It was on this date in 1814 that French Canada’s future hero of Confederation, the great Sir George-Étienne Cartier, was born in Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu in what was then Lower Canada.  He went on to become Sir John A. Macdonald’s key French-Canadian ally in the run-up to Confederation.  Unlike so many others of their generation, Macdonald and Cartier were able to see past the divides of race and religion to envision a joint future in a new nation called Canada.During the first years of Macdonald’s government, Cartier was the Quebec anchor of the team that cemented the new Dominion.  Cartier’s death, in 1873, at the age of 58, was a great loss for the Macdonald government and for Sir John A. personally.On the bicentennial of Cartier’s birth in 2014, I wrote a tribute to him for the Kingston Whig-Standard.  I am pleased to place it below.By Arthur MilnesToday is the bicentennial of the birth of Sir John A. Macdonald's great French-Canadian partner in the building of Canada, Sir George-Etienne Cartier. To help mark this historic anniversary, we are pleased to present below an excerpt of Sir John A. Macdonald's own tribute to his fallen friend and fellow Father of Confederation. Canada's first prime minister delivered the address below at the unveiling of Cartier's Parliament Hill statue in 1885."We are assembled here today to do honour to the memory of a great and good man. The Parliament of Canada has voted a sum of money for the purpose of defraying the cost of erecting a fitting statue to Sir George Cartier. In doing so, I believe Parliament truly represented the desires and wishes of the whole people of the Dominion to do honour to the memory of that statesman.That lamented gentleman, during the whole of his official life, was my colleague. As we acted together for years from the time he took office in 1855 until 1873, when he was cut off, it is almost impossible for me to allude to his services to the country without at the same time passing, in some degree, a laudation on the Government of which he and I were both members. But there is no necessity for me to recall to your memory the deeds of Sir George Cartier. He served his country faithfully and well. Indeed, his life was cut short by his unremitting exertions in the cause of this country.I believe no public man, since Canada has been Canada, has retained during the whole of his life, as was the case of Sir George Cartier, in such an eminent degree the respect of both the parties into which this great country was divided. He was a strong constant Lower Canadian. He never disguised his principles; he carried them faithfully and honestly into practice. But while he did this, he allowed others the same liberty he claimed for himself and approved of the principle that each man should do according to his conscience what he thought best for the good of the country. The consequence was that even those gentlemen who were strongly opposed to his political course and views gave due credence to his honesty of purpose, and believed that whether right or wrong he was acting according to the best of his judgment and the impulses of his conscience.As for myself, when the tie between us was broken, no man could have suffered more keenly than I did at the loss of my colleague and my friend. I shall leave it to others to expatiate upon his labours more particularly. Sufficient for me to say that he did what he regarded to be in the interests not of a section but of the whole country.Nevertheless, he was a French-Canadian. From the time he entered Parliament, he was true to his province, his people, his race, and his religion. At the same time, he had no trace of bigotry, no trace of fanaticism. Why, those who were opposed to him in his own province used to call him a French-speaking Englishman. He was as popular among the English-speaking people as he was among his own countrymen, and justly so, because he dealt out even justice to the whole people of Canada, without regard to race, origin or principles.Gentlemen, he was true to his province, he was true to the institutions of his province, and if he had done nothing else than see to the complete codification of the law of his native province, if he had done nothing else but give to Quebec the most perfect code of law that exists in the whole world, that was enough to make him immortal amongst civilized people who knew his merits, knew his exertions, and knew the value of the great code of civil law he conferred on his country.I shall say no more in respect of what he did, but I will speak of him as a man truthful, honest and sincere; his word was as good as his bond, and his bond was priceless. A true friend, he never deserted a friend. Brave as a lion, he was afraid of nothing. He did not fear a face of clay. But whilst he was bold, as I have said, in the assertion of his own principles, and he carried them irrespective of consequences, he respected the convictions of others ...I can speak of him perfectly because I knew his great value, his great value as a statesman, his great value as a friend. I loved him whilst he was living; I regretted and wept for him whilst he died.I shall not keep you here longer by any remarks of mine. Others coming from his own province will speak of his merits. I can only conclude in the words of the song he used to sing to us so often when he was with us in society: 'II y a longtemps que je t'aime jamais je ne t'oublierai.' "Birthday alerts: Sending out birthday greetings to MPs Michael McLeod and Harjit Sajjan.[caption id="attachment_582790" align="alignleft" width="183"] Sir George-Étienne Cartier[/caption]Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist.  He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy.  A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.