John A

by Richard J. Gwyn

  Little Englanders made the economic case—men including Manchester School Liberals such as Richard Cobden,*102 John Bright and Goldwin Smith. The press fired more shots, as in the Edinburgh Review’s description of the North American colonies as “productive of heavy expense to Great Britain, and of nothing else.” Such opinions were common among the most knowledgeable Britons of all—those in the Colonial Office. In 1864 John Taylor, one of the influential officials there, dismissed all the British North American colonies as “a sort of damnosa hereditas.” Taylor and the top official, Sir Frederic Rogers, were “separatists” who believed that the best solution was to gently nudge the colonies towards independence.

  Those who wanted the Empire retained evoked glory and honour. Prime ministers in particular held this view: Lord Melbourne proclaimed that “the final separation of these colonies might possibly not be of material detriment…. But it is clear it would be a serious blow to the honour of Great Britain” Sir Robert Peel’s view, specifically about “the Canadas,” was that “the tenure by which we hold [them] is most precarious, & that sooner or later we must lose them” Lord John Russell warned that “the loss of a great portion of our Colonies would disrupt our imperial interests in the world, and the vultures would soon be getting together” and Lord Palmerston felt that “it would lower us greatly, for ‘if reputation is strength’ then the reverse would weaken us much.” Until Disraeli won the day, the Big Englanders’ case was defensive: while no particular colony might be worth keeping, a domino effect might precipitate the loss of all the rest. (The real concern of those who wanted to keep the colonies was that if Canada went, so, sooner or later, would Ireland.)

  It was only after Confederation that the British really embraced their empire, and so embraced Canada. During the earlier years, Macdonald had no assurance that his own loyalty and that of other Canadians would be reciprocated. Indeed, it was during this period of uncertainty that he made some of his sharpest comments about Canada-British relations: he pronounced that Canada had the right “to raise revenue in [its] own fashion,” that is, to impose whatever tariffs it saw fit on British goods; he protested strongly to the governor general, as “a matter of the gravest importance…directly affecting the independence of our Courts and of our people” and as “an unseemly and irritating conflict of jurisdiction,” the decision of a British court to issue a writ of habeas corpus to protect an accused person in Canada.*103 Macdonald praised the action itself as done for “praise-worthy motives” but insisted that “the English Courts of Justice shall have no jurisdiction in Canada, and that no writ or process from them shall run into it.”

  The possibility of a split should not be exaggerated. The British aristocracy and political class always supported the Empire—it created jobs for those troublesome younger sons. Some did so for high-minded reasons: Edward Cardwell, the colonial secretary, argued in a January 1865 speech at Oxford University that while “lynx-eyed logicians” might dismiss the colonies, in contrast to other empires that had clung on to their holdings, “it has been given to England alone to be also the mother of great and free communities.”*104 There was also the powerful emotional argument that imperialism’s real purpose was to create converts to Christianity; prime ministers always wanted to keep the colonies, because none of them wanted to go down in the history books as the leader who had “lost” them. And at no time did anyone ever suggest giving up India, that jewel in Britain’s crown, or naval bases such as Gibraltar and Malta—or Halifax.

  Support for keeping all the other colonies, though, remained suspect until the 1870s—particularly Canada, because with it came the risk of a clash with the United States. The Colonial Office itself was a second-rank portfolio and remained so until almost the end of the century.†105 Its staff was tiny; its offices—at 14 Downing Street—were crumbling and so damp that fires had to be kept going all year round to prevent the files from going mouldy. Colonial Office clerks passed their time playing darts with pen-nibs attached to literal red tape.

  Among the colonies, Canada, while the richest and most advanced politically, attracted little sentiment. “Who is Minister, at Quebec City or any other seat of British government in America, we none of us know,” observed the Times. “If we knew today, we should forget tomorrow.” New Brunswick’s lieutenant-governor, Arthur Gordon, described Canada as “a last resort for people who have ruined themselves at home.” According to the Times, Canada came second to Australia, because those going there came from “a wealthier and more completely English class”—by which it meant that, blessedly, few Irish went to Australia. Outside politics, Canada could count on few friendly voices or pens: the novelist Anthony Trollope had his eponymous hero Phineas Finn declare, “Not one man in a thousand cares whether the Canadas prosper or fail to prosper.”*106 Mind you, a number of Canadians—Macdonald conspicuously absent from their ranks—felt the same, in reverse. A legislature member, Philip VanKoughnet, wrote home from London that he “felt himself like a cat in a strange garret.” George Brown, while in England on the trip during which he met Anne, wrote home that “after all I have seen, I say now as earnestly as I can—Canada for me!” Still, there was that crushing, dismissive judgmet of the authoritative Times that whether Canadians opted for independence or not was hardly “considered a matter of great moment to England.”

  From this conflicting raw material, Macdonald had to forge a counterweight to the colossus next door. Two comments capture the outer limits of the possibilities available to him. One was by the colonial secretary, the Duke of Newcastle. The other was by an unknown editor of a backcountry weekly. While in Washington at the end of 1860, following the Prince of Wales’ North American tour, Newcastle sought out the future secretary of state, William Seward. They talked about the possibility that Canada, just by being there, might accidentally precipitate a Britain-U.S. conflict. Seward said he couldn’t believe Britain would risk so much for so little. “Do not remain under such an error,” answered Newcastle. “Once touch us on our honour, and you will soon find the bricks of New York and Boston falling about your heads”*107 —in other words, the Royal Navy would use the Atlantic ports of the United States for target practice. The other comment was contained in a small Lower Canada newspaper, Le Défricheur, in an editorial about whether, as Macdonald and many others claimed, a confederation of the British North American colonies would actually improve Canada’s military security. Such dependence on a piece of paper, wrote the young editor, would be like being “armed with an eggshell to stop a bullet.” The editor’s name was Wilfrid Laurier.

  Wilfrid Laurier. As the editor of a small rural newspaper, Laurier dismissed the argument that Confederation would secure Canada from invasion by comparing its effect to trying to stop a bullet with an eggshell.

  The duke in private and the country editor in an unknown newspaper were saying what Macdonald had told the Quebec City delegates. There was only so much that Britain could or would do for Canada. It would do even that almost entirely for the sake of its honour, and do it on its own terms. Canada really was on its own.

  Credible or not, useful or not, some sort of attempt to improve Canada’s military security had to be made, if only as a gesture. In 1863 Britain sent out a Lieutenant-Colonel William Francis Drummond Jervois to recommend improvements for defence. Jervois’s report, made public early in 1864, touched off a political storm because he had quite clearly concluded that Upper Canada was indefensible. Hope remained only for those places the Royal Navy could reach, such as Halifax, Quebec City and perhaps Montreal. The effect of his report, said Macdonald, had been to create “a panic” in Upper Canada. Jervois later turned in a second, more optimistic report calling for heavy spending on fortifications and, to reassure Upper Canadians, for a fleet on Lake Ontario. The Canadian legislature approved the spending of one million dollars, though little work was actually done. Macdonald refused to take the plans seriously. After two years, he forecast, “a hole may be made in the mud opposite Quebec, and the found
ation of single redoubt built.” Implicitly, Macdonald agreed with Laurier.

  Something else was needed. What it might be, Macdonald as yet had no idea. But he did understand the nature of the problem that had to be solved—Canada had to find a gap, no matter how narrow and twisting it might be, between the opposed risks of “forcible annexation and abandonment by Britain,” as he phrased it in a letter to a Maritime supporter. What Macdonald could not know was that Queen Victoria had been discussing the very same conundrum with her ministers at the same time. This was, as she recorded, “the impossibility of our being able to hold Canada, but we must struggle for it; and by far the best solution would be to let it go as an independent kingdom under an English prince.”*108 The problem was defined. The next step, long overdue, was to define a solution and then implement it.

  SEVENTEEN

  Irreplaceable Man

  Everybody admits that the union must take place some time. I say now is the time. If we allow so favourable an opportunity to pass, it may never come again. John A. Macdonald

  The political minuet that followed the defeat of Macdonald’s government on June 14, 1864, was well practised. After he had lost the non-confidence vote, Macdonald called on Governor General Monck at Spencer Wood, his residence in Quebec City, where the government was now located, to ask for a dissolution of the legislature so an election could be held. This Monck agreed to. Here, though, the familiar ritual was halted; it was interrupted first by George Brown, and soon afterwards by Monck himself.

  A month earlier, the resolution Brown had moved at the start of the session—for a legislative committee to look at all the alternative proposals for some form of federation—had at last come to a vote; to general surprise it passed, 59 to 48. Those opposed were mostly Canadien bleus, but they also included John A. Macdonald, Alexander Tilloch Galt and George-Étienne Cartier, all of them suspicious of what Brown was up to. On May 20 the committee assembled—Macdonald as a member—to begin its work. To make certain that all present stayed and really worked, Brown strode over to the door, locked it, and told the group, “Now gentlemen, you must talk to me about this matter, as you cannot leave this room without coming to me.” Another seven meetings followed, with Cartier playing an active part—an unusual role for him when constitutional changes were being discussed.

  By a fluke of fate, the committee’s report was finished on the same day, June 14, that Macdonald’s government fell. Brown read out its conclusion to the House: “A strong feeling was found to exist among members of the committee in favour of changes in the direction of a federative system, applied either to Canada alone or to the whole British North American Provinces.” Its sole recommendation—opposed by just three of the twenty members, among them Macdonald—was that yet another committee look again at the matter. This was tepid stuff.

  Late that night, though, Brown spoke to two Liberal-

  Conservative members. Could the crisis not be used to address directly the great constitutional questions? he suggested. The pair asked if they could pass this comment back to Macdonald and Cartier. Brown agreed. The members hurried off.

  The next morning, there was a slight alteration in the customary steps of the minuet. Macdonald asked the House for an adjournment to give him time to consult the governor general. When Macdonald and his delegation arrived, Monck assured them that his approval for a dissolution and an election still stood. He asked, though, why they did not talk to the opposition leaders to see whether an all-party government might be formed to address the constitutional options. One day later, members of the legislature were astonished to see Brown and Macdonald having a brief, urgent yet seemingly amicable conversation in the chamber’s centre aisle. They were discussing when and where Macdonald and Galt should meet Brown to talk about a possible coalition government.

  The challenge before the old enemies was to agree on what such a government should stand for and, scarcely less consequential, who should be in its cabinet. They met, at one in the afternoon on the 17th, in Brown’s room in the St. Louis Hotel, overlooking Quebec City’s harbour. For Macdonald and Galt, harking back to their own agreement of 1858, the new government’s first priority had to be a pan-Canadian federation. For Brown, it had to be Representation by Population. The differences between them had to be fudged, and getting there took time and immense care by both sides as they struggled not to look back at old battles and wounds. The fudge proved to be that Brown, no less than Macdonald and Galt, was committed to the “federative principle”—a term that conveniently could mean almost anything and could also be applied as easily to the United Province of Canada alone, as Brown wanted, or to all of British North America, as was Macdonald and Galt’s choice. They were still arguing about details when they had to hurry back to the chamber for Parliament’s three o’clock opening.

  Macdonald spoke first. His government had initiated negotiations with a leading opposition member, he disclosed, and as a result of progress in these talks the dissolution of Parliament was being delayed. After a pause to heighten the suspense, Macdonald revealed that the opposition member he was negotiating with was “the member for South Oxford”—Brown. There were gasps of disbelief. Then Brown spoke. He had never imagined himself negotiating with such a government, but “the repeated endeavours year after year to get a strong government formed have resulted in constant failure.” Out of this crisis, he continued, a chance had been created “to consider the interests of both sections of the Province, and to find a settlement of our differences.” With great grace, Brown singled out Cartier as having done “a most bold and manly thing” by agreeing to the project. The chamber rang out with cheers, shouts, exclamations, slaps on the back. At one in the morning, alone at last in his hotel room, Brown wrote home to tell Anne all about it: “You never saw such a scene…but as the whole thing may fail, we will not count our chickens yet.” The Canadien newspaper expressed its opinion that the Macdonald-Brown accord “comptera parmi les plus memorable de notre histoire parlementaire.” In the town now known as Kitchener, the Berliner Journal expressed, in the primary language of the people of that area, its delight that the project could lead to the incongruity: that “George Brown mit John A. Macdonald, Cartier und Galt Hand in Hand zu gehen—daran nätte, gewiss Niemand in Traume gedacht.”*109

  It was the most dramatic instance of political reconciliation in Canada’s parliamentary history since 1848, when Governor General Lord Elgin had followed his reading of the Throne Speech in English with, for first time, a re-reading in French. As on that earlier occasion, some Canadien members rushed up to Brown to kiss him on both cheeks—a challenging feat given his height of more than six feet. Brown and Macdonald had fought over everything from Rep by Pop to the double majority to the choice for Canada’s capital. Besides their multiple combats, they shared a mutual animosity, thickening towards contempt, matched only a century later by that between Prime Ministers John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson. Yet here they were, doing what they had promised never to do—joining hands with each other.

  The explanation each gave at the time was “deadlock.” That was true enough: the journalist Goldwin Smith would later describe deadlock as having been the “true Father of Confederation.” The Canadian political system had become stale and sterile. The Conservatives and the Reformers were like punch-drunk fighters, still upright only because they each propped the other up, too depleted now to take more than the occasional swipe at each other over stale quarrels.

  Brown in particular was displaying an out-of-character generosity for which Anne Brown surely deserves a share of the credit. The newspaper owner had a first-rate mind, but as a politician he was of the third rank; yet he was now putting himself into Macdonald’s supple and deviously articulated hands.

  Macdonald’s own explanation for embracing Brown and Confederation, given in a letter to a Conservative supporter two years later, was straightforward: “As leader of the Conservatives in Upper Canada, I then had the option of forming a coalition government or
of handing over the administration of affairs to the Grit party for the next ten years.” That admission of opportunism is persuasive—Macdonald’s political circumstances were indeed parlous. His count of Conservative supporters was down to twenty. He had misjudged until the very last moment the readiness of politicians in all corners of the House to find a way out of the legislative inertia made unavoidable by the double-majority rule.

  An entirely new political threat also confronted him. Now that Brown had stopped denouncing “French domination,” an alliance between Brown and Cartier’s bleus became a real possibility. Brown could bring to such a grouping many more elected members than remained with Macdonald. The “mini-confederation” that Brown favoured, of separating Upper and Lower Canada into autonomous provinces with some minimal “joint authority” over them, would give Cartier what he most wanted—protection against Rep by Pop. And Macdonald knew it would be far easier merely to reshape the existing government in this way than to recreate the entire country as he now wanted to do.

  It fact, though, Brown had for too long said too much that was hateful for Canadien members ever to fully accept him. His “mini-federation” would be far more difficult to bring off than it might seem at first glance. It would leave the English in Lower Canada (now one-quarter of Montreal’s population) isolated in a quasi-separate province dominated by the French. Cartwright wrote in his Reminiscences that he thought the English in Lower Canada would have responded by seeking union with the United States (as they had advocated in 1849). To prevent such an unhinging of all its British North American colonies, the Imperial government would almost certainly have intervened to disallow the “mini-federation.”

  Yet something was going on between Brown and Cartier, and if it ever came to anything, the victim would be Macdonald. Cartwright wrote later that there existed at this time a perfectly good understanding between Mr. Cartier and Mr. Brown about forming “a new ministry”—and he claimed that Governor General Monck had told him this. In the end, all this backstage plotting came to nothing, except that thereafter Macdonald and Brown circled each other even more warily.