Reply #16: Hmmmm

[GirlinContempt]

No he wasn't directly offered it:

In March 1873 the federal Reformers settled on Mackenzie as their leader. It seems likely that if Blake had wanted the position it could have been his, but he begged off. Mowat’s return to politics had led Sir John A. Macdonald to appoint Samuel Blake to a vice-chancellorship in the Court of Chancery, leaving the Blake firm in some disarray. Edward’s own nervous debilitation in the latter half of 1872, the death of an infant daughter, and the drawn-out consequences of his father’s death in 1870 had led to his retreat from provincial politics and his unwillingness to undertake direct leadership at the federal level. Thus, while he fully participated in the massive assault on the Macdonald government over the Pacific Scandal, an attack that let him exercise his powerful forensic skills and sense of moral outrage to the full, it was Mackenzie whom Governor General Lord Dufferin asked to form a new government in November 1873. Blake felt, perhaps only in retrospect, that he might have been asked. The failure to take on the Reform leadership in March 1873 was the premier error of his political career.

http://www.biographi.ca/EN/ShowBio.asp?BioId=41335