SIR CHARLES TUPPER died in 1915, in his ninety-fifth year. In his final years, he made periodic excursions to the Vancouver home of his son Charles Hibbert Tupper, but his residence at the end was an English country estate with the Wodehousian name of Bexleyheath. It is an enormous leap – almost too much for one life to contain – from the young political scrapper who entered Nova Scotia’s colonial assembly in 1855 to this ancient baronet of Bexley. It seems odd to us, now, how so many Canadian nation-builders, even those born and raised in Canada, took themselves off to Britain in retirement, preferring to die in the “old country,” even if, like Tupper, they had never been young there. The last Canadian political leader to choose a British deathbed was R. B. Bennett, child of Hopewell Hill, New Brunswick, who in 1938 removed himself to an English village called Mickleham, wangled himself a viscountcy, and died impersonating an English gentleman. Today, of course, Tupper and Bennett would be more apt to die in Palm Beach or Lyford Cay, which at least have weather to commend them. As the natural refuge of superannuated Canadian leaders, Britain has become unimaginable.
So Tupper at the end of his life cuts an incomprehensible figure. The last of the thirty-six fathers of confederation, all his contemporaries long dead, sits, a huge old ruin in a fur collar with a blanket over his knees, chauffeured about the damp English countryside in some clanking black motor car, doubtless trying to comprehend the horribly modern slaughter of young Canadians at Ypres and Festhubert, gradually letting it go.
That unedifying twilight makes it hard to recapture the energetic nation-building young Tupper of the 1860s. And Tupper himself does not help us. He left two volumes of memoirs and an authorized Life and Letters – all so bland, superficial, and sanitized that they tell us little of his achievements and almost nothing about him. His personal papers were, in historian Peter Waite’s phrase, “not so much laundered as starched.” The destruction of most of what was worthwhile in them has made it almost impossible to flesh out the stiff cardboard of his public image with anything human and tangible.
He had his admirers. There are many reports of the Tupper who always overflowed with energy and enthusiasm, who kept his black medical bag under his parliamentary desk and would offer medical help at any time. Those who liked him said he was bluff and four-square and immovable in his determination. He was full of “a characteristic which may be defined in a favourable sense as audacity,” as one journalist put it. “In repose, even, he looked as if he had a blizzard secreted somewhere about his person,” said a fellow MP. With the wives of his friends and colleagues, he was said to be gallant and flirtatious, never too busy to hear some medical confidence, organize an outing, or simply present a flower from the garden.1
Those who liked him said he was dogged in adversity. Actually he was a bully. When he had power, he was constantly eager not merely to defeat but to humiliate his rivals. Historian Waite, who made a wonderful biography from the well-preserved papers of Tupper’s fellow Nova Scotian John Thompson, notes in it the legend that “Tupper” arose from the French tu perds, “you lose.” For the weak or dependent, Tupper was hardly the trusted companion his more secure friends imagined. He was married for sixty-five years, and friends insisted the marriage was happy and close, but letters – vanished from Tupper’s papers but preserved in Thompson’s – suggest a Tupper who was aggressively sexual. Waite reports how Tupper, a Baptist and a minister’s son, once bullied Thompson into taking him to mass, simply to pursue a young Catholic woman he was attracted to. That and a hundred other incidents might have been simply flirtatious, but Waite also cites the Washington typist who alleged in a legal action that Tupper got her pregnant, talked her into an abortion, and vanished. Her complaint was unproven, and her court case, denounced as a blackmail, was either abandoned or privately settled. Still, such stray details give an unpleasant inkling of the kind of bullying endured, if half the rumours are true, by vulnerable citizens upon whom Tupper forced his attentions.2
Tupper’s public record was long and distinguished. After the great editor and statesman Joseph Howe brought Nova Scotia responsible government in 1847 by welding supporters of reform into a disciplined party with broad electoral support, Tupper helped bring the conservative party back into contention by transforming it from an aristocratic Anglican clique into a broad coalition of middle-class Protestants and Catholics. He personally came to public attention by unseating Howe himself in a head-to-head contest. Howe acknowledged Tupper as a worthy foe, both as a campaigner and a strategist – though he regretted that young Tupper, for all his talents, could never simply argue a principle; he had to attack the good name of his opponents, too. As premier of Nova Scotia, Tupper led the confederation negotiations, and against deep opposition he brought his province into confederation. Moving to the federal stage, he became an indefatigable cabinet minister, ambassador, and political fixer, and finally prime minister of Canada.
Two deep scars flaw the record of nearly fifty years in public life. The more visible of the two was inflicted in 1896, after Tupper returned from nearly a decade as Canadian High Commissioner to Britain to become party leader and prime minister. He had to face the voters at once, and was swept from office. Defeat left him the shortest-serving prime minister ever. With fewer days in office than Kim Campbell or John Turner, Tupper the prime minister ranks merely as one of the four hapless Conservatives – Waite’s Thompson was another – who briefly held the office after the death of Sir John A. All have been totally eclipsed by Macdonald’s halo and by the bright light of Wilfrid Laurier’s sunny ways, which flared out upon Tupper’s rout and outshone all rivals for fifteen years. Tupper, the last of the futile four and the only one to face election, seems now diminished rather than elevated by having held the office, an asterisk prime minister, a trivia question.
The other deep flaw in Tupper’s record is the nasty business of Nova Scotia’s entry into confederation in 1867. At the very end of his term of office, Premier Tupper got confederation through without an electoral mandate and over the protests of many Nova Scotians. The unwilling province responded with fury, driving his party from office provincially and electing anti-confederates to eighteen of Nova Scotia’s nineteen seats in the first Canadian House of Commons. Tupper’s bullying of his province remains a complaint in Nova Scotia, part of the black legend of Maritime grievance against the Canadian union. Neither 1896 nor 1867 lends lustre to Charles Tupper’s political reputation.
But something Tupper did in 1864 deserves to loom large. Eighteen sixty-four was, like 1992, a summer of constitutional accord at Charlottetown. But the first constitutional Charlottetown was as much a success as the second was an embarrassment and a failure. The 1864 conference at Charlottetown transformed the pious, impractical ideal of confederation into a political program to be taken seriously. Charles Tupper more than anyone put in place the crucial factor that made success at Charlottetown possible in 1864. So it is worth giving some attention to how Charlottetown came to be and how Charles Tupper came to Charlottetown.
“It was the enthusiasm of Gordon of New Brunswick that gave the movement its real start,” reads the opening sentence of The Road to Confederation, Donald Creighton’s 1964 book about the shaping of the nation. Creighton was the pre-eminent Canadian historian of the 1950s and 1960s. His Road to Confederation, written just after his magisterial biography of John A. Macdonald, is a marvellous book, with wonderful detailing, strong ideas, and an unrelenting narrative drive to catch and carry the reader along. It’s much the most readable account of the confederation process. A reader comes away thinking that Creighton knew a lot about his subjects, and wondering why historians don’t often write like that.
For all the authority and readability of his work, however, historians began to react against Creighton even before his long life ended in 1979. His late-in-life role as a national scold, inveighing against bilingualism, liberals, women, the American empire, and the modern world in general, certainly diminished his stature. His dismissive contempt for anyone who resisted or questioned John A. Macdonald’s view of Canada (or was it Creighton’s own) provoked resistance as confederation itself ran into trouble. But historians were also made suspicious by his wonderful prose. Creighton’s narratives are so rhetorical, so persuasive, so dismissive of even the possibility of any other interpretation of events, that any critically attuned reader must suspect that many noteworthy alternates are being buried and denied. “The prince of pattern makers,” an historian recently called him, with just a hint that the pattern was as much imposed as discovered.
The sceptics are right enough. Much of Creighton’s steamroller version of confederation urgently needs to be reconsidered. Still, giving the storyteller his due, we have to inquire: who was this “Gordon of New Brunswick” to be honoured with the master storyteller’s first line? What could he have done to have given confederation “its real start”?
Gordon of New Brunswick was Arthur Gordon, lieutenant-governor of the province. Obviously we have come a long way, if an office now so wrapped and bound in absolute irrelevance could be the springboard of confederation. Creighton opened with Gordon for one reason. Gordon had provoked the Charlottetown conference into being.
Creighton, however, was not out to make Arthur Gordon a hero. He wanted Gordon for comic relief, a foil for his real heroes. In Creighton’s sketch, Gordon was the Bertie Woosterish son of an earl, just thirty-five in 1864 and unshakeably certain that he was meant to rule New Brunswick as an Imperial potentate. He had taken the job on the assumption that New Brunswick was meant to be ruled by expatriate autocrats, like any other corner of the British Empire, and he found responsible government a rude shock. Gordon thought it beneath his dignity to do anything but dictate to colonial politicians, whom he characterized as the “ignorant lumberer,” the “petty attorney,” and the “keeper of a village grog shop.”3
Gordon proposed a conference at Charlottetown because he wanted to unite Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, not British North America at large. Given his high opinion of the importance his office should have, he naturally assumed that the governors of the three provinces would take the lead in securing the union, and that he would govern it. He could not entirely ignore the people’s elected representatives, but what he proposed was an executive conference, a meeting of the three governors and their premiers. When that cosy conclave had approved the union, the dutiful premiers would be sent to secure the consent of their legislatures, while the governors arranged with the Colonial Office to have the change made. Gordon set about organizing a meeting of six, the three governors and their three premiers.
Charles Tupper killed that. He was not even premier when Gordon’s proposal for an intercolonial conference reached Halifax in the fall of 1863. After eight years in politics, Tupper still deferred to his party’s titular leader, his father’s old Baptist colleague, James Johnston, who had brought him into politics. The recent elections had made Johnston premier, at least in name; Tupper did not succeed him until May 1864. But Tupper’s influence on party policy was already substantial. When Gordon’s proposal came to Nova Scotia, Tupper declared that the government of Nova Scotia would not attend the conference unless delegates from the opposition went with them.
In March 1864, the Nova Scotia legislature approved a resolution by Tupper for an all-party delegation to attend the conference on Maritime union. When the premiers of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island followed Tupper’s lead, Arthur Gordon found, to his fury, that the small executive conclave he had planned had become a much larger legislative conference, and politicians from all parties would participate. Tupper had hijacked his plan, cutting out the governors and handing the conference over to the politicians Gordon despised. Gordon promptly denounced him as a man of limited ability “and considerable obstinacy.”4
From the perspective of the 1990s, Tupper’s position was riveting, for it was almost inexplicable. A premier who insisted on taking members of the opposition to a first ministers’ conference confounded everything the late twentieth century knew of politics. Through all the constitutional discussions from the Confederation of Tomorrow conference of 1967, through the Victoria conference of 1971, the patriation round of 1981-2, the Meech Lake talks of 1987-90, and the Charlottetown accord of 1992, participation was exclusively an executive prerogative. In the late twentieth century, six successive prime ministers and scores of provincial premiers preferred Arthur Gordon’s executive model to Charles Tupper’s representative one. Premiers and political analysts alike declared that to let anyone else participate in constitution-drafting would be an insult to government as it was practised in the 1990s.
Rivers of historical ink have flowed over the forces that persuaded George Brown, John A. Macdonald, and George-Étienne Cartier to sink their deep animosities and form the Canadian coalition of June 1864. By comparison, the constitutional armistice into which the politicians of the Maritime colonies entered voluntarily, shortly before their Canadian counterparts, has interested hardly anyone. Donald Creighton and his fellow historians made little of the reasons why the politicians transformed Gordon’s autocratic plan into an all-party parliamentary conference. Writing of triumphal nation-building, they had little incentive to dwell on such arcana as the proper quorum for constitutional meetings. Yet, in its way, the Maritimers’ choice to co-operate on the constitution was even more extraordinary than the Canadian coalition, since no political deadlock forced co-existence upon them.
Tupper’s sanitized memoirs are useless on this point, and the testimony of other contemporaries is not much more enlightening. D’Arcy McGee mentioned the inter-party consensus on confederation as “an extraordinary armistice in political warfare,” but did not dwell on its causes. John Hamilton Gray, who was one of New Brunswick’s delegates at Charlottetown and Quebec, said blandly that it was done to remove “the question of the union … beyond the pale of party conflict,” but he did not inquire why there should have been such a dispensation from the fierce partisanship that had long been the norm.5
The man who initiated this armistice was “Tu perds.” Charles Tupper was never magnanimous towards his rivals or gentle with those in weaker positions. His ruthlessness in the use of patronage would shock even John A. Macdonald, and he never lightly threw away the advantages of office. And Tupper’s partisanship typified mid-Victorian politics in Canada. The conservative and reform tendencies were generations old by the 1860s. Both parties understood the value of party loyalty and the uses of power and patronage. Each side had its talismans and its martyrs, and passionate hatreds had long been nursed on both sides. Tupper himself had done much to build Nova Scotia’s conservatives into a disciplined party, and he had not done it by kindness to his rivals. This sudden outbreak of bipartisan courtesy was something rare and strange.
The power of Gordon and the other governors may provide some explanation for it. After the great change of 1847, governors of British North American colonies had to accept the advice (at least on local matters) that they received from ministers chosen by elected legislatures. But in the 1860s, governors were still powerful men, not to be disdained by any politician. If they were not earls’ sons, the governors were often generals or ex-cabinet ministers. In the era when being a “gentleman” signified much more than merely polite behaviour, they were all British gentlemen, imbued with an easy, instinctive sense of natural superiority over the colonials they ruled. Even with their powers curtailed by responsible government, governors remained intimidating.
In Gordon’s small conclave of governors and premiers, the three governors, wrapped in the mantle of social precedence as well as the delegated authority of the British Crown and cabinet, would have been in the best possible position to compel consent from three over-awed colonial premiers. Invited into Gordon’s web, then, Tupper may have recruited his fellow legislators, even those from the opposition benches, as allies against the dangerous coercive power of the governors.
But that cannot be the whole explanation. Gordon had been right to complain of Tupper’s special obstinacy, but colonial politicians had to be able to stand up to even the most august governors if they hoped to prosper. Indeed, for the country lawyers, small-town journalists, and local merchants who won office in the Canada of the 1860s, the governors’ obligation to take advice must have been one of the pleasures of responsible government. Politicians now made policy, and some dignified baron or imperious general, fresh from the British court or cabinet room, had to dignify it with his approval and signature, no matter what his personal opinion of it or of the people who gave it to him as their “advice.” From Baldwin’s and LaFontaine’s government in the 1840s to Mackenzie King’s in the 1940s, a century of Canadian politicians loved to wrap themselves and their policies in all the pomp and prestige an aristocratic governor could provide, combining fawning deference to the viceregal office with a cold determination to ensure that it served their own will and purpose. Arthur Gordon found himself helpless – “and that helplessness felt to be a triumph over the past by the people,” as he wailed to the colonial secretary in London. Tupper could not afford to be trapped by Gordon on the union issue, but he had never been trapped before, and he had not previously needed the opposition members to save him.6
If fear of being bullied by powerful governors provided only slight reason for premiers to welcome their political rivals into constitutional meetings, the state of parliamentary government in the 1860s gave a stronger one.
Parliamentary government, at least the full-fledged version that had been ushered in with responsible government after 1847, was still new and shiny in the British North American colonies in the 1860s. British North Americans of the day were proud, not merely of their victory over autocratic rule, but of inheriting the thousand-year mythology of Parliament. They claimed to be equal and rightful heirs, not merely colonial beneficiaries, of that tradition. Reformers raised in the struggle for responsible government were particularly given to setting out the virtues of parliamentary government, but conservatives were not far behind. Orators on the hustings effortlessly celebrated their share in “the rights of Englishmen,” guaranteed by the English Parliament’s victory over autocratic royal power in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. If they were journalists, they paraphrased Edmund Burke on the glories of representative government. If they were lawyers, they quoted the justifications of parliamentary rule they had imbibed from the Blackstone they read as law students.
Politically active Canadians in the 1860s unashamedly and confidently declared parliamentary government the best of all possible political systems. They were plagued by no sneaking doubt that some other system was better because it was “more democratic.” They certainly feared the tyranny unfettered majorities could wield, but they did not concede that the system they preferred made them less than free citizens. When they condemned democracy, they usually meant mob rule, and when they extolled constitutional liberty, they meant something close to what we call parliamentary democracy.
Being proud of parliamentary democracy, the politicians of the 1860s worked all the harder to be masters of it. They learned the subtleties, both of its high ideals and of its low practices. They tinkered with the valves and levers of parliamentary government like the engineers who were tinkering with the powerful, temperamental steam engines then transforming society. In the process, mid-nineteenth-century politicians achieved a mastery of parliamentary practice hardly possible in another age with little respect for merely parliamentary skills.
Charles Tupper, who would practise parliamentary politics for more than fifty years, was already an adept of the art even before he assumed the premiership of Nova Scotia in 1864. And it seems to have been his practical understanding of parliamentary democracy that led him to seek inter-party participation in constitutional discussion, even without the spur of necessity that influenced the Canadians.
Tupper saw, surely, that constitutional politics were almost certain to be divisive, unpredictable, and dangerous. Constitutional proposals, particularly those focused on new colonial unions, provided a leader with few obvious favours to dispense and no clear ideological cry to hold a party together. To go alone to a constitutional conference – particularly one where he was likely to be bullied by the governors – probably meant getting into some commitment. Any commitment Tupper made might not be welcomed by his own party, let alone by the legislature, or the voters. To commit himself to any particular change might simply expose a weakness which political rivals would exploit, first to woo away doubtful backbenchers, then to attack the weakened government in elections. As Tupper knew better than Gordon, support for Maritime union was barely an inch deep in the spring of 1864. It would be better, Tupper understood, to share the credit than risk taking the blame.
Tupper’s instinctive wish to bring along the opposition – and to transform the meeting at Charlottetown from an executive conclave into a parliamentary conference – was not some magnanimous gesture from a gentler age. It recognized that power lay ultimately in the legislature, not in the cabinet room. It reflected a skilled tactician’s calculation, based on long experience of parliamentary risks and benefits. As the perceptive British historian Ged Martin put it, the fathers of confederation took each other “not by the hand but rather by the throat.”* 7
In the late twentieth century, politicians had much less sense of Parliament as a potential source of risk and danger – because such dangers had indeed largely vanished. With disciplined, obsequious parliamentary caucuses, modern party leaders had become virtual presidents when they commanded a majority. Premiers, so skilled at striking the postures of leadership that became the essence of television politics, were inexperienced in the work that was meat and drink to mid-nineteenth-century politicians – namely building and holding together parliamentary consensuses. Lacking any experience of situations where they might need to seek parliamentary support or to defuse parliamentary resistance, modern premiers and prime ministers saw no advantage in letting members of the opposition participate in constitutional deal-making.
Nevertheless, even in the debased parliamentary system of the 1990s, it is intriguing to consider the long list of premiers who went home from Meech Lake or Charlottetown to proclaim themselves new fathers of confederation – only to be chopped down brutally by the voters after opposition leaders accused them of having gotten too little and given too much at the constitutional table. The opposition leaders, excluded from the negotiations, were free to claim they could have done better. The modern presidential-style premiers, never having had reason to grasp the benefits of sharing the credit as Tupper did, repeatedly reaped the disastrous consequences Tupper skilfully avoided. Neither more noble nor more devious than his modern counterparts, Tupper simply enjoyed the benefits of superior experience in adapting parliamentary process to his political needs – a by-product of living in a time that put its trust in parliamentary processes.
The Nova Scotia legislature had voted to send five delegates to Charlottetown “for the purpose of arranging a preliminary plan for the union of the three provinces under one government and legislature.” Tupper, now premier in his own right, was the dominant figure in the delegation, and the one earliest inclined to favour a union. Tupper had a Victorian faith in railways and economic growth, and a rather less Victorian eagerness to draw new groups into his coalitions. Tupper favoured throwing railroads across the colonies, doing away with their separate postages, coinages, and customs tariffs, and finding new political supporters among their disparate populations. Any union that could do these would have Tupper’s instinctive support.
To complete the government side of the Charlottetown delegation, Tupper took with him two lawyers: his attorney-general, William Henry, and Robert Dickey from Nova Scotia’s appointive upper house. From the opposition he did not want merely token representatives. He first tried to recruit his great rival, Joseph Howe. Howe, like most colonial politicians, had often mused about a union of the colonies. Just two weeks before the Charlottetown meeting, he rhetorically asked a boozy, sociable dinner organized to welcome Canadian visitors to Halifax: “Why should union not be brought about? Was it because we wish to live and die in our insignificance?” Howe was formally out of elective politics in 1864, but his prestige was enormous and his campaigning skills legendary. Had Tupper recruited Howe to Charlottetown and the union cause, he would have had few concerns about political risks at home. But a year earlier, Howe, eager to prove that colonials could help to run the Empire in which he considered them equals, not subjects, had accepted an Imperial commission to report on the Atlantic fishery. He could not go to Charlottetown.8
Replacing Howe in the delegation to Charlottetown were Adams Archibald, who had succeeded Howe as leader of the liberal opposition, and Jonathan McCully, who faced Robert Dickey in Nova Scotia’s upper house. When the matchless Howe had retired from journalism, McCully had become the most successful political journalist in the province. Both he and Archibald had dismissed colonial union as an impractical fancy. Weeks before Charlottetown, McCully had hooted at confederation as “a new, untried, and more than doubtful expediency adapted to the exigencies of Canadian necessities.” 9
Tupper had not sought yes-men; his four fellow delegates were strong figures in Nova Scotia’s two houses. But the delegation consisted of four lawyers and a doctor. There were no financiers from the Halifax banking houses who might crack open the details of a complicated financial proposal, no one from the seafaring towns of western Nova Scotia, no Scots Catholics, no one from Cape Breton. Tupper had reached far by inviting leading opposition figures, but each constituency left out of the delegation would view its work with deep suspicion.
New Brunswick’s politicians were even more cautious than Nova Scotia’s about the Maritime union conference. Nova Scotia was the largest, richest, oldest of the three provinces, with 350,000 people to New Brunswick’s 270,000. For all its doubts, it could expect to dominate any union of the three provinces, and its resolution appointing delegates was the one most optimistic about the outcome. New Brunswick’s legislature appointed delegates, not to “arrange,” but only to “consider,” this idea about Maritime union. In New Brunswick, the premier was reformer Leonard Tilley, a businessman who, at forty-six, was a fifteen-year veteran of colonial politics. Union, particularly a union which might reduce New Brunswick to subservience to Halifax, had produced no wave of enthusiasm in New Brunswick, but it could appeal to Tilley’s hard-headed appreciation of such progressive virtues as tariff reductions, improved communications, expanded trading units, and governmental efficiency.
Tilley took with him his attorney-general, John Mercer Johnson, and the reform leader in the upper house, William Steeves, a lumberer and shipbuilder. From the opposition came Edward Chandler, a lawyer and a scion of the old loyalist gentry of the province. An old-fashioned politician from before the days of responsible government, Chandler had a touch of tory noblesse oblige about him; he was considered sympathetic to the Acadian and Catholic interests of north-shore New Brunswick. The other conservative delegate was lawyer John Hamilton Gray, who at different times had been both an ally and a rival of Tilley’s, and who was himself a former premier. Formidable as a courtroom lawyer, Gray was considered a weathercock politician, likely to follow the prevailing trends.
Notably absent from New Brunswick’s delegation were spokesmen for two large New Brunswick minorities, the Irish Catholics and the Acadian French. Both groups had representatives in the legislature, but none was appointed. Tilley, an evangelical Protestant, had never had much Catholic support. Absent by their own choice were two powerful figures who wanted no part of Maritime union: Albert Smith, a fiery reform lawyer, and Timothy Anglin, a Saint John journalist who would have spoken for New Brunswick’s Irish Catholics. Smith and Anglin would become confederation’s implacable foes in New Brunswick. They would use it to drive Tilley, nominally a fellow reformer, from office.
In Prince Edward Island, neither party saw much advantage in having Prince Edward Island joined to the larger colonies across Northumberland Strait. Prince Edward Island was not all bucolic charm and hayseed amusements. Even the farmers among the Island’s 80,000 people were hardly lost in rural contentment. Most were tenants on lands owned by great absentee landlords, and in 1864 a new mass movement, the Tenant League, was launching a campaign of non-payment of rents that would sweep the Island during the summer of Charlottetown. Island people were also timber-cutters, shipbuilders, and cargo-traders, and the Island’s merchant fleet linked Charlottetown’s harbour to all the seaports of the world. As the collector of customs reported with calm pride, sea trades had become “the means of introducing into our colony a large amount of gold or its equivalent in exchange.” Why, many asked, should the Island yield its independence and its customs revenues to become a small unit in a large union?10
“If the provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were to be annexed to Prince Edward Island, great benefits might result to our people,” said Colonel John Hamilton Gray, the retired Imperial soldier who was premier, “but if this colony were to be annexed to these provinces, the opposite might be the effect.”* Gray’s government agreed to participate in the conference, it was said, only because the other colonies proposed to meet at Charlottetown, making it seem churlish for the Islanders not to take part. Prince Edward Island appointed delegates only to “discuss the expediency” of a union, and it took a party vote by the government side to see even that halfhearted measure adopted. Premier Gray was joined in the delegation by Attorney-General Edward Palmer, an ultra-tory who even then was working to undermine Gray’s leadership of the party, and by William Henry Pope, who was almost the only strong enthusiast for union in the government.11
The opposition had voted against appointing delegates, but the bipartisan principle prevailed here as well, and reformers filled two of the five places in the Island’s delegation. Opposition leader George Coles, a successful brewer and the Island’s former premier, had denounced the whole notion of Maritime union as “bogus,” but he accepted a place in the delegation along with Andrew Macdonald, reform leader in the elected upper house, who was a shipbuilder and merchant from an established Island family and the only Catholic among the Maritime delegates.
The fifteen Maritime delegates who gathered at Charlottetown on the last day of August 1864 were joined the next day by eight Canadians, all ministers in the coalition cabinet. Macdonald, Cartier, and Brown, the leaders of the three main parties in the governing coalition, had each brought one additional member from their own parties. Macdonald and Cartier were each supported by former law students turned political protégés. Macdonald’s colleague, Alexander Campbell, would remain mostly a backroom fixer until Macdonald made him lieutenant-governor of Ontario. The public career of Cartier’s supporter, Hector Langevin, still a relative novice in 1864, would be much longer and more prominent. George Brown brought William McDougall, a Toronto lawyer and journalist with a Clear Grit background and an independent streak that irritated all the party leaders he served. Two other Canadian delegates spoke for the powerful, uneasy, English minorities in Quebec. Businessman and railway promoter Alexander Tilloch Galt was an early advocate of confederation and an expert on its finances. Thomas D’Arcy McGee was an Irish Catholic journalist who dreamed that ethnic and religious tribalism would soon be submerged in a new Canadian nation.
Striking by their absence from the Canadian delegation were men such as Antoine-Aimé Dorion, Brown’s ill-fated ally of 1858 and former premier of the united Canadas in his own right. His rouge party remained powerful in Quebec, but the Canadian delegation was a governmental one, and the rouges were not partners in the coalition. Cartier, unlike Tupper and the other Maritime leaders, had seen no reason to bring his strongest political rivals into the constitutional discussions. The rouges were the only substantial political party in any of the colonies not to be included in the confederation bargaining. The confederation movement would suffer for having excluded them.
The twenty-three delegates to the Charlottetown conference illustrated the weaknesses and the strengths of political representation in that time. There were no women and only a handful of Catholics from a population that was half female and almost half Catholic.* The two French Quebeckers could hope to wield a veto through their power in the Canadian cabinet, but there were no Acadians or Irish from New Brunswick, no Scots from Nova Scotia. There were no workers or farmers in a society where almost everyone lived by manual labour and most people lived in the countryside. The confederation-makers never imagined seeking participation from the native nations. In the mid-nineteenth century, British North Americans looked ahead to the rapid extinction or assimilation of native society. Native peoples were seen as foreigners, and they would be dealt with through treaties rather than by inclusion in colonial politics. The nineteenth-century treaties would at least underline the separate and independent status of the native nations, but they would also reflect the vast disparity in power between the contracting parties.
On the other hand, the delegates were hardly so unrepresentative as has routinely been presumed. Coming from two parties in each of the Maritime provinces and three in the Canadas, the delegates spoke for almost the whole of their legislatures. Legislatures in the 1860s were elected by all adult males in some provinces and most of them in the rest, so the delegates had a legitimate claim to represent a large part of the political class of their society. Strongly middle-class and professional, they typified political representation then as today. A few were holdovers from the old days of noblesse oblige, but as many had made political careers as advocates for the common farmer against élite interests.
Increasingly, colonial politicians were brokers, well-placed intermediaries rather than authority figures in their own right. It was no longer necessary to have inherited wealth and position to succeed in politics, but it did help to have the skills that gentlemen and lawyers and successful businessmen tended to possess. Members of Parliament were paid (in Britain they would not be until 1911), but it helped to be well-to-do, or at least to be able to carry off the lifestyle of the independently wealthy. In all these ways, mid-nineteenth-century politicians were not much different from late-twentieth-century ones.
As the delegates gathered at Charlottetown in 1864, constitutional discussions of the sort they were about to launch were something new in British North American politics. All previous British North American constitutions, down to the most recent – the union imposed upon Upper and Lower Canada in 1841 – had been made in London to serve Imperial objectives. Responsible government, the sea-change of 1847, had changed that, too. In 1862, in response to union talk, Britain’s colonial secretary declared that the British government “do not think it their duty to initiate any movement towards such union, but they have no wish to impede any well-considered scheme which may have the concurrence of the people of the provinces through their legislatures, assuming of course that it does not interfere with Imperial interests.” The Colonial Office suggested “consultation on the subject among the leading members of the governments concerned” without much consideration of the details, beyond the need for ratification in the colonial legislatures. The bipartisan form of the mid-nineteenth-century constitutional talks was a Canadian innovation.12
The Charlottetown conference gave a uniquely carnivalesque air to the sober world of Canadian political history. George Brown, sailing to Charlottetown with the Canadian delegation, rose at four for a saltwater shower and saw dawn revealing the rich green shores of Prince Edward Island, “as pretty a country as you could ever put your eye upon.” Everyone going to Charlottetown seems to have been similarly inspired. The charms of the Island and the glorious high summer weather that prevailed throughout the conference soon enveloped all the potentially quarrelsome participants in a festive, party mood.13
No one has evoked this mood better than Peter Waite. Waite’s 1962 book The Life and Times of Confederation was the first of the great 1960s histories of confederation to appear; its opening sentence notes that no book had been published on the subject since 1924. When he researched The Life and Times, Waite was determined that its themes would grow out of the “raucous voices” of the “vast and multifarious native sources” in the newspapers of the time. Later, he would describe himself as “driven to the newspapers, to the Parliamentary Library, to the St. John’s library, to the hot little sheds on Pinnacle Street, Belleville, Ont., not by the exigencies of a Ph.D. but by adrenalin.” He was caught, he said, “as the newspapermen of the time were, by the sheer magnitude of confederation, of colonials meeting and greeting for the first time, a bit star-struck some of them, the way the writer was, who’d caught it too.” 14
Waite’s quarryings from those newspapers yielded the details of the Charlottetown conference that historians have relied on ever since. Charlottetown in 1864 was a town of just seven thousand people, with red dirt streets running in parallel lines down to the spacious, sheltered harbour. Its landmark was Province House, the Georgian legislative building built with Island stone and Island craftsmanship in 1847, and still central in the modern city of Charlottetown.
In late August 1864, Waite tells us, the great excitement in the town was caused not by the hastily scheduled political conference, but by Slaymaker’s and Nichol’s Olympic Circus, the first circus seen on the Island in twenty years. Charlottetown’s twenty small hotels were crowded with excursion visitors drawn by this sensation. As one of the newspapers noted, even Island politicians could not be deprived of their chance to see the elephants, and in his book Waite has fun with the casual reception given to the arriving delegations. When the spit-and-polish steamship Queen Victoria, carrying the Canadian delegation, the last to arrive, anchored in the harbour on September 1, the Island’s provincial secretary William Pope had to have himself rowed out to her in an oyster boat “with a barrel of flour in the bow and two jars of molasses in the stern.” Once Pope had welcomed the visitors, the Queen Victoria’s boats were lowered, “man-of-war” fashion. In Brown’s amused phrase, “we landed like Mr Christopher Columbus, who had the precedence of us in taking possession of portions of the American continent.”15
That same day, the conference opened in Province House. For all its giddy improvisation and champagne-fuelled sociability, the delegates to the Charlottetown conference also spent quite a few hours grinding out constitutional details around a conference table – more hours, in fact, than late-twentieth-century first ministers usually devoted to constitutional accords. Today, half-legislature and halfmuseum, Province House still preserves that serious side. Visitors to “the Confederation Room,” which in 1864 was the chamber where the Island’s upper house met, still lean over the barrier to see the long table and leather chairs where the business of the conference was conducted.
The Charlottetown conference began with its original mandate of Maritime union, and no Canadians. The Maritimers, veterans of parliamentary business, set about electing Colonel Gray, their host, as chairman, and the visiting premiers, Tupper and Tilley, as joint secretaries, and hearing the enabling resolutions from their three legislatures. Despite some dissent, they soon decided they would have no observers and no transcripts. “Buncombe speeches will be out of place, and politicians will for once deal with naked facts,” wrote a surprisingly sympathetic journalist. While no transcript was made, the shape of the discussions was soon widely known and widely reported.16
Having organized the formalities, the Maritimers decided almost at once to bring in the Canadians and hear their proposal. Charlottetown thereupon became two conferences proceeding in tandem – the Maritimers’ sessions on Maritime union, interspersed with much longer meetings to discuss confederation with the Canadian guests. The Charlottetown conference would continue all week, and the delegates would hold further sessions in Halifax and Saint John before adjourning the Charlottetown conference indefinitely (in fact, permanently) in Montreal in October. The vital sessions, however, were those with the Canadians in the upstairs room at Charlottetown.
With the entry of the Canadians, Maritime union was effectively marginalized. Begun as a whim of Arthur Gordon, it was not a vital interest of any of the three governments. None of them had done the preparatory planning the governors might have ordered had they retained control. Gordon, who disapproved of both the confederation idea and the representative form the conference had taken, spent only a couple of days at Charlottetown before returning to Fredericton to draft a scathing report for his masters in London. The elected politicians of the Maritimes, however, were eager to learn more of the larger union before making any decision on the smaller one. So the Canadians, straight from the boat and many of them quite unknown to their Maritime colleagues, were ushered in for what Brown called “the shake elbow and the how-d’ye-do and the fine weather.” Charlottetown had been permanently redirected.
For the next three business days, Friday, Saturday, and Monday, September 2, 3, and 5, the Canadians led the conference through a long presentation on the ways and means of a federal union of British North America. They had done their homework. George Brown, Alexander Galt, and others in the Canadian delegation had been thinking hard about such a union for half a decade, and the parliamentary committee led by Brown had given the concept a rigorous examination in May and June 1864. After the Brown–Cartier–Macdonald coalition was formed in June, federal union had dominated the Canadian cabinet’s agenda, and the last-minute opportunity to join the Maritimers at Charlottetown had provoked furious preparation of position papers and background documents. The Canadians’ scripts were ready, and they knew their lines.
John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier introduced the confederation proposal. Macdonald spoke more than Cartier, who to the end of his life was never entirely comfortable speaking formally in English. “Federalism” was a large part of Macdonald’s presentation. A federal union, one that divided power between central and provincial governments, was the basis on which the Canadian coalition had formed, and any proposal that did not guarantee the survival of local legislatures would be hard to sell in the Maritime provinces. But federalism provoked doubts, too. None of the colonials had ever lived under a federal regime. The United Kingdom, to which they all looked, was a unitary state, not a federal union, and the collapse of the United States into secession and civil war was no recommendation for the federal principle. Macdonald, both an instinctive centralizer and an adroit politician, must have spent much of the day threading his way between the centralized authority he would have preferred and the local autonomy he had to accept, eagerly seizing any hint of what leeway the delegates would tolerate.
The next day was devoted to Alexander Galt’s exposition on the finances of a federal union. Galt also inclined to a strong central government, and his presentation may have begun to bring home to the Maritimers just how much power the Canadians expected the national government to wield in confederation. Big, energetic, dogmatic George Brown took all of the third day to outline the Canadians’ proposals on constitutional mechanics: the divisions of powers, the relations of the provinces to the central government, the harmonization of laws, the judiciary. Back in 1859, at the great reform convention in Toronto’s St. Lawrence Hall, Brown had sold federal union to the restive, separatist-minded delegates by describing its central government merely as “some joint authority” between powerful provinces. Memories of that stand, and of Brown’s long fight to free Canada West from the union, may have reassured local patriots that their provincial prerogatives would endure. But by 1864 Brown’s views on federalism were changing. He too foresaw a central government with broad powers, and he would soon be describing the provinces as “mere municipal institutions.”17
After three days of detailed proposals, the next day, not surprisingly, was for questions, answers, and discussion. Hector Langevin of the bleus, D’Arcy McGee, and the old Clear Grit reformer William McDougall gave speeches, perhaps to suggest all-party support for the leaders’ views within the Canadian delegation. But the Maritimers also probed and tested the broad concept. Setting out their concerns and interests, they gave the Canadians a sense of where to push hard, where to pull back.
Only on the sixth day, Wednesday, September 7, did the Maritimers hold a substantial session on Maritime union, the formal business their legislatures had authorized them to discuss. The return to formal session required a resolution to drive the business, and Tupper moved Charlottetown’s first substantial motion: “Whereas in the opinion of this conference a Union of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island under one government and legislature would elevate the status, enhance the credit, enlarge the influence, improve the social, commercial, and political condition, increase the development, and promote the interests generally of all these provinces, RESOLVED that the time has arrived when such Union should be effected.”18
For all the confidence of the preamble, this was a resolution of principle only. Tupper, who would have been happy to see its passage as a first step in the rebuilding of greater Nova Scotia, spoke forcefully of the benefits of union. But he had no details comparable to those the Canadians had been providing about the federal union, no suggestions for where the capital of a united Maritime province would be, nothing to say how distinct (and politically explosive) schools systems would be integrated, nothing about how the delicate ethnic, religious, and class coalitions of each province would be reordered in a united province.
Tupper’s notes confirm that debate on his motion quickly exposed deep divisions amongst the delegations. The tactless suggestion of New Brunswick attorney-general Johnson that it would be good for Prince Edward Island to become “a partner in the land of New Brunswick” invited retaliation. Colonel Gray soon replied that Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were already as good as united, but the disadvantages to the Island would be great. Edward Palmer reminded the room that the Islanders were there only to listen. Their legislature, he said coldly, had given them no authority to endorse a union – or even to express an opinion. Chandler, the loyalist aristocrat from New Brunswick, perhaps offended by Colonel Gray’s dismissal of his province’s individuality and aware that Halifax was the most likely capital of a united Maritimes, noted that New Brunswick was going to have difficulty with the seat-of-government problem.
The more these issues loomed, the more eagerly the Maritimers brought confederation back into the Maritime-union debate. The Canadians were eager to see the Maritimes become one province, suggested Tilley darkly, because Canada might have to offer better terms to the three provinces separately than to one united province. William Pope of Prince Edward Island took the same view. George Coles said eagerly that a federal government would have the authority – and the money – to settle the Island’s vexed problem of absentee estates, a tempting carrot for the Islanders. (Indeed, withdrawal of this carrot would make Coles a vigorous anti-confederate who would help keep Prince Edward Island out of confederation in 1867.)
Finally, Leonard Tilley voiced a gathering consensus about Maritime union and confederation. Confederation seemed possible, he said, but Maritime union would not help confederation and, given its difficulties, would probably delay it. “If we get the confederation now,” Tilley said breezily, “we could easily unite the Maritime provinces … afterwards.” If we want to, some of his audience perhaps added silently.
With that settled, Maritime union was disposed of as a serious alternative. The Maritimers adjourned their discussion of Tupper’s motion and invited the Canadians back in. Brown summed up in a phrase. “The conference gave the Canadian delegates their answer – that they were unanimous in regarding federation of all the provinces to be highly desirable, if the terms of union could be made satisfactory – and that they were prepared to waive their own more limited question until the details of our scheme could be more fully considered and matured.”19
The delegates took the next day off. Though there would be further sessions, that agreement on Wednesday, September 7, marked the effective end of the Charlottetown conference. Simultaneously, it had launched the Quebec conference. Maritime union had been shelved; substantive discussions of the terms of a federal union were now required. The Canadians had already planned to invite the Maritimers to Quebec if the Charlottetown sessions succeeded, and within a few weeks new delegations were being appointed to gather there on October 10.
Charlottetown had done more than dispose of Maritime union, however. The conference had endorsed the principle of a federal union of the British North American provinces – a union in which the central government would be supreme, but in which local legislatures would retain significant powers. This was the principle of the British North America Act in a nutshell. This was Canada in a nutshell, in fact.
Not all, or even half, of that agreement had been achieved at the conference table in what is now the Confederation Room at Province House. Around the business sessions developed an extraordinary social whirl. The politicians of the united Canadas and those of the Maritime provinces hardly knew each other, and their occasional previous dealings had most often led to acrimonious failure. On the delicate and momentous matters that had come to dominate the Charlottetown conference, they needed to sound out each other’s sense of what was essential and what was unacceptable, what each might offer and what each would demand. For the business to succeed, they needed to know something about each other, and that was where Charlottetown had its great and memorable success.
Charlottetown hospitality was constant and exhausting. The first night, the Island’s lieutenant-governor held a lavish dinner at his waterfront residence. The next day, after the conference adjourned at three, William Pope invited delegates to his home for an elaborate “luncheon” of Island delicacies: oysters, lobsters, and champagne. “This killed the day,” reported George Brown, “and we spent the beautiful moonlight evening in walking, driving, or boating, as the mood was on us.”20
The social calendar remained crowded for the rest of the week, even as the business sessions ground through their agenda. After Galt’s financial presentation, a late lunch aboard the Queen Victoria was followed by a grand dinner at Colonel Gray’s country estate, “Inkerman.” On the Monday, George Coles, the Island opposition leader, gave his luncheon. Next day, it was the turn of Edward Palmer to offer the late luncheon. That night Lieutenant-Governor George Dundas and his wife hosted a grand ball at Government House – “a very nice affair, but a great bore for old fellows like me,” wrote Brown to his wife, Anne, who was visiting Scotland. On the following days, there would be another reception aboard the Queen Victoria, excursions to the country and the north-shore beaches, and yet another ball at Province House.
For Peter Waite, “the beginning of confederation” could be precisely dated. It happened when the Canadians began pouring from their plentiful stores of champagne aboard the Queen Victoria on Saturday, September 3, after the second day of their presentation. They were celebrating, he wrote, “the heady discovery of a national destiny.” Waite had Brown’s evidence to back up his claim. “Cartier and I made eloquent speeches,” said Brown about that shipboard party, “and whether as the result of our eloquence or of the goodness of our champagne, the ice became completely broken, the tongues of the delegates wagged merrily, and the banns of matrimony between all the provinces of BNA having been formally proclaimed … the union was formally proclaimed and completed.” Champagne flowed like water, commented Waite, “and union talk with it. The occasion took hold of everyone. Champagne and union.… Here was a metamorphosis indeed: this transformation of the dross of reality into the gold of personal conviction.”21
Champagne and union inspired a lot of cynical comment, to the effect that confederation was made when a conspiracy of politicians got drunk together at the public expense. But confederation at Charlottetown had two requirements. Men who had good reason to consider themselves legitimate representatives of the electorates of five future provinces had to be persuaded that confederation was both worthy and feasible. In the business sessions, the politicians confronted serious issues and fundamental principles. In the sunshine and the dinners and the country excursions, they established the trust that helped the business sessions go forward. Charlottetown’s social sessions and business sessions worked in tandem.
At the closing ball, the most lavish yet, the delegates tried blending business and sociability. George Brown heard that at 2:00 a.m, after the dancing and the dinner, “the Goths commenced speech-making and actually kept it up for two hours and three-quarters, the poor girls being condemned to listen to it all.” Brown himself had gone to bed early and avoided such horrors. The next morning, as the delegations left for Halifax, one newspaper correspondent noted that most of the statesmen were as befogged as the harbour.22
Charles Tupper was surely there to the end, and his attention to the poor girls, though unrecorded, may well have been more assiduous than Brown’s. Charlottetown had been a triumph for Tupper. As the leader of the largest Maritime province and the most bullish enthusiast among them, both for Maritime union and for confederation, he was crucial in forging Atlantic Canada’s welcome to the Canadian proposal. John A. Macdonald told Joseph Pope, his official biographer, that he had concluded on the first day of Charlottetown that Tupper was exactly the man needed for the accomplishment of confederation. While this smacks of Macdonaldian bonhomie, it strikes the right note about Tupper’s influence at Charlottetown, and the two men did forge a political alliance that lasted almost thirty more years. In time, their sons would become law partners and cabinet colleagues. Tupper was enamoured of big opportunities and had the personality to dominate most gatherings. Charlottetown must have been glory to him.
After Charlottetown, Tupper never doubted the feasibility or the worth of confederation. He took ruthless measures to get it through, and in the following decades confederation carried him to Ottawa, to Washington, to London, to the prime minister’s office, and to a baronetcy. It opened the way for his sons and daughters to move from Nova Scotia to Ottawa, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and London, to political honours, legal prominence, and social eminence. Confederation opened to the Tuppers all the larger horizons that the delegates toasted as the champagne flowed and the ice broke aboard the Queen Victoria in Charlottetown harbour.
Yet Tupper had done his vital work before the conference started, when he made Charlottetown an all-party conference. Whether it was in the business sessions, or in the champagne-fuelled sociability aboard ship, or in the great houses, the politicians had let down their guard precisely because their rivals were beside them. At Charlottetown, Tupper abandoned once and for all his previous concerns that confederation might be an impractical dream. But for him and all the politicians in the room, practicality meant political practicality as much as anything. As Tupper began to make up his mind to support confederation, the leader of the Nova Scotia opposition, Adams Archibald, and Halifax’s most powerful newspaperman, Jonathan McCully, were in the room making the same decision. Leaders of government and opposition from the other provinces were making the same simultaneous commitment. Even Island rivals like Edward Palmer and George Coles, who days earlier had been competing over which would be most determinedly hostile to any threat to Island independence, were joining the gathering consensus that the thing was possible.
The explosion of enthusiasm and ambition at Charlottetown was possible because of the diversity of participation – Tupper’s gift to the process. Multi-party participation was the sine qua non that enabled the politicians to consider endorsing the new ideas without worrying about being blindsided back home. Tupper, the hard-edged, high-stakes political battler, would never have made the large commitments he made at Charlottetown if he had anticipated that what seemed so enticing in the sunshine of Charlottetown would be turned into a partisan fight at home. Given the pre-Charlottetown views of McCully and Archibald, they surely would have opposed it, had they not been there.
The men of Charlottetown could be converted by union and champagne because they saw their rivals being converted at the same time. That Joseph Howe, Timothy Anglin, Antoine-Aimé Dorion, and other political leaders who did not attend soon became confederation’s fiercest critics confirms how essential broad participation was – and how confederation might actually have been achieved more easily had participation in the conferences been even broader.
The bipartisanship of Charlottetown started a brief constitutional tradition. The Charlottetown delegations would be joined at Quebec in October 1864 by a two-party delegation from Newfoundland. Bipartisanship prevailed immediately after confederation as well. Even during the Red River uprising of 1869-70, the delegation which negotiated Manitoba’s entry into confederation represented a broad cross-section of anglophone and francophone Métis and recent settlers. When British Columbia negotiated its entry to confederation in 1871, its autocratic lieutenant-governor would have nothing to do with those who advocated responsible government such as Amor de Cosmos and John Robson. Parliamentary government came to British Columbia only with confederation (and both de Cosmos and Robson became premiers). Nevertheless, the B.C. delegation that settled terms with Ottawa did include representatives of both Vancouver Island and the mainland, as well as both advocates and sceptics about confederation.
Prince Edward Island broke the bipartisan tradition. When it decided to enter confederation in 1873, it did so amidst a partisan squabble over which side could get most and give up least in the deal-making. A Conservative government, with better ties to John A. Macdonald in Ottawa, displaced a Liberal one, and brought Prince Edward Island into confederation without the participation of its rivals, initiating a long and mostly counter-productive tradition of partisan constitutional deals. But even in the twentieth century, some sense of the value of bipartisan constitution-making endured: an all-party constitutional assembly preceded Newfoundland’s decision to seek terms with Canada in 1949. Only with the new initiatives of the 1960s did executive federalism come to be taken for granted.
At Canada’s late-twentieth-century constitutional conferences, at Meech Lake in 1987 and Charlottetown in 1992, the first ministers in their executive conclaves quickly reached unanimity – by excluding all their rivals. They meant well and they worked hard, only to find themselves assaulted and finally defeated by partisan attack and local resentment. Eager to float above the political landscape as fathers of the new confederation, they made themselves irresistibly juicy targets for every opposition leader who lined up to declare that he would have gotten more and given up less.
Charles Tupper, a political brawler and not a man to shed tears for losers, would surely have sneered at the defeated makers of the Meech Lake accord, the would-be confederation-makers who failed to get their deal through. Bringing his rivals to Charlottetown had been no act of kindness. Tupper did it as much to protect his hide as to ensure success. But it did both. Bipartisanship gave the results a legitimacy no modern constitutional initiative has achieved. The premiers of Meech Lake failed where he succeeded, because they followed their presidential egos when he followed his parliamentary guile. In its strategic calculation and in its understanding of parliamentary necessities, it demonstrated in Tupper and his confrères a parliamentary sagacity never matched in the constitutional efforts of the late twentieth century.
* Ged Martin used this phrase to me in an interview in 1991, when I was beginning to look into confederation. It crystallized the process for me instantly and has stayed with me ever since. I am glad to have a chance to acknowledge Ged Martin’s perception and enthusiasm for his subject.
* It is one of the oddities of confederation history that two of the thirty-six fathers of confederation were fiftyish gentlemen of conservative views named John Gray, and both of them had the middle name Hamilton. Colonel Gray, a retired soldier, was premier of Prince Edward Island; Mr. Gray, a lawyer, was ex-premier of New Brunswick.
* I take up the political status of women in Chapter Six.