Brown's Small and Virtuous Local Legislature and Macdonald's Large and Spendthrift National Legislature

George Brown's fiscal revolt had a huge flaw. Liberal governments were indeed well positioned to refuse subsidies to local interests. But the Conservative government of John A. Macdonald was well positioned to connive ways of circumventing the fiscal straitjacket and buying off interests with discretionary spending. Macdonald had never taken his eyes off the tariff: someone had to manage it and that someone would have no small revenue to command. Brown could have his small, virtuous local legislature, and Macdonald could have his large, spendthrift national one.

--E.A. Heaman, Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017), 53-54.