BOWELL, Sir Mackenzie

No other working printer has ever been Prime Minister of Canada. No other Prime Minister has come to the office from the Senate. And no other Canadian Prime Minister has been forced out by a cabinet mutiny inside his own party. Sir Mackenzie Bowell managed all three. He had also run the Belleville Intelligencer for the better part of fifty years, led the Grand Orange Lodge of British America through its most politically turbulent decade, and represented Hastings North in every single House of Commons from Confederation to 1892.

Early life

Bowell was born on 27 December 1823 at Rickinghall, a small Suffolk village. The family crossed to Upper Canada in 1833, when he was nine, and settled in Belleville on the Bay of Quinte. His formal schooling ended at twelve — printer’s apprentices in the 1830s didn’t have the luxury of a protracted education. He was foreman of the Intelligencer’s print room by twenty-three, married Harriet Moore in 1847, and owned the paper outright by the mid-1850s. Through his son he held it until the day he died in 1917.

Militia and Orange Order

Bowell held a commission as an Ensign in the First Belleville Rifle Company in 1864, a period of heightened militia activity driven by the American Civil War across the Great Lakes. He served in the militia through the Fenian raids.

He was installed as Grand Master of the Loyal Orange Association of British America in 1870 and held the office until 1878. His eight-year term covered the Ontario separate-schools controversy and the second Macdonald government’s first years.

House of Commons

Bowell ran for the new House of Commons in the first post-Confederation general election, taking the riding of Hastings North on 20 September 1867. He held the seat continuously through seven general elections until December 1892. In the House he sat with the Liberal-Conservative and then the Conservative caucus.

Cabinet

John A. Macdonald brought Bowell into the cabinet as Minister of Customs in October 1878. He held the Customs portfolio through the rest of Macdonald’s life, a stretch of nearly thirteen years, and added Minister of Militia and Defence briefly in 1891–1892. Under Sir John Abbott he moved to Minister of Trade and Commerce, a new portfolio created in 1892.

Senate

On 13 December 1892, Abbott appointed Bowell to the Senate. He sat as Government Leader in the Senate under John Thompson.

Prime Minister

Sir John Thompson collapsed and died at Windsor Castle on 12 December 1894, while being sworn in as a member of the Imperial Privy Council. The Governor General, Lord Aberdeen, declined to elevate any of the Commons Conservatives likely to succeed Thompson and turned instead to the Leader of the Government in the Senate. (Lady Aberdeen’s journal of the Canadian years, published by the Champlain Society in 1960 as The Canadian Journal of Lady Aberdeen, is the fullest primary record of the Government House view of the succession.) Bowell took the oath on 21 December 1894.

His sixteen months in office foundered on the Manitoba Schools Question. Manitoba had abolished the province’s separate-school rights in 1890; the 1895 Judicial Committee ruling said Ottawa had the power to restore them. Catholic and French-Canadian members of the cabinet wanted remedial federal legislation; Bowell’s Orange instincts pulled him against it. Seven of his ministers walked out on him in January 1896 — the “nest of traitors,” a phrase the Dictionary of Canadian Biography entry by Gaffen and Brown attributes to Bowell himself about the men who had sat at his own cabinet table. He held on long enough to table remedial legislation. The government lost a closure vote on it in the Commons, and on 27 April 1896 he handed the premiership to Sir Charles Tupper.

Opposition Senate years and death

Bowell returned to the Senate and served there another twenty-one years. He was made a KCMG in 1895. He was the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate through the Laurier years, resigning that position in 1906 but keeping his seat to the end. He died in Belleville on 10 December 1917, at the age of ninety-three, and is buried in Belleville Cemetery.