John A

by Richard J. Gwyn

  A twentieth-century painting by Rex Woods of the ship Queen Victoria, which brought the Canadian delegates to the Charlottetown Conference. Macdonald stands on the landing at the top of the ladder.

  Brown described to Anne the “shake elbow, and the how d’ye-do” of their first encounter with the Maritime delegates, who immediately informed them that Maritime Union was being held over for later so that Canada’s Confederation proposal could be first on the conference agenda. All business was then set aside until the next day, which included a state dinner given by the island’s governor, followed by dancing. Brown sat outside as he wrote, telling Anne about “the sea washing up gently to the very door” and how “there is something to the sea.”

  The next day, in the small red-sandstone building that housed the island’s Parliament, the real work began. Cartier started, making a general case for Confederation. Macdonald followed with a long exposition on the benefits of union and the different types of federalism, along with their faults and virtues. That evening there was a buffet that, according to the Charlottetown Islander, included “substantials of beef rounds, splendid hams, salmon, lobster…all vegetable delicacies peculiar to the season, pastry in all its forms, fruits in almost every variety.” All these dishes were generously washed down with the ample supplies of liquor, principally champagne, that the Canadians had cagily brought with them on their boat.

  The next day Galt delivered a closely argued analysis of the finances of federalism, laying special stress on how the new central government would compensate the Maritime provinces for their revenue losses—primarily from giving up their tariffs on entering Confederation. There followed a long lunch aboard Queen Victoria at which, in Brown’s description, “the ice became completely broken, the tongues of the delegates wagged merrily.” That night, PEI’s premier, Colonel John Hamilton Gray, gave a dinner, followed by dancing. To his astonishment, Brown found himself talking there to one lady who, in her entire life, had never crossed to the mainland; he later advised Anne that Prince Edward Islanders were, nevertheless, “amazingly civilized.” After the break on the Sunday, Brown spoke about the division of powers and the new national judiciary.

  By Tuesday, the Canadians were done. On Wednesday, the Maritimers gave their answer. “They were unanimous,” a delighted Brown wrote home, “in regarding Federation of all the Provinces to be highly desirable—if the terms of union could be made satisfactory.” To celebrate their success, they gathered together for a grand ball at Province House. John Ross of Ross’s Weekly described the closing gala: “The fascinating dance goes merrily, and the libidi[n]ous waltz with its lascivious entwinements while in growing excitement; the swelling bosom and the voluptuous eye tell the story of intemperate revel.” Ross may have been getting a bit intemperate himself.

  In this cabinet room in Charlottetown’s Parliament Buildings, the two sides agreed on the principles of Confederation. Macdonald took time out to sign his name as a “Cabinet maker” in the visitors’ book.

  Macdonald would have been too canny to get overexcited while still in the company of the Maritimers. But he must have been as pleased as Brown was with their progress. To augment his pleasure, he had acquired in Charlottetown a political asset that would prove invaluable in the future. Among the Canadians, no one knew the Maritimes as well as McGee did. In addition to all his visits, he had that summer organized and led a tour of approximately one hundred Canadian businessmen, journalists and politicians around the principal Maritime cities. He would have briefed Macdonald that both of the two most important Maritime premiers, Nova Scotia’s Charles Tupper and New Brunswick’s Leonard Tilley, were strong Confederates. In Charlottetown, Macdonald began developing friendships with these powerful regional figures as potential recruits for the Liberal-Conservative Party.

  The wind was blowing full in the sails of the Canadians. The Maritimers had not only agreed in principle to Confederation but had also agreed to attend a second conference to be held in Quebec City just one month later. There, they and the Canadians, and as well delegates from Newfoundland, would attempt to draft an actual constitution for a confederation. Moreover, while the agreements reached at Charlottetown had been only an agreement in principle, those there had in fact settled on many draft clauses that could go on for final approval at Quebec City.

  During one of the breaks in the conference, when Macdonald took a tour of Province House, the island’s legislature building, he came upon the visitors’ book. He signed his name and, in the column for occupation, wrote “Cabinet maker.”

  From Charlottetown, the delegates went on as planned to Halifax, some by train and others, Macdonald among them, by the Queen Victoria. The press commentary was highly laudatory. As the Halifax Witness remarked, almost in bewilderment at the change in Maritimers’ attitude towards the Canadians, “There is less aversion to Canada. Indeed, there seems to be a positive desire for union.”

  At a dinner in the Halifax Hotel on September 12, Premier Tupper proposed a toast to “Colonial Union.” In his reply Macdonald talked about his twenty long, dreary years in provincial politics. He mentioned the distance that Canada and the Maritimes still had to go to form a real nation: while all were part of the Empire, he said, “there was no political connection, and we were as wide apart as British America is from Australia…. We had only the mere sentiment of a common allegiance, and we were liable, in case England and the United States were pleased to differ, to be cut off, one by one.” He outlined the mistakes that the American constitution makers had made in giving too much power and sovereignty to the constituent states—an arrangement that, in his view, had made the American Civil War, or dissolution, inevitable. He claimed that the makers of Canada could avoid these dangers, “if we can agree upon forming a strong central government—a great central legislature—a constitution for a union which will have all the rights of sovereignty except those that are given to the local governments.”

  He talked, again with the almost unnerving frankness he sometimes employed, about the Intercolonial Railway, that great lure to attract the Maritimes to Confederation; the truth here, said Macdonald, was that “as a commercial enterprise [it] would be of comparatively little advantage to the people of Canada. Whilst we have the St. Lawrence in summer, and the American ports in time of peace, we have all that is requisite for progress.”*112 But, Macdonald went on, this railway would provide for a common defence, and, once the West was opened up, “all [its] great resources will come over the immense railways of Canada to the bosom of your harbour.” He described how the new nation would be “a great British monarchy, in connection with the British empire, and under the British Queen.” And he said the time to do all this nation-building had to be now: “Everything, gentlemen, is to be gained by union, and everything to be lost by disunion. 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.”

  The cheers went on and on and on. Three months earlier, Macdonald had been a defeated premier leading a dwindling band of Conservative members. He was now British North America’s irreplaceable man.

  EIGHTEEN

  A Pact of Trust

  In giving ourselves a complete government we affirm our existence as a separate nationality. La Minerve (Montreal)

  Four weeks after the close of the Charlottetown Conference, the Queen Victoria was again chugging around the Gulf of St. Lawrence, this time to Pictou and Shediac and once again to Charlottetown to pick up the Maritime delegates to transport them to Quebec City for the second Confederation conference. The return trip, unlike the downriver one, was stormy and cold; they arrived on October 6, amid an unseasonably early snowstorm. The conference’s purpose was to move beyond pleasantries and generalities by drafting a constitution, which would be sent over to London for enactment by the Mother of Parliaments.

  A little more than two weeks later, between October 10 and October 27, with only two days off for rest, the deed
was done. Seldom can so much work of this kind have been done so quickly. By the end of the conference, the delegates had agreed to seventy-two resolutions spelling out the rules of governance for a new nation, down to minutiae such that the “general government” would be responsible for “quarantine” but the “local” ones for immigration. With remarkably few changes (for example, to make immigration and agriculture joint jurisdictions), these resolutions would be translated into the clauses of the British North America Act that established Confederation. To this original constitution, no substantial change would be made until 1982, when Pierre Trudeau’s new Constitution Act*113 added to it the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In a fundamental sense, all of Canada’s prime ministers have functioned as managers of the estate that Macdonald created, Trudeau alone expanding it significantly.

  The Quebec City Conference. In less than three weeks, the Canadians and Maritimers agreed on seventy-two resolutions that, with few changes, became Canada’s founding constitution. Macdonald emerged as the clear leader.

  D’Arcy McGee later credited Macdonald with the authorship of fifty of these seventy-two resolutions. Macdonald himself claimed to a friend, “I ha[d] no help. Not one man of the Conference (except Galt on finance) had the slightest idea of Constitution making.” Warming to his theme, he wrote, “I must do it all alone as there is not one person connected with the government who has the slightest idea of the work.”†114 Both were exaggerating, but not by that much. Macdonald was the gathering’s orchestra conductor, cheerleader, bookkeeper (of the law, not the finances), entertainer and diplomat. At times, he performed as a clown, cooling tempers by his antics: “Feo” Monck, the governor general’s sister, who was visiting from Ireland, recorded in her diary, “He is always drunk now, I am sorry to say, and when someone went to his room the other night, they found him in his night shirt with a railway rug thrown over him, practicing Hamlet.”‡115

  The best description of Macdonald’s performance was made later by the Colonial Office’s top official, Sir Frederic Rogers. He made these comments about the last of the Confederation conferences, held in London at the end of 1866, which he attended and where Macdonald once again did just about everything except cut the sandwiches for the luncheon breaks. They provide an excellent insight into how he operated throughout the entire Confederation project: “Macdonald was the ruling genius and spokesman, and I was very much struck by his powers of management and adroitness,” wrote Rogers. “The French delegates were keenly on the watch for anything that weakened their security; on the contrary, the Nova Scotia and New Brunswick delegates were very jealous of concessions to the arrière province; while one main stipulation in favour of the French was open to constitutional objection on the part of the home government. Macdonald had to argue the question with the home government on a point on which the slightest divergence from the narrow line already agreed on in Canada was watched for—here by the English, and there by the French—as eager dogs watch a rat-hole; a snap on one side might have provoked a snap on the other; and put an end to all the concord. He stated and argued the case with cool, ready fluency while at the same time you saw that every word was measured, and that while he was making for a point ahead, he was never for a moment unconscious of the rocks among which he had to steer.”

  The clear, deep water beyond the shoals towards which Macdonald was steering the delegates at the Quebec Conference was Confederation itself. Just getting the deal on the constitution mattered far more than its specific legal arrangements. As Macdonald wrote to Matthew Crooks Cameron shortly after the conference, on December 19, 1864, “I am satisfied that we have hit upon the only practical plan. I do not mean to say the best plan, but the only practical plan for carrying out the Confederation.” About the value of constitutional rewrites in order to solve fundamental political and economic problems, Macdonald had always been deeply skeptical. A constitution, he told the Quebec City delegates, “should be a mere skeleton and framework that would not bind us down. We have now all the elasticity which has kept England together.” He wanted the best possible constitution, and he wanted a strongly centralized one. But just gaining a constitution itself would be the declaration of will that Canada needed to make to become a nation that others would respect as a nation.

  Luck helped. Chilly rain fell day after day, leaving the delegates with nothing better to do than get on with the work. As a further inducement to stay indoors, the delegates soon found that while Quebec City was charming and historic, its streets were new and horrible. “Bump-thump-jump you go from one stick to another—out of one deep hole into another till you are well nigh shaken to pieces,” was the account of a ride in a horse-drawn calèche by a reporter from Halifax’s Morning Chronicle. The work itself was done in a plain, three-storey, grey-stone building, originally intended as a post office and used temporarily as a parliament building after the original one had burned down.*116 The second-storey parliamentary reading room, now crowded with a huge table, had been refashioned into a conference chamber. The incessant rain was hard to take; for some reason the pitch of the roof, combined with three awkward skylights, magnified the noise of the rain to a constant drumming. What made up for this was the conference’s location: through the windows of their chamber, the delegates could look down at the St. Lawrence River, at the rafts of logs a little upstream, and then the shipyards and docks, and then the river flowing eastwards, past thin strips of farms on either bank, the magnificent Montmorency Falls as a white wisp in the distance, and the water gradually becoming ever more saline as, now out of sight, it widened into the Gulf, there to wash against all four of the Lower Provinces now represented at the conference. The delegates worked exceedingly hard, initially from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and soon through two full sessions each day, the first from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., and the second from 7:30 on, sometimes to midnight. Lunches, usually so leisurely, lasted just fifteen minutes. The Canadians worked harder still, meeting each day at 9 a.m. to discuss tactics and, again, from 4 to 6 p.m. After the close of the conference sessions, Canadian ministers retired to their rooms to catch up on their correspondence and go over their draft resolutions.

  Careful planning and several dollops of canniness helped as well. In advance of the arrival of the Maritimers in Quebec City, the Canadians leaked to the Morning Chronicle a summary of most of their intended resolutions, thereby minimizing the surprises while leaving themselves free to deny authorship should controversy break out over any of them. They paid for all the hotel expenses (totalling some fifteen thousand dollars) of the delegates, and of their wives and daughters. To keep everyone amiable, there were constant balls and dinners and receptions, principally hosted by the governor general but also by railway lobbyists. Mercy Coles, the daughter of a Prince Edward Island delegate, recorded in her diary that her father returned home from one of these balls “with every stitch of clothing wringing wet with perspiration.” Feo Monck wrote of Cartier flirting with her, saying that his favourite occupation was “the activity of the heart.” (Neither woman paid the least attention to the work of the conference itself.) The Prince Edward Island delegate Edward Whelan sent regular stories to his newspaper, the Examiner, informing readers that “the Cabinet ministers—the leading ones especially—are the most inveterate dancers I’ve ever seen” and that “the French ladies here give a delightful tone to society…. They make no difficulty in falling in love—or appearing to do it—with a dozen gentlemen at a time.”

  As with Charlottetown, a good deal more is known about who danced with whom at Quebec City than who bargained what with whom. The sessions were closed, and no briefings were held for the press. (Among the journalists were a half-dozen from Britain and the United States.) All that was ever made public were the texts of the seventy-two approved resolutions. Official minutes were kept by Macdonald’s deputy minister, Hewitt Bernard, but they were prosaic and terse. Unofficial and abbreviated notes were taken by a Prince Edward Island delegate, A.A. Macdonald, who did record the snippet that Ne
wfoundland delegate Frederick Carter had expressed the hope that Confederation might encourage wealthy fish merchants not to “retir[e] to the Old Country to spend their fortunes.”

  After a brief formal opening by the premier of the United Province of Canada, Étienne-Paschal Taché, Macdonald took the floor. He delivered a speech that said little that was new—Confederation should not repeat the American mistake of being too decentralized, and all residual or unspecified powers should revert to the federal government, not to the states, as had happened south of the border—but he said it persuasively. When Macdonald finished, those outside the chamber could hear a burst of applause from inside. His speech done, Macdonald moved the first general resolution, to establish a “federal union” with a government based on the British system and with the monarch as its head of state. The actual work now began.

  In hindsight it is remarkable how much the delegates accomplished—and also how little they did. Issues that have dominated Canadian politics ever since, such as the division of powers between the two levels of government, were barely discussed at all; Macdonald suggested a list of federal powers, and Oliver Mowat a list of provincial ones, and both were passed quickly with little argument or debate. Matters fundamental to the functioning of any federal system, such as how to amend the constitution, were not debated. A satisfactory explanation has never been constructed for the absence of so vital a piece of constitutional machinery. Speculatively, Macdonald may have worried that an amending system, which merely by existing implied that the constitution might need improving later on, might open the way for critics calling for changes before the constitution was carved into legislative stone, but whose real purpose was delay for its own sake. What is remarkable is that no one in Quebec City commented on the absence of an amending formula, even though one existed in the United States and was known to be working well. The Nova Scotia anti-Confederate Joseph Howe (who was not present at Quebec City) was one of the few in the entire country to raise the issue.