John A
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The only way to determine the people’s will on a single issue would be to hold a referendum, declared Macdonald. In a letter to a supporter, Saumel Amsden, he argued that a referendum would be “unconstitutional and anti-British” anyway, “submission of the complicated details to the Country is an obvious absurdity.” In the Parliament, he based his argument on the nature of Parliament itself. “We in this house” he told the members, “are representatives of the people, not mere delegates, and to pass such a law would be robbing ourselves of the character of representatives.” The idea itself was dangerous, because “a despot, an absolute monarch” could use referendums to win public approval “for the laws necessary to support a continuation of his usurpation.” The strength of Macdonald’s feelings came through in his unaccustomed eloquence: “If the members of this house do not represent the country—all its interest, classes and communities—it never has been represented. If we represent the people of Canada…then we are here to pass laws for the peace, welfare and good government of the country…. If we do not represent the people of Canada, we have no right to be here.”*137 Macdonald genuinely believed what he was saying; as a desirable bonus, his argument ensured that the Quebec Resolutions would be approved as quickly as possible.†138
One other factor may have influenced Macdonald’s arguments against democracy: he knew that referendums produce losers as well as winners, and that turning some people into losers always comes at a cost. Macdonald had anticipated this point in the speech he delivered at the beginning of the conference in Quebec City. The effect of the constitution, he told the delegates, would be to create “a strong and lasting government under which we can work out our constitutional liberty as opposed to democracy, and be able to protect the minority by having a powerful central government…. The people of every section must feel they are protected.” One of the constitution’s purposes would be specifically to protect minorities—religious, ethnic and linguistic. Here Macdonald was feeling his way towards the thoroughly modern and pre-eminently Canadian concept that democracy must balance its own defining rule—the will of the majority—with the needs, and the rights, of minorities.
Contemporary sensibilities are still bruised by Macdonald’s exclusion of Canadians from any say in making their own constitution. If he had included them, though, it might not have made that decisive a difference. Then, no more than 15 per cent of adults in Canada had the vote. And the turnout might well have been low. A systematic search of Macdonald’s correspondence during the key years of 1864 and 1865 reveals how few letters he sent out expressing his views about and arguments for the constitution. The explanation is disconcerting: he wrote few letters about the constitution because he received very few asking for his thoughts. The truth is that at the same time they were excluded from constitution making, Canadians willingly excluded themselves. Moreover, there was always the risk that a referendum might indeed have made a decisive difference: Confederation might well have lost.
Macdonald’s main speech, two hours in length, given on February 6, wasn’t one of his best. He was tired, suffering an illness of some kind that was caused or exacerbated by heavy drinking. Anyway, he had said everything many times before. He declared that he had always favoured a legislative union—“the best, the cheapest, the most vigorous, and the strongest system of government we could adopt”—but accepted that a federation of some kind was needed to protect “the individuality of Lower Canada.” In addition, both of the Maritime provinces now committed to Confederation were not prepared to “lose their individuality as separate political organizations.”
He did broach one fresh topic of potentially great importance. Some Canadians, Macdonald noted, opposed Confederation out of fear that “it is an advance towards independence.” He himself had no such concern; he did, though, expect the transatlantic relationship to change. “The colonies are now in a transition state. Gradually a different colonial system is being developed—and it will become[,] year by year, less a case of dependence on our part, and of overruling protection on the part of the Mother Country, and more a case of healthy and cordial alliance. Instead of looking on us as a merely dependent colony, England will have in us a friendly nation to stand by her in North America in peace or in war.”
Among all the speakers in the six-week debate, no one identified the dilemma inherent in Canada’s ongoing relationship with Britain with more devastating accuracy than Christopher Dunkin.*139 Small and whip-smart—perhaps too smart for his own good, because he generated more bright ideas than his hearers could absorb—Dunkin asked rhetorically, “What are we doing? Creating a new nationality, according to the advocates of this scheme. I hardly know whether we are to take the phrase as ironical or not. It is a reminder that, in fact, we have no sort of nationality at all about us…. Unlike the people of the United States, we are to have no foreign relations at all to look after…therefore, our new nationality, if we could create it, could be nothing but a name.” Cruelly, but unanswerably, Dunkin commented, “Half a dozen colonies federated are but a federated colony after all.”
In response to the contradiction identified by Dunkin—of creating a nation that would have no nationality—Cartier did his best, very possibly, since he was no intellectual, by repeating ideas suggested to him by Macdonald. “When we were united together, if union were attained, we would form a political nationality, with which neither the national origin nor the religion of any individual would interfere,” said Cartier. Some complained that Canada was too diverse, but, he continued, “the idea of unity of races was utopian—it was impossible. Distinctions of this kind would always exist. Dissimilarity in fact appeared to be the order of the physical world, of the moral world, as well as in the political world.” Britain itself was composed of several nations. Likewise in Canada, the English, French, Irish and Scots would each, by their “efforts and success[,] increase the prosperity and glory of the new confederacy.” In his rough way, Cartier was talking about a nation whose unity would be its diversity.
Cartier’s principal purpose was to mollify Quebecers’ anxieties about a “new nationality.” Nevertheless, his comments were one of perhaps only two genuinely original insights to emerge during the prolonged debate. The other insight has almost vanished from the history books, but it merits being revived. Its author, Alexander Mackenzie, that worthy but dull rawboned Scot, later a Liberal prime minister, commented in the midst of an otherwise routine speech, “I do not think the federal system is necessarily a weak one, but it is a system which requires a large degree of intelligence and political knowledge on the part of the people.”
As the days passed, it became clear that those opposed to the scheme, principally the rouges, had nothing to suggest in its place. A mood of inevitability took hold. At times, there were only twenty members in the chamber. In the description of the Stratford Beacon, the House had deteriorated to “an unmistakably seedy condition, having as it was positively declared, eaten the saloon keeper clean out, drunk him entirely out, and got all the fitful naps of sleep that the benches along the passages could be made to yield.”
The vote on the main motion was called at last, at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday, March 11, 1865. The result was 99 to 33. The Nays included nineteen French Canadians—a half-dozen fewer than those who had voted six weeks earlier for Dorion’s motion opposing a “new nationality.”
Except for the legislatures in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Confederation was now a done deal.
Four weeks later, the long agony south of the border ended when General Robert E. Lee called on Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, bringing with him the signed surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. Thereafter, the North began demobilizing its vast armies with remarkable speed. Fear of an invasion northwards receded rapidly, in Canada as well as in Britain. In Macdonald’s judgment, either the huge Northern armies, “full of fight,” would invade almost immediately or, if not, “we may look for peace for a series of years.”
Before the Confederation Debates ended, other news—this time deeply discouraging—reached Macdonald. It came from New Brunswick’s small capital of Fredericton. The result of a provincial election there, even though not yet completed, was almost certainly going to be the defeat of Premier Leonard Tilley’s pro-Confederation government. Shortly afterwards, Nova Scotia’s premier, Charles Tupper, sent word to Macdonald that support for Confederation was slipping fast there.
Patching these pieces back together now became Macdonald’s principal mission. It would remain so for far longer than he, or anyone, imagined.
TWENTY
The Administration of Strangers
[Take a Nova Scotian to Ottawa], where he cannot view the Atlantic, smell salt water or see the sail of a ship, and the man will pine and die. Joseph Howe, Nova Scotia anti-Confederate leader
The news from New Brunswick, once it had been handed over to Macdonald from the telegraph office, was far worse than the initial reports. Premier Leonard Tilley had not merely lost the government; he had lost his own seat. His party had not just been defeated but trounced, winning fourteen seats against the twenty-seven captured by the incoming anti-Confederation premier, Albert James Smith. Even if Nova Scotia could be kept on side—Charles Tupper by now was thoroughly gloomy—there would be no continuous chain of provinces extending out to the Atlantic. With such a gap in its middle, Confederation would be all but unattainable; without it, Britain and the United States would have no reason to believe that Canadians possessed the will to be a nation.
In the House, Macdonald accepted without argument the choice that New Brunswickers had made; the result, he admitted, represented a “declaration against the policy of Confederation.” In contrast to D’Arcy McGee, who claimed that American money had determined the outcome, Macdonald made only a glancing reference to that possibility. He remained defiant, though, rejecting “any signs of weakness, any signs of receding on this question,” and telling Tupper, “there was nothing left for us but the bold game.” To one alarmed supporter he counselled, “stick with the ship until she rights.” He was particularly concerned that George Brown might use the setback to argue once again for his “mini-federation,” applying only to the United Province of Canada. Macdonald was able to forestall that. In private, though, he let his frustration show, telling a Prince Edward Island supporter that Tilley had been “unstatesmanlike” to allow an election to happen without first putting the Confederation scheme to his legislature to ensure that “the subject had been fairly discussed and its merits understood.”
Nova Scotia premier Charles Tupper. He was the only Father of Confederation with a university education (Edinburgh, in medicine). He was bold and blustery, an even stronger advocate of a centralized Confederation than Macdonald.
By the end of March, he was already planning a counterattack. “We will endeavour to convince the Catholic Bishop of the benefits to be derived from Confederation,” he told Tupper, while he himself would arrange “to get the communication you speak of from the Orange Grand Lodge to the same body in New Brunswick.” These tactics were premature, though. The news soon got bleaker. On April 10, 1865, Tupper informed his legislature in Halifax that “under existing circumstances, an immediate Union of the British North American Colonies has become impractical.” He stopped trying to bring the issue to a vote. Inevitably, anti-Confederates in Canada itself joined in. Rouge leader Antoine-Aimé Dorion declared triumphantly, “This scheme is killed. I repeat that it is killed.” And a new player now came onto the stage. He was Joseph Howe, a former Nova Scotia premier and easily its most exceptional politician of the century. He was also the strongest anti-Confederate that Macdonald would ever face.
Howe was the third of the three Maritime politicians who were by now becoming familiar names to newspaper readers across the country. The others were Tupper and Tilley. Since both men would have long terms in post-Confederation Ottawa, a snapshot of each will suffice for now. Tupper was a medical doctor—ebullient, bombastic, bold. He practically challenged observers to employ purple ink while describing him, as in “broad-shouldered, self-contained, as vigorous-looking as Wellington’s charger” and “oratorical and obstetrical”—these latter words by Lord Rosebery, later the British prime minister. Tupper was not just pro-Confederate but an ultra Confederate: he outdid even Macdonald in his advocacy of a full legislative union with minimalist provinces, rather than merely the kind of centralized confederation Macdonald aspired to. Tilley was a druggist, and a most successful one. Never popular because of a self-righteous streak, particularly as a prohibitionist, he was widely respected for his intelligence and integrity. It’s because of Tilley that for a long time, as we shall see, our title was that of a dominion.
New Brunswick premier Leonard Tilley. He led the fight for Confederation in his province, and for a time lost it.
Joseph Howe, the anti-Confederate leader in Nova Scotia. He was the one “anti” to propose a serious alternative. The odds were against him and he lost, but Macdonald later praised him as “the most seminal mind” he had met.
Between them, Tupper and Tilley began the tradition of the Maritimes exporting its political talent to Ottawa.
New Brunswick premier Leonard Tilley. He led the fight for Confederation in his province, and for a time lost it.
Of all the men who fought against Confederation, and so against Macdonald, Howe was the one Macdonald respected the most.
Years later, he told his secretary Joseph Pope that Howe possessed the most seminal mind” he had ever met. Yet Howe was the tragic figure of Confederation. He opposed it, and lost. The true source of his pain, though, was that he lost his faith in Britain. His father, John Howe, who had been living in the United States at the time of the rebellion by the American colonies, had been the only member of his family to come north as a Loyalist. He passed on this almost mystical attitude towards Britain to his son.
Self-educated, Howe edited a journal, the Novascotian, which was way ahead of its time in calling for such grand notions as “more of rational freedom” and, as early as 1838, for a union of the British American colonies. Howe sent letters to the colonial secretary suggesting how best to reform the Empire, into a sort of super-confederation of Britain and its colonies strikingly similar to the concept developed decades later as Imperial Federation. Elected to the legislature, Howe took up the cause of Responsible Government and played a major role in its attainment in 1848, a few months ahead of the United Province of Canada. He became premier, a post he lost to Tupper, regained and then lost again to Tupper in 1860. Short of money, he accepted a minor patronage post as a fisheries commissioner. In 1864 he gave a fiery speech to the touring group of Canadian businessmen and journalists organized by McGee, calling for a sea-to-sea union; the alternative, he said, was to “live and die in insignificance.”
Then, in January 1865, Howe burst out as a fully fledged anti-Confederate. He wrote eleven long articles, the “Botheration Letters,” which played a substantial part in stoking Nova Scotian fears of what Confederation might bring. Disappointment at his own career was a factor: when his poorly paid patronage job came to an end, Howe would face virtual penury at the age of sixty. Jealousy of Tupper, who had forced him out of politics, was also a factor; invited to be a Nova Scotia delegate to the Charlottetown Conference, Howe refused, saying he wouldn’t “pl
ay second-fiddle to that damn’d Tupper.” He assumed that the conclave would fail, then watched from the sidelines as Confederation took off—and Tupper with it. Howe’s core reason for opposing Confederation was his love of country—far less for Nova Scotia than for Britain. As he wrote, “I am a dear lover of old England, and to save her would blow up Nova Scotia into the air or scuttle her like an old ship.”
He opposed Confederation so fiercely because he feared it would tug Canada, and so Nova Scotia, away from the mother country. He talked more often about Britain than about his own province, as in his speech in Yarmouth in May 1866: “You go down to the sea in ships, and a flag of old renown floats above them, and the Consuls and Ministers of the Empire are prompt to protect your property, and your sons in every part of the world.” And, in another speech, “London [was] large enough—London, the financial centre of the world, the nursing mother of universal enterprise, the home of the arts, the seat of Empire, the fountainhead of civilization.” Who could think of giving all that up for a capital in Canada’s backwoods “with an Indian name and any quantity of wilderness and ice in the rear of it”?
When Howe did talk to Nova Scotians about themselves, it was about their past. To take any Nova Scotian to Ottawa, “away from tidewater…where he cannot view the Atlantic, smell salt water or see the sail of a ship, and the man will pine and die.” Rule by Canada, he said, would be “the administration of strangers.” And he simply didn’t believe that so polyglot and divided a country as Canada could possibly work: “The builders of Babel were only a little more ambitious than these Canadian politicians.”