Angus L. Macdonald: A Provincial Liberal (review)

This insightful biography advances our understanding of a range of historical issues affecting Nova Scotia in particular and Canada in general during the middle decades of the twentieth century. It also documents with skill and nuance the emergence of the iconic ‘Angus L.’ from the diffident forty-year-old lawyer and academic who had unexpectedly won the provincial Liberal leadership in 1930. Macdonald served as premier of Nova Scotia from 1933 to 1940 and again from 1945 until his death in 1954, with the intervening years spent in Ottawa as minister responsible for naval affairs in the war Cabinet.

Stephen Henderson’s analysis of the roots of Macdonald’s approaches to liberalism and to political life is securely based on evaluations of crucial formative influences. An intellectual whose Harvard doctorate dealt with the adaptation of law to the needs of industrial society, Macdonald had been a penurious student whose years at St Francis Xavier University never quite persuaded him to adopt the tenets of social Catholicism, and then a veteran of the First World War who recovered only slowly from a wound inflicted by a sniper’s bullet. In politics, he was drawn continually to matters of constitutional import even though no stranger to the murky world of patronage and vote-buying, while his liberalism was expressed, for example, by favouring relief work over direct relief during the Depression years and, later, infrastructure development over direct state intervention in the provincial economy.

The book offers compelling perspectives on diverse areas of political history. One of them concerns the consistency of Macdonald’s approach to Canadian federalism. Only after the Second World War did he become known as a stubborn defender of provincial rights, and yet the key to his advocacy lay in his influence on and support for the findings of the Rowell-Sirois Commission (1940), from which Ottawa moved sharply away in 1945. Henderson also provides a persuasive reappraisal of Macdonald’s role in navigating the shoals of the vexed issue of conscription. Although a longstanding supporter of conscription, Macdonald emerges from this analysis as a mediator whose refusal to endanger the government by resigning over Mackenzie King’s manoeuvring earned him only the intensified animosity of the prime minister and ultimately an untidy exit from Ottawa in 1945. In regard to the more cultural dimensions of political life, Henderson writes intriguingly of Macdonald’s commitment to anti-modernism and tartanism not only in the interests of Nova Scotia’s growing automobile-based tourism but also as an expression of identity that could reinforce liberal ideals of sturdy independence and ‘help Nova Scotians towards self-realization.’

Although Macdonald’s first language was English, not Gaelic or Scots, and his ancestry was Acadian and Irish as well as Scottish, his romanticization of both Highland and Lowland cultural expressions clearly had deep personal roots. Where this biography is more reticent is on other areas of his personal life. His marriage to Agnes Foley inaugurated a lifelong partnership with a woman of strength and intellect – and an accomplished poet – and yet we gain little sense of her creative influence on his life. Similarly, the observation that ‘his career kept him somewhat distant from his children’ hints only obliquely at a personal cost that was surely inseparable from Macdonald’s political endeavours. Could it all have been different if he had remained a Halifax lawyer with strong scholarly credentials and an avocational interest in politics? An idle question perhaps, historically speaking, but one that some family members may have pondered from time to time.

Yet this is, first and foremost, a political biography. As such, it traverses a varied and often challenging historical landscape with assurance and conviction. Angus L. Macdonald appears as a principled figure in many respects, but never free of the paradoxes that attend any durable politician. He was the student and practitioner of Canadian federalism who never fully understood the complex aspirations of Quebec and paid a heavy price in terms of...