Macdonald remained gripped in his inertia. He ignored a June 17 warning from Tupper reminding him that an election in Nova Scotia—of which the outcome was far from certain—had by law to be held before May of the next year, 1867. Tupper pleaded, “We must obtain action during the present session of the Imperial Parliament or all may be lost.” Governor General Monck was at least as anxious. To get Macdonald moving, he sent him a stinging letter on June 21. In it, he bluntly told Macdonald that “valuable time is being lost and a great opportunity in the temper and disposition of the House is being thrown away by the adoption of this system of delay.” Monck then showed the mailed fist inside his habitually well-padded glove: “I have come to the delicate conviction that if from my cause this session of Parliament should be allowed to pass without the completion of our portion of the Union scheme…that my sense of duty to the people of Canada myself would leave me no alternative except to apply for my immediate recall.” A bit disingenuously, he added that he wasn’t mentioning his possible resignation “by way of threat.”
Macdonald’s reply, one day later, began by saying that Monck’s letter had “distressed” him greatly. Thereafter, he conceded nothing. “The proceedings have arrived at the stage that success is certain and it is now not a question of strategy. It is merely one of tactic,” he wrote. This tactic involved picking “the proper moment for projecting the local scheme [the provincial constitutions].” Macdonald then showed his own mailed fist: “With respect to the best mode of guiding the measure through the House, I think I must ask Your Excellency to leave somewhat to my Canadian Parliamentary experience.” The fist having been shown, Macdonald offered a conciliatory hand: Monck must not resign because “to you belongs…all the kudos and all the position (not to be lightly thrown away) which must result from being a founder of a nation.” After that delicate reminder of the relationship between Monck’s prospects for future Imperial employment and the achievement of Confederation, Macdonald ended jauntily, as he so often did, “My lame finger makes me write rather indistinctly. I hope you can read this note.”
Governor General Monck. He and Macdonald had their disagreements, but they worked well together, making sure that Tilley had enough money to win the key election in New Brunswick for Confederation.
Monck’s reply, written the day he received Macdonald’s letter, was almost as deft. While he accepted without question “your right as a leader of the Government to take your own line,” he nevertheless reserved the right to advise Mac donald against “a course of conduct which I consider injudicious.” He retained his right to resign should Macdonald continue to “hang back now when all other parties to the matter are prepared to move on.” Thereafter, Macdonald moved no faster than before, but some of the tensions each felt had been released. And their relationship remained as cordial as ever, even surviving Macdonald’s spectacular misdemeanour of so losing control during one visit to the governor general’s residence as to vomit over a newly upholstered chair Lady Monck had installed in her drawing room.*148
A major cause of Macdonald’s shilly-shallying was the most obvious. He was drinking more heavily, more continually than he had ever done before, at times having to grip his desk so he could remain standing in the House. Tiredness and stress made him vulnerable. So did D’Arcy McGee. Night after night they caroused together at Ottawa’s Russell Hotel. After one such binge, while Macdonald managed to make it back to his room, McGee wandered off into the night and was found the next morning curled up on the desk of the editor of the Ottawa Citizen. Cabinet finally addressed the matter, one minister calling the behaviour of the pair a “disgrace.” In response, Macdonald sought out McGee and informed him, “Look here McGee, this Cabinet can’t afford two drunkards, and I’m not quitting.”
Both continued to drink heavily. On August 6, Brown, now an ordinary member, reported to Anne that “John A. was drunk on Friday and Saturday, and unable to attend the House. Is it not disgraceful?” The Globe went into attack mode: Macdonald had not been sober for ten successive days and was unfit for his duties as minister of militia. In fact, it was not until the legislature had adjourned in September that he began to regain control over his drinking. He was able to handle a mini-crisis caused by Galt’s resignation from the cabinet after he failed to win his long-sought guarantees for Protestant education in Quebec. After shuffling the ministry, Macdonald still persuaded Galt to come to London as one of Canada’s constitutional delegates. In the meantime, though, McGee in particular continued to drink heavily.
That Confederation was now so close yet still remained vulnerable was undoubtedly a major cause of Macdonald’s prolonged drinking. But cool calculation may also have influenced his behaviour. As people kept blaming Macdonald for his misdeeds, they paid less attention to the fact that time was indeed slipping steadily by. And that is precisely what Macdonald wanted to happen.*149 His objective was to shrink to a bare minimum the span of time between the moment when the Confederation delegates finally agreed on a revised constitution and the actual introduction of the document into the British Parliament. The longer the gap between those two events, the greater the risk that Confederation critics would learn of any last-minute changes to the original Quebec Resolutions and demand a reopening of the entire debate on the grounds that Canada’s Legislative Assembly had approved a different version of Confederation.†150Macdonald explained his stratagem to Tilley in a letter on October 6: “The Bill should not be finally settled until just before the meeting of the British Parliament” the measure had to be “carried per saltum—with a rush. No echo of it must reverberate through the British provinces until it becomes law.” Premature disclosure could “excite new and fierce agitation on this side of the Atlantic.” But, he promised, “the Act once passed and beyond remede, the people will soon be reconciled to it.”
Not until the end of November 1866 did the Canadians finally make it to London. They—Macdonald, Cartier, Galt, Hector-Louis Langevin (a rising Quebec bleu) and two Reform ministers, William McDougall and William Howland—all stayed at the now-familiar Westminster Palace Hotel, looking out on Westminster Abbey and with the Houses of Parliament across the road.*151 Already ensconced there were the two five-member Maritime delegations, headed by Tupper and Tilley. In getting them to join this final, climactic phase of a project that by now had been going on for more than two years, Macdonald and the Fenians had played critical roles. For the Maritimes, though, the decisive force had been that of Britain—far less by its “turn[ing] of the screw” than by the irresistible pull of loyalty. In the end, what caused Maritimers to come in was their realization that in order to remain British, they had to become Canadians.
TWENTY-TWO
The Man of the Conference
I had a merry Xmas alone in my own room and my dinner of tea & toasts & drank all your healths. John A. Macdonald, in a letter to Louisa
The last of the three Confederation conferences began on December 4, 1866, at London’s Westminster Palace Hotel, in an elongated ground-floor room used most of the time for lectures and concerts. The delegates’ first order of business was to elect Macdonald as chairman. It was his performance here that prompted Sir Frederic Rogers, the senior Colonial Office mandarin, to describe him as “the ruling genius.” Hector-Louis Langevin, the senior Canadien after Cartier, sketched out a similar judgment in a letter to his brother: “Macdonald is a sharp fox. He is a very well informed man, ingratiating, clever and very popular. He is the man of the conference.”
The conference’s second item of business was to keep anti-Confederate critics in a state of sullen ignorance by making sure that everything done inside the room stayed there. At Macdonald’s urging, the delegates agreed that “no minutes of the various discussions should be taken, and no record, therefore, exists of them.”*152 Macdonald also urged the new colonial secretary, Lord Carnarvon, to “avoid any publicity being given to the resolutions,” since this might “tend to premature discussion on imperfect information of the subject both i
n this country and America.” A key reason for this manoeuvring was that Joseph Howe had come over to London and was telling everyone he could persuade to meet him that the project should be halted and that Macdonald was a helpless drunkard. Howe himself, though, was now a forlorn figure. The Halifax Morning Chronicle dismissed him as “vanity struck,” and he even described himself as “lonely, weary and vexed.” He was simply being shunted aside.
The London Conference was the last of the three conferences that drew up the constitution. The Canadians and the Maritimers were quartered at the grand Westminster Palace Hotel—so grand that it had an elevator.
Until the conference began, Macdonald used his time to get briefed on the latest twists and turns in British politics caused by the looming crisis over the Reform Bill and to catch up on news at the Colonial Office. He also got to know the colonial secretary. Despite the gap in their ages, they shared a mutual enthusiasm for the Empire and, from this point on, remained lifelong friends. Carnarvon, while fully briefed about Macdonald’s “notorious vice,” and angered that Macdonald was “occasionally so drunk as to be incapable of official business for days altogether,” yet judged him “the ablest politician in Upper Canada” and reckoned that, without him, the entire Coalition would collapse.
In fact, Macdonald succumbed spectacularly to his “vice” on at least one occasion in London. On December 27 he reported to Louisa that “for fear that an alarming story may reach you, I may as well tell you what occurred.” He had come back from a weekend at Lord Carnarvon’s country house, took the newspapers to his bed to read, fell asleep and awoke to discover his “bed, bed clothes & curtains all on fire.” Macdonald tore down the curtains, dousing them with water, then tore the “blazing” sheets and blankets from the bed and stomped out the flames. With Cartier’s help, he made certain that the flames were entirely out. Only then did Macdonald realize that his “hair, forehead & hands [were] scorched.” But for wearing a thick flannel shirt under his nightshirt, “I would have been burned to death.”*153 A bad wound on Macdonald’s shoulder caused the doctor to order him to bed for three days, and he had to stay on in the hotel for an extra eight days. He ended his note jauntily: “I had a merry Xmas alone in my own room and my dinner of tea & toasts & drank all your healths.”
From the start of the conference, Macdonald’s objectives were clear. He wanted the work done as quickly as possible to minimize the risk that a defeat of Lord Derby’s government on the Reform Bill would force an election and so delay Confederation’s passage beyond the May deadline, when Nova Scotia had to go to the polls. If that happened, there was a distinct possibility that Tupper would be defeated, bringing down with him the entire Confederation project. Indeed, to delay the constitution’s passage until after May was the specific reason for Howe’s presence in London. No less urgently, Macdonald wanted as few changes as possible to the already agreed upon Quebec Resolutions: each change could lead to others being demanded, and to the potential unravelling of the entire package.
Debate itself could not be avoided. Unlike Canada’s Legislative Assembly, neither the Nova Scotia nor the New Brunswick legislatures had approved the Quebec Resolutions; their delegates’ mandate was to secure improvements, and only then to sanction Confederation’s go-ahead. To negotiate around those obstacles, adroitness was required. Tupper initiated a debate about just how binding were the Quebec Resolutions. Delegates argued both sides of the question. At the right moment, Macdonald pulled them together by declaring that both were right, but within definite limits: “We are quite free to discuss points as if they were open,” he said, “although we may be bound to adhere to the Quebec scheme.” Macdonald thereby managed to quiet restive Maritimers while keeping any actual amendments to a minimum.
A number of changes were made. Immigration and agriculture were redesignated as joint responsibilities of both levels of government; coastal fisheries and penitentiaries were added to Ottawa’s list; and the solemnization of marriages was given to the care of the provinces. There was a long debate about whether, and how, additional senators might be created to resolve a deadlock between Parliament’s two houses, the Senate and the Commons.*154 The Maritimes won for themselves an increase in their subsidies from Ottawa, although Tupper, probably from overconfidence, gained far less for Nova Scotia than the less-showy Tilley did for New Brunswick. “Confederation” was agreed on as the official term rather than “federation,” but confusingly the term used throughout the resulting act was “union.” The names agreed on for the two Canadian provinces were Quebec and Toronto, the latter being changed later to Ontario.
The single substantive change was to strengthen—a little—
Ottawa’s role as defender of the educational rights of minorities across the country. This correction came about at the insistence of Galt on behalf of the English minority in Quebec, supported by Archbishop Connolly of Halifax, who lobbied on behalf of his separate schools. The change was small: the federal government was granted the power to intervene in educational matters, but only on occasions when there was a need for “remedial laws.” Even this limited authority applied only to school systems already in place before Confederation.
All this work was done in a couple of weeks; indeed, twenty-nine of the Quebec Resolutions were dealt with on the first day. Revised clauses were hurried over to the legal draftsmen at the Colonial Office. There, the chief draftsman, F.S. Reilly, complained at one time, “I can’t make bricks without clay, to say nothing of straw.”
One change that might have greatly altered Canadian history never happened. A year earlier, when Confederation had seemed imminent, a legal draftsman at Westminster, Henry Thring, had drawn up draft legislation by which Canada could opt to become independent from Britain at any time by a two-thirds’ vote in both the Commons and Senate. At around the same time, a British politician, Lord Bury, who had served in Canada as an aide to the governor general, proposed that an agreement be negotiated that would allow either Canada or Britain to terminate the colonial connection by its government giving a year’s notice. So far as can be determined, this possibility was never discussed at the London Conference. Macdonald would very likely have vetoed it, because of his own attachment to Britain and out of concern that it might provoke a backlash in Canada against Confederation. Indeed, Howe at this time was reporting to Nova Scotia anti-Confederates his dismay at “the almost universal feeling…that uniting the provinces was an easy mode of getting rid of them.” In fact, Canada’s status as a colony would not be ended—legally—until the Statute of Westminster in 1931. Had the constitution included from its start an agreed way to achieve independence, it’s more likely that the leap to national maturity would have been taken a lot earlier.
Inside this room at the hotel, the delegates settled the last clauses of the British North America Act. A top British official described Macdonald as “the ruling genius.”
The most significant change was one made to prevent another change from happening. All along, Macdonald had intended that the new nation should be called the Kingdom of Canada.*155 In one speech during the 1865 Confederation Debates, he had gone further, suggesting that the Queen should be represented in the new nation by “one of her own family, a Royal prince, as a Viceroy to rule over us.” (The Queen, as it turned out, had been musing similarly about how “dearest Albert had often thought of the Colonies for our sons.”)†156 At one stage during the London Conference, Macdonald tried out alternative titles, writing in the margin of a handwritten draft of the bill: “Province, Dependency, Colony, Dominion, Vice-Royalty, Kingdom.” This last title was used in all the drafts of the constitution sent by the delegates to the Colonial Office until early February.‡157
Just before the bill’s final version—there were seven drafts in all—the nation’s title was changed to the Dominion of Canada.*158 It was done by Prime Minister Lord Derby on the advice of Carnarvon,†159 who feared that Americans would interpret monarchical nomenclature as a deliberate provocation. There we
re, in fact, grounds for this worry: the British minister at Washington reported that newspaper speculation that Canada might become a kingdom had provoked “much comment of an unfriendly character.” Macdonald never forgot or forgave this dismissal of his dream. In 1889 he wrote to the then colonial secretary, Lord Knutsford, recounting that he had once described to Disraeli what had happened, and that Disraeli’s response had been, “It is so like Derby—a very good fellow but who lives in a region of perpetual funk.”
The well-known story about “dominion” is that its author was Tilley, who informed the conference delegates that he had come upon in the Bible, in Psalm 72, verse 8, the evocative phrase, “And he shall have dominion also from sea to sea.” This account is certainly correct.‡160 The full story may have been a bit more complicated. The use of the term “dominion” for such a purpose was not in fact new. It was applied to the brief confederation of American colonies, known as the Dominion of New England, which lasted from 1686 to 1689. As well, Virginia, until it became a state, was known as “The Old Dominion.”
All these details were marginalia. The central fact was that Confederation had been agreed to by all the constituent provinces. The later “compact” theory, that Confederation constituted a treaty negotiated by the provinces, was pure myth; none of them, as colonies, had the power to sign treaties. Lord Carnarvon, on behalf of the enabling power, Britain, explained in his parliamentary speech that the new dominion “derives its political existence from an external authority”—namely, the Imperial government.
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