If fear of being bullied by powerful governors provided only slight reason for premiers to welcome their political rivals into constitutional meetings, the state of parliamentary government in the 1860s gave a stronger one.
Parliamentary government, at least the full-fledged version that had been ushered in with responsible government after 1847, was still new and shiny in the British North American colonies in the 1860s. British North Americans of the day were proud, not merely of their victory over autocratic rule, but of inheriting the thousand-year mythology of Parliament. They claimed to be equal and rightful heirs, not merely colonial beneficiaries, of that tradition. Reformers raised in the struggle for responsible government were particularly given to setting out the virtues of parliamentary government, but conservatives were not far behind. Orators on the hustings effortlessly celebrated their share in “the rights of Englishmen,” guaranteed by the English Parliament’s victory over autocratic royal power in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. If they were journalists, they paraphrased Edmund Burke on the glories of representative government. If they were lawyers, they quoted the justifications of parliamentary rule they had imbibed from the Blackstone they read as law students.
Politically active Canadians in the 1860s unashamedly and confidently declared parliamentary government the best of all possible political systems. They were plagued by no sneaking doubt that some other system was better because it was “more democratic.” They certainly feared the tyranny unfettered majorities could wield, but they did not concede that the system they preferred made them less than free citizens. When they condemned democracy, they usually meant mob rule, and when they extolled constitutional liberty, they meant something close to what we call parliamentary democracy.
Being proud of parliamentary democracy, the politicians of the 1860s worked all the harder to be masters of it. They learned the subtleties, both of its high ideals and of its low practices. They tinkered with the valves and levers of parliamentary government like the engineers who were tinkering with the powerful, temperamental steam engines then transforming society. In the process, mid-nineteenth-century politicians achieved a mastery of parliamentary practice hardly possible in another age with little respect for merely parliamentary skills.
Charles Tupper, who would practise parliamentary politics for more than fifty years, was already an adept of the art even before he assumed the premiership of Nova Scotia in 1864. And it seems to have been his practical understanding of parliamentary democracy that led him to seek inter-party participation in constitutional discussion, even without the spur of necessity that influenced the Canadians.
Tupper saw, surely, that constitutional politics were almost certain to be divisive, unpredictable, and dangerous. Constitutional proposals, particularly those focused on new colonial unions, provided a leader with few obvious favours to dispense and no clear ideological cry to hold a party together. To go alone to a constitutional conference – particularly one where he was likely to be bullied by the governors – probably meant getting into some commitment. Any commitment Tupper made might not be welcomed by his own party, let alone by the legislature, or the voters. To commit himself to any particular change might simply expose a weakness which political rivals would exploit, first to woo away doubtful backbenchers, then to attack the weakened government in elections. As Tupper knew better than Gordon, support for Maritime union was barely an inch deep in the spring of 1864. It would be better, Tupper understood, to share the credit than risk taking the blame.
Tupper’s instinctive wish to bring along the opposition – and to transform the meeting at Charlottetown from an executive conclave into a parliamentary conference – was not some magnanimous gesture from a gentler age. It recognized that power lay ultimately in the legislature, not in the cabinet room. It reflected a skilled tactician’s calculation, based on long experience of parliamentary risks and benefits. As the perceptive British historian Ged Martin put it, the fathers of confederation took each other “not by the hand but rather by the throat.”* 7
In the late twentieth century, politicians had much less sense of Parliament as a potential source of risk and danger – because such dangers had indeed largely vanished. With disciplined, obsequious parliamentary caucuses, modern party leaders had become virtual presidents when they commanded a majority. Premiers, so skilled at striking the postures of leadership that became the essence of television politics, were inexperienced in the work that was meat and drink to mid-nineteenth-century politicians – namely building and holding together parliamentary consensuses. Lacking any experience of situations where they might need to seek parliamentary support or to defuse parliamentary resistance, modern premiers and prime ministers saw no advantage in letting members of the opposition participate in constitutional deal-making.
Nevertheless, even in the debased parliamentary system of the 1990s, it is intriguing to consider the long list of premiers who went home from Meech Lake or Charlottetown to proclaim themselves new fathers of confederation – only to be chopped down brutally by the voters after opposition leaders accused them of having gotten too little and given too much at the constitutional table. The opposition leaders, excluded from the negotiations, were free to claim they could have done better. The modern presidential-style premiers, never having had reason to grasp the benefits of sharing the credit as Tupper did, repeatedly reaped the disastrous consequences Tupper skilfully avoided. Neither more noble nor more devious than his modern counterparts, Tupper simply enjoyed the benefits of superior experience in adapting parliamentary process to his political needs – a by-product of living in a time that put its trust in parliamentary processes.
The Nova Scotia legislature had voted to send five delegates to Charlottetown “for the purpose of arranging a preliminary plan for the union of the three provinces under one government and legislature.” Tupper, now premier in his own right, was the dominant figure in the delegation, and the one earliest inclined to favour a union. Tupper had a Victorian faith in railways and economic growth, and a rather less Victorian eagerness to draw new groups into his coalitions. Tupper favoured throwing railroads across the colonies, doing away with their separate postages, coinages, and customs tariffs, and finding new political supporters among their disparate populations. Any union that could do these would have Tupper’s instinctive support.
To complete the government side of the Charlottetown delegation, Tupper took with him two lawyers: his attorney-general, William Henry, and Robert Dickey from Nova Scotia’s appointive upper house. From the opposition he did not want merely token representatives. He first tried to recruit his great rival, Joseph Howe. Howe, like most colonial politicians, had often mused about a union of the colonies. Just two weeks before the Charlottetown meeting, he rhetorically asked a boozy, sociable dinner organized to welcome Canadian visitors to Halifax: “Why should union not be brought about? Was it because we wish to live and die in our insignificance?” Howe was formally out of elective politics in 1864, but his prestige was enormous and his campaigning skills legendary. Had Tupper recruited Howe to Charlottetown and the union cause, he would have had few concerns about political risks at home. But a year earlier, Howe, eager to prove that colonials could help to run the Empire in which he considered them equals, not subjects, had accepted an Imperial commission to report on the Atlantic fishery. He could not go to Charlottetown.8
Replacing Howe in the delegation to Charlottetown were Adams Archibald, who had succeeded Howe as leader of the liberal opposition, and Jonathan McCully, who faced Robert Dickey in Nova Scotia’s upper house. When the matchless Howe had retired from journalism, McCully had become the most successful political journalist in the province. Both he and Archibald had dismissed colonial union as an impractical fancy. Weeks before Charlottetown, McCully had hooted at confederation as “a new, untried, and more than doubtful expediency adapted to the exigencies of Canadian necessities.” 9
Tupper had not sought yes-men; his four fellow delegate
s were strong figures in Nova Scotia’s two houses. But the delegation consisted of four lawyers and a doctor. There were no financiers from the Halifax banking houses who might crack open the details of a complicated financial proposal, no one from the seafaring towns of western Nova Scotia, no Scots Catholics, no one from Cape Breton. Tupper had reached far by inviting leading opposition figures, but each constituency left out of the delegation would view its work with deep suspicion.
New Brunswick’s politicians were even more cautious than Nova Scotia’s about the Maritime union conference. Nova Scotia was the largest, richest, oldest of the three provinces, with 350,000 people to New Brunswick’s 270,000. For all its doubts, it could expect to dominate any union of the three provinces, and its resolution appointing delegates was the one most optimistic about the outcome. New Brunswick’s legislature appointed delegates, not to “arrange,” but only to “consider,” this idea about Maritime union. In New Brunswick, the premier was reformer Leonard Tilley, a businessman who, at forty-six, was a fifteen-year veteran of colonial politics. Union, particularly a union which might reduce New Brunswick to subservience to Halifax, had produced no wave of enthusiasm in New Brunswick, but it could appeal to Tilley’s hard-headed appreciation of such progressive virtues as tariff reductions, improved communications, expanded trading units, and governmental efficiency.
Tilley took with him his attorney-general, John Mercer Johnson, and the reform leader in the upper house, William Steeves, a lumberer and shipbuilder. From the opposition came Edward Chandler, a lawyer and a scion of the old loyalist gentry of the province. An old-fashioned politician from before the days of responsible government, Chandler had a touch of tory noblesse oblige about him; he was considered sympathetic to the Acadian and Catholic interests of north-shore New Brunswick. The other conservative delegate was lawyer John Hamilton Gray, who at different times had been both an ally and a rival of Tilley’s, and who was himself a former premier. Formidable as a courtroom lawyer, Gray was considered a weathercock politician, likely to follow the prevailing trends.
Notably absent from New Brunswick’s delegation were spokesmen for two large New Brunswick minorities, the Irish Catholics and the Acadian French. Both groups had representatives in the legislature, but none was appointed. Tilley, an evangelical Protestant, had never had much Catholic support. Absent by their own choice were two powerful figures who wanted no part of Maritime union: Albert Smith, a fiery reform lawyer, and Timothy Anglin, a Saint John journalist who would have spoken for New Brunswick’s Irish Catholics. Smith and Anglin would become confederation’s implacable foes in New Brunswick. They would use it to drive Tilley, nominally a fellow reformer, from office.
In Prince Edward Island, neither party saw much advantage in having Prince Edward Island joined to the larger colonies across Northumberland Strait. Prince Edward Island was not all bucolic charm and hayseed amusements. Even the farmers among the Island’s 80,000 people were hardly lost in rural contentment. Most were tenants on lands owned by great absentee landlords, and in 1864 a new mass movement, the Tenant League, was launching a campaign of non-payment of rents that would sweep the Island during the summer of Charlottetown. Island people were also timber-cutters, shipbuilders, and cargo-traders, and the Island’s merchant fleet linked Charlottetown’s harbour to all the seaports of the world. As the collector of customs reported with calm pride, sea trades had become “the means of introducing into our colony a large amount of gold or its equivalent in exchange.” Why, many asked, should the Island yield its independence and its customs revenues to become a small unit in a large union?10
“If the provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were to be annexed to Prince Edward Island, great benefits might result to our people,” said Colonel John Hamilton Gray, the retired Imperial soldier who was premier, “but if this colony were to be annexed to these provinces, the opposite might be the effect.”* Gray’s government agreed to participate in the conference, it was said, only because the other colonies proposed to meet at Charlottetown, making it seem churlish for the Islanders not to take part. Prince Edward Island appointed delegates only to “discuss the expediency” of a union, and it took a party vote by the government side to see even that halfhearted measure adopted. Premier Gray was joined in the delegation by Attorney-General Edward Palmer, an ultra-tory who even then was working to undermine Gray’s leadership of the party, and by William Henry Pope, who was almost the only strong enthusiast for union in the government.11
The opposition had voted against appointing delegates, but the bipartisan principle prevailed here as well, and reformers filled two of the five places in the Island’s delegation. Opposition leader George Coles, a successful brewer and the Island’s former premier, had denounced the whole notion of Maritime union as “bogus,” but he accepted a place in the delegation along with Andrew Macdonald, reform leader in the elected upper house, who was a shipbuilder and merchant from an established Island family and the only Catholic among the Maritime delegates.
The fifteen Maritime delegates who gathered at Charlottetown on the last day of August 1864 were joined the next day by eight Canadians, all ministers in the coalition cabinet. Macdonald, Cartier, and Brown, the leaders of the three main parties in the governing coalition, had each brought one additional member from their own parties. Macdonald and Cartier were each supported by former law students turned political protégés. Macdonald’s colleague, Alexander Campbell, would remain mostly a backroom fixer until Macdonald made him lieutenant-governor of Ontario. The public career of Cartier’s supporter, Hector Langevin, still a relative novice in 1864, would be much longer and more prominent. George Brown brought William McDougall, a Toronto lawyer and journalist with a Clear Grit background and an independent streak that irritated all the party leaders he served. Two other Canadian delegates spoke for the powerful, uneasy, English minorities in Quebec. Businessman and railway promoter Alexander Tilloch Galt was an early advocate of confederation and an expert on its finances. Thomas D’Arcy McGee was an Irish Catholic journalist who dreamed that ethnic and religious tribalism would soon be submerged in a new Canadian nation.
Striking by their absence from the Canadian delegation were men such as Antoine-Aimé Dorion, Brown’s ill-fated ally of 1858 and former premier of the united Canadas in his own right. His rouge party remained powerful in Quebec, but the Canadian delegation was a governmental one, and the rouges were not partners in the coalition. Cartier, unlike Tupper and the other Maritime leaders, had seen no reason to bring his strongest political rivals into the constitutional discussions. The rouges were the only substantial political party in any of the colonies not to be included in the confederation bargaining. The confederation movement would suffer for having excluded them.
The twenty-three delegates to the Charlottetown conference illustrated the weaknesses and the strengths of political representation in that time. There were no women and only a handful of Catholics from a population that was half female and almost half Catholic.* The two French Quebeckers could hope to wield a veto through their power in the Canadian cabinet, but there were no Acadians or Irish from New Brunswick, no Scots from Nova Scotia. There were no workers or farmers in a society where almost everyone lived by manual labour and most people lived in the countryside. The confederation-makers never imagined seeking participation from the native nations. In the mid-nineteenth century, British North Americans looked ahead to the rapid extinction or assimilation of native society. Native peoples were seen as foreigners, and they would be dealt with through treaties rather than by inclusion in colonial politics. The nineteenth-century treaties would at least underline the separate and independent status of the native nations, but they would also reflect the vast disparity in power between the contracting parties.
On the other hand, the delegates were hardly so unrepresentative as has routinely been presumed. Coming from two parties in each of the Maritime provinces and three in the Canadas, the delegates spoke for almost the whole of their le
gislatures. Legislatures in the 1860s were elected by all adult males in some provinces and most of them in the rest, so the delegates had a legitimate claim to represent a large part of the political class of their society. Strongly middle-class and professional, they typified political representation then as today. A few were holdovers from the old days of noblesse oblige, but as many had made political careers as advocates for the common farmer against élite interests.
Increasingly, colonial politicians were brokers, well-placed intermediaries rather than authority figures in their own right. It was no longer necessary to have inherited wealth and position to succeed in politics, but it did help to have the skills that gentlemen and lawyers and successful businessmen tended to possess. Members of Parliament were paid (in Britain they would not be until 1911), but it helped to be well-to-do, or at least to be able to carry off the lifestyle of the independently wealthy. In all these ways, mid-nineteenth-century politicians were not much different from late-twentieth-century ones.
As the delegates gathered at Charlottetown in 1864, constitutional discussions of the sort they were about to launch were something new in British North American politics. All previous British North American constitutions, down to the most recent – the union imposed upon Upper and Lower Canada in 1841 – had been made in London to serve Imperial objectives. Responsible government, the sea-change of 1847, had changed that, too. In 1862, in response to union talk, Britain’s colonial secretary declared that the British government “do not think it their duty to initiate any movement towards such union, but they have no wish to impede any well-considered scheme which may have the concurrence of the people of the provinces through their legislatures, assuming of course that it does not interfere with Imperial interests.” The Colonial Office suggested “consultation on the subject among the leading members of the governments concerned” without much consideration of the details, beyond the need for ratification in the colonial legislatures. The bipartisan form of the mid-nineteenth-century constitutional talks was a Canadian innovation.12
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