EIGHTEEN
A Pact of Trust
In giving ourselves a complete government we affirm our existence as a separate nationality. La Minerve (Montreal)
Four weeks after the close of the Charlottetown Conference, the Queen Victoria was again chugging around the Gulf of St. Lawrence, this time to Pictou and Shediac and once again to Charlottetown to pick up the Maritime delegates to transport them to Quebec City for the second Confederation conference. The return trip, unlike the downriver one, was stormy and cold; they arrived on October 6, amid an unseasonably early snowstorm. The conference’s purpose was to move beyond pleasantries and generalities by drafting a constitution, which would be sent over to London for enactment by the Mother of Parliaments.
A little more than two weeks later, between October 10 and October 27, with only two days off for rest, the deed was done. Seldom can so much work of this kind have been done so quickly. By the end of the conference, the delegates had agreed to seventy-two resolutions spelling out the rules of governance for a new nation, down to minutiae such that the “general government” would be responsible for “quarantine” but the “local” ones for immigration. With remarkably few changes (for example, to make immigration and agriculture joint jurisdictions), these resolutions would be translated into the clauses of the British North America Act that established Confederation. To this original constitution, no substantial change would be made until 1982, when Pierre Trudeau’s new Constitution Act*113 added to it the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In a fundamental sense, all of Canada’s prime ministers have functioned as managers of the estate that Macdonald created, Trudeau alone expanding it significantly.
The Quebec City Conference. In less than three weeks, the Canadians and Maritimers agreed on seventy-two resolutions that, with few changes, became Canada’s founding constitution. Macdonald emerged as the clear leader.
D’Arcy McGee later credited Macdonald with the authorship of fifty of these seventy-two resolutions. Macdonald himself claimed to a friend, “I ha[d] no help. Not one man of the Conference (except Galt on finance) had the slightest idea of Constitution making.” Warming to his theme, he wrote, “I must do it all alone as there is not one person connected with the government who has the slightest idea of the work.”†114 Both were exaggerating, but not by that much. Macdonald was the gathering’s orchestra conductor, cheerleader, bookkeeper (of the law, not the finances), entertainer and diplomat. At times, he performed as a clown, cooling tempers by his antics: “Feo” Monck, the governor general’s sister, who was visiting from Ireland, recorded in her diary, “He is always drunk now, I am sorry to say, and when someone went to his room the other night, they found him in his night shirt with a railway rug thrown over him, practicing Hamlet.”‡115
The best description of Macdonald’s performance was made later by the Colonial Office’s top official, Sir Frederic Rogers. He made these comments about the last of the Confederation conferences, held in London at the end of 1866, which he attended and where Macdonald once again did just about everything except cut the sandwiches for the luncheon breaks. They provide an excellent insight into how he operated throughout the entire Confederation project: “Macdonald was the ruling genius and spokesman, and I was very much struck by his powers of management and adroitness,” wrote Rogers. “The French delegates were keenly on the watch for anything that weakened their security; 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 objection 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.”
The clear, deep water beyond the shoals towards which Macdonald was steering the delegates at the Quebec Conference was Confederation itself. Just getting the deal on the constitution mattered far more than its specific legal arrangements. As Macdonald wrote to Matthew Crooks Cameron shortly after the conference, on December 19, 1864, “I am satisfied that we have hit upon the only practical plan. I do not mean to say the best plan, but the only practical plan for carrying out the Confederation.” About the value of constitutional rewrites in order to solve fundamental political and economic problems, Macdonald had always been deeply skeptical. A constitution, he told the Quebec City delegates, “should be a mere skeleton and framework that would not bind us down. We have now all the elasticity which has kept England together.” He wanted the best possible constitution, and he wanted a strongly centralized one. But just gaining a constitution itself would be the declaration of will that Canada needed to make to become a nation that others would respect as a nation.
Luck helped. Chilly rain fell day after day, leaving the delegates with nothing better to do than get on with the work. As a further inducement to stay indoors, the delegates soon found that while Quebec City was charming and historic, its streets were new and horrible. “Bump-thump-jump you go from one stick to another—out of one deep hole into another till you are well nigh shaken to pieces,” was the account of a ride in a horse-drawn calèche by a reporter from Halifax’s Morning Chronicle. The work itself was done in a plain, three-storey, grey-stone building, originally intended as a post office and used temporarily as a parliament building after the original one had burned down.*116 The second-storey parliamentary reading room, now crowded with a huge table, had been refashioned into a conference chamber. The incessant rain was hard to take; for some reason the pitch of the roof, combined with three awkward skylights, magnified the noise of the rain to a constant drumming. What made up for this was the conference’s location: through the windows of their chamber, the delegates could look down at the St. Lawrence River, at the rafts of logs a little upstream, and then the shipyards and docks, and then the river flowing eastwards, past thin strips of farms on either bank, the magnificent Montmorency Falls as a white wisp in the distance, and the water gradually becoming ever more saline as, now out of sight, it widened into the Gulf, there to wash against all four of the Lower Provinces now represented at the conference. The delegates worked exceedingly hard, initially from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and soon through two full sessions each day, the first from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., and the second from 7:30 on, sometimes to midnight. Lunches, usually so leisurely, lasted just fifteen minutes. The Canadians worked harder still, meeting each day at 9 a.m. to discuss tactics and, again, from 4 to 6 p.m. After the close of the conference sessions, Canadian ministers retired to their rooms to catch up on their correspondence and go over their draft resolutions.
Careful planning and several dollops of canniness helped as well. In advance of the arrival of the Maritimers in Quebec City, the Canadians leaked to the Morning Chronicle a summary of most of their intended resolutions, thereby minimizing the surprises while leaving themselves free to deny authorship should controversy break out over any of them. They paid for all the hotel expenses (totalling some fifteen thousand dollars) of the delegates, and of their wives and daughters. To keep everyone amiable, there were constant balls and dinners and receptions, principally hosted by the governor general but also by railway lobbyists. Mercy Coles, the daughter of a Prince Edward Island delegate, recorded in her diary that her father returned home from one of these balls “with every stitch of clothing wringing wet with perspiration.” Feo Monck wrote of Cartier flirting with her, saying that his favourite occupation was “the activity of the heart.” (Neither woman paid the least attention to the work of the conference itself.) The Prince Edward Island delegate Edward Whelan sent regular stories to his newspaper, the Examiner, informing readers that “the Cabinet ministers—the leading ones especially—are the most inveterate dancers I’ve ever seen” and that “the French ladies here give a delightful tone to society…. They make no difficulty in falling in love—or appearing to do it—with a dozen gentlemen at a time.”
As with Charlottetown, a good deal more is known about who danced with whom at Quebec City than who bargained what with whom. The sessions were closed, and no briefings were held for the press. (Among the journalists were a half-dozen from Britain and the United States.) All that was ever made public were the texts of the seventy-two approved resolutions. Official minutes were kept by Macdonald’s deputy minister, Hewitt Bernard, but they were prosaic and terse. Unofficial and abbreviated notes were taken by a Prince Edward Island delegate, A.A. Macdonald, who did record the snippet that Newfoundland delegate Frederick Carter had expressed the hope that Confederation might encourage wealthy fish merchants not to “retir[e] to the Old Country to spend their fortunes.”
After a brief formal opening by the premier of the United Province of Canada, Étienne-Paschal Taché, Macdonald took the floor. He delivered a speech that said little that was new—Confederation should not repeat the American mistake of being too decentralized, and all residual or unspecified powers should revert to the federal government, not to the states, as had happened south of the border—but he said it persuasively. When Macdonald finished, those outside the chamber could hear a burst of applause from inside. His speech done, Macdonald moved the first general resolution, to establish a “federal union” with a government based on the British system and with the monarch as its head of state. The actual work now began.
In hindsight it is remarkable how much the delegates accomplished—and also how little they did. Issues that have dominated Canadian politics ever since, such as the division of powers between the two levels of government, were barely discussed at all; Macdonald suggested a list of federal powers, and Oliver Mowat a list of provincial ones, and both were passed quickly with little argument or debate. Matters fundamental to the functioning of any federal system, such as how to amend the constitution, were not debated. A satisfactory explanation has never been constructed for the absence of so vital a piece of constitutional machinery. Speculatively, Macdonald may have worried that an amending system, which merely by existing implied that the constitution might need improving later on, might open the way for critics calling for changes before the constitution was carved into legislative stone, but whose real purpose was delay for its own sake. What is remarkable is that no one in Quebec City commented on the absence of an amending formula, even though one existed in the United States and was known to be working well. The Nova Scotia anti-Confederate Joseph Howe (who was not present at Quebec City) was one of the few in the entire country to raise the issue.
Premier Étienne-Paschal Taché. He served as the titular leader whom both Macdonald and Brown could accept.
What interested the delegates most was the Senate. One full week was spent on a debate (which came close to breaking up the conference) about how many senators*117 each section (Upper Canada, Lower Canada, the Maritimes) should have. “Everyone here has had a fit of the blues,” reported the Toronto Globe. At Charlottetown, it had been agreed that every section would have twenty-four senators. The possible addition of Newfoundland meant that the Maritime colonies as a whole would end up with fewer senators than either of the Canadas. Eventually Macdonald concocted a compromise—Newfoundland would get four senators all of its own, if and when it joined. That said, the work resumed.
It was now October 19, and progress had been slow. From this point on, as Prince Edward Island delegate Edward Palmer reported in a newspaper article, “the current seemed to set with the Canadians.” Contentious matters remained: Prince Edward Island asked for a special grant of £200,000 to buy up the extensive holdings of absentee landlords (mostly British) but was refused, and its delegates thereafter effectively dropped out of the discussions. Mistakes were made: on New Brunswick’s behalf, Leonard Tilley managed to get an extra $63,000, but Charles Tupper forgot to ask for a matching amount for Nova Scotia.
The turn of the tide towards the Canadians meant a turn at the same time towards the strong central government that Macdonald had always called for. Words like “unity” and “nation” gained a magical quality. During a debate about criminal law, Mowat declared, “I quite concur in the advantages of one uniform system. It would weld us into a nation.” A quote from a popular pamphlet, The Northern Kingdom, written by S.E. Dawson—“Never was there such an opportunity as now for the birth of a nation”—was reprinted in a Quebec City newspaper and commented on by many delegates. When a New Brunswicker, E.B. Chandler, protested that the provinces would be reduced to “merely large municipal corporations,” he was almost shouted down. Macdonald was now so confident of success that he was able to dismiss as invalid another delegate’s claim that the provisions of New Zealand’s 1842 constitution, which had ended with the provinces there being abolished, could be used in Canada. A Newfoundland delegate, Ambrose Shea, caught the mood of many when he said the scheme would enable British North Americans to escape from the “wretched broils of our colonial life.” Out of Quebec City came the first sense of Canada as a national community.
On Wednesday, October 26, the conference held its final full sessions—which extended until midnight. They met again on Friday to tidy up the details. That evening there was a huge ball, attended by one thousand guests. For the first time in history, a band of colonists had drafted a constitution for themselves. The deed was done.
The first reward of this constitutional success was financial. “The immediate effect of the scheme was such on the public mind that our five per cents [government bonds] rose from 75 to 92,” Brown reported to Anne.
The new draft constitution was in fact an unrelievedly prosaic document, more like a car repair manual than a prescription for building a nation. The London Times commented, unkindly but accurately, on its “practical and unpretending a style.” Only one resolution contained even a hint of poetry. It called for Canadians to move ahead by means of “the perpetuation of our connection with the mother country and the promotion of the best interests of the people of these provinces [who] desire to follow the model of the British constitution,” with, since this was a Canadian document, the closing qualifier “so far as our circumstances will prevail.”
Macdonald understood the significance of what had been achieved. During the brief debate on the division of powers, he intervened to say that if the mix was too decentralized, a “radical weakness” would be introduced into the constitution that would “ruin us in the eyes of the civilized world.” To gain respect and acceptance, the new nation had to let the world know, and its own people know, that it was united and capable of being daring. To do that took a strong central government. By contrast, Brown’s understanding was much more parochial: “Constitution adopted—a most credible document—a complete reform of all the abuses and injustices we have complained of,” he wrote to Anne right after the conference’s close. He then added, “Is it not wonderful? French-Canadianism is entirely extinguished.” (He meant by this that French Quebecers would no longer be able to intervene in the politics of English Ontarians.)
To be fair to the Quebec City delegates, they had to cobble together a federal constitution at the very time when the world’s best-known federation had dissolved into a horrendous civil war. The temptation was strong to assume that federations were inherently flawed and that only a “legislative union,” or a unitary state like Britain, could work. They were also hemmed in by circumstances. The United States’ solution to the challenge of representing the regions at the centre—two senators from each state, no matter their size—was indeed well known in Canada. But Canada was too oddly sized for such a system to work here. The three Maritime provinces together contained only a fifth of the total population; a U.S.-style equal allocation of Senate seats would give them a majority in that chamber, growing to a two-to-one majority once Newfoundland joined. This said, any solution would have served better the need for a national balance than the one the delegates settled on—a Senate supposed to represent the regions, but with all its members appointed by the federal government.
There was, nevertheless, a fair amount of shrewd sense in the delegates’ preference for the pedestrian. Thus, the Canadiens were conspicuous by their silence about the rights of French Canadians outside Quebec, in particular entirely ignoring the interests of New Brunswick’s Acadians. Any vocal defence of the pan-Canadian interests of French Canadians, though, would have triggered demands for extra protections by English Canadians in Quebec. The silence was unbrotherly, and even cowardly, but it preserved for Quebec’s Canadiens what they wanted.
To contemporary eyes, the aspect of the Quebec City resolutions most difficult to comprehend is that the delegates took almost no interest in the respective powers of the federal and provincial governments. Ever since, there have been long periods when the only matter of consequence in Canadian politics seems to be which level of government is responsible for what, and who should pay for it. While unsatisfying, the explanation for this constitutional amnesia is easy: governments then did so little because people wanted them to do little. Pre-Confederation, the share of government revenues expended on what are now the principal activities of government—education, public charities and social services—was just 9 per cent of the total.*118 Neither governments themselves nor ordinary Canadians expected them to do much more. Then, some 80 per cent of Canadians were farmers and fishermen, and they looked after themselves and their families.
Also, there was a general assumption that setting down lists of federal and provincial responsibilities would pre-empt all the jurisdictional problems. This attitude was odd, given that delegates were familiar with the contortions that had bedevilled the quasi-federation of the United Province of Canada. But the naïveté about federalism was widespread. Macdonald would later proclaim, “We have avoided all conflict of jurisdiction and authority.” The Globe, in that tone of plaintive exasperation at the follies of others so distinctive to editorial writers, would ask with unconcealed impatience, “We desire local self-government in order that the separate nationalities of which the population is composed may not quarrel. We desire at the same time a strong central authority. Is there anything incompatible in these two things? Cannot we have both? What is the difficulty?”
The delegates were practical men, not visionaries or scholars. Just one of the thirty-three Fathers of Confederation at Quebec City—Nova Scotia’s Charles Tupper—had a university education, in his case in medicine from the University of Edinburgh.*119 By contrast, of the fifty-five at Philadelphia in 1787, more than half were university trained or had studied at the Inns of Court in London. The composition of the Senate interested the delegates for the sake of regional balance, but scarcely less so for their personal career prospects.†120 Few had bothered to study federal systems. The proceedings of those American colonists were available at the conference, and Macdonald had brought along his well-annotated copy of James Madison’s Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, which included Alexander Hamilton’s Draft of a Constitution for the United States. But really only Macdonald, Galt, Mowat and, less so, Brown understood the complexities and subtle tradeoffs inherent in any federal system.
Practical men—even pedestrian ones as most of them were—the Quebec City delegates did one thing that was more imaginative than anything attempted at any federal-provincial conference since: most of the delegations were composed of representatives of both the government and the opposition in the home colony, as Christopher Moore pointed out in his excellent book 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal. (The one exception was the opposition rouges, who refused to take part.) Also, half hidden beneath all the workaday clauses of the resolutions, there was one radical new notion that was little appreciated by most of the drafters: in the new nation, linguistic and cultural differences would be protected.*121 This promise had never been made before, not even in the constitution of the original Swiss federation, which, if only by historic circumstance, was based on cantons that were all linguistically and ethnically German.
Here resides one of the great mysteries of the achievement of Confederation. It was built on the understanding of a pact between Canada’s two founding races. Yet this fundamental building block of the national architecture was, for all practical purposes, never discussed.
The extent of this pact is not at all easy to decipher. The actual provisions for bilingualism agreed on at Quebec City were exceedingly limited. There was no ringing proclamation of the equality of the two languages: the Quebec Resolutions merely declared, permissively, that “both the English and French languages may be employed by the general parliament…and also in the federal courts.” There was no mention of bilingualism in the federal government, or anywhere in Canada outside Quebec.
Just once did Macdonald appear to accept that French should be a national language rather than one limited, outside Quebec, to Parliament and the federal courts. During the Confederation Debates that immediately followed the Quebec Conference, Macdonald said that “the use of the French language should form one of the principles upon which the Confederation should be established.” Here, he linked French to Confederation itself rather than only to the new central government. This statement, though, was made only during a debate; he made no similar statement (so far as is known) during any of the conferences at which the new constitution was drafted. And his phrase “the use of” was imprecise. Yet the bleu members were satisfied. More striking, because Confederation could never have been implemented without his approval, Cartier was satisfied.
Cartier’s confidence wasn’t misplaced. Much would be gained by Confederation: the Canadiens would have their own legislature and government. In them, the dominant language would of course be French, in a return to the situation that existed before the Conquest. To reinforce the sense of assurance so gained, there was also the force of rising expectations. The eventual British North America Act would be the sixth constitutional construct by which French Canadians had been ruled—the earlier five being the Military Government of 1760, the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Quebec Act of 1774, the Constitutional Act of 1791 and the Act of Union of 1841. Whatever the particular constitutional system, French Canadians had found ways to use it not merely to survive but progressively to enlarge their self-rule, gaining recognition of their religion, their language and their right to a full share of the patronage of the national government. If this much had been won already, why not more, later, by other constitutional changes and rearrangements?
These ambitions were expressed quite openly. La Minerve (Montreal), a strong supporter of Cartier, used the evocative phrase “maîtres chez nous” to describe what Confederation would accomplish for the francophones of Quebec. Le Journal de Québec said that French Canadians “can and must one day aspire to being a nation,” adding that premature independence would lead to annexation by the United States. Other than “nation,” probably the most common word in the commentaries on the Confederation project in Quebec newspapers was that of “separation.” The most explicit declaration was in La Minerve, which in its issue for Confederation Day, July 1, 1867, advised readers, “As a distinct and separate nationality, we form a state within a state. We enjoy the full exercise of our rights, and the formal recognition of our national independence.” The magazine Contre-poison wrote that Quebec was to be “completely separated from Upper Canada” and praised the leaders who had “turned us over into our own hands, who have restored our complete autonomy.” And La Minerve observed, “In giving ourselves a complete government we affirm our existence as a separate nationality.”
Quebecers—as they soon would be called—were saying to each other, or at least were being told by their newspapers and political leaders, that Confederation’s purpose was not to create some new Canadian nation but to create a political system in which they could not only continue to be what they always had been but grow into something larger—perhaps, to quote La Minerve again, into a “state within a state,” or, eventually, into “national independence.” And their understanding of Confederation itself was quite different from that of English Canadians. At the same time, English Canadians were being told by leaders such as Macdonald and Brown that Confederation’s purpose was to create a “new nation.” Le Canadien, by contrast, informed its readers that Confederation’s purpose was to create “un certain nombre d’États souverains, déléguant une partie définie de leurs droits et leurs pouvoirs à un gouvernement central.”
Few if any English Canadians, in Upper Canada or the Maritimes, read any of these commentaries. In the mid-nineteenth century, the two solitudes were wholly disconnected from each other and wholly self-absorbed. But for this mutual ignorance, the bliss of Confederation, such as it is, simply could not have been achieved.
To some extent, the use of terms such as “separation” and “nationality” in bleu newspapers was just a tactic to reassure Quebec francophone voters. Some of it was wish-fulfillment. A large part of it, though, was real. It was an expectation about the future that arose directly out of the past and the present.
The concept of Canada as a political pact between the two races derived from the alliance years between Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine. Macdonald and Cartier had picked it up a decade later, and so it had remained in the public discourse. The Confederation pact itself was now Macdonald and Cartier’s pact. Once it was achieved, both of them would still be there to implement it. Many Canadiens must have taken for granted that the pair of them could, and would, make it work. It wasn’t a legal compact but rather a pact of trust.
Nothing was ever said about this pact during any of the Confederation conferences, and no evidence exists that Cartier and Macdonald ever discussed the nature of the pact between them. Whether they even sketched out a deal is unknowable. Most of Cartier’s personal papers were destroyed after his early death in 1873, almost certainly deliberately to protect him (and Macdonald) from any further disclosures about Canadian Pacific Railway funds being used in Conservative election campaigns. Macdonald and Cartier were so close, though, that they would hardly have needed to commit to paper any agreement between them about Confederation’s future.
Macdonald, nevertheless, is on the public record as committing himself to a pact with both Cartier and les Canadiens. In reference not to Confederation but to its predecessor, the United Province of Canada, he said in a speech he gave in Toronto, which was quoted in the Toronto Leader on April 30, 1861, that union had been “a distinct bargain, a solemn contract.” During the Confederation Debates of 1865, Macdonald again used the term “Treaty of Union” to refer to the practices followed in the legislature of the United Province, and he intriguingly admitted that, although a single unit according to its constitution, it had been, “as a matter of fact…a Federal Union”—or little different in its reality from what the proposed Confederation would be.
Legally, no such treaty or contract between the French and English ever existed. But in Macdonald’s mind, and equally in Cartier’s, a “distinct bargain, a solemn contract” existed between them, and so between the English and the French. Confederation didn’t create this bargain between the two founding peoples, as has often been claimed. Instead, it arose out of a pact of trust that predated Confederation and had, by the time of Confederation, been made into part of Canada’s DNA by Macdonald and Cartier.
Between Cartier and Macdonald there was one dramatic Confederation-era public exchange that revealed how they understood their respective roles. In March 1864, on the eve of the formation of the Great Coalition government, Macdonald, then not yet committed to Confederation, spoke briefly on Brown’s motion to set up a legislature committee to consider all federal options. “The sad experience on the other side [the United States],” Macdonald said, “proved that it must not be merely a federal one; that instead of having a federal one, we should have a Legislative Union, in fact, in principle, and in practice.” Sitting beside him, Cartier interjected grimly, “That is not my policy,” meaning he would never accept a unitary state in which his Canadiens would have no government of their own to protect them. Just a few days later, Macdonald showed that he understood Cartier’s objection, and that he accepted it, by coming out in support of a pan-Canadian federal union. The mutual trust between these two men was the unwritten pact that made Confederation possible.
At Quebec City, there was one revealing public discussion of this existential issue between French and English, though it involved neither Macdonald nor Cartier. It occurred right at the start of the conference, and it’s very likely that only Macdonald among the English-speaking delegates understood the significance of what was being said. Sir Étienne-Paschal Taché made a brief opening statement in his role as nominal premier of Canada. After pleasantries, he informed the delegates that Confederation would be “tantamount to a separation of the provinces, and Lower Canada would thereby preserve its autonomy together with all the institutions it held so dear.” Not one member of the “other” solitude rose to challenge or inquire about what the words “separation” and “autonomy” meant; by their silence, English Canadians sealed the pact.
Here is the place for a footnote too important to be tucked away at the bottom of the page. Taché, avuncular in his appearance and genial in his manner, was highly regarded by his English counterparts as one of the gatekeepers between themselves and the near-invisible Canadiens. But Taché was also a passionate patriot. He showed this side of himself in a remarkable 1858 letter to a fellow Canadien politician. “The important thing to remember is that the unity we have just consolidated in Lower Canada ensures that we are the de facto rulers of the entire province [of Canada],” he wrote. “It may come that, in their impotent rage, we will soon be hearing weeping and gnashing of teeth from the Upper Canadians…. All the blustering of our enemies will vanish into thin air, while we go forward, govern, progress…. And we will do more: we will safeguard our institutions and preserve them from impure contact.” Fortunately for Macdonald, and for Canada, neither Brown nor the Globe ever learned about this other side of their gatekeeper.*122 Equally fortunately for Canada, no Canadien leader learned of Brown’s triumphant declaration to Anne that Confederation’s great accomplishment was that French Canadianism had been extinguished.
Macdonald achieved all he really wanted just in getting the Confederation deal itself at Quebec City. Prince Edward Island pulled out from the pact later, as did Newfoundland, neither of these island colonies having any interest in the Intercolonial Railway or any fear of Americans attempting to invade by running the gauntlet of the Royal Navy. The approval of the Nova Scotia and New Brunswick delegates, though, meant that Macdonald had in his hand one-half of a continental-sized nation that would stretch to the Atlantic; the addition of the second half, stretching all the way to the Pacific, was specifically provided for in the Quebec Resolutions.
Macdonald didn’t get what he had said on several occasions he personally would prefer to a confederation or federation—a “legislative union.” Such an arrangement was highly attractive to Britain, itself a “legislative union,” or unitary state, and one that had forged a “Union” with Scotland and had rejected repeatedly, and violently, any attempts at Home Rule, or self-government, in Ireland. Midway through the conference, Macdonald wrote to the businessman-politician Isaac Buchanan, “My great aim is to strengthen the general Legislature and Govt. as much as possible, and approach as nearly to a Legislative Union as is practicable.” Shortly after the conference ended, he wrote to a supporter, Malcolm Cameron, “If the Confederation goes on, you, if spared the ordinary age of man, will see both local Parliaments and Governments absorbed in the General Power.” Macdonald added, as hardly needed to be said, “But of course, it doesn’t do to adopt that point of view in discussing the subject in Lower Canada.”
While Macdonald kept on saying this kind of thing, he may not have meant it. He may have been playing another set of his “long game.” He once even showed his hand in public. In the Confederation Debates in the Canadian legislature that followed the Quebec Conference, Macdonald engaged in an intriguing exchange with the High Tory M.C. Cameron, who challenged Macdonald that he would have “better shown [his] patriotism by waiting a little longer to accomplish it.” Macdonald interjected, “Accomplish what?” Cameron answered, “A legislative union of all the provinces.” Macdonald then gave his colleague a lesson in realpolitik. “I thought my hon. friend knew that every man in Lower Canada was against it, every man in New Brunswick, every man in Nova Scotia,*123 every man in Newfoundland and every man in Prince Edward Island. How, then, is it to be accomplished?” The “long game” that Macdonald thus was playing was to position himself at a constitutional extreme from which he could gracefully retreat, while using his concessions to gain in exchange yet more bits and pieces of a highly centralized federal system.
That in fact is exactly what happened. Before the Confederation project was completed, Macdonald won a succession of important additions to the central power. Immigration and agriculture became joint jurisdictions rather than exclusively provincial concerns, and Ottawa gained the right to appoint the provincial lieutenant-governors, officials considered so powerful at the time that Macdonald described them as “chief executive officers.” Moreover, during the negotiations at the Quebec Conference, even though many delegates favoured a legislative union rather than a confederation—Brown†124 and Galt among the Canadians, and, among the Maritimers, Tupper and some senior men—Macdonald made no attempt to win approval for a legislative union. By not attempting seriously the impossibility of a legislative union, he got the possible—namely, as he expressed it and believed he had achieved, that “the Central Government assumes towards the local governments precisely the same position as the Imperial Government holds with respect to each of the provinces.”
The constitution that emerged from Quebec City, and that went on to become the BNA Act, was almost certainly the most centralized constitution for a federation or confederation that’s ever been assembled. Macdonald secured all the four centralizing measures Alexander Hamilton had attempted to insert into the U.S. Constitution at Philadelphia in 1787—appointment of senators for life; federal appointment of state governors; the federal right to disallow state laws; and the granting of residual powers to the federal government. He also secured one centralizing authority, over “banking, incorporation of banks, and the issue of paper money,” that Hamilton never even thought of.
Macdonald’s “long game” had another objective, one far more critical to his purpose than creating a strong central government for the sake of governmental efficiency. Confederation’s prime purpose was to impress Britain and the United States by a statement of national will; gathering together the British North America colonies was merely a means to that end. A central government that possessed, as he put it, “all the powers which are incident to sovereignty” would impress as the government of a nation rather than of some upgraded province or colony. To impress further, it would avoid what Macdonald saw as the “fatal error” that had almost sundered the United States—that of “making each state a distinct sovereignty, and giving to each a distinct sovereign power.” In the nation-state he was creating, therefore, sovereignty would reside, as in all real nation-states, at its centre.
As it turned out, Macdonald would lose this part of his “long game”—in later sets. Quirky decisions by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London during the latter part of Macdonald’s post-Confederation term were an early cause. The underlying reason was that Canadians themselves wanted a decentralized confederation rather than Macdonald’s centralized one. Another reason was the most obvious one of all: immense distances kept the people of British North America apart from each other and turned them to their own local governments and away from the remote national one. Above all, Canadiens, soon to become Québécois, located their true national government not in Ottawa but in Quebec City. As to the future of federal-provincial relations, rather than Macdonald’s benign confidence about federal dominance, the shrewdest guess was the one made by that unnervingly perceptive critic Christopher Dunkin: the “cry” of the provinces, he predicted in 1865, “will be found to be pretty often and pretty successfully—‘Give, give, give.’”
A closing note about the Quebec Conference. The most famous painting in Canadian historiography is Robert Harris’s The Fathers of Confederation. Macdonald dominates the picture—because he’s in the centre, he’s standing rather than sitting, he’s tall (at five foot eleven he was above the average height for the time), he’s wearing a dashing white waistcoat inside his black frock coat, and, in contrast to the ponderous gravitas of most of the others, his posture is alert, watchful, purposeful. Harris painted it in 1884. By that time the building in which the event had taken place had burned down, and Harris improved the vista by painting in delicate arched windows in place of the square wooden casements of the original.
This painting was lost in the 1916 fire that destroyed the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. Harris, by then seventy, refused a second commission but did touch up his original cartoon, or charcoal sketch. In 1964 the insurance company Confederation Life commissioned Toronto artist Rex Woods to recreate Harris’s 1884 version and presented it to Parliament as a Centennial gift. It now hangs in the Railway Committee Room of the Parliament Buildings.*125
Macdonald’s mood after the comprehensive success at Quebec City was confident to the point of being cocky. Within a fortnight of the conference’s end, he was treating Confederation as if it were already an accomplished fact and was looking beyond to the administrative details of a post-Confederation government. On November 14, 1864, he wrote to Premier Tilley of New Brunswick, “Have you thought over the formation of the Govt—the Federal Govt I mean?—i.e. as to the number and composition of the Executive, the number and nature of the Departments & the general system of administration?” He made the same request to Nova Scotia’s Tupper the same day, adding, “I intend to commence next week to draft the Bill to be submitted for the consideration of the Imperial Govt.”
His personal correspondence communicated the same assurance. A day after his letters to Tilley and Tupper, in a letter to Judge James Robert Gowan, Macdonald claimed the entire constitution as “mine.” In another letter at this time, he declared, “We do not pretend that it is at all perfect, or even symmetrical, but it was the result of a series of compromises which were necessary to secure the support of all classes.”
To heighten his high spirits, events kept breaking his way. Midway through the Quebec Conference, the delegates heard worri some news that two dozen Southern Confederates hiding in Canada had staged a cross-border raid on the northern Vermont town of St. Albans, taking two hundred thousand dollars from three banks, killing one person and wounding another before fleeing back to Canada. The general commanding the American forces in the region gave his troops an order that if other Confederates made a similar sortie, they were to give hot pursuit right into Canada. President Lincoln refused to confirm the order, which would have breached Canada’s neutrality, and waited to see how Canada would respond.
By bad luck, that response could not have been more thoroughly bungled. Most of the Confederates were arrested as soon as they arrived back in Canada from St. Albans. On December 13, their preliminary trial came up before Montreal magistrate Charles-Joseph Coursol. The defence lawyer made a convoluted argument for the prisoners’ temporary release; a confused Coursol assented, and the Confederate raiders instantly vanished. American newspapers, and many American politicians, were certain it was an anti-North plot. Four days later Washington gave notice that all Canadians would have to have passports to enter the United States. Privately, Macdonald expressed his fury at “the unhappy and mistaken decision of Coursol.” To an inquiring businessman, Macdonald’s response was nuanced adroitly. On the one hand, Macdonald wrote, there was no reason why “individuals or incorporated companies like Railways should not join in their exertions with Americans from the Western Frontier to procure its [the passport order’s] withdrawal.” On the other, “it would be extremely impolitic, and, indeed, defeat our object, if the Canadian Government went on its knees to the United States government.” Macdonald then gave the businessman a lesson in governance: an intervention by the Canadian government itself, he wrote, “would give Mr. Seward [the secretary of state] an exaggerated idea of the inconvenience and loss suffered by Canada and it [the order] would be kept up as a means of punishment or for purposes of coercion.”
In fact, the released raiders were quickly rearrested and retried by a different judge, who subsequently ruled (very likely after being prompted by Macdonald) that they should be extradited to the United States.*126 To forestall future raids, Macdonald called up two thousand volunteers to stand guard along the border. As a further precaution, he organized a detective force, headed by Gilbert McMicken, “a shrewd, cool and determined man who won’t easily lose his head,” to provide intelligence on what was happening across the border. The flap died down, although, as always, not without calls by American newspapers, especially the New York Herald, for Canada’s annexation, if necessary by force. Of lasting consequence, though, was the decision by Congress not to renew the Reciprocity Treaty when it reached its due date in 1866, in reaction to what was seen to be Canadian favouritism towards the South. The combination of this cross-border free-trade pact, together with the immense demand generated by American military mobilization, had led to the growth of Canada’s economy at a faster rate than ever before in the nineteenth century.†127
The immediate consequences of this mini-crisis, though, were all positive. Even the passport rule was soon withdrawn. As always, an external threat drew people together. Further, the St. Albans affair reminded Canadians of the threat about to be posed by the imminent victory of the North over the South. About the war itself, Macdonald now insisted on the strictest neutrality, urging it on a colleague with just a hint of regret: “We can’t help the South[,] and a naked expression of sympathy would do it no good and greatly injure us.” Nevertheless, the fact remained that once the American Civil War ended, the vast Federal armies might be demobilized—or, perhaps, mobilized to march northwards.
To this threat, actual or perceived, two responses were possible: Confederation, which would signal Canada’s will to survive; as well, a helping hand from Britain. Macdonald now set out to secure both.