Events conspired dramatically against the Smith government. By the fall of 1865, railway policies, religious antagonisms, disputes over patronage, and cabinet bickering had discredited the new government. London was emphasizing its desire to see confederation ratified, and Lieutenant-Governor Gordon, whose open dislike of the Quebec resolutions had helped undermine Tilley late in 1864, had now accepted his orders from the Colonial Office and began to harass Smith. Robert Wilmot, one of the pillars of the Smith government, was drawn into negotiations with the Canadian government over trade and came to recognize, as the Quebec delegates had, that a tightly centralized union would always be unacceptable to Lower Canada. His opposition to the Quebec resolutions faded as he abandoned legislative union as an impractical will-of-the-wisp, and he left Smith’s cabinet.
In 1865, as the American civil war ended, Fenian raiders began to attack the British North American colonies as a way to punish Britain for its control of Ireland. The raids, by Irish-Americans who had learned soldiering in the Northern armies, would prove to be small, disorganized, and easily contained. But they were a boon to confederation supporters, who could preach unity in the face of external threat much more plausibly than their opponents. As Irish raiders menaced New Brunswick, a brutal smear campaign, questioning the loyalty of Irish Catholics who opposed the Quebec resolutions, drove Timothy Anglin from Smith’s cabinet. Such attacks also helped persuade the leaders of New Brunswick’s clerical hierarchy, who had been dubious about confederation, to affirm their loyalty by calling for approval of the Quebec plan.
When a by-election was called in York County, the region surrounding Fredericton, Charles Fisher, who had been a delegate to Quebec and had been defeated in the general election, ran again. It was a hard-fought campaign. Tilley told John A. Macdonald it could be won – “with the expenditure of eight or ten thousand dollars.” While his backers poured drinks and promised favours, Fisher made extravagant commitments, exploited Protestant bigotry against Anglin, and mocked the government’s decisions. With anti-confederate funding from Halifax, Smith’s supporters fought back just as hard. They, even more than Fisher, insisted that confederation was the central issue. Fisher won by a large majority. Barely six months after the New Brunswick general election, the death watch on the Smith government began.22
As the coalition against confederation crumbled, Tilley, confederation, and the Quebec resolutions re-occupied the moderate middle ground. Indeed, it began to seem likely that, if Smith’s government did not endorse confederation, the members elected as anti-confederates just a few months earlier would put in a new cabinet that would. Smith actually agreed to endorse confederation in principle but, pushed hard by Lieutenant-Governor Gordon to accept the Quebec resolutions themselves, he resigned. Robert Wilmot formed a government, but the anti-confederates remained strong enough to defeat it and force a second general election.
The second New Brunswick election was a great confederation triumph – and a famously corrupt campaign. Thousands of dollars of “the needful” (as Tilley called it in a letter to Macdonald) flowed in from Canada to support the confederates, and thousands more came from Halifax to shore up the anti-confederates. Anyone whose vote was for sale could expect a record price. Sober analysis of the Quebec resolutions was almost drowned out by Fenian scares, accusations of disloyalty, and appeals to religious bigotry and crude self-interest. But, after a year in which confederation had been the dominant issue of New Brunswick politics, the voters endorsed it even more decisively than they had rejected it a year earlier. Having fought two elections in one year on constitutional issues, Leonard Tilley was back in power. New Brunswick’s legislature, quickly recalled for a rare summertime session, endorsed his resolution in favour of confederation thirty-one to eight. Just in case the upheavals had strengthened New Brunswick’s hand at the bargaining table, however, the House approved not the Quebec resolutions, but confederation “upon such terms as will secure the rights and interests of New Brunswick.”23
In barely a year, New Brunswick’s voters had twice determined their province’s confederation policy. Yet the very completeness of the pro-confederate victory in 1866 encouraged a black legend that democracy had been suborned rather than sustained. Anti-confederates insisted their enemies had bought and bullied the unwilling province into submission. Canadian and British observers, inclined to condescend to hayseed Maritimers – as if money, patronage, and corruption were unknown in their own elections – hardly bothered to contest the accusation. And historians who saw in confederation proof of the need for strong central authority would long be content to emphasize local corruption – as another argument against local autonomy.
But in mid-nineteenth-century Canada, all hard-fought elections spawned corrupt practices. Had the 1866 confederation victory been simply a question of buying votes, Tilley should have been just as able to buy the 1865 election – in which he and confederation had been routed. The issue of union mattered, too. The demonstrated inability of Tilley’s rivals to form a coherent anti-confederate program probably did more to sway voters than the infamous sacks of money shipped in by John A. Macdonald.
In 1865 and 1866, Nova Scotia moved almost in lockstep with New Brunswick – but without the elections. In New Brunswick, elected members and the electorate had opposed confederation early in 1865. Members and voters had both changed their mind early in 1866. The second election proved it, but that election had only been held because the elected members had already lost their anti-confederate passion. In Nova Scotia, the voters went unconsulted, but the legislature, which had been unwilling to endorse confederation in 1865, also began to have second thoughts.
Opposition remained strong, but Nova Scotian opposition to confederation was neither total nor unconditional. Anyone intrigued by the possibilities of railways and manufacturing saw promise in union, and the coal and mineral regions of eastern Nova Scotia looked forward to gaining a large national market. John Bourinot, a conservative member from Cape Breton Island, famous in the House for complaining of Halifax’s neglect of his region, began to argue that the island might do better in confederation than it had as part of Nova Scotia. Even the argument from pride cut both ways. When Tupper declared, “No intelligent man … can feel for a moment that, as a Canadian, he does not occupy a far higher status than he ever could have done as a New Brunswicker, a Prince Edward Islander, or a Nova Scotian,” he infuriated many Nova Scotians – but he touched latent ambition in many others.24
Even among the “antis,” opposition was not absolute. Joseph Howe himself had often preached the benefits of colonial union -though not on the terms proposed at Quebec – and many Nova Scotians held out for better terms rather than no union at all. As early as the summer of 1865, William Annand had floated the idea of another confederation conference at which the Quebec terms could be improved. Howe swiftly reined him in, but the idea that the Quebec terms should be improved rather than rejected continued to float in the Nova Scotia air. As in New Brunswick, the failure of anti-confederates to construct a plausible alternative to confederation influenced Nova Scotia opinion, and the Fenian raids provoked alarms about defence and suspicions about loyalty which the confederates exploited skilfully.
In the spring of 1866, Charles Tupper gambled that a majority of Nova Scotian legislators might now be ready to approve a union resolution, even against the still-hostile mood in the province. William Miller, a liberal member from Cape Breton, who until then had condemned the Quebec terms, gave him the opportunity. Two years earlier, when the Charlottetown conference had first been proposed, Miller had declared that Maritime union should be a side issue and confederation the real objective. It was the terms negotiated at Quebec, not confederation itself, he had opposed in 1865. In the spring of 1866, his unionist convictions reasserted themselves. On April 3, Miller declared in the legislature that he would support the government if it would propose sending delegates to London to help the British government draft a confederation bill with terms more f
avourable than the Quebec resolutions. A week later, on April 10, Tupper staked his government on a bill that called on the British Parliament to pass “a scheme of union which will effectually ensure just provision for the rights and interests of this province.”25
The Nova Scotia legislature began its second confederation debate. It lasted only a week, and the official record of the speeches, now a very rare volume, has been almost entirely neglected, but it was a remarkable airing of two urgent issues. Did the House believe confederation was the right answer in Nova Scotia’s present circumstances? And did the House have the right to decide the issue, or did confederation have to go to the people?
The debate began with a slanging match between William Annand and Charles Tupper, in which each impugned the other’s honesty and patriotism. Tupper was more skilful than Annand at this kind of parliamentary abuse. He provoked Annand into making unprovable accusations, then forced him into embarrassing withdrawals. But neither’s performance was edifying. “Webster says a traitor is one who deceives, who betrays his country, and I say, taking that sense, there are men here who deserve the appellation,” said Annand. “I think the honourable member is safe in making that assertion,” Tupper retorted. It was other members from both sides who gradually gave the debate substance.26
On confederation itself, the “antis” conceded from the start that they were now a minority in the House. They also proved themselves as disunited as Albert Smith’s New Brunswick government had been. Few of them bothered to support Annand’s implausible proposal that, instead of joining confederation, Nova Scotia should abandon its own independent status to federate with Britain and gain a couple of seats at Westminster. “Canadians are disloyal,” cried anti-confederate John Locke in a speech rich with Nova Scotian patriotism, but pro-confederates cited the frankly pro-American speeches of other anti-confederates, notably Yarmouth member William Townsend, who said, “The interests of the people do not lie in the direction of connection with Canada.… My people would prefer annexation to confederation.” Archibald McLelan gave vigorous economic arguments for an autonomous Nova Scotia, but Tupper’s cabinet colleague James McDonald was just as passionate about the economic benefits of confederation. “Give us the population of four million that union will give, strike down the hostile tariffs, … and you will have the market for manufactures that is now wanting. Why should not Halifax be the Boston of British North America?”27
On one issue there was consensus. Few speakers on either side took seriously the “better terms” proposed in the resolution. McLelan quoted George-Étienne Cartier giving his word of honour to the Canadian House that the British Parliament would vote on a confederation bill in which there were no significant changes from the Quebec terms. McLelan declared that this showed that the terms were most unlikely to be improved. But confederation supporter Adams Archibald readily agreed with him. Archibald said he was perfectly willing to vote for accepting better terms in case they somehow became available, but he said he expected none, and he still stood four-square behind the Quebec resolutions he had helped to negotiate. William Miller, who had raised the hope of “better terms,” also declared union itself was the essential thing. Improvements should be made, said his seconder, Samuel Macdonell, but “union we must have!” By the end of the debate, it was evident that most members would accept the Quebec terms if they had to, and the speaker had to restrain the rambunctious pro-confederate spectators who cheered them on from the legislative gallery.28
The hardest-fought issue in the debate, however, was not confederation itself. It was who should decide on confederation.
The question of an appeal to the people had been around from the start. In January 1865 (when he still believed the Nova Scotia legislature would never endorse confederation), Joseph Howe had insisted that confederation could not be made legitimate “without submitting it fairly to the constituencies.” Eighteen months later, he stuck to that opinion. “Let the people accept it or reject it. If they voluntarily abandon their institutions, they will sincerely support the union.” Howe had a hundred objections to the Quebec resolutions, but the one that resonated most deeply was his insistence that only a general election could settle confederation in Nova Scotia.29
In late-twentieth-century Canada, when legislative debate had been reduced to ceremonial posturing and “elections” and “democracy” were assumed to be synonymous, it was hard to imagine that anyone would debate this point. Charles Tupper’s willingness to see confederation ratified without an election has consistently been portrayed as unjustifiable and all too typical of the anti-democratic instincts of the confederation-makers.
Tupper, however, argued that it was Howe and not himself who was unorthodox. Indeed, demanding an appeal to the people against the verdict of the legislature was out of character for Howe. As Nova Scotia’s premier in 1861, Howe had declared, “If Parliament were to be dissolved whenever a gentleman changed sides, or a discontented constituency petitioned, free institutions would become an endless distraction, and no man would ever dare to deliberate or run the risk of being convinced.”30
Later that year, he had been even more explicit. “It is the undoubted principle of the British constitution that a member once returned by a constituency has to consider what he believes to be the interests of the whole country and not the simple wishes of his own constituency. He is elected a representative and not a delegate.… [His constituents] have no right … to expect that the royal prerogative [to hold a new election] should be used because they are dissatisfied with the choice they have made.” In 1862, when the colonial secretary informed the colonies that Britain would want the colonial legislatures to approve any plan for colonial union, Premier Howe never suggested a popular mandate would be required.31
Tupper happily cited these views when Howe, seeing his side losing in the legislature, redoubled his demands for an appeal to the people. Indeed, Howe was being inconsistent – but he was not simply being opportunistic. Since his first newspapering efforts in the 1820s, Joseph Howe had lived by the belief that, by educating and informing the people, he would eventually see Nova Scotia reaping “a harvest of reform.” In decades of writing, speaking, and travelling, he had built a remarkable rapport with Nova Scotia’s people. He was not boasting when he said he had linked his “name and daily labours with the household thoughts and fireside amusements of our countrymen, aye, and countrywomen.… We stepped across their thresholds, mingled in their social duties, went with them to the woods … or the fields.” Howe loved and trusted his fellow Nova Scotians and had a deep faith in their wisdom. The principles of representative government were sacred to him, but the Quebec resolutions touched the national existence of his beloved Nova Scotia. Howe could not bear to see his people’s wishes unconsulted – particularly when they seemed to match his own.32
In the legislative debate, the anti-confederates fought desperately for an election or a plebiscite. William Annand pleaded with the pro-confederate majority in the House to consider the nine-tenths of Nova Scotians who he said were against it. “You must carry with you the sentiment of the people,” he said. “Even if they are entirely wrong, you must defer to their prejudices and give them time to consider the subject calmly and deliberately.” Dr. Brown of South Kings accused Tupper of stifling the people to save the rulers of the people. “We may establish what will be called a union, but will it be a union of the heart?” asked Mr. Blackwood. “The people are able to judge.”33
Far from wilting under these charges, confederation supporters confronted them. Attorney-General William Henry was one of several who challenged the nine-tenths estimate. Many Nova Scotians objected to the Quebec resolutions, he acknowledged, but some wanted to change a few details, some wanted legislative union, and some wanted other modifications. “Nearly all,” he insisted, “wish union of some shape or other.” Several other members predicted public opinion was shifting to confederation, and they noted the meagre numbers of signatures on the petitions anti-confedera
tes were presenting almost daily. Mostly, however, the pro-confederate members argued precedent and principle against their opponents’ insistence that the people and not the legislature must decide. They challenged anti-confederates to support their demand with a single example from the history of representative government or British constitutionalism. “Opponents of union are not in a situation to challenge the right of this house in the exercise of its legitimate functions,” said Tupper bluntly. There would be an election only if the House showed it wanted one – by rejecting the government’s confederation bill.34
Many members proudly proclaimed the rights of parliamentary representatives. Liberal Hiram Blanchard declared that a free people settled its affairs through its deliberative assemblies. “The people were here present by their representatives,” he said. Attorney-General Henry backed him up: “The constitutional doctrine prevails that the gentlemen within these walls represent the feelings of their constituents.” Members, said Alexander McFarlane, were “untrammeled by pledges and free to exercise an independent judgment on the question.” Several members from both sides declared they had come to exercise a representative’s duty to make up their own minds. To say they should do otherwise, said James McDonald, was to strike at “one of the highest privileges of this legislature.” 35
These arguments prevailed. Stewart Campbell’s motion to postpone a decision until the people had voted was soundly defeated. After hours of passionate appeals, the House passed Tupper’s better-terms resolution on April 18, at two-thirty in the morning, with thirty-one in favour and nineteen opposed. Four of Tupper’s conservatives remained opposed, but Archibald and four other reformers supported confederation. Confederation had its ratification in Nova Scotia. A year later, when the final text of the British North America Act was published, and it was clear no “better terms” had been offered, the anti-confederates made one last attempt to have confederation put to the people. With growing confidence, the House voted it down with a two-thirds majority on the confederation side.
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