’s 2015 Donald Grant Creighton Award, which recognizes the best book of biography or autobiography highlighting life in Ontario, past or present.
The book contains fourteen chapters in four sections. The first section details the early life of the economist. Mackintosh was born in Madoc, Ontario, during a time of unprecedented prosperity in Canada. He received his education at Queen’s University and Harvard University. In the second section, Grant discusses the origins of Canada’s “staple thesis,” which is based on wheat production between the World Wars, and economics during the Great Depression. The third section is devoted to the arrival in Canada of the economic ideas of John Maynard Keynes, called Keynesianism; a discussion of World War II as the “economists’ war;” and economics in post-World War II Canada. The final section covers Mackintosh’s career at Queen’s University as head of the department of political and economic science and dean of arts.
As for Mackintosh’s legacy, he was considered Canada’s leading economist during the 1920s and 1930s. His most notable contribution was his work with Harold Innis on the staple thesis of Canadian economic development, which influenced research in the field for a generation. In 1923 Mackintosh published his seminal article on the “Economic Factors in Canadian History,” published in Canadian Historical Review. The article had so much impact on Canadian economics that it was called pathbreaking.
On the H-Net Web site, Greg Donaghy called the book “a first-rate piece of work on the economist, civil servant, and university administrator who introduced Keynes to Canada.” Discussing Mackintosh’s work with Innis, Donaghy explained that the book “offers a sophisticated reading of Mackintosh’s scholarly work that challenges recent critics who have dismissed him as a Liberal hack and postwar continentalist. Grant ties him closely to Innis, his friend and colleague, demonstrating persuasively that the two great economists were divided chiefly by their attitudes toward applying their ideas.”
Grant also explores the importance of Mackintosh’s joining the Department of Finance during World War II, where he was instrumental in managing Canada’s wartime economy and in championing the country’s adoption of Keynesian economic policy. After the war, Mackintosh further developed Keynesianism and then returned to Queen’s University, where he held both teaching and administrative positions and played an important role in transforming Canada’s universities. During his entire career, Mackintosh displayed wit, consummate fairness, and an ability to convey complex matters in concise, uncluttered fashion.
Writing in Choice, B. Osborne described the book: “This rich biography includes bibliographic notes and two dozen images of Mackintosh and influential persons in his life.” According to Duncan McDowall in Canadian Historical Review, “Grant takes us inside the mind of that 1920s iconoclast in his superb biography. … Under Grant’s pen, Mackintosh emerges as a man for all seasons, always cautiously dedicatedly pragmatic in applying his academic skills to the betterment of humanity.” Further praising the book, McDowall added: “Hugh Grant has given us a wonderfully incisive, human, and accessible biography of this remarkable Canadian. … Grant also leaves us with the realization that biography remains the most durable performance in the historian’s repertoire.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Canadian Historical Review, September, 2016, Duncan McDowall, review of W.A. Mackintosh: The Life of a Canadian Economist, pp. 441-443.
Choice, April, 2016, B. Osborne, review of W.A. Mackintosh, p. 1206.
ONLINE
H-Net, https://networks.h-net.org/ (April 27, 2017), Greg Donaghy, review of W.A. Mackintosh.
University of Manitoba Web site, http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/ (April 27, 2017), author faculty profile.
Hugh Grant is professor of economics at the University of Winnipeg.
Hugh Grant, Professor
Economics
Hugh GrantHugh Grant, Professor
BA, MA, PhD (Toronto)
Areas of Specialization: Economic History, Labour, Health Economics
Recent Publications:
"Unhealthy Pressure: How Physician Pay Demands Put the Squeeze on Provincial Health-Care Budgets," Calgary School of Public Policy Research Papers (July 2013) v.6, n. 22 (with Jeremiah Hurley).
“Mandatory Retirement and the Employment Rights of Elderly Canadian Immigrants,” Canadian Public Policy (2013) 39:135-52 (with James Townsend).
“The Remarkable Career of David A. Golden,” Manitoba History (Winter 2012) 67:
“Rent Control,” Encyclopaedia of Housing (New York: Sage, 2012).
“An Analysis of Manitoba’s Rent Regulation Program and the Impact on the Rental Housing Market,” prepared for Manitoba Family Services and Consumer Affairs, March 2011.
“Poverty among Elderly Canadian Immigrants” (with J. Townsend), in Immigrant Seniors, edited by D. Durst (Calgary: Detselig, 2010)
“University decision making and prestige: an empirical study,” Economics of Education Review (2009) 28: 237-48 (with P. Cyrenne).
“Revolution at Winnipeg,” Labour/Le Travail, 60 (Fall 2007). Introduction to a previously unpublished paper written by W.A. Mackintosh in 1919.
Grant, Hugh. W. A. Mackintosh: the life of a Canadian
economist
B. Osborne
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1206.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Grant, Hugh. W. A. Mackintosh: the life of a Canadian economist. McGill-Queen's, 2015. 545p bibl index afp (Carleton library series, 233) ISBN
9780773546387 cloth, $49.95
53-3579
HB121
Can. CIP
Mackintosh (1895-1970) had many roles in Canadian public life: intellectual, economic theorist, federal bureaucrat, university principal, public
scholar. Grant (economics, Univ. of Winnipeg) develops these roles in 14 chapters arranged in four topical sections bracketed by a preface and a
reflexive "legacy." Part 1 deals with Mackintosh's early years and education at Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario), Harvard, and Brandon
University (Manitoba). The seven chapters that make up parts 2 and 3 look at his years at Queen's, where he taught economics; his identification
of the "staples thesis" of Canadian economic development; his pre--WW II roles in the National Employment Commission and the Royal
Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations; and his contributions to international strategies for post-war international reconstruction and
Canadian policies for domestic reconstruction. Part 4 covers the postwar years--his leadership role at Queen's University and his continued
participation in the development of federal policies on banking and finance. The substantial postscript, "Legacy," summarizes Mackintosh's
contributions to public life as a scholar, policy adviser, and university administrator and his "valiant and decent pride in being Canadian." This
rich biography includes bibliographic notes and two dozen images of Mackintosh and influential persons in his life. Summing Up: **
Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.--B. Osborne, Queens University at Kingston
3/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Osborne, B.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Osborne, B. "Grant, Hugh. W. A. Mackintosh: the life of a Canadian economist." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016,
p. 1206+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661710&it=r&asid=91dac80ae1e77fac49865e08ff0d66ea. Accessed 14 Mar.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661710
Canadian Historical Review. Sep2016, Vol. 97 Issue 3, p441-443. 3p.
MCDOWALL, DUNCAN1
W.A. Mackintosh: The Life of a Canadian Economist. Hugh Grant. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. Pp. xi þ 545, $49.95 paper
W.A. Mackintosh: The Life of a Canadian Economist. Hugh Grant. Montreal
and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. Pp. xi þ 545,
$49.95 paper
As the twentieth century entered its twilight, the Canadian Historical
Review (CHR) pondered its contribution to national historiography.
Founded in 1920, the journal had generated articles that in retrospect
served as a roadmap of the trends and revisions in thought of Canadian
historians. Accordingly, York historian Marlene Shore was asked
to compile a compendium of this unfolding legacy. Her volume, The
Contested Past (University of Toronto Press, 2002), provoked many of
its readers to ponder what might have been the most influential article
to ever appear in the CHR. As with any attempt at fingering the
‘‘greatest,’’ values and sensibilities shift relative to time, making
comparison difficult. This said, one article did push its way to the
forefront: W.A. Mackintosh’s ‘‘Economic Factors in Canadian History’’
(1923). Shore described the article as ‘‘path breaking’’ and is now
‘‘inclined to agree’’ that no other CHR contribution to Canadian history
has had so dramatic an impact. In one fell swoop, Mackintosh, fresh
from a Harvard doctorate in agricultural economics, deflected Canadian
historians’ attention away from a fixation on the political and constitutional
to an appreciation of how economic substructure determines
history. Now, almost a century later, University of Winnipeg economist
Hugh Grant takes us inside the mind of that 1920s iconoclast in his
superb biography of a career that straddled scholarship, university
administration, and the incubation of public policies at the heart
of the emergence of the modern welfare state. Under Grant’s pen,
Mackintosh emerges as a man for all seasons, always cautiously dedicatedly
pragmatic in applying his academic skills to the betterment of
humanity.
Scholars such as J.L. Granatstein have long stressed the contribution
of the ‘‘Ottawa men’’ who left their classrooms in the dire days of
the Great Depression and the crisis of the Second World War to craft
policies that bolstered the economy and promoted stability in the daily
lives of Canadians. Many of these men (and one or two women) came
from Queen’s University, which seemed at times to support a shuttle
service north to Ottawa for scholars prepared to grapple with the
increasing intricacies of managing the modern urban-industrial state.
O.D. Skelton helped to shape Canada’s nascent foreign policy. Norman
McLeod Rogers pioneered state intervention in the labour market. Mac
Urquhart helped to build the national accounts. Charlotte Whitton
examined the welfare of children. Adam Shortt and Frank Knox helped
Reviews 441
to fine tune the Canadian banking system. Mackintosh fit this pattern:
a rural lad from Madoc, Ontario, he became a Queen’s man from the
moment he came up to the university in 1912 and immersed himself
in its ethos of Presbyterian utilitarianism.
Powerfully shaped by teachers such as Skelton and Shortt, Mackintosh
became interested in the institutional aspects of the Canadian
economy. Graduate work at Harvard and exposure to economists
Frank Taussig and Edwin Gay obliged Mackintosh to examine the
mechanics of the Canadian economy – how, in particular, Canada’s
heavy dependence on commodity exports in the Laurier boom created
vulnerabilities and institutional dependencies in our society. Mackintosh
focused on Western Canada and the emergence of an agrarian society
that sought to assert some control over its own fortunes. By the time
Mackintosh returned to teach at Queen’s University in the early 1920s,
this line of thinking had crystallized into the ground-breaking notion
that Canada’s past and future might best be understood as a reaction
to the dictates of staple production. For a profession inured to conceiving
of Canada’s history in terms of the Durham Report and the
Charlottetown conference, this was a startling revelation. Others such
as Harold Innis were working in the same direction. What would
separate Mackintosh from his academic colleagues over the next half
century was his determination to apply the insights of economics to
the realities of life. Innis would brilliantly pursue the ‘‘biases’’ of a
staple society, while Mackintosh would endeavour to advise on its
remedying.
Bill Macintosh provided public policy advice to every federal administration
from that of Robert Borden to Lester Pearson. Mackintosh’s
long list of assignments in Ottawa ran the gamut of tariff adjudication,
industrial relations, financial regulation, and wartime fiscal
management. He became, in the words of journalist Bruce Hutchinson,
‘‘an economic handyman.’’ In 1950, the Globe and Mail saluted his
balance and the clarity of his problem solving with an editorial entitled
‘‘Why Not More Mackintosh?’’ Undoubtedly, his most lasting impact
came as a result of his 1945 White Paper on Employment and Income,
which set out the contours of postwar economic stabilization and
growth, resulting in policies that are with us to this day. Grant chronicles
all of these endeavours in a style that marries his insight as an economist
with an ability to build a fascinating narrative. Mackintosh’s wit, his
consummate fairness, and his ability to convey immensely complex
matters in concise, uncluttered fashion are constantly evident in this
telling of a life so energetically spent.
442 The Canadian Historical Review
Mackintosh, however, never drifted away from his central academic
inclination. He continued to wrestle with the intellectual side of policy,
advising on international economic integration at Bretton Woods while
continuing to nurture the birth of Keynesianism in Canada, a development
to which Grant brings particular insight. In 1946, Mackintosh
returned to his academic roots, becoming first dean of arts and then
principal of Queen’s University in 1951, on the cusp of a decade that
saw it begin to shed its comfortable, at times complacent, ways and
embrace the rhythms of modern, managed academic life. It was
Macintosh, who, for instance, lured another Queen’s Ottawa man,
John Deutsch, back to the university to assume the new role of viceprincipal
of administration in 1959. Retirement from Queen’s in
1961 brought new challenges from Ottawa: a royal commission on
banking and finance.
Hugh Grant has given us a wonderfully incisive, human, and accessible
biography of this remarkable Canadian. His research, mainly
conducted at the stellar Queen’s University Archives, is exhaustive,
but the result is never exhausting. One leaves the book aching for
more academics who might reach beyond the classroom and the life
of cloistered academic conferences to the world beyond. As the Globe
and Mail said, give us more Mackintoshs. Grant also leaves us with
the realization that biography remains the most durable performance
in the historian’s repertoire, something with which a 1920s reader of
the CHR would have readily agreed.
duncan mcdowall, Queen’s University
Donaghy on Grant, 'W. A. Mackintosh: The Life of a Canadian Economist' and Macdonald and McQueen, 'Thumper: The Memoirs of the Honourable Donald S. Macdonald'
Author:
Donald S. Macdonald, Rod McQueen
Reviewer:
Greg Donaghy
H. M. Grant. W. A. Mackintosh: The Life of a Canadian Economist. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015. 550 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7735-4638-7.Donald S. Macdonald, Rod McQueen. Thumper: The Memoirs of the Honourable Donald S. Macdonald. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014. x + 275 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7735-4469-7.
Reviewed by Greg Donaghy (Head, Historical Section/POHR)
Published on H-Canada (April, 2016)
Commissioned by Corey Slumkoski
Canadian Keynesianism: Coming and Going
During the last half of the twentieth century two great economic ideas have dominated Canadian life. From the mid-1940s on, Keynesianism, with its notions of state intervention into the national economy, has prompted governments to smooth out capitalism’s turbulent economic cycles, promoting steady growth and full employment. By the late 1970s, however, after a decade of stagflation, the ideas of British economist John Maynard Keynes were increasingly suspect, and they were soon swept away in a rush to embrace free trade, globalization, and its neoconservative agenda. But Keynesianism has made a comeback since the Great Recession of 2008, and as globalization’s prospects fade in the face of a crumbling Europe and slow growth in China. The arrival of new books, a biography and a memoir with the life stories of two Canadian policymakers associated with these clashing economic models, is timely and relevant.
Economist Hugh Grant’s biography, W.A. Mackintosh: The Life of a Canadian Economist, is a first-rate piece of work on the economist, civil servant, and university administrator who introduced Keynes to Canada. Born in the rural hamlet of Madoc, Ontario, in 1895, Mackintosh was a product of the rugged Canadian landscape, whose productive rhythms infused his thinking. He studied political economy at Queen’s University under the legendary O. D. Skelton on the eve of the First World War. Ambivalent about the war--Grant contends that he was opposed--Mackintosh headed to Harvard in 1916, where he pursued a PhD in economics under Frank Taussig.
This is intellectual history at its best, and Grant carefully traces Mackintosh’s intellectual development from his undergraduate thesis on Leo Tolstoy to his PhD work on farm cooperatives to his seminal 1923 article on the “Economic Factors in Canadian History,” the first iteration of the staple thesis. Grant’s precise delineation of the contributions of Mackintosh and University of Toronto economist Harold Innis to the development of the staple thesis is fair-minded and convincing.
The Life of a Canadian Economist offers a sophisticated reading of Mackintosh’s scholarly work that challenges recent critics who have dismissed him as a Liberal hack and postwar continentalist. Grant ties him closely to Innis, his friend and colleague, demonstrating persuasively that the two great economists were divided chiefly by their attitude toward applying their ideas. Innis held back from the fray, while Mackintosh was a pragmatist to the core: “Unless economics and other social sciences are to be justified by policy, they become mere chess games to be classed as recreation” (p. 125).
Grant traces the interplay between Mackintosh’s ideas and his practical work through the 1920s and 1930s as he bounced between teaching, consulting work, and government contracting. As a scholar and intellectual, Mackintosh played a major role in the interwar period in shaping the emerging discipline of Canadian political economy and its related fields. At Queen’s, the young economics professor introduced new studies in commerce and courses in industrial relations. Nationally, he was one of a generation of scholars who reinvigorated the Canadian Political Science Association, serving as its president in 1936.
Through the late 1930s and into the 1940s, Mackintosh slowly worked out how Keynesianism could be applied to Canada’s kind of staple, open, and trade-dependent economy. His work with the National Employment Commission in 1936-38 nudged Prime Minister W. L. Mackenzie King’s government toward recognizing an expanded role for the state. The Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations, for which Mackintosh supplied a crucial study on The Economic Background of Dominion-Provincial Relations, represented another small step towards Keynes’s bright new world.
The outbreak of war in September 1939 overtook the Royal Commission’s recommendations on expanding the federal government’s role in the federation. With the economy rebounding from depression and government ballooning to fight the war, Mackintosh headed to Ottawa as a temporary employee and special assistant to the deputy minister of finance. Over the next six years, Grant argues, Mackintosh was the “single most important official in Ottawa when it came to the economic aspects of the war effort” (p. 392).
Grant avoids getting bogged down in bureaucratic detail, while offering much to substantiate this bold claim. Early on, Mackintosh served on the crucial Economic Advisory Committee, managing foreign exchange, inflation, wages, and industrial relations, and shaping a new role for the state in the “managed economy.” He played a key role too representing Canadian interests at the several international conferences that gave shape to the postwar global economic order. Significantly, on behalf of Canada, he seconded Keynes’s motion to adopt the “Final Act” of the Breton Woods conference setting up the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
As the war ended, Mackintosh turned his considerable talents to the domestic postwar order and the problems of reconstruction. His “masterful” white paper, Employment and Income, which pulled together the government’s ad hoc wartime economic initiatives into a coherent program for the first time, was the first “wedding of the staple thesis with Keynesianism” (p. 288). Tabled in the House of Commons on April 12, 1945, it reiterated the government’s commitment to maintaining high levels of employment, while acknowledging that “a prosperous world is essential to a prosperous Canada” (p. 288).
When Clifford Clark fell ill in June 1945, Mackintosh stepped in, and served as acting deputy minister of finance for eight months. There, Mackintosh developed the comprehensive set of social security reforms, including a universal old-age pension and health insurance, that were incorporated into the Proposals of the Government of Canada (the Green Books) for the 1945 federal-provincial conference. Though blocked by Quebec and Ontario in 1946, the proposed reforms set the national welfare agenda for the next two decades.
Mackintosh returned to Queen’s in 1946. Over the next two decades, he continued to offer policy advice to government, but his focus was on producing “educated people of integrity” (p. 300). He served Queen’s as dean of arts, and then as principal from 1951 to 1961. There was a whiff of the self-satisfied about Queen’s during the 1950s, a residence college spared “the indifferent day student” (p. 336). And Grant might have delved more sharply into hints that Mackintosh had difficulties as an administrator. But overall, here too, Grant leaves his readers in no doubt as to Mackintosh’s accomplishments and the depth of his intellectual commitment to a liberal education.
This is an excellent biography: well-written and exhaustively researched. Nevertheless, there are occasional errors of fact: Sandy Skelton was never deputy minister of trade and commerce (p. 313), and the cabinet’s decision to send troops to Korea was not taken on July 25, 1950 (p. 316). The economic discussions occasionally assume more knowledge than many readers possess, and it is never explained why Sandy Skelton “kept pregnant mares for female hormones” (p. 180) Moreover, there is an unsettling number of typos. On balance, however, these are quibbles, and they take little away from Grant’s achievement.
Liberal politician Donald S. Macdonald, nicknamed Thumper by a university classmate on account of his size thirteen feet, is a Canadian of a different stripe. As he recounts in his self-titled memoirs, Thumper, Macdonald was born a scion of the Canadian establishment. He spent his boyhood during the Second World War in the tony Ottawa suburb of Rockcliffe, and studied at the city’s best schools, Lisgar Collegiate and Ashbury College. He prayed amid the stolid stonework of Ottawa’s First Baptist Church, where he knelt alongside Liberal stalwarts Finance Minister J. L. Isley and Defence Minister J. L. Ralston. Naturally, his way ahead seemed clear: Carleton College to boost his high school transcripts, Trinity College at the University of Toronto, and Osgoode Hall Law School, from whence he emerged a lawyer in 1955.
It was an age of multilateral enthusiasms, which Macdonald’s graduate studies reflected. He embraced international law at Harvard University, before heading to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he completed a thesis on the new General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Somehow, and the memoirs are not entirely clear on this, he graduated from the Establishment ‘50s into the revolutionary ‘60s as “a progressive, a centre-left liberal” (p. 58) He caught up to the resurgent federal Liberal Party just in time to be elected to the House of Commons in 1962 as an “accidental candidate” (p. 53).
Macdonald, taken under Walter Gordon’s nationalist wing, moved leftward over the next decade. He stood proud when Prime Minister L. B. Pearson defied US president L. B. Johnson over Vietnam, and he canvassed supporters for Gordon’s crusade against North American economic integration at the 1966 Liberal Convention. An outspoken critic of Canadian foreign policy under Pearson and Foreign Minister Paul Martin Sr., he supported Pierre Trudeau for Liberal leader in 1968. He was rewarded with posts as president of the Queen’s Privy Council and house leader.
During the early Trudeau years, Macdonald was a vocal advocate for foreign policy reform, most notably in his unsuccessful fight to withdraw Canadian forces from Europe. Over time, however, his reformist instincts faded. He settled in as Trudeau’s chief political minister in Ontario, responsible for patronage and appointments, eventually emerging as finance minister and potential successor. But when Trudeau lingered too long in office, Macdonald fled to Bay Street in 1978, just as the Western world tilted right. Although Trudeau’s short-lived resignation in 1979 reignited his hopes, Macdonald missed his chance, unwilling to push the dithering prime minister aside. His hesitations, he acknowledges honestly, reflected his “lack of royal jelly” (p. 183).
Macdonald remained an influential figure in Ottawa during a long political afterlife. He headed the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects in 1982-84, whose recommendations in favour of free trade with the United States ushered Canada into the modern, globalized world. In 1988, Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney appointed him high commissioner to the United Kingdom, a role he embraced enthusiastically. Amid the ruins of his progressive beliefs, he marvelled at the specious miracle wrought by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher through “the encouragement of free enterprise, privatization, and lower taxes” (p. 221). By the time he returned to Canada in 1991, his views were sufficiently orthodox that Ontario’s Conservative premier Mike Harris could trust Macdonald with a commission reviewing the future of Ontario Hydro.
There is much to like in these memoirs. Macdonald writes well and easily, and is a natural raconteur. Appearing alone at an all-candidates meeting at a Catholic church closely identified with the Liberal cause, he asked about his rivals. “The other candidates?” deadpans the priest, “Oh no, we wouldn’t invite them here” (p. 69). His pithy portraits of Trudeau and his cabinet in the 1970s are judicious, as well as frank and funny. There are useful sketches of Gene Whelan, Jean Marchand, Gérald Pelletier, Marc Lalonde, Roméo LeBlanc, Paul Martin, and self-made Newfoundlander Don Jamieson, who “would leave ‘no turd unstoned’ to get a job done” (p. 100). And appropriately for a memoir, he gets even with former foes Mitchell Sharp (“a little bit prissy,” p. 101) and NDP house leader Stanley Knowles, whom he denounces for his partisanship and glory-seeking.
It is doubtful, however, that the memoirs ever reveal the real Macdonald. He moves through the second half of the twentieth century like a Canadian Forrest Gump. Hyper-imperialist during the Second World War, Deke pledge in the 1950s, and then a leftist-nationalist, Macdonald ends up a Bay Street operator, embracing arch-conservatives Thatcher and Harris in the 1990s. Crucially, the source and progress of this intellectual voyage remain unclear. Perhaps subconsciously, certainly ironically, he offers his own assessment, quoting with approval Britain’s Iron Lady: “Who are these people who shape their policy with every wind, and trim every sail? They have never believed in anything in their lives” (p. 219).
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=46706
Citation: Greg Donaghy. Review of Grant, H. M., W. A. Mackintosh: The Life of a Canadian Economist and Macdonald, Donald S.; McQueen, Rod, Thumper: The Memoirs of the Honourable Donald S. Macdonald. H-Canada, H-Net Reviews. April, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=46706
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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