John Sandfield Macdonald Threatens Imperial-Colonial Relations

The John Sandfield Macdonald ministries do not bulk large in Canadian historiography. Most writers on the Confederation period have either ignored them entirely or have concluded that they represent a failed but, in the kindest of interpretations, noble attempt to create a political structure which could encompass people of different languages and different religions. This narrow perspective needs to be supplemented by a wider view. In the context of imperial-colonial relations, these governments threatened to undermine a delicate collaborative structure which had evolved over the previous decade and within which the interests of a powerful local elite, of British colonial administrators and of imperial investors intersected.

--Peter Baskerville, "Imperial Agendas and "Disloyal" Collaborators: Decolonization and the John Sandfield Macdonald Ministries, 1862-1864," in Old Ontario: Essays in Honour of J.M.S. Careless, ed. David Keane and Colin Read (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1990), 234.