After Charlottetown, Tupper never doubted the feasibility or the worth of confederation. He took ruthless measures to get it through, and in the following decades confederation carried him to Ottawa, to Washington, to London, to the prime minister’s office, and to a baronetcy. It opened the way for his sons and daughters to move from Nova Scotia to Ottawa, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and London, to political honours, legal prominence, and social eminence. Confederation opened to the Tuppers all the larger horizons that the delegates toasted as the champagne flowed and the ice broke aboard the Queen Victoria in Charlottetown harbour.
Yet Tupper had done his vital work before the conference started, when he made Charlottetown an all-party conference. Whether it was in the business sessions, or in the champagne-fuelled sociability aboard ship, or in the great houses, the politicians had let down their guard precisely because their rivals were beside them. At Charlottetown, Tupper abandoned once and for all his previous concerns that confederation might be an impractical dream. But for him and all the politicians in the room, practicality meant political practicality as much as anything. As Tupper began to make up his mind to support confederation, the leader of the Nova Scotia opposition, Adams Archibald, and Halifax’s most powerful newspaperman, Jonathan McCully, were in the room making the same decision. Leaders of government and opposition from the other provinces were making the same simultaneous commitment. Even Island rivals like Edward Palmer and George Coles, who days earlier had been competing over which would be most determinedly hostile to any threat to Island independence, were joining the gathering consensus that the thing was possible.
The explosion of enthusiasm and ambition at Charlottetown was possible because of the diversity of participation – Tupper’s gift to the process. Multi-party participation was the sine qua non that enabled the politicians to consider endorsing the new ideas without worrying about being blindsided back home. Tupper, the hard-edged, high-stakes political battler, would never have made the large commitments he made at Charlottetown if he had anticipated that what seemed so enticing in the sunshine of Charlottetown would be turned into a partisan fight at home. Given the pre-Charlottetown views of McCully and Archibald, they surely would have opposed it, had they not been there.
The men of Charlottetown could be converted by union and champagne because they saw their rivals being converted at the same time. That Joseph Howe, Timothy Anglin, Antoine-Aimé Dorion, and other political leaders who did not attend soon became confederation’s fiercest critics confirms how essential broad participation was – and how confederation might actually have been achieved more easily had participation in the conferences been even broader.
The bipartisanship of Charlottetown started a brief constitutional tradition. The Charlottetown delegations would be joined at Quebec in October 1864 by a two-party delegation from Newfoundland. Bipartisanship prevailed immediately after confederation as well. Even during the Red River uprising of 1869-70, the delegation which negotiated Manitoba’s entry into confederation represented a broad cross-section of anglophone and francophone Métis and recent settlers. When British Columbia negotiated its entry to confederation in 1871, its autocratic lieutenant-governor would have nothing to do with those who advocated responsible government such as Amor de Cosmos and John Robson. Parliamentary government came to British Columbia only with confederation (and both de Cosmos and Robson became premiers). Nevertheless, the B.C. delegation that settled terms with Ottawa did include representatives of both Vancouver Island and the mainland, as well as both advocates and sceptics about confederation.
Prince Edward Island broke the bipartisan tradition. When it decided to enter confederation in 1873, it did so amidst a partisan squabble over which side could get most and give up least in the deal-making. A Conservative government, with better ties to John A. Macdonald in Ottawa, displaced a Liberal one, and brought Prince Edward Island into confederation without the participation of its rivals, initiating a long and mostly counter-productive tradition of partisan constitutional deals. But even in the twentieth century, some sense of the value of bipartisan constitution-making endured: an all-party constitutional assembly preceded Newfoundland’s decision to seek terms with Canada in 1949. Only with the new initiatives of the 1960s did executive federalism come to be taken for granted.
At Canada’s late-twentieth-century constitutional conferences, at Meech Lake in 1987 and Charlottetown in 1992, the first ministers in their executive conclaves quickly reached unanimity – by excluding all their rivals. They meant well and they worked hard, only to find themselves assaulted and finally defeated by partisan attack and local resentment. Eager to float above the political landscape as fathers of the new confederation, they made themselves irresistibly juicy targets for every opposition leader who lined up to declare that he would have gotten more and given up less.
Charles Tupper, a political brawler and not a man to shed tears for losers, would surely have sneered at the defeated makers of the Meech Lake accord, the would-be confederation-makers who failed to get their deal through. Bringing his rivals to Charlottetown had been no act of kindness. Tupper did it as much to protect his hide as to ensure success. But it did both. Bipartisanship gave the results a legitimacy no modern constitutional initiative has achieved. The premiers of Meech Lake failed where he succeeded, because they followed their presidential egos when he followed his parliamentary guile. In its strategic calculation and in its understanding of parliamentary necessities, it demonstrated in Tupper and his confrères a parliamentary sagacity never matched in the constitutional efforts of the late twentieth century.
* Ged Martin used this phrase to me in an interview in 1991, when I was beginning to look into confederation. It crystallized the process for me instantly and has stayed with me ever since. I am glad to have a chance to acknowledge Ged Martin’s perception and enthusiasm for his subject.
* It is one of the oddities of confederation history that two of the thirty-six fathers of confederation were fiftyish gentlemen of conservative views named John Gray, and both of them had the middle name Hamilton. Colonel Gray, a retired soldier, was premier of Prince Edward Island; Mr. Gray, a lawyer, was ex-premier of New Brunswick.
* I take up the political status of women in Chapter Six.
CHAPTER THREE
Ned Whelan and Edmund Burke on the Ramparts of Quebec
THE CANADIAN steamship Queen Victoria, which had carried the Canadian delegation down to Charlottetown in August 1864, sailed again in October. This time, she collected Maritime delegates at Pictou, Charlottetown, and Shediac, and carried them up the St. Lawrence, bucking headwinds and snow squalls all the way. Among the passengers eager to get to Quebec and the second confederation conference was Edward Whelan, who had recently been added to Prince Edward Island’s delegation.
Whelan makes an odd figure among the makers of confederation, at least among the anti-democratic, élitist fathers we take for granted. He was of working-class origins, raised by his mother and largely self-educated. He never had money or any security beyond what an Island printing office provided, and he had built his political career as a troublemaker and an agent of change. He once declared that all of history was an endless battle of aristocratic power against “the humbler classes of society, the men of small means and limited education.” In the cause of the humbler classes, he was capable of calling loyalty to the Empire “old rubbish” and the British constitution “a mockery, a sham, and a delusion.” Smashing the existing state of property relations on Prince Edward Island was the foundation of his twenty-year political career there.1
In the tributes given him after his early death, everyone said Ned Whelan was “convivial.” There are just hints that he ate and drank too much and neglected his family. His power base lay with the Island’s Irish Catholic minority, but he was a backsliding Catholic and occasionally a thorn in the bishop’s side. Yet neither his confrontational politics nor his private life made him an outcast. He was generally acknowledged as Prince Ed
ward Island’s liveliest orator on any subject from Shakespeare to educational reform. He ran the Island’s best newspaper, the Examiner, and filled it with his perceptive and wide-ranging writing. Though he was just forty in 1864, Whelan had been in Island politics since 1846 and he had never lost an election. In 1864, he was in opposition, but he had been a cabinet minister during most of the 1850s.
A perceptive political tactician, Whelan understood why he had been invited to join the delegation going to Quebec. As an opposition member who favoured union, he was doubly useful to provincial secretary (and confederation advocate) William Henry Pope, usually his bitter foe, who seems to have secured his appointment, along with that of an establishment tory, Heath Haviland. Whelan and Haviland would become Pope’s strongest pro-confederation allies among the increasingly sceptical delegates from the Island.
Whelan was the only confederation delegate to note the political calculation behind the recruiting of opposition members to the conferences. “Politicians are generally cunning fellows, and those in the several Maritime governments showed this quality to great advantage when they appointed members of the opposition,” he told a Montreal banquet in October, “because if the people of the several provinces should be so unwise as to complain, … the opposition would have to bear the censure as well as those in the administration.” 2
Whelan, so clear-eyed about why he had been invited, was none the less happy to participate. No apolitical ambassador, he saw himself “representing the opinions of the liberal party” at the conference, and he had his own political agenda to pursue. Whelan had endorsed confederation mostly for its promise to bring the changes he wanted for the Island, and he wanted his views on this confederation heard, whatever the political risk. He boarded the Queen Victoria in high enthusiasm. From shipboard he sent back a promise to his readers to report on “the ancient and historic city” and its “mazy, crooked, narrow, and bewildering streets,” as well as “the great question of inter-colonial union.” He had never been to Quebec – or any part of the united Canadas – before.3
Whelan had a magpie curiosity about people and places, but he was also temperamentally inclined to argue all his political stances back to principles. This makes him doubly curious, for historians have been at pains to insist that the makers of confederation were plain-speaking pragmatists, not philosophers. It was a point of pride, almost, for the historians of the 1960s to declare that the makers of confederation, as Donald Creighton put it in his forthright way, “saw no merit in setting out on a highly unreal voyage of discovery for first principles.” In the pragmatic, end-of-ideology 1950s and early 1960s, historians preferred to see the constitution-makers as politicians to their fingertips, manoeuvring their way with one eye on the voters and the other on Westminster toward any deal that seemed possible.4
Since then, Creighton’s praise has often been turned into a rebuke to the delegates, used to characterize them – and their confederation – as unintellectual, reactionary, and incapable of assimilating big ideas. Professor Russell backhands the Canadian constitution as “a practical, though not philosophical accord.” Writer George Woodcock, less restrained, sneers at it as “a makeshift document cobbled together by colonial politicians.”5
If historians and political scientists do challenge this aphilosophical view of confederation, they do so by invoking the name of Edmund Burke. This is no compliment. In the twentieth century, Burke has become perhaps the most spectacularly out-of-fashion political philosopher in the canon. Few who point to Burke’s influences on the makers of confederation mean to honour them by the identification.
Edward Whelan would not admit being a disciple of Edmund Burke. An Irish Catholic immigrant with more than a little sympathy for Irish nationalism and Irish rebels, he preferred as his role model Henry Grattan, who, as the founder of a short-lived Irish parliament in the late 1700s, was a hero to mid-nineteenth-century Irish nationalists. Edmund Burke was Irish, but he had made his career in London and had opposed Grattan’s plans for Ireland. To Whelan, he seemed entirely too English and too conservative. Whelan ranked Grattan far above Burke both as orator and thinker.6
As an ink-stained newspaperman in a small town in a small colony where politics were mostly known for their petty viciousness, Whelan wrote to meet deadlines rather than out of philosophical contemplation. He had gone to work at Joseph Howe’s newspaper office at the age of eight, and his further education, at a modest Catholic institute in Halifax, ended at nineteen when he moved to Charlottetown to launch his own newspaper. He had none of the cultivated leisure of Burke in England or Madison and Jefferson among the American founding fathers. No philosophical giant, simply someone who had absorbed Howe’s – and the age’s – love for wide reading, debate, and self-improvement, Whelan was never intimidated by ideas. He cited English political writer “Junius” for the motto of one of his Charlottetown papers and Euripides for another, and he studded his speeches with literary and historical references in the best Victorian fashion.7
Whelan expressed and acted on a philosophy of government virtually extinct today, easily caricatured and easily misunderstood, but characteristic of his era and shared by many of his fellow makers of the Canadian constitution. Despite Whelan’s urge to make government an engine of social change in Prince Edward Island, that philosophy was indeed best exemplified and argued out by Edmund Burke. And so, arriving at Quebec in October 1864, Whelan brought with him the ghost of Edmund Burke to haunt the proceedings of the conference. We cannot take that conference’s measure without measuring Burke’s shadow on it.
In life, Edmund Burke never walked the ramparts of Quebec. Born in Ireland in 1729, he went to London as a student, and remained near there as a writer, a political adviser, and a member of Parliament, mostly in opposition, until his death in 1797. He went once to France, but rarely anywhere else. He did not visit North America, even when he was the London agent for the colony of New York in the years before the American Revolution, and he made few substantial references to Canadian matters.
In Whelan’s day as in ours, Edmund Burke was most famous as the author of Reflections on the Revolution in France, a spectacular polemic, one of the greatest in the language. Published in 1790, Reflections condemned every part of the French Revolution, even its rights-of-man, Liberté-Égalité-Fraternité phase, before the Terror and the rise of Napoleon soured many of Burke’s fellow citizens on it. Burke called ceaselessly not merely for resistance to revolutionary France but for war, “a long war,” to confront, contain, and overthrow the revolution abroad and to repress its admirers in England.
The uncompromising force and rhetorical brilliance of Reflections made it an inspiration for every counter-revolutionary tract for the next two centuries. Reflections was also an impassioned declaration of the sacredness of the Bourbon monarchy, with a paean to the glories of Marie Antoinette that today is incomprehensible. “The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone!” was the lesson Burke drew from the queen’s fall from the elevated sphere where he had once worshipped her, “glittering like the morningstar, full of life and splendor and joy.”8
More deeply, Reflections was an argument against abstract theories of government and in favour of tradition – seemingly, in favour of any tradition, no matter how unjust (or actually because of its injustice, in the view of those who saw Burke as the paid apologist of the ruling class). While its subject was France, Reflections was addressed to Burke’s British compatriots. It was an argument against political change in Britain.
Reflections has remained Burke’s most famous work, the one most often anthologized and reprinted. It is frequently taken as the essence of Burke’s political philosophy. As disciples of Burke, therefore, the confederation-makers are often declared to be not merely averse to change, but positively hostile to it and to democracy, national autonomy, and most of the values that have held sway in the twentieth century. Ned Whelan’s case suggests, howev
er, that the lessons they drew from Burke were hardly so simple.
As a counter-revolutionary monarchist and impassioned defender of the British constitution, Burke might be expected to be a blimpish Imperialist, celebrating the blessings of British rule worldwide. Yet, during the American Revolution, Burke consistently supported the cause of the American colonists, even when he was a member of the Parliament that was waging war against the Thirteen Colonies. He devoted decades to a probing criticism of Britain’s empire in India, going so far as to argue that, in ruling India, Britain’s goal should be “studying the genius, the temper, and the manners of the people, and adapting to them the laws that we establish” – an incomprehensible and subversive notion to most of the builders of the British Raj. The Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien has discovered inside Burke the tribune of Protestant England an Irishman with deep sympathies for oppressed Catholic Ireland. Burke opposed Whelan’s hero Grattan because Grattan’s Irish Parliament, despite the rhetoric of national independence that attracted Whelan, had mostly empowered Irish Protestants to oppress Irish Catholics more effectively.9
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