Kirkpatrick, Sir George Airey

  • DICTIONARY OF CANADIAN BIOGRAPHY ARTICLE: Leslie H. Morley, “KIRKPATRICK, Sir GEORGE AIREY,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 12, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/kirkpatrick_george_airey_12E.html
  • DCB profile notes:
    • Lawyer, militia officer, politician, office holder, and businessman; b. 13 Sept. 1841 in Kingston, Upper Canada, son of Thomas Kirkpatrick and Helen Fisher; m. first 25 Oct. 1865 Frances Jane Macaulay (d. 1877), daughter of John Macaulay, and they had four sons and one daughter; m. secondly 26 Sept. 1883 Isabel Louise Macpherson, daughter of David Lewis Macpherson, in Paris, and they had a son; d. 13 Dec. 1899 in Toronto.
    • ecause he had a law degree, Kirkpatrick had to article for only three years, which he served in his father’s firm. He was called to the bar in 1865 and became, according to David Breakenridge Read, the “most prominent lawyer of his day in Kingston.” 
    • Kingston in the 19th century was home to a number of powerful politicians, including Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir Alexander Campbell, Sir Richard John Cartwright, and Sir Oliver Mowat. In 1870, without much local political experience, Kirkpatrick defeated Cartwright’s cousin and succeeded his own father as Conservative mp for Frontenac, the largely rural riding surrounding Kingston, which he would represent for the next 22 years. During that period he sat as chairman of the standing committee on public accounts (which brought forth the Tariff Act of 1879), served as speaker of the House of Commons from 1883 to 1887, and was appointed to the Privy Council in 1891. None the less, he spent his political career in the shadow of the more prominent Kingston politicians. A minor figure in parliament, he was unable to secure a cabinet post and even flirted with the Liberal party at the time of the Pacific Scandal in 1873. In refusing him a place in cabinet in 1888, Macdonald bluntly told him: “You are not strong enough in the House, when you were Speaker of the Commons you were afraid, and decided Parliamentary questions against your Conservative friends.”
    • In the commons, in fact, he was a forceful advocate for the interests of Kingston, its businesses, Queen’s, and the Royal Military College of Canada, and for the expansion of the Great Lakes–St Lawrence canal system that was so important to the economy of Kingston and other Ontario ports.
    • Kirkpatrick, whom historian Donald Wayne Swainson has called a “political patrician,” clearly felt obliged to promote the well-being of the community in which he was a leader. In turn he was widely respected. A few years after his death in 1899, Liberal mpp Edward John Barker Pense obtained money from the Ontario government, Kingston’s city council, and Kingstonians in general to erect a huge memorial fountain at the Frontenac County Court-House. It was formally presented in 1903 as the climax of the city’s Homecomers’ Festival.
  • Grandson of United Empire Loyalist listed in Loyalist Directory: https://uelac.ca/loyalist-directory/detail/?wpda_search_column_id=2805
  • Find a GRAVE: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/43203704/george-airey-kirkpatrick