A memorial, a wake and a toast to a Canadian hero — 150 years after he was assassinated

His funeral was one of the largest in Canadian history.

On a freezing cold April morning — 150 years ago — more than 80,000 people lined Montreal's Rue Saint-Jacques to honour Thomas D'Arcy McGee, one of Canada's Fathers of Confederation. 

He'd been shot in the back of the head. He was 42 years old.

Last weekend in Montreal, they came to honour him again. 

McGee was an Irish immigrant — journalist, poet and politician. A fiery nationalist in his youth, he fled Ireland for the United States where the idea of an American-Canadian union was popular among his comrades. 

But McGee renounced his early revolutionary politics. By the time he moved to Canada, he had planted himself at the centre, became a respected parliamentarian, a fan of the British Empire, a passionate advocate of Catholic-Protestant cooperation, and of Confederation. He may have paid for that with his life. Patrick James Whelan — a suspected Fenian — was hung for the crime.

Many Irish Montrealers have long believed that McGee hasn't been given his proper due. And so on Saturday April 7, on the 150th anniversary of his death, the Montreal St. Patrick Society held a mass at the Basilica where he worshipped, and toasted him at a wake at Hurley's Irish Pub.

The day was as cold and windy, as it had been 150 years ago. And it began with a laying of wreaths at McGee's grave in the Notre Dame des Neiges Cemetery.

Click 'listen' above to hear David Gutnick's report.