Quote:
Originally Posted by passwordisnt123
I never said he made no contribution. I used five (or six depending on how you count them) adjectives or nouns to describe the man. They were: petty, unimportant, corrupt, drunk and fortunate/unfortunate (I counted those as one coin with two sides but I guess you could see them as separate). I think I'm on pretty solid ground in asserting each of those five/six.
In terms of an alternate theory, we're dealing in the realm of counterfactual history here so it's highly speculative. But I think one interesting perspective when discussing this is to look at it in the context of his WAR, or his Wins Above Replacement. Using this metric, we'd ask questions like: what was his unique contribution above or below that of any of his contemporaries? Did he have any superlative value that none of his contemporaries had or that even any of the other Fathers of Confederation lacked? I haven't seen any evidence of any such superlative value if he had one. Was he uniquely qualified in a way that no other Father of Confederation could have possibly done x, y or z? I've seen no evidence of that either. Quite the contrary actually. I think any less corrupt Father of Confederation could have arguably done better if only by virtue of their being less corrupt. That's why I'd argue that, if we could hop in a time machine and shove John A. in a drunken stupor before a racing carriage, he could easily be replaced by almost any one of contemporaries who would be just as competent, if not more so. In other words, his Win Above Replacement value, in my estimation, was low. For example, I'm sure almost any other member of his Tory cabinet could have just as competently exterminated indigenous peoples and cultures, created an underclass of Chinese serfs, and hanged Louis Riel for having the audacity to advocate for the rights, land, and survival of the Métis people. |
You make it sound like Riel was a philosophy professor. He led an armed rebellion. Treason is a crime in every country. His sentence should have been commuted due to his mental illness (as many of Macdonald’s contemporaries as well as the jury that convicted him, called for).
The only person who possibly could have played a leading role in the Liberal Conservative party was John Galt, and he turned down the Premiership because he didn’t think he could maintain control of the legislature and recommended Macdonald and Cartier. Your alternate history lacks a viable leader.
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