Another possibility—a distinctly alarming one—was that the Americans might come into the North-West first. In fact, they were almost there already. By now a railway line had reached St. Paul, Minnesota. From there, by oxcart and by boat along the winding Red River, it was incomparably easier to send goods to and from the settlement of Red River than it was for Canadians to make the long, brutal slog westwards across the Pre-Cambrian Shield above Lake Superior. To heighten the threat, a scientist at the Smithsonian Institution, Lorin Blodgett, issued a report in 1857 describing the land beyond the forty-ninth parallel as “perfectly adapted to the fullest occupation by a civilized nation.” In response, two surveying expeditions to the West were dispatched from Canada the following year, one headed by Captain John Palliser, a Britisher, and the other by Henry Youle Hind, a graduate of Cambridge who had settled in Toronto as the professor of chemistry and geology at Trinity College. To heighten the sense of cross-border rivalry and threat, Minnesota was elevated from a territory to a state in 1858.
Macdonald’s response to all this expansionism was cautious to a degree. About a possible federation he said nothing at all. About territorial expansion he said as little as possible, influenced by the warning of his friend John Rose, a Montreal lawyer, that it would be expensive to protect “such an extent of territory, even if it is given up to us for nothing.”
Britain, in the person of the colonial secretary, Henry Labouchere, nevertheless felt that something had to be done to regularize the situation in the North-West. At Westminster, a select committee of the Commons was set up to recommend on the future of the Hudson’s Bay Company charter, including whether the territory should be offered to Canada and at what price. The company adroitly countered with an offer that it would accept a takeover in return for a payment of one million pounds. To present Canada’s case to the Commons committee, Macdonald established a commission headed by his former leader William Draper, now a judge.
Very little came of any of this. Draper told the select committee that Canada “must assert her rights” in the North-West, but in the absence of clear instructions from Macdonald his presentation to the British MPs was vague and legalistic. The committee made only one innovative recommendation—for a second Crown colony to be established on the Pacific Coast, to be named British Columbia. By oversight (or perhaps by design), the Hudson’s Bay Company charter was allowed to lapse of its own accord in 1859. A group of British businessmen bought up the company, calculating shrewdly they would make an easy profit once they were forced to resell it to Canada. The Hudson’s Bay Company continued to rule over its land, but less and less to govern it. Among those who came increasingly to control their own lives were the Métis of Red River, a change in their sense of themselves that no one outside the settlement took any notice of.
For the first time, though, ordinary Canadians had become aware of the open territory to their west. Indeed, because of a gold rush at the Fraser River, they appreciated now that this immense territory stretched all the way to the Pacific. An eventual takeover seemed more or less inevitable, if in no way imminent. Canada’s own version of Manifest Destiny beckoned.
That expansionary thought precipitated others. If Canada were to be extended to the Pacific, then logically it should be extended as well to the east, to the Atlantic. Yet if Canada proper were to be augmented by both the North-West and the Lower Provinces (as the Maritimes then were called), the population balance would tilt decisively against the Canadiens—everyone taking it for granted that the West would be colonized by settlers from Upper Canada and by new immigrants from the British Isles. The Canadiens, though, would oppose any such radical change in Canada’s demographic character as a violation of the agreement between the two groups when the United Province had been formed; more to the point, they could forestall it by exercising the de facto veto they possessed through the double-majority convention. When Cartier and Galt went to Britain for their meetings in 1858, Cartier warned Colonial Secretary Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton that, if forced to, he would exercise this veto. Nothing was resolved, but for the first time politicians were giving thought to the kind of problems that would emerge as soon as any serious attempt was made to add to Canada some or all of the other pieces of British North America.
Here, Macdonald allowed himself for the first time to express some views about a possible wider Canada. In the debate that followed the announcement that Draper would represent Canada’s views on the North-West to the British Parliament, Macdonald made an intriguing comment quite different from his earlier cautious utterances on the topic of Canada’s future. “The destiny of this continent,” he told the House, could depend on the results of the parliamentary inquiry in London. “Upon that action may depend whether this country remains confined to its present boundaries or swells to the dimension of a nation; whether we are to be annexed to the neighbouring Republic or extend the boundaries of this country itself.”
Macdonald was allowing the wheels of his mind to turn in public. Earlier he had dismissed the western territory as useless, and on one occasion expressed concern that Canada could be weakened by spreading out its settlers too thinly. Now he was declaring that adding the West to Canada could transform what was still only a province into something resembling a nation. While the word “federation” had not yet crossed his lips, Macdonald was here using the word that had always held talismanic importance to him—“annexation”—in the sense of stressing the need to make certain it never happened.
Proposals for a federation of the British North American colonies, or for a confederation of them—the terms were used interchangeably at this time—were not in themselves in any way new. The number of different proposals made for some form of federation or confederation before McGee and Galt took up the cause has been estimated at eighteen in all. The first person to advocate it—three-quarters of a century earlier—was Major Robert Morse, a British army engineer who, after surveying the Bay of Fundy in 1784 for possible settlements following the loss of the American colonies, suggested that all the colonies still remaining under the Crown should be banded together for their own protection. The same thought was expressed a few years later by two leading Loyalists, William Smith, later chief justice of Quebec, and Jonathan Sewell, who, in 1807, published a pamphlet about his idea: Plan for a General Legislative Union of the British Provinces in North America.*79 In the late 1830s in Britain, a Canadian-educated British MP, James Roebuck, proposed it at Westminster; Lord Durham came very close to recommending it in his famous report; and the Colonial Office later drafted a report on how it might be constructed.
A major obstacle—one common to most transformational ideas—was that potential losers could count their losses before they experienced them, while gains for likely winners were futuristic. The Maritimes, all of which were separate colonies that had already won Responsible Government for themselves, had little interest in giving up London as their protector in favour of Ottawa. Upper Canada had little interest in offering the one lure Maritimers might respond to—a railway to Halifax—because it would be the principal payer of the scheme, while Montreal, where the headquarters of this intercolonial railway would be located, would be the chief beneficiary. As for the Canadiens, it was difficult to offer them any greater protection than the virtual veto over Canadian national affairs they already exercised.
This combination of indifference and skepticism among so many of the British North Americans had been more than enough to convince Bulwer-Lytton to give Galt and Cartier a dusty, evasive answer when they came looking for British support for Galt’s federation concept. Further, the colonial secretary was sharp enough to guess that Macdonald’s real motive for sending over the mission was “the convenience of the present Canadian administration”—in other words, to make certain that Galt joined his cabinet.
Yet again, inertia won the day. What was needed to make something actually happen was a crisis, one that would shake everyone from his own fixed position. Also needed at that moment of
opportunity would be a political leader who knew how to herd cats.
Some commentators, the most influential among them Donald Creighton, have attempted to situate Macdonald among the early advocates of Confederation, as if to mingle his lustre with that of the cause of union itself. The weight of evidence is otherwise: even the inclusion of support for Confederation in the Liberal-Conservative policy from 1858 onwards was strictly tactical. The most persuasive negative evidence comes from Macdonald himself—in his own words.
In advance of the impending next election—it actually happened in the summer of 1861—Macdonald published an Address to the Electors of the City of Kingston of some three thousand words in which he set out his policies on all the central issues of the day, including a bankruptcy law, university reform, the Grand Trunk Railway, law reform and Representation by Population. About this last, controversial, topic, Macdonald penned the evasive phrase “This is not a party question, and ought not to be made one.”
About his thoughts on Confederation as he held them in mid-1861, Macdonald wrote, “The Government will not relax its exertions to effect a Confederation of the North American Provinces. We must however endeavour to take warning by the defects in the Constitution of the United States, which are now so painfully made manifest, and to form (if we succeed in a Federation) an efficient, central government.” That was all he had to say. To have said less would have been difficult. His disinclination to commit himself to any “vision thing” came out of the policy of governance he was committed to. Back in 1844, in advance of his first election, Macdonald had promised Kingston’s voters that he would not “waste the time of the legislature and the money of the people on abstract and theoretical questions of government.”*80 After two decades of practical political experience, the abstract and the theoretical still left him cold.
About constitutions, Macdonald was at all times particularly wary. They should not be fiddled with, he believed, unless “the people are suffering from the effects of the constitution as it actually exists,” as he had said in a legislature speech in 1854. Anyway, the substance of constitutions could be changed without an i or a t of them being amended. Canada had, after all, gained Responsible Government, although its constitution had been drafted specifically to exclude it; and the double-majority principle had entered into legislative life without any legal sanction. Britain, Macdonald’s political ideal, had won and was now administering the world’s second-greatest empire on the foundation of no written constitution at all. Put simply, Confederation at this time was, to Macdonald, an impractical irrelevancy.
But that left him with no governing principle at all—at the time when Brown’s governing principle of Rep by Pop kept gaining ever more legitimacy and support. Even Antoine-Aimé Dorion, the leader of rouges, who were loosely allied to the Reformers, felt compelled to suggest in the legislature a possible trade of his agreement to Rep by Pop for disentangling the United Province of Canada into a loose federation of two provinces with some minimalist central government.
Macdonald was reduced to advising Conservative candidates who supported Rep by Pop how best to express their opinion without appearing to be splitting from the party. He wrote to a sitting member, George Benjamin, to “go for Rep by Pop as strongly as you like, but do not say that it must be granted if a majority of U.C. members say so. Say that the principle is so just & equitable that it must prevail and that you have no doubt it will eventually.” He went on to urge Benjamin, “As you are situated, do not put yourself in opposition to the French.…The French are your sheet anchor.”
Macdonald was being forced to perform like a gymnast edging his way along a high wire that someone else was jiggling. Of the six Upper Canada ministers in his government, all but one would eventually go public as supporters of Rep by Pop—the lone exception being Macdonald himself. At the same time, his French Canadians were becoming increasingly concerned that Macdonald could not forever forestall Rep by Pop. So, some bleus began to wonder, why not switch over to the winning side—that of Brown and the Reformers—and thereby keep hold of the perks of patronage? Moreover, while Macdonald had spotted the possibility that he might be reduced to an opposition rump by a loss of bleu support, so had Brown.
After the humiliation of the double shuffle—and the taunt that he had headed “His Excellency’s most ephemeral Administration”—Brown’s career had gone into decline. He seemed even to have lost power at the Globe, where the editorials were being determined by the editor, George Sheppard. The anti-French Sheppard repeatedly called for an end to “French domination” and demanded that the problem be solved by an outright dissolution of the Union that would release Upper Canada from “Romish” and “Jesuitical” scheming.
Brown began his march back to leadership by organizing a huge Reform convention for the fall of 1859 in Toronto; its six hundred delegates made it easily the largest Canada had seen. Sheppard delivered a powerful speech and moved a resolution calling for the “unqualified dissolution” of the United Province of Canada. Brown’s turn came a day later. He agreed with Upper Canada’s complaints about the dominance of its smaller partner,*81 admitted that dissolving the union might resolve the problems, but then offered a brighter alternative: “What true Canadian can witness the tide of immigration now commencing to flow into the vast territories of the North West without longing…to make our own country the highway of the traffic to the Pacific.” The one way to achieve this was to keep the United Province together, so that it “may at some future date readily furnish the machinery of a great confederation.” Brown had found for himself a new voice as a moderate advocate of Confederation.
Brown, though, was no politician. After the convention, one Reform member recalled meeting his leader several times and never being recognized; a few days later, he had encountered Macdonald, who grasped his hand, slapped him on the back and declared how glad he was to see him. Brown’s ideas remained remote, abstract—and confusing. The resolution eventually passed by the Reform convention called for a federation composed only of the two existing “sections” of the United Province, Upper and Lower Canada, each separating to form new provinces, with, over them, “some joint authority.” The populist Grits rejected such a scheme as tame, and, far worse, as failing to be certain of ridding them of the French Canadians. By the summer of 1860, Brown’s hold on the party had weakened again, and he began to talk about resigning.
At the same time as Brown was losing control over his own party, so was Macdonald over his group. Besides having to tug back into line the ever-growing number of Conservatives now openly supporting Rep by Pop, he had to cope with rising disaffection with his leadership among the Orange Order, which had always provided him with a large number of his electoral foot soldiers. The divisive force here was that, in the summer of 1860, a spectacular royal tour of Canada—the first ever of its kind—had been made by Queen Victoria’s son Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, at the request of Macdonald’s government. While the prince’s progress had been overwhelmingly successful, it had been marred by one jarring confrontation involving the Orange Order.
The young Prince of Wales, Canada’s first royal visitor. On the far left is Governor General Sir Edmund Head, a great admirer of Macdonald’s. John Rose organized the prince’s tour.
Only eighteen years old, Prince Edward was generally judged to be handsome in the way, then as now, a special indulgence is always extended to royal princes. He had the reputation of being a good dancer and a stylish dresser—too stylish perhaps, because Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, complained that his eldest son took “no interest in anything but clothes. Even when out shooting, he is more occupied with his trousers than with the game.” But no matter—parades, pageantry and pomp always please the masses. For the colony to put on its best show—as Macdonald observed, “Our administration is more familiar with cocktails than cocked hats”—he picked his friend John Rose, at this time the minister of public works. And it went splendidly. The colonials were ecstatic and awed
. There was one terrible gaffe, in London, where an overeager citizen had the audacity to “seize the hand of his Royal Highness and shake it like a pump-handle.” More generally, as the Ottawa Citizen reported, “Ottawa appeared lovely and anxious as a bride awaiting the arrival of the bridegroom to complete the joy.” Everywhere, there were triumphal arches, red, white and blue bunting, patriotic banners, fireworks and illuminations achieved by the new marvel of gas. And there were newly minted ditties: “For hark, the trumpets / hark, the drums / The Princely Heir of England comes!”*82
Then it all unravelled in Macdonald’s hometown of Kingston. It was the most loyal town in the country, not only because of the Loyalists but even more because the Loyal Orange Order was so strong there. To greet their prince who had come over the water, Kingston’s Orangemen built two large arches of firs, which they covered with their own regalia and symbols. Then they gathered en masse to await him. Premonitions of trouble came from complaints by Kingston’s Catholics that the prince should not and could not be welcomed by a sectarian political organization that was banned in England itself. To stir things up, the Globe pointed out that when the prince began his tour in Quebec City, he had not only been greeted in French but visited Roman Catholic institutions such as Laval University and the Ursuline Convent. To head off a confrontation, Macdonald met with the colonial secretary, the Duke of Newcastle, who was accompanying the prince.*83 Macdonald argued that Upper Canadians felt that the Catholics “had had it all their own way in Lower Canada” and that the same courtesy should be extended to Upper Canada’s Protestants. Newcastle replied that there was no comparison between the Catholic artifacts in Quebec City, “which were emblematical of a faith,” and the paraphernalia of Orangemen, “which were those of a rancorous party.”
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