Not everyone convicted of murder went to the gallows, though. Just over half the 1,533 people listed in the official inventory of Department of Justice capital case files as having received the death penalty escaped the noose. In some cases, their sentence was commuted or quashed; in others, they were given a new trial leading to a reduced sentence or acquittal. Some prisoners awaiting execution died in jail. Chillingly, some unfortunates committed suicide.
So who was most likely to be executed? Statistics show us that certain groups of people, such as young working-class males and men from ethnic and racial minorities, were particularly vulnerable. The poor were often targeted. Women were generally treated leniently, as were Indigenous people in the early stages of their association with whites. However, racist thinking among the ruling classes would sometimes evoke pity for “lesser” peoples but at other times reflect fear and hatred of “the other.” In short, there were never any guarantees, consistent application of the law, or immutable rules or principles in what Strange calls “the lottery of death” — capital punishment in Canada.
The main players are all assembled. Let’s not forget the second-stringers, important in the action, too: police officers, homicide detectives, doctors, court officials, Crown prosecutors crossing swords with lawyers for the defence, jailers, and families of the victims and accused.
And standing by on the sidelines, waiting for his turn, is the most contentious participant of them all: the hangman.
The game is on.
Chapter 3
The Assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee: A Murder Mystery
T homas D’Arcy McGee may have had a premonition that his brains would be blown out by an assassin’s bullet. A few days before his death, he had a terrifying dream of tumbling into a powerful river and being swept helplessly toward a waterfall.
It was April 1868 and things had not been going well for McGee. Once a rising star among Irish Canadians, he had won a seat in parliament in the United Province of Canada (now Ontario and Quebec) in the general election of 1857 and had been instrumental in persuading Irish Canadians to support Confederation. But now his political career was in tatters. After playing a prominent role in the first two conferences in Charlottetown and Quebec that had led to Confederation, he was omitted from the third in London. He had been expelled from the St. Patrick’s Society in Montreal and denounced as a traitor to Ireland. In spite of his waning political fortunes, however, he was elected by a slim majority to the first House of Commons in the Dominion of Canada in 1867. But the Cabinet position he had expected as a prominent member of the ruling Conservative Party did not materialize. His clashes with the Irish community made him a liability rather than an asset, and the proposal was withdrawn. Instead, he was offered a job in the civil service as a consolation prize.
But at 2:00 a.m. on April 7, 1868, all of this faded into the background. In the House of Commons in Ottawa, parliamentarians were on their feet, giving McGee a standing ovation for his last passionate speech on the spirit of Confederation.
Then McGee put on his overcoat, gloves, and new white top hat and left the newly built centre block of parliament. As he started his slow walk back to his boarding house a short distance away, a full moon beamed down on him.
“Good night, Mr. McGee,” called John Buckley, a House of Commons employee, as McGee turned onto Sparks Street.
“Good morning,” joked McGee. “It’s morning now.”
Those were his last words.
His landlady, Mrs. Trotter, heard the drumming of feet and what sounded like a firecracker outside her front door. When she went to investigate, she found a figure slumped against the blood-speckled doorway. It was her lodger, shot to death. The bullet had entered the back of his head, passed through his skull, and exited through his mouth. The gun had been fired at such close range that some of McGee’s teeth were found embedded in the doorpost.
McGee was a close friend and drinking buddy of John A. Macdonald, also a Father of Confederation and now prime minister of Canada. Sir John A., as he was called, was devastated when wakened with the news that his companion had just been shot. He rushed at once to the scene of the murder and helped carry his dead friend into the house. He returned home, covered in blood and, as Macdonald’s wife Agnes described him, “much agitated,” with a face “ghostly white.”
A massive manhunt was launched, with more than two hundred people arrested in the police sweep. That afternoon, Sir John A. delivered a sombre tribute in the House of Commons to the “foully murdered” McGee. Flags flew at half-mast in Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto. The mayor of Ottawa posted a reward of $2,000 for information leading to the capture of the killer, and the federal government and provinces of Ontario and Quebec between them offered another $10,000.
The nation was in shock.
McGee, a short, chunky man with shaggy black hair, was nothing remarkable to look at. But he was an inspired public speaker with a magnetic personality. On the day he died, The Globe described him as “marvellously eloquent.… His wit — his power of sarcasm — his readiness in reply — his aptness in quotation — his pathos which melted to tears, and his broad humour which convulsed with laughter — were all undoubtedly of a very high order.”
In the period leading up to Confederation, McGee had fired up audiences with his enthusiasm and his vision of a free, tolerant, and united Canada. As noted by Fennings Taylor in a 1868 sketch of McGee’s life and death, McGee presented this ideal to fellow provincial parliamentarians in 1860. “I see in the not remote distance,” he said, “one great nationality, bound, like the shield of Achilles, by the blue rim of ocean. I see it quartered into many communities, each disposing of its internal affairs, but all bound together by free institutions.… I see within the round of that shield the peaks of the western mountains and the crests of the eastern waves.”
Thomas D’Arcy McGee, statesman, journalist, public speaker, and poet. This portrait is dated 1868, the year that McGee was felled by an assassin’s bullet, becoming the only Canadian federal politician ever to be assassinated.
McGee was a man of action as well as a visionary. Between 1864 and 1866, his key role in the negotiations with Britain that led to the founding of the Dominion of Canada prompted many to describe him as the (rather than a ) Father of Confederation.
But McGee wasn’t always a Canadian nationalist, loyal to the British Crown. Ironically, he started off as a fiery revolutionary. In Ireland, where he was born in Carlingford in 1825 and raised as a Roman Catholic, and in the United States, where he landed as a seventeen-year-old in 1842 to work as a newspaperman, he was strongly in favour of armed rebellion against British rule in Ireland. On his return to his native country in 1845, he became so politically active that the British issued a warrant for his arrest, and he had to flee back to the States, disguised as a priest.
McGee became increasingly disenchanted with what he regarded as the discrimination and exploitation experienced by Irish immigrants in the United States. And once he moved to Canada in 1857 on the invitation of a group of Irish Catholics to start up the New Era newspaper in Montreal, he expressed his opinions even more forcefully, declaring that minorities, including Catholics, were much better off in Canada than in the United States.
McGee was dirt poor in spite of his multiple professional activities as a charismatic politician, public speaker, journalist, and poet. Fortunately, he had powerful friends who were happy to help out. He owned a home on St. Catherine Street in Montreal, where he lived with his wife, Mary, and their two young daughters, Frasa and Peggy. The house, decorated with shamrocks, the symbol of Ireland, had been a gift from supporters.
But