The C.N.A. Businessmen's Association was an organization of business owners in the Confederation of North America. In the late nineteenth century it was the most powerful such organization in the country. Governor-General John McDowell's forceful response to the Great Depression of the early 1880s led the C.N.A.B.A. to proclaim him "the strongest and wisest leader our nation has ever had."
Sobel's source for the C.N.A.B.A.'s endorsement of McDowell is Abner LeFevre's The Age of Renewal: The First McDowell Administration (New York, 1968).