TWENTY

The Administration of Strangers

[Take a Nova Scotian to Ottawa], where he cannot view the Atlantic, smell salt water or see the sail of a ship, and the man will pine and die. Joseph Howe, Nova Scotia anti-Confederate leader

The news from New Brunswick, once it had been handed over to Macdonald from the telegraph office, was far worse than the initial reports. Premier Leonard Tilley had not merely lost the government; he had lost his own seat. His party had not just been defeated but trounced, winning fourteen seats against the twenty-seven captured by the incoming anti-Confederation premier, Albert James Smith. Even if Nova Scotia could be kept on side—Charles Tupper by now was thoroughly gloomy—there would be no continuous chain of provinces extending out to the Atlantic. With such a gap in its middle, Confederation would be all but unattainable; without it, Britain and the United States would have no reason to believe that Canadians possessed the will to be a nation.

In the House, Macdonald accepted without argument the choice that New Brunswickers had made; the result, he admitted, represented a “declaration against the policy of Confederation.” In contrast to D’Arcy McGee, who claimed that American money had determined the outcome, Macdonald made only a glancing reference to that possibility. He remained defiant, though, rejecting “any signs of weakness, any signs of receding on this question,” and telling Tupper, “there was nothing left for us but the bold game.” To one alarmed supporter he counselled, “stick with the ship until she rights.” He was particularly concerned that George Brown might use the setback to argue once again for his “mini-federation,” applying only to the United Province of Canada. Macdonald was able to forestall that. In private, though, he let his frustration show, telling a Prince Edward Island supporter that Tilley had been “unstatesmanlike” to allow an election to happen without first putting the Confederation scheme to his legislature to ensure that “the subject had been fairly discussed and its merits understood.”

Nova Scotia premier Charles Tupper. He was the only Father of Confederation with a university education (Edinburgh, in medicine). He was bold and blustery, an even stronger advocate of a centralized Confederation than Macdonald.

By the end of March, he was already planning a counterattack. “We will endeavour to convince the Catholic Bishop of the benefits to be derived from Confederation,” he told Tupper, while he himself would arrange “to get the communication you speak of from the Orange Grand Lodge to the same body in New Brunswick.” These tactics were premature, though. The news soon got bleaker. On April 10, 1865, Tupper informed his legislature in Halifax that “under existing circumstances, an immediate Union of the British North American Colonies has become impractical.” He stopped trying to bring the issue to a vote. Inevitably, anti-Confederates in Canada itself joined in. Rouge leader Antoine-Aimé Dorion declared triumphantly, “This scheme is killed. I repeat that it is killed.” And a new player now came onto the stage. He was Joseph Howe, a former Nova Scotia premier and easily its most exceptional politician of the century. He was also the strongest anti-Confederate that Macdonald would ever face.

Howe was the third of the three Maritime politicians who were by now becoming familiar names to newspaper readers across the country. The others were Tupper and Tilley. Since both men would have long terms in post-Confederation Ottawa, a snapshot of each will suffice for now. Tupper was a medical doctor—ebullient, bombastic, bold. He practically challenged observers to employ purple ink while describing him, as in “broad-shouldered, self-contained, as vigorous-looking as Wellington’s charger” and “oratorical and obstetrical”—these latter words by Lord Rosebery, later the British prime minister. Tupper was not just pro-Confederate but an ultra Confederate: he outdid even Macdonald in his advocacy of a full legislative union with minimalist provinces, rather than merely the kind of centralized confederation Macdonald aspired to. Tilley was a druggist, and a most successful one. Never popular because of a self-righteous streak, particularly as a prohibitionist, he was widely respected for his intelligence and integrity. It’s because of Tilley that for a long time, as we shall see, our title was that of a dominion.

New Brunswick premier Leonard Tilley. He led the fight for Confederation in his province, and for a time lost it.

Joseph Howe, the anti-Confederate leader in Nova Scotia. He was the one “anti” to propose a serious alternative. The odds were against him and he lost, but Macdonald later praised him as “the most seminal mind” he had met.

Between them, Tupper and Tilley began the tradition of the Maritimes exporting its political talent to Ottawa.

New Brunswick premier Leonard Tilley. He led the fight for Confederation in his province, and for a time lost it.

Of all the men who fought against Confederation, and so against Macdonald, Howe was the one Macdonald respected the most.

Years later, he told his secretary Joseph Pope that Howe possessed the most seminal mind” he had ever met. Yet Howe was the tragic figure of Confederation. He opposed it, and lost. The true source of his pain, though, was that he lost his faith in Britain. His father, John Howe, who had been living in the United States at the time of the rebellion by the American colonies, had been the only member of his family to come north as a Loyalist. He passed on this almost mystical attitude towards Britain to his son.

Self-educated, Howe edited a journal, the Novascotian, which was way ahead of its time in calling for such grand notions as “more of rational freedom” and, as early as 1838, for a union of the British American colonies. Howe sent letters to the colonial secretary suggesting how best to reform the Empire, into a sort of super-confederation of Britain and its colonies strikingly similar to the concept developed decades later as Imperial Federation. Elected to the legislature, Howe took up the cause of Responsible Government and played a major role in its attainment in 1848, a few months ahead of the United Province of Canada. He became premier, a post he lost to Tupper, regained and then lost again to Tupper in 1860. Short of money, he accepted a minor patronage post as a fisheries commissioner. In 1864 he gave a fiery speech to the touring group of Canadian businessmen and journalists organized by McGee, calling for a sea-to-sea union; the alternative, he said, was to “live and die in insignificance.”

Then, in January 1865, Howe burst out as a fully fledged anti-Confederate. He wrote eleven long articles, the “Botheration Letters,” which played a substantial part in stoking Nova Scotian fears of what Confederation might bring. Disappointment at his own career was a factor: when his poorly paid patronage job came to an end, Howe would face virtual penury at the age of sixty. Jealousy of Tupper, who had forced him out of politics, was also a factor; invited to be a Nova Scotia delegate to the Charlottetown Conference, Howe refused, saying he wouldn’t “play second-fiddle to that damn’d Tupper.” He assumed that the conclave would fail, then watched from the sidelines as Confederation took off—and Tupper with it. Howe’s core reason for opposing Confederation was his love of country—far less for Nova Scotia than for Britain. As he wrote, “I am a dear lover of old England, and to save her would blow up Nova Scotia into the air or scuttle her like an old ship.”

He opposed Confederation so fiercely because he feared it would tug Canada, and so Nova Scotia, away from the mother country. He talked more often about Britain than about his own province, as in his speech in Yarmouth in May 1866: “You go down to the sea in ships, and a flag of old renown floats above them, and the Consuls and Ministers of the Empire are prompt to protect your property, and your sons in every part of the world.” And, in another speech, “London [was] large enough—London, the financial centre of the world, the nursing mother of universal enterprise, the home of the arts, the seat of Empire, the fountainhead of civilization.” Who could think of giving all that up for a capital in Canada’s backwoods “with an Indian name and any quantity of wilderness and ice in the rear of it”?

When Howe did talk to Nova Scotians about themselves, it was about their past. To take any Nova Scotian to Ottawa, “away from tidewater…where he cannot view the Atlantic, smell salt water or see the sail of a ship, and the man will pine and die.” Rule by Canada, he said, would be “the administration of strangers.” And he simply didn’t believe that so polyglot and divided a country as Canada could possibly work: “The builders of Babel were only a little more ambitious than these Canadian politicians.”

Howe’s interventions made a difference. But the prime source of Maritimers’ hostility to Confederation was something quite different and almost unresolvable. This was that they were so distant from Canada and so near, relatively, to Britain. In his speech in Halifax after the Charlottetown Conference, Macdonald had said, jokingly, that Canada was almost as far from the Maritimes as from Australia. (Later, Howe remarked, entirely correctly, that the Maritimes were no nearer to Canada than was Britain to Austria, across half of Europe.) Less than 3 per cent of Canada’s exports went to the Maritimes, and the return flow was even smaller. A letter from Halifax took as long to reach Ottawa as it did to cross the Atlantic to Liverpool. There were no Canada–Maritime rail or road connections; just the St. Lawrence River, and it only in summer. Few Canadians had any commercial or personal reasons to make the laborious journey; nor, in reverse, did Maritimers. The Acadian Recorder of Halifax summed it all up: “We don’t know each other. We have no facilities or resources to mingle with each other. We are shut off from each other by a wilderness, geographically, commercially, politically and socially. We always cross the United States to shake hands.” By contrast, any Maritimer could travel to England in one of the steamships that now made the voyage in as little as ten days.

Differences in self-perception widened the physical distance. The Maritime provinces were small: 350,000 inhabitants in Nova Scotia, 250,000 in New Brunswick, 80,000 in Prince Edward Island. But they were already mini-nations. Just as in the United Province of Canada, they had Responsible Government. In politics, they were ahead in some respects: New Brunswick had the secret ballot, and Nova Scotia had experimented with universal suffrage. It was the Maritimers who, at Charlottetown and Quebec City, had taken the innovative step of including opposition members in their delegations.

Maritimers felt themselves superior to Canada, looking dubiously on its jumble of immigrants and its disturbing qualities of dynamism and brashness—an almost mirror image of the way Canadians viewed the United States.^*140 They were, in other words, defensively superior. British North America’s first real theatre had opened in Halifax in 1787, and its first literary periodical began there twelve years later. The Royal Navy, with its base in Halifax, gave the small city a distinct social life. Confederation, if it happened, would bring the Maritimes no new gifts except the Intercolonial Railway, which would create short-term jobs but over time bring new competition for the small and inefficient local business class. Tupper warned Macdonald that “a great body of the trading men comprising the most wealthy merchants” opposed Confederation.

Just as critical, all three Maritime provinces were booming, due chiefly to Reciprocity with the United States and the demand created by the Civil War. These, too, were the great days of the sailing ship: one in three ships entering Boston Harbor started out from Nova Scotia. That Maritimers were living on borrowed time was not yet realized, with the steam engine, the screw propeller and the iron hull all soon to turn even the finest wood and sail ships into museum pieces. Why risk any of this prosperity, they argued, for what Howe called “this crazy Confederacy with a mongrel crew, half-English, half-French”? Why give up John Bull for Jack Frost?

There was a good reason to make such a switch, one that Howe undoubtedly realized as it became the principal cause of his anger and his anguish. John Bull was showing clear signs of wanting to get rid of the Maritimes by thrusting them into the arms of Jack Frost. Confederation would enable Britain to distance itself from Canada, most certainly so militarily. Of lesser consequence, yet still useful, Confederation would enable Britain to rid itself of the Maritimes—except for the vital Halifax base, which was considered as important to the Empire as Gibraltar or Malta.

As Howe would have been the first to understand, and so have wanted to rage against the dying of the light, the Maritimes in the end had nowhere to go other than into a union with Canada. Alone, they would be lost. The only alternative was Maritime Union, something New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island feared even more than union with “mongrel” Canada. Ottawa, unlike Halifax, was at least not next door.

The Maritimers who struggled against Confederation were major contributors to their own defeat. They failed to unite themselves, so they never spoke with a single, magnified voice. They trusted Britain. They failed to do their homework until it was too late. At the Quebec Conference, Brown wrote dismissively that “we hear much talkee-talkee” from the Maritimers, “but not very much administrative ability.” And they deluded themselves that they could outfox Macdonald.

Before Macdonald appears back on stage, it’s necessary to describe the scenery against which this particular act unfolded. This backdrop was not something physical but a force far more substantial—a psychological attitude that had hardened into an utter conviction.

During the twenty-first century, Canadians have come to define themselves by their tolerance—a quality now accepted almost universally as the feature that makes us a distinct people. The acceptance of difference—indeed, its outright celebration—has gained a talismanic power among contemporary Canadians. To be tolerant is to be a Canadian. To be intolerant is not just to be personally racist or exclusionary, but to possess the attribute of someone who is not a real member of the Canadian community.

The equivalent talismanic virtue in nineteenth-century Canada was loyalty. To be disloyal, even to doubt the centrality of the importance of loyalty, was to be something less than a full Canadian. Expressions of disloyalty divided the community and threatened its identity. Loyalty distinguished the nation from its neighbour even more definitively than tolerance does today. Canada was loyal; the United States was disloyal, or had been when it rebelled. No other cross-border differences needed to be identified or constructed.^*141

The object of Canadians’ loyalty was Britain, the Empire, the Crown, personified so alluringly by Queen Victoria. Even more so, Britain was exemplified by such institutions as the parliamentary system and the judicial system, and by British values of fair play, a stiff upper lip and a man’s words being his bond, no matter whether they were for real or just for boasting.

Loyalty wasn’t only about being British. Loyalty was a cardinal virtue—its near kin being fidelity—and extended to loyalty to family, to the marriage vows (there were incomparably fewer divorces in Canada than in the United States), to friends, to tribe or clan or community, and to religion (Canadians who exchanged one faith for another faith were called “perverts”). As the educator Egerton Ryerson put it, “it is a reverence for, and attachment to, the laws, order, institutions and freedom of the country.”

Being loyal was seen as synonymous with being God-fearing. Ryerson observed that if “a man does not love the King, he cannot love God.” And the Reverend J.W.D. Gray informed his parishioners that the “spirit of submission to lawful authority... lies at the foundation of your loyalty to your earthly Sovereign.”

The potency of the ethic of loyalty, conjoining as it did an earthly sovereign with a heavenly one and with the rule of law, was overwhelming. It made Canadians not just proud to be who they were (and not to be Americans) but ebulliently, braggartly proud. There was not the least shyness about Canadians’ loyalty. Flags were waved, songs were sung and public figures competed in their expressions of devotion to Crown and Queen. Canadians in the mid-nineteenth century may well have been more patriotic than were Americans, but to the mother country rather than to their own country. Macdonald, the great loyalist, heightened the stakes, and advanced his partisan cause, by accusing his opponents of “treason.”

It all began with the Loyalists. There were only about fifty thousand of them, but their spirit defined Upper Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, and the far larger number of British immigrants who followed took over the torch from them. That torch was the Loyalist Myth—the chronicles of their suffering and sacrifice for the sake of their loyalty to the Crown. It was much embellished, as all national foundational myths always are. In his book The Sense of Power, historian Carl Berger makes two perceptive points. One is that “nationalistic history was just as much an instrument for survival for the British-Canadian Loyalists as it was for the French-Canadians.” The other is that the Loyalists brought with them not so much British institutions as “its inner spirit”—assumptions such as “the primacy of the community over individual selfishness, society conceived as an organism of functionally related parts…religion as the mortar of the social order, and the distrust of materialism.” The British connection has long vanished, but it takes only a short dig down to the sedimentary layer once occupied by the Loyalists to locate the sources of a great many contemporary Canadian convictions and conventions.

Perhaps the most eloquent expression of the force of loyalty in Canada among English Canadians was made by a British Columbia Legislature member, T.L. Wood, in a debate about possible entry into Confederation. “The bond of union between Canada and the other provinces bears no resemblance to the union between England and her colonial possessions,” Wood said. “There is not natural love and feeling of loyalty. The feeling of loyalty towards England is a blind feeling, instinctive, strong, born with us and impossible to shake off.”

If the loyalty of English Canadians was so potent and deeply rooted because it was instinctual, that among Canadiens was as strong, even if unemotional, precisely because it was self-interested and calculated. Cartier summed it up during the Confederation Debates when he said that the reason the Canadiens “had their institutions, their language and their religion intact today, was because of their adherence to the British Crown.” Back in 1846 Étienne-Paschal Taché had famously proclaimed that “the last cannon which is shot on this continent in defence of Great Britain will be fired by the hand of a French Canadian.” Here resided the magical, however paradoxical, effect of the creed of loyalty among Canadians: being loyal to another nation and to an absent monarch kept Canadians loyal to each other.

Macdonald, to return to the theme of this book, was not merely a loyalist: he embodied it in his very person. In his 1883 biography of Macdonald, the journalist J.E. Collins wrote that “more than any other Canadian statesman…[he] taught us the duty of loyalty.” In his lifelong battle to keep Canada un-American, Macdonald’s most potent instrument was Canadians’ loyalty to Britain. No less valuable was the particular nature of his own loyalty to Britain.

His was fiercely loyal, of course; but there was no deference in his posture. Macdonald was exactly the kind of colonial, or foreigner, who could break through English reserve and snobbery simply because there was not a trace of colonial cringe about him. As the journalist Nicholas Flood Davin, himself a British immigrant, observed, Macdonald was “the type of politician who has never failed to delight the English people—the man who, like Palmerston, can work hard, do strong things, hold his purpose, never lose sight for a moment of the honour and welfare of his country, and yet crack his joke and have his laugh…. There is nothing viewy about Sir John Macdonald.” In short, whenever in Britain, Macdonald regarded himself as an equal, and he was accepted as one.

Only when the British Empire began to fade and fall apart did loyalty lose its magnetic appeal to Canadians; thereafter, as was incomparably more challenging, Canadians had to find reasons to be loyal to themselves.

In the task of turning around public opinion in the Maritimes, loyalty constituted Macdonald’s secret weapon. In Nova Scotia, loyalty to Britain, beginning with that of the tortured Joseph Howe, was even deeper than in Canada. In New Brunswick, attitudes were more ambiguous. After an 1864 visit there, the editor of the Kingston British American wrote, “They are more American [than Canadians]—more democratic in their tastes—have more of the ‘free’ swagger in their manners…more flash-dressed ladies at Theatres and Concerts.”

What Macdonald now had to do was make certain that Maritimers understood what it was that Britain wanted of them—to join Canada. This, therefore, is what he proceeded to do.