John A

by Richard J. Gwyn

  Nevertheless, a transformational change had taken place. Macdonald and Brown had reversed their roles. Brown, the impatient moralist, was now the cautious conservative. The scheme he was advocating amounted only to a rejigging of the existing system. Macdonald, the scheming opportunist, had turned visionary. He had not only committed himself to Galt’s 1858 plan for a new Confederation extending to the Maritimes but had added to it an entirely new goal of stretching this new nation west to the Pacific. His leitmotif of maintaining Canada as an un-American nation was at work. As Macdonald expressed it in a letter to British railway promoter Edward Watkin, “If Canada is to remain a Country separate from the United States, it is of great importance that they should not get behind us by right or force and intercept the route to the Pacific.” Not only was Macdonald now calling for a much more ambitious federation than that proposed by Brown but he was calling also for a much more ambitious national government than Brown’s minimalist “some joint authority.” Of the pair, one wanted only to spring clean the existing house, while the other wanted to build an entirely new mansion.

  It was this formula for national survival that, six months later, Macdonald would lay before the delegates at the Quebec Conference when he challenged them to “convince the world of our strength by being united.”

  In the immediate future, the boldest of the three was Cartier. He was risking the bird he already had in his hand—the effective veto on national affairs exercised by his bleu members—on a good-faith assumption that Quebec’s distinctiveness would continue to be respected even when it was surrounded by an entire transcontinental flock of English-speaking fowl. Between Macdonald and Brown, though, there was no question who now was the bolder. Indeed, Brown at times seemed curiously self-doubting. Asked how he saw the way ahead, he replied, “I am not so well informed as to all the bearings on the question of a union of all the British North American Provinces that I could at once pronounce a final option on that question.” Brown’s Globe echoed his timidity: “Efforts are to be made to induce the Lower Provinces [the Maritimes] to join confederation, but the success of the scheme, so far as Canada is concerned, is not to be contingent on their assent.”

  A timeout is needed here to justify the argument being presented that Macdonald, despite the judgment of most historians, was acting strategically as well as tactically for the sake of his own partisan advantage. True, Macdonald seldom went in for big ideas or “visions.” But that’s not the same as saying—as has been said many times—that he had no ideas at all.

  The world over, politics then had precious little to do with ideas. There were exceptions, of course, such as the daring ones that came out of the French and American revolutions, ideas that found their source in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. But the sweeping economic and social concepts that lay ahead—Karl Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital in the Confederation year of 1867—were prompted largely by the search for a response to the human dislocations caused by the Industrial Revolution and the growth of huge, impersonal cities, neither of which had happened yet in overwhelmingly rural Canada. Other than going to war or, the Canadian equivalent, trying to build a nation, governments did precious little. Only the most occasional politician—the high-minded Gladstone in Britain or Bismarck in Germany—thought much about social change and reform. As Goldwin Smith, the Regius Professor of History at Oxford before he transplanted himself to the colony, wrote in sad resignation about Canada, “In this country, what is there for Conservatives to conserve, or for Reformers to reform?”

  Macdonald’s Scottishness should never be discounted: Scots didn’t go in for intellectualizing or for attitudinizing. Essentially, they get on with the job at hand. Inside almost every Scot, though, there is, somewhere, an urge handed down across the generations to behold the Hebrides in dreams. Confederation, while about such practical matters as ending political deadlock, was at its core an absurdly romantic project. Its end objective was to create a new nation that might actually survive in North America without becoming American. At some level that Macdonald would never allow himself to show, man and mission had to be as one.

  Some of Macdonald’s often-expressed contempt for the utility of ideas was a pose. He read far too much, from literature to philosophy to politics to history, to have been in the least timid about ideas in themselves. It’s a rare reader who does not think.

  Yet Macdonald has usually been portrayed as having no political ideas at all: the two historians who studied this specific part of his record—T.W.L. MacDermot in 1931 and Peter Waite in 1968—reached this conclusion.*110 The single contrary view is that of political scientist Rod Preece, who in a 1980 article made a spirited argument that Macdonald did have a political philosophy. He traced Macdonald’s philosophy to Edmund Burke, writing that “Macdonald practised the Burkean principles of prudence and experience combined and it is these which have been confused with pragmatism by Macdonald’s numerous commentators.” In one especially fine phrase, Preece writes: “What distinguished Macdonald from the commonplace political leader was that he understood in a philosophical manner why he should be expedient.”

  Waite, the leading post-Creighton scholar on Macdonald, doesn’t in any way dismiss him as merely an opportunist. “For Macdonald, the supreme test of any policy was in the results…. No Canadian politician, except perhaps [Mackenzie] King, had such a grasp of the art of the possible.” He goes on to discuss the central characteristic about Macdonald’s concept of the exercise of political power: “For Macdonald, the word ‘reform’ was largely devoid of political significance…. He distrusted there forming temperament; he distrusted the view of society, which sees in changes of institutions or of laws, the panacea for the problems of human society…. The reason for that assumption was his view of human nature. Human beings do not change, and since they do not, the root character of human life cannot change much either. Reform this, or reform that; but human beings will find holes in any system.”

  Waite’s analysis is brilliant and is absolutely correct. In fact, Preece was saying much the same thing in describing Macdonald as the embodiment of Burkean prudence and experience. Both are different ways of saying that politics is about people, not about ideology—and that, of course, is an ideology in itself.

  Besides his belief in the cardinal values of prudence and experience, and his idea that politics is about the nature of human beings writ large, Macdonald had a second line of consistent thought. This thought was about Canada itself. Today, Canadianness has acquired a kind of cult status. Contemporary politicians and all those involved in public life in any way compete to be more Canadian than anyone else, to be more passionate about the nation’s potential than others. Some end their speeches with the words, “God bless Canada.” In the mid-nineteenth century, few people loved Canada. Their love was for Britain (or, for Canadiens, for Quebec). The constitution that the Confederation project eventually gave birth to was not the Constitution of Canada but the British North America Act.

  Whatever the constitution’s formal title, its defining characteristics were that it was a British-inspired document crafted for an un-American Canada. It would be only one step of many that Macdonald would take to preserve the un-Americanness of Canada—the National Policy of protecting domestic manufacturers, the building of a railway from sea to sea, and his unceasing opposition to cross-border free trade. What is so striking about these policies is their consistency. Macdonald committed himself to this course with his first declaration on entering politics in 1844; his last war cry a half-century later was “A British subject I was born, a British subject I will die.” Among Canadian leaders, perhaps only Trudeau matched his consistency. Macdonald, though, unlike Trudeau, never paraded his intellect before the crowd like a cape. Rather, he went out of his way to appear to have no ideas: “I am satisfied to confine myself to practical things…I am satisfied not to have a reputation for indulging in imaginary schemes and harbouring visionary ideas…always utopian and never practical,”
he said during the Confederation Debates of 1865. He sent out to ordinary Canadians the reassuring signal that he was just like them, and to his opponents the equally reassuring signal that they didn’t need to worry about overestimating his intellect.

  He just got on with the job, occasionally smiling sardonically at those who preferred merely to talk about the job. In Creighton’s fine phrase, “he thumped no tubs and he banged no pulpits.” In his Reminiscences, Globe editor Sir John Willison gave a wonderful description of Macdonald keeping himself at a distance from ideology: “For the evangelical school of reconstructionists who would remake the world in their own image and reform mankind by legislation, he had only a complacent tolerance.” Except that Macdonald then went ahead and reconstructed Canada in his own image.

  Macdonald seldom allowed his feeling about Canada to show through his pose of unruffled pragmatism. It happened once in the small Upper Canada town of St. Thomas during his speaking tour in November 1860. There he said, “I am like those who hear me, a Canadian heart and soul. I heard the gallant officer who returned thanks for the army and navy say he was. That, I believe, is the feeling that exists in every breast here; and though I have the misfortune, like my friend the deputy adjutant-general, to be a Scotchman, still I was caught young and was brought to this country before I was very much corrupted. [Laughter] Since I was five years old, I have been in Canada. All my hopes and dreams and my remembrances are Canadian; not only are my principles and prejudices Canadian but what, as a Scotchman, I feel as much as anyone else, my interests are Canadian. [Applause]”

  Not until Laurier would another Canadian leader talk with such feeling about his country, and, after Laurier, there was a long gap until Diefenbaker.

  It’s time now to return to the story itself.

  The backroom bargaining about the policies and composition of the new coalition government went on for another week. Brown made a last attempt to secure a commitment that the new government would work for an immediate federation of the Province of Canada alone, but yielded to Macdonald’s insistence that a pan-Canadian federation had to be considered first. Incomparably more difficult was the bargaining over cabinet posts. Macdonald insisted that the six Upper Canada portfolios be split evenly between Conservatives and Reformers, even though Brown’s party was far larger. He insisted also that Brown himself fill one of those coalition posts. “I have the offer of office for myself and two others to be named by me,” Brown wrote to Anne. “I am deeply distressed at having this matter thrust on me now—but dare not refuse the responsibility with such vast interests at stake. How I do wish you had been here to advise me.” During the bargaining, Macdonald at one point offered to step aside himself if this would induce Brown to come in; the offer was rejected, as Macdonald undoubtedly knew it would be. Brown, before making his final decision, consulted his caucus and the governor general and read all the letters that came pouring in. One from D’Arcy McGee advised, “How can you hope to secure the settlement without your own personal participation?” Monck similarly told Brown that success or failure “depends very much on your consenting to come into the Cabinet.” Finally, on Wednesday, June 22, Brown made up his mind, explaining to Anne, who had been hoping he would return home to Toronto, “There was no help for it—and it was such a temptation to have possible the power of settling the sectional troubles of Canada forever.”

  That day, Macdonald informed the House that a new government had been formed—the Great Coalition it would come to be called—for the specific purpose of attempting a confederation of all the British American colonies, and, if that failed, of the United Province of Canada alone. The new premier was—again—Sir Étienne-Paschal Taché, by now close to seventy years old and serving in the Legislative Council. Taché’s Upper Canadian ministers would be Macdonald, Alexander Campbell and McGee, and, from the Reformers, Brown, Oliver Mowat and William McDougall. His Lower Canadian ministers would be led by Cartier and would include Galt. The only group not represented was Antoine-Aimé Dorion’s rouges.

  Relations between Macdonald and Brown were never easy. Just six weeks after the coalition was formed, Brown was complaining about overspending on the new Parliament Buildings, exactly as he had done repeatedly from the Opposition benches but now, as a minister, fully informed that “it will cost half the revenue to the province to light them and heat them and keep them clean. Such monstrous folly was never perpetrated in the world before.” More smoothly, that same August, Macdonald advised an inquiring newspaper editor that “Brown and myself are going to sit down immediately to arrange the names of the newspapers deserving of Government patronage.”

  Convincing Conservatives and Reformers to work together after years of clawing at each other was a constant trial. As early as July, Macdonald had to plead with a supporter “that I may call on you to lay aside, for the present at least, party feeling…and to ask you to support Mr. McDougall, and will feel very much obliged by your doing so.” To McDougall, one of Brown’s supporters now in the cabinet and running in a by-election, Macdonald wrote reassuringly that he shouldn’t “suspect McGee of acting against you merely because he was seen talking to his countryman and co-religionist Moylan [an old opponent of McDougall’s].” Macdonald added that Brown, by saying that the Great Coalition was only “a temporary junction for a temporary purpose, which being attained[,] old party lines would be re-drawn,” had made many Conservatives unwilling to “dissolve their organization and be powerless at the next general election.” The Conservatives followed their chief, but reluctantly. “I scarcely know where I am or who I am,” one wrote plaintively to Macdonald.

  The work that mattered, of drafting proposals for a confederal constitution, did get done, nevertheless, and at remarkable speed. Luck helped, by confining these internal debates, carried on in the cabinet offices in Quebec City, to an inalterable deadline. It so happened that the Maritime provinces were already scheduled to meet, in just over two months, in Charlottetown, on September 1. Their agenda was to discuss Maritime Union, a scheme being pushed on them by the Colonial Office. Monck asked London whether a Canadian group could come down and add its ideas to the mix. London said yes, and the request to attend was made and accepted.

  Over a span of less than six weeks, the cabinet ministers discussed, and made decisions about, what they would say about federalism to the Maritime politicians, along with the specific proposals they would make about a confederation of British North America. No record survives of how they accomplished this task, or of any disagreements among them and how they resolved them. There certainly were difficult moments. Macdonald, with the extreme pressure and ongoing exhaustion as factors, was now hitting the bottle hard. As Brown recounted to Anne, a key meeting set for noon was delayed until three, when Macdonald finally arrived, “bearing symptoms of having been on a spree.” Having at last joined the others, who were waiting impatiently, Macdonald promptly went over to the lunch table and poured himself one glass of ale after another, until he was “quite drunk.” Yet somehow the discussion began and the business got done.

  There were also easier times: Macdonald and Brown went together to a party at the governor general’s residence and, as Brown reported to Anne, “John A. and I were the only civilians—we had a very good fun.” The driving force behind them all was the sense of history. As Brown told Anne, “For the first time in my political life, I indulged in a regular chuckle of gratified pride…. It will be a tremendous thing if we accomplish it…. There is no other instance of a colony peacefully remodelling its own constitution—such changes have always been the work of the parent state.”

  A distinctively Canadian attribute of the process by which Confederation was achieved was that the motivating force which enabled it to happen was, as often as not, that of separating Canadians as of uniting them. Thus, the United Province of Canada was to be disassembled into its two original provinces—soon to be renamed Ontario and Quebec—in order to separate English Protestants from French-Canadian Catholics. London
’s foremost interest, though never stated in public, was that Confederation would give Britain an excuse to separate itself militarily from North America. To the Maritimers, a determining attraction of Confederation was that it would keep them separate from each other rather than compacting them together into a Maritime Union. The Colonial Office strongly advocated this scheme, but Arthur Gordon, New Brunswick’s lieutenant-governor, understood Maritime culture better. He reported home: “The different counties [of New Brunswick] hate each other, and they all unite in hating Halifax.”*111

  On August 29, seven senior ministers, among them Macdonald, Cartier, Brown, Galt and McGee, and also three secretaries (including Hewitt Bernard, Macdonald’s principal civil servant), boarded the government steamer Queen Victoria for the sail down the St. Lawrence to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. Queen Victoria was a gay little ship of two hundred tons and with a three-hundred-horse power engine.

  Fortunately, for this part of the story, an insider’s report on Confederation does exist. It deals not with politics but with people. In his almost daily letters to Anne, Brown described how the voyage downstream was a succession of sunny, calm days, with the delegates relaxing under an awning, reading, playing chess and backgammon, and sometimes taking saltwater baths. The Queen Victoria arrived at Charlottetown on September 1 and lowered its two boats, each packed with ministers accompanied by four oarsmen and a boatswain. They were met by a single oyster boat, flat-bottomed and with a barrel of flour in the bow and two jars of molasses in the stern, and, in between, the Prince Edward Island provincial secretary, William H. Pope. He reported that no official reception was immediately possible, because everyone was attending a performance of Slaymaker and Nichols’ Olympic Circus. Because of this attraction, all the hotels were filled. Most of the Canadians, Macdonald included, had to sleep on their own boat.