Reopening the Quebec resolutions was no easy matter. The delegates’ debates at London seem to have been as fractious and free-flowing as at Quebec. Even the degree to which the delegates were free to debate was contentious. Peter Mitchell argued that New Brunswick’s “better terms” resolution empowered them to reopen only the handful of matters that he considered particularly contentious. Charles Fisher, no less dedicated a confederate, retorted that he had heard forty different objections in New Brunswick. He intended to follow his own judgement.22
John W. Ritchie, the new Nova Scotia delegate who had replaced Robert Dickey, said plaintively that “in the legislature of Nova Scotia it was understood that all matters should be entirely open.” William Howland and William McDougall of Upper Canada, however, declared the Canadian legislature had approved the Quebec resolutions and nothing else; their hands were tied, they said. Somehow, the conference permitted this exchange to be summed up with the extraordinarily vague statement that “We are quite free to discuss points as if they were open, although we may be bound to adhere to the Quebec scheme.”23
Hector Langevin had been to both Charlottetown and Quebec and had gone on the tours afterwards. But his letters home suggest how little friendship confederation had created among the men most responsible for making it. McDougall was ambitious but lazy, Langevin wrote, Galt was impetuous and too easily swayed, and Tupper made enemies by his bluntness. Howland was second-rate, and Fisher was mediocre. Among the Maritimers, only Leonard Tilley really impressed him, though he liked McCully and expressed some respect for one or two others. The delegates attended many banquets in London, but the one really sociable moment shared by most of them came in February, when John A. Macdonald married Agnes Bernard, the sister of his long-time aide and conference secretary, Hewitt Bernard.24
Langevin considered himself and Cartier as ranking number two and three among the delegates, but even Cartier now struck him as unreliable. He spent too much time in London’s great society, Langevin thought, leaving Langevin to cover all the details. Langevin spent the conference fearful that, while Cartier caroused, the English and the English Canadians were still plotting to turn confederation into a tightly centralized legislative union. “This has been settled,” he thundered when the form of the Senate came up for debate among the colonial delegates. He wrote to his family that he had to remain constantly alert and combative to protect the interest of French Canada. “I go my own way. When someone wants to block me, I show my teeth and I bite if I have to.” Langevin was determined that the bill would remain substantially unchanged from what had been negotiated at Quebec. “I have had to see it, review it, review it again, and then re-review it whenever anyone else has put their hand to it.”25
Even in the midst of his distrust and frustration, Langevin did not doubt who was number one among the delegates. “Macdonald is a sly fox,” he wrote. “He is well briefed, subtle, adroit, and popular. He is the man of the conference.” At the London conference, there were no more neutral chairmen. The delegates unanimously agreed Macdonald should have the job. Later, as Macdonald increasingly took precedence over him, Cartier would grouse that it was only the accident of being the cabinet member with the greatest seniority that gave Macdonald the right to chair the conference, but political longevity was only one of Macdonald’s qualifications. The delegates had accepted “the ablest man in the province,” in Governor General Monck’s phrase, as first among equals.26
A week into the conference, Macdonald managed to set his hotel room on fire after falling asleep while reading by candlelight, but he carried on despite his serious burns. He steered the discussions, summed up the consensus, and wrote up the resolutions with Hewitt Bernard. The colonists’ meetings wound up on December 24, 1866. Macdonald formally delivered them to the Colonial Office on Christmas Day. Several significant details had been added, but the bargain struck at Quebec two years earlier remained essentially unchanged.
Drafting the bill itself proved as difficult as the negotiations among the colonial delegates. The Colonial Office staff, always dubious about federalism and seemingly oblivious to the hard-fought trade-offs the colonial politicians had made, drafted a bill that recklessly breached the Quebec agreements in order to reinforce the central power. With Langevin hotly suspicious that Macdonald was colluding with the English to further his own centralizing aims, Macdonald supervised the final tense exchanges between the delegates and the British officials. Redrafting went on through January and February of 1867. In the end, the British North America bill went to Parliament with minimal alterations in the colonials’ plan.*
The pressures, deadlines, tensions, and suspicions of the London sessions were a nearly perfect environment for the exercise of Macdonald’s parliamentary skills. Frederic Rogers, the deputy minister at the Colonial Office and a man not much inclined to defer to colonials, paid Macdonald a tribute that was also an acute accounting of his abilities. “Macdonald was the ruling genius and spokesman,” Rogers said of the London conferences,
and I was very much struck by his powers of management and adroitness. The French delegates were keenly on the watch for anything which weakened their securities; on the contrary, the Nova Scotia and New Brunswick delegates were very jealous of concessions to the arrière province; while one main stipulation in favour of the French was open to constitutional objections on the part of the home government. Macdonald had to argue the question with the home government on a point on which the slightest divergence from the narrow line already agreed on in Canada was watched for – here by the English, and there by the French – as eager dogs watch a rat hole; a snap on one side might have provoked a snap on the other; and put an end to all the concord. He stated and argued the case with cool, ready fluency, while at the same time you saw that every word was measured, and that while he was making for a point ahead, he was never for a moment unconscious of the rocks among which he had to steer.27
When the confederation bill was introduced into Parliament, Walter Bagehot declared his approval in the Economist. He thought the new nation should be named “Northland” or “Anglia,” instead of “Canada.” He wondered why a Senate was necessary at all, and he repeated his doubts about federalism. But he declared it a bill with few defects, one that served a good purpose and deserved all-party support in the British Parliament.28
Bagehot’s enthusiastic approval reflected the views he had stated in The English Constitution, which was just about to be published. He saw in the British North America Act the essence of the English constitution, adapted to Canadian conditions. Indeed, his chief complaints involved attempts to include “dignified” holdovers which he thought unnecessary and ill-suited to Canada – like the monarchy.
But these were quibbles. In Bagehot’s view, parliamentary government and presidential government were the pre-eminent alternatives for “government by discussion” – his phrase for the self-government of free peoples. Canadian confederation reassured him that the parliamentary system was not an historical accident unique to Britain. It could indeed be exported to other countries. North America would have more than one form of constitutional liberty from which to choose, said Bagehot, and, as a good freetrader, he was glad to see this competition of alternative modes of government. In the British North America Act, he had foreseen the twentieth-century flourishing of parliamentary government, not only in Britain’s settler colonies, but in nations as diverse as India, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, and Japan.29
John A. Macdonald once said that, until confederation, he never knew what it was to govern. Before then, he had held power for a decade, but always insecurely, and usually as a dependent partner. Despite being so late to convert to confederation, he became its earliest and greatest beneficiary, for it launched his remarkable career as a parliamentary prime minister. After the London conference, he was the inevitable choice to form the new nation’s first government, and the Crown further marked his pre-eminence with a knighthood – to the fury of Cartier and several other coa
lition partners, who received lesser honours or none at all.
Canadian politics after 1867 provided a wonderful opportunity for Macdonald’s skills as a parliamentary politician. George Brown had left the Canadian coalition in mid-1866 and was eager to restore party politics as soon as possible. But Macdonald, with the levers of power in hand, was steps ahead of him, using the coalition to draw potential rivals into his orbit. Conservative allies like Cartier and Tupper moved readily into national politics, but Macdonald also convinced many of the reformers who had helped define confederation that they had a duty to help run the new country. Nova Scotia’s Adams Archibald, New Brunswick’s Leonard Tilley, and Ontario’s William McDougall helped ensure that Macdonald’s “Liberal–Conservative” party would dominate the first federal Parliament. Brown was left trying to reassemble a reform coalition from disgruntled anti-confederates in Quebec and the Maritimes. In the first federal election, Brown lost to a coalition candidate.
In 1868, Macdonald made perhaps the most extraordinary recruit to his coalition. Joseph Howe was not only a bitter anti-confederate, but also a lifelong reformer and a stern political moralist. When he admitted sadly that there was no future in opposing confederation, it was Tilley of New Brunswick who saw a deal could be made, but it was Macdonald who nailed it down. He happily offered federal funds to Nova Scotia, and in exchange persuaded Howe to join his cabinet. Howe, who had long been seeking a larger stage on which to test his skills, now found it in Ottawa politics, not in the Imperial civil service at London. By recruiting Howe, Macdonald tore the heart out of anti-confederate opposition in Nova Scotia, and strengthened his own party in the process. His Liberal–Conservatives, almost wiped out there in the anti-confederate sweep in 1867, would themselves sweep Nova Scotia in the 1872 election.
Macdonald was proving himself superbly adept at what Bagehot understood as the essential business of a parliamentary leader – putting together parliamentary majorities from the materials at hand, however unlikely. During the confederation debates, Christopher Dunkin had predicted that the great diversity of the new nation would create difficulties in assembling a cabinet backed by a coherent majority. “That cleverest of gentlemen who shall have done this for two or three years running,” he said sarcastically, “had better be sent home to teach Lords Palmerston and Derby their political alphabet. The task will be infinitely more difficult than the task these English statesmen find it none too easy to undertake.” Cartier bobbed up to say he foresaw no difficulty, but it was Macdonald, not Cartier, who surmounted the very real difficulties for a quarter-century. The first time, he seems to have done it while drunk. On June 23, 1867, a week before the first Canadian cabinet was to take office, Alexander Galt wrote to his wife that Macdonald was “in a constant state of partial intoxication” and the coalition was about to break up. But it did not, and Galt accepted office as minister of finance.30
Beneath the recruiting of cabinet colleagues and parliamentary allies, something deeper was going on. Even as he worked to assemble and maintain parliamentary majorities in the way Bagehot would have approved, Macdonald was seeking to build a party system that would free him from endlessly having to coax, cajole, and bully allies and rivals into line behind him. Bagehot could have identified what Macdonald’s intention was. In The English Constitution, Bagehot described one great threat to parliamentary government. A prime minister could, he feared, became so powerful that he did not have to worry about his parliamentary support. Bagehot illustrated the danger with funny stories of one prime minister describing loyal and naive new backbenchers as “the finest brute votes in Europe,” and another leader, confident his caucus would follow him, saying blandly about the problems in a bill he had just introduced: “This is a bad case, an indefensible case. We must apply our majority.” But the problem was serious. Instead of being under perpetual review, Bagehot reasoned, a prime minister who was able to dictate to his caucus would be a president, beyond all control for years at a time.31
Bagehot saw that, if MPS became more loyal to their party than to their constituents and simply voted as their leader told them to, the Commons would be merely a talking shop. This was one of the reasons he feared universal suffrage. “I can think of nothing more corrupting or worse for a set of poor ignorant people than that two combinations of well-taught and rich men should constantly offer to defer to their decision and compete for the office of executing it.” Party caucuses were essential to organize the “big meeting” of parliamentary politics, but Bagehot feared that, if the parties grew too powerful, Parliament would abruptly shift from the efficient to the merely dignified side of the English constitution. There would remain no check on prime ministerial authority.32
Powerful parties were only a remote threat to the gentlemanly politics of Bagehot’s England of “the ten thousand.” Once again, Bagehot might have seen the future in the colonies, for John A. Macdonald was already far ahead of the English theorist.
Macdonald excelled at cabinet-making and the construction of parliamentary caucuses, however temporary and fragile, but presiding over such caucuses was always risky and demanding. There was always the danger that a Robert Dickey would suddenly decide his leader was wrong and refuse to vote with him. In fact, a sudden collapse in parliamentary support had been the almost inevitable fate of British North American leaders before confederation. The fight over confederation itself had caused secure majorities to evaporate beneath both Charles Tupper and Leonard Tilley in 1865. A year later, anti-confederates William Annand and Albert Smith found themselves similarly abandoned. In both Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, backbenchers had instructed their governments not to proceed with confederation, and both governments had meekly submitted. Even in 1866, when Leonard Tilley urged that a hint of Canadian openness to “better terms” would help him in his struggle to regain power in New Brunswick, Macdonald and Cartier could not oblige. The backbenchers of Canada East, said Macdonald, would desert to a man if their leaders deviated from the deal struck at the Quebec conference. The loyalty of Quebec’s bleus had long been exceptional in Canadian politics, yet Hector Langevin had been terrified that the backbenchers would desert Cartier if Quebec’s public opinion, particularly clerical opinion, turned against confederation.
It was little different after confederation. In 1873, it was Macdonald’s turn to suffer the defection of a secure majority. After a hard fight against a fast-rising Liberal Party, Macdonald and his party had won a fifty-seat majority in the 1872 federal elections. Then the newspapers published Macdonald’s secret telegrams (“I must have another ten thousand”), which revealed the victory had been greased by huge cash transfusions Macdonald had received from the financiers who were to get the contract for the transcontinental railway. The “Pacific scandal” erupted.
With a majority, a late-twentieth-century Macdonald would be immune to parliamentary rebuke, and some unelected ethics commissioner would have to tell him to resign. In 1873, however, governments answered to the House of Commons. Conservative backbenchers, disgusted by the revelations or simply fearful of their constituents’ wrath, turned into “loose fish” as the debate raged, and the loose fish soon shoaled towards the opposition. The House decided John A. and his government had become a liability and turned them out of office less than a year after the general election.
When he was tossed from the prime minister’s office, Macdonald avoided being dumped by what remained of his own caucus. To general astonishment, the disgraced leader of 1873 led his party back to power in the 1878 federal election. He would not be defeated again. From 1878 to his death in 1891, even as he was growing into the grand old leader of Canadian politics, Macdonald worked incessantly to reduce his vulnerability to the kind of parliamentary rebuke he had suffered in 1873. He did that by building a disciplined and obedient political party, and he did that mostly by patronage.
“In the distribution of government patronage, we carry out the true constitutional principle: whenever an office is vacant it belongs
to the party supporting the government,” Macdonald said unapologetically.33 As prime minister, he supervised the appointment of station-masters, customs officers, and postal clerks, and he never considered this time wasted. He wanted men in every riding who could be trusted to support the party because they owed it for some office or appointment. He called this kind of politics “the long game.” “Depend on it, the long game is the true one,” he declared. His franchise bill of 1885 authorized him to appoint a federal revising officer – a loyal party member appointed by patronage – to supervise federal elections in each riding. Not only could he gerrymander the Liberal Joseph Rymal out of the House, but he could also threaten independent-minded backbenchers of his own party. When the bill went through, Macdonald called it “the greatest triumph of my life.”34 Macdonald was not the only one seeking such triumphs. His old nemesis Oliver Mowat, the Christian statesman, employed the same tools to build a Liberal Party machine in Ontario. “In Ontario there was an ethical line drawn between patronage and corruption,” writes S. J. R. Noel, the historian of Mowat’s party machine, and Mowat walked the line with a clear conscience. Like Macdonald, Mowat insisted there could be no impropriety in patronage, so long as the appointees were competent. With the help of William Preston, a professional organizer with the wonderful nickname “Hug-the-Machine,” Mowat made dozens of Liberal supporters into Ontario government inspectors, agents, trustees, and even rain-gaugers. Faced with temperance demands to control alcohol, Mowat readily agreed that all taverns should be inspected and licensed. The temperance movement was pleased, but so was the party, for every licence inspector appointed was a loyal Grit.35
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