John A

by Richard J. Gwyn

  Premier Étienne-Paschal Taché. He served as the titular leader whom both Macdonald and Brown could accept.

  What interested the delegates most was the Senate. One full week was spent on a debate (which came close to breaking up the conference) about how many senators*117 each section (Upper Canada, Lower Canada, the Maritimes) should have. “Everyone here has had a fit of the blues,” reported the Toronto Globe. At Charlottetown, it had been agreed that every section would have twenty-four senators. The possible addition of Newfoundland meant that the Maritime colonies as a whole would end up with fewer senators than either of the Canadas. Eventually Macdonald concocted a compromise—Newfoundland would get four senators all of its own, if and when it joined. That said, the work resumed.

  It was now October 19, and progress had been slow. From this point on, as Prince Edward Island delegate Edward Palmer reported in a newspaper article, “the current seemed to set with the Canadians.” Contentious matters remained: Prince Edward Island asked for a special grant of £200,000 to buy up the extensive holdings of absentee landlords (mostly British) but was refused, and its delegates thereafter effectively dropped out of the discussions. Mistakes were made: on New Brunswick’s behalf, Leonard Tilley managed to get an extra $63,000, but Charles Tupper forgot to ask for a matching amount for Nova Scotia.

  The turn of the tide towards the Canadians meant a turn at the same time towards the strong central government that Macdonald had always called for. Words like “unity” and “nation” gained a magical quality. During a debate about criminal law, Mowat declared, “I quite concur in the advantages of one uniform system. It would weld us into a nation.” A quote from a popular pamphlet, The Northern Kingdom, written by S.E. Dawson—“Never was there such an opportunity as now for the birth of a nation”—was reprinted in a Quebec City newspaper and commented on by many delegates. When a New Brunswicker, E.B. Chandler, protested that the provinces would be reduced to “merely large municipal corporations,” he was almost shouted down. Macdonald was now so confident of success that he was able to dismiss as invalid another delegate’s claim that the provisions of New Zealand’s 1842 constitution, which had ended with the provinces there being abolished, could be used in Canada. A Newfoundland delegate, Ambrose Shea, caught the mood of many when he said the scheme would enable British North Americans to escape from the “wretched broils of our colonial life.” Out of Quebec City came the first sense of Canada as a national community.

  On Wednesday, October 26, the conference held its final full sessions—which extended until midnight. They met again on Friday to tidy up the details. That evening there was a huge ball, attended by one thousand guests. For the first time in history, a band of colonists had drafted a constitution for themselves. The deed was done.

  The first reward of this constitutional success was financial. “The immediate effect of the scheme was such on the public mind that our five per cents [government bonds] rose from 75 to 92,” Brown reported to Anne.

  The new draft constitution was in fact an unrelievedly prosaic document, more like a car repair manual than a prescription for building a nation. The London Times commented, unkindly but accurately, on its “practical and unpretending a style.” Only one resolution contained even a hint of poetry. It called for Canadians to move ahead by means of “the perpetuation of our connection with the mother country and the promotion of the best interests of the people of these provinces [who] desire to follow the model of the British constitution,” with, since this was a Canadian document, the closing qualifier “so far as our circumstances will prevail.”

  Macdonald understood the significance of what had been achieved. During the brief debate on the division of powers, he intervened to say that if the mix was too decentralized, a “radical weakness” would be introduced into the constitution that would “ruin us in the eyes of the civilized world.” To gain respect and acceptance, the new nation had to let the world know, and its own people know, that it was united and capable of being daring. To do that took a strong central government. By contrast, Brown’s understanding was much more parochial: “Constitution adopted—a most credible document—a complete reform of all the abuses and injustices we have complained of,” he wrote to Anne right after the conference’s close. He then added, “Is it not wonderful? French-Canadianism is entirely extinguished.” (He meant by this that French Quebecers would no longer be able to intervene in the politics of English Ontarians.)

  To be fair to the Quebec City delegates, they had to cobble together a federal constitution at the very time when the world’s best-known federation had dissolved into a horrendous civil war. The temptation was strong to assume that federations were inherently flawed and that only a “legislative union,” or a unitary state like Britain, could work. They were also hemmed in by circumstances. The United States’ solution to the challenge of representing the regions at the centre—two senators from each state, no matter their size—was indeed well known in Canada. But Canada was too oddly sized for such a system to work here. The three Maritime provinces together contained only a fifth of the total population; a U.S.-style equal allocation of Senate seats would give them a majority in that chamber, growing to a two-to-one majority once Newfoundland joined. This said, any solution would have served better the need for a national balance than the one the delegates settled on—a Senate supposed to represent the regions, but with all its members appointed by the federal government.

  There was, nevertheless, a fair amount of shrewd sense in the delegates’ preference for the pedestrian. Thus, the Canadiens were conspicuous by their silence about the rights of French Canadians outside Quebec, in particular entirely ignoring the interests of New Brunswick’s Acadians. Any vocal defence of the pan-Canadian interests of French Canadians, though, would have triggered demands for extra protections by English Canadians in Quebec. The silence was unbrotherly, and even cowardly, but it preserved for Quebec’s Canadiens what they wanted.

  To contemporary eyes, the aspect of the Quebec City resolutions most difficult to comprehend is that the delegates took almost no interest in the respective powers of the federal and provincial governments. Ever since, there have been long periods when the only matter of consequence in Canadian politics seems to be which level of government is responsible for what, and who should pay for it. While unsatisfying, the explanation for this constitutional amnesia is easy: governments then did so little because people wanted them to do little. Pre-Confederation, the share of government revenues expended on what are now the principal activities of government—education, public charities and social services—was just 9 per cent of the total.*118 Neither governments themselves nor ordinary Canadians expected them to do much more. Then, some 80 per cent of Canadians were farmers and fishermen, and they looked after themselves and their families.

  Also, there was a general assumption that setting down lists of federal and provincial responsibilities would pre-empt all the jurisdictional problems. This attitude was odd, given that delegates were familiar with the contortions that had bedevilled the quasi-federation of the United Province of Canada. But the naïveté about federalism was widespread. Macdonald would later proclaim, “We have avoided all conflict of jurisdiction and authority.” The Globe, in that tone of plaintive exasperation at the follies of others so distinctive to editorial writers, would ask with unconcealed impatience, “We desire local self-government in order that the separate nationalities of which the population is composed may not quarrel. We desire at the same time a strong central authority. Is there anything incompatible in these two things? Cannot we have both? What is the difficulty?”

  The delegates were practical men, not visionaries or scholars. Just one of the thirty-three Fathers of Confederation at Quebec City—Nova Scotia’s Charles Tupper—had a university education, in his case in medicine from the University of Edinburgh.*119 By contrast, of the fifty-five at Philadelphia in 1787, more than half were university trained or had studied at the Inns of Court in London.
The composition of the Senate interested the delegates for the sake of regional balance, but scarcely less so for their personal career prospects.†120 Few had bothered to study federal systems. The proceedings of those American colonists were available at the conference, and Macdonald had brought along his well-annotated copy of James Madison’s Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, which included Alexander Hamilton’s Draft of a Constitution for the United States. But really only Macdonald, Galt, Mowat and, less so, Brown understood the complexities and subtle tradeoffs inherent in any federal system.

  Practical men—even pedestrian ones as most of them were—the Quebec City delegates did one thing that was more imaginative than anything attempted at any federal-provincial conference since: most of the delegations were composed of representatives of both the government and the opposition in the home colony, as Christopher Moore pointed out in his excellent book 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal. (The one exception was the opposition rouges, who refused to take part.) Also, half hidden beneath all the workaday clauses of the resolutions, there was one radical new notion that was little appreciated by most of the drafters: in the new nation, linguistic and cultural differences would be protected.*121 This promise had never been made before, not even in the constitution of the original Swiss federation, which, if only by historic circumstance, was based on cantons that were all linguistically and ethnically German.

  Here resides one of the great mysteries of the achievement of Confederation. It was built on the understanding of a pact between Canada’s two founding races. Yet this fundamental building block of the national architecture was, for all practical purposes, never discussed.

  The extent of this pact is not at all easy to decipher. The actual provisions for bilingualism agreed on at Quebec City were exceedingly limited. There was no ringing proclamation of the equality of the two languages: the Quebec Resolutions merely declared, permissively, that “both the English and French languages may be employed by the general parliament…and also in the federal courts.” There was no mention of bilingualism in the federal government, or anywhere in Canada outside Quebec.

  Just once did Macdonald appear to accept that French should be a national language rather than one limited, outside Quebec, to Parliament and the federal courts. During the Confederation Debates that immediately followed the Quebec Conference, Macdonald said that “the use of the French language should form one of the principles upon which the Confederation should be established.” Here, he linked French to Confederation itself rather than only to the new central government. This statement, though, was made only during a debate; he made no similar statement (so far as is known) during any of the conferences at which the new constitution was drafted. And his phrase “the use of” was imprecise. Yet the bleu members were satisfied. More striking, because Confederation could never have been implemented without his approval, Cartier was satisfied.

  Cartier’s confidence wasn’t misplaced. Much would be gained by Confederation: the Canadiens would have their own legislature and government. In them, the dominant language would of course be French, in a return to the situation that existed before the Conquest. To reinforce the sense of assurance so gained, there was also the force of rising expectations. The eventual British North America Act would be the sixth constitutional construct by which French Canadians had been ruled—the earlier five being the Military Government of 1760, the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Quebec Act of 1774, the Constitutional Act of 1791 and the Act of Union of 1841. Whatever the particular constitutional system, French Canadians had found ways to use it not merely to survive but progressively to enlarge their self-rule, gaining recognition of their religion, their language and their right to a full share of the patronage of the national government. If this much had been won already, why not more, later, by other constitutional changes and rearrangements?

  These ambitions were expressed quite openly. La Minerve (Montreal), a strong supporter of Cartier, used the evocative phrase “maîtres chez nous” to describe what Confederation would accomplish for the francophones of Quebec. Le Journal de Québec said that French Canadians “can and must one day aspire to being a nation,” adding that premature independence would lead to annexation by the United States. Other than “nation,” probably the most common word in the commentaries on the Confederation project in Quebec newspapers was that of “separation.” The most explicit declaration was in La Minerve, which in its issue for Confederation Day, July 1, 1867, advised readers, “As a distinct and separate nationality, we form a state within a state. We enjoy the full exercise of our rights, and the formal recognition of our national independence.” The magazine Contre-poison wrote that Quebec was to be “completely separated from Upper Canada” and praised the leaders who had “turned us over into our own hands, who have restored our complete autonomy.” And La Minerve observed, “In giving ourselves a complete government we affirm our existence as a separate nationality.”

  Quebecers—as they soon would be called—were saying to each other, or at least were being told by their newspapers and political leaders, that Confederation’s purpose was not to create some new Canadian nation but to create a political system in which they could not only continue to be what they always had been but grow into something larger—perhaps, to quote La Minerve again, into a “state within a state,” or, eventually, into “national independence.” And their understanding of Confederation itself was quite different from that of English Canadians. At the same time, English Canadians were being told by leaders such as Macdonald and Brown that Confederation’s purpose was to create a “new nation.” Le Canadien, by contrast, informed its readers that Confederation’s purpose was to create “un certain nombre d’États souverains, déléguant une partie définie de leurs droits et leurs pouvoirs à un gouvernement central.”

  Few if any English Canadians, in Upper Canada or the Maritimes, read any of these commentaries. In the mid-nineteenth century, the two solitudes were wholly disconnected from each other and wholly self-absorbed. But for this mutual ignorance, the bliss of Confederation, such as it is, simply could not have been achieved.

  To some extent, the use of terms such as “separation” and “nationality” in bleu newspapers was just a tactic to reassure Quebec francophone voters. Some of it was wish-fulfillment. A large part of it, though, was real. It was an expectation about the future that arose directly out of the past and the present.

  The concept of Canada as a political pact between the two races derived from the alliance years between Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine. Macdonald and Cartier had picked it up a decade later, and so it had remained in the public discourse. The Confederation pact itself was now Macdonald and Cartier’s pact. Once it was achieved, both of them would still be there to implement it. Many Canadiens must have taken for granted that the pair of them could, and would, make it work. It wasn’t a legal compact but rather a pact of trust.

  Nothing was ever said about this pact during any of the Confederation conferences, and no evidence exists that Cartier and Macdonald ever discussed the nature of the pact between them. Whether they even sketched out a deal is unknowable. Most of Cartier’s personal papers were destroyed after his early death in 1873, almost certainly deliberately to protect him (and Macdonald) from any further disclosures about Canadian Pacific Railway funds being used in Conservative election campaigns. Macdonald and Cartier were so close, though, that they would hardly have needed to commit to paper any agreement between them about Confederation’s future.

  Macdonald, nevertheless, is on the public record as committing himself to a pact with both Cartier and les Canadiens. In reference not to Confederation but to its predecessor, the United Province of Canada, he said in a speech he gave in Toronto, which was quoted in the Toronto Leader on April 30, 1861, that union had been “a distinct bargain, a solemn contract.” During the Confederation Debates of 1865, Macdonald again used the term “Treaty of Union” to refer to the practices followed in the legislature of
the United Province, and he intriguingly admitted that, although a single unit according to its constitution, it had been, “as a matter of fact…a Federal Union”—or little different in its reality from what the proposed Confederation would be.

  Legally, no such treaty or contract between the French and English ever existed. But in Macdonald’s mind, and equally in Cartier’s, a “distinct bargain, a solemn contract” existed between them, and so between the English and the French. Confederation didn’t create this bargain between the two founding peoples, as has often been claimed. Instead, it arose out of a pact of trust that predated Confederation and had, by the time of Confederation, been made into part of Canada’s DNA by Macdonald and Cartier.

  Between Cartier and Macdonald there was one dramatic Confederation-era public exchange that revealed how they understood their respective roles. In March 1864, on the eve of the formation of the Great Coalition government, Macdonald, then not yet committed to Confederation, spoke briefly on Brown’s motion to set up a legislature committee to consider all federal options. “The sad experience on the other side [the United States],” Macdonald said, “proved that it must not be merely a federal one; that instead of having a federal one, we should have a Legislative Union, in fact, in principle, and in practice.” Sitting beside him, Cartier interjected grimly, “That is not my policy,” meaning he would never accept a unitary state in which his Canadiens would have no government of their own to protect them. Just a few days later, Macdonald showed that he understood Cartier’s objection, and that he accepted it, by coming out in support of a pan-Canadian federal union. The mutual trust between these two men was the unwritten pact that made Confederation possible.