Sir Oliver Mowat

Randall White, a political scientist, is also a Toronto-based economic
consultant and author of Voice of Region: On the Long Journey to Senate
Reform in Canada.

Oliver Mowat served as Liberal premier of Ontario for more than 23
consecutive years in the formative post-Confederation era, from October
1872 to July 1896. It is only a slight exaggeration to call him the
founder of the modern Ontario political system. He was also a key
founder of the “province-building” tradition in Canadian federalism,
and a staunch opponent of John A. Macdonald’s centralist
constitutional views in the late 19th century. At the end of his
premiership, he played a crucial role in Wilfrid Laurier’s watershed
victory in the federal election of 1896.

Despite Mowat’s undoubted historical significance, Margaret Evans’s
biography is the first book-length study of his career since the early
20th century. Through an unfortunate misunderstanding very few of
Mowat’s private papers have survived. Evans has had to “piece
together” an admirably clear and detailed outline of his political
life “in the main from public records.” Somewhat unhappily, from
some points of view, Mowat was a rather congenitally grey and austere
figure. Evans’s story might thus not have sounded all that different
even with the humanizing warmth of private papers. A serious interest in
Mowat is an acquired taste: it can be highly illuminating once acquired,
but he is not altogether easy to appreciate on first acquaintance.

In the end the extra effort is well worthwhile. Mowat’s various
legacies to the present have some particular resonance in the wake of
our most recent constitutional debates. His vision of late 19th-century
Ontario as a “mixed community” is even more relevant today. The
winning political style he bequeathed to generations of subsequent (and,
as Evans stresses, mostly Conservative) Ontario premiers is starting to
show its age. But understanding the pragmatic logic behind the old style
is important food for any practical thought about what might
successfully replace it. Margaret Evans has at last given us a proper
modern biography of a historic central Canadian political leader who
still deserves more attention than he often receives. It is bound to
remain essential reading for anyone with any serious interest in
“Canada’s most populous province,” for many years to come.