Born in Glasgow in 1815 and raised in Kingston, Upper Canada, John A. Macdonald trained as a lawyer before entering colonial politics in the 1840s. As leader of the Conservative Party he was the central figure at the Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences of 1864, where representatives of the British North American colonies negotiated the terms of union, and he led the delegation that took the resulting scheme to London for enactment as the British North America Act, which received royal assent on 29 March 1867 and took effect on 1 July 1867. He became the new Dominion of Canada's first prime minister and pursued a 'National Policy' of protective tariffs, western settlement and a transcontinental railway (completed 1885) intended to bind the new confederation together economically and politically.

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