THE CANADIAN steamship Queen Victoria, which had carried the Canadian delegation down to Charlottetown in August 1864, sailed again in October. This time, she collected Maritime delegates at Pictou, Charlottetown, and Shediac, and carried them up the St. Lawrence, bucking headwinds and snow squalls all the way. Among the passengers eager to get to Quebec and the second confederation conference was Edward Whelan, who had recently been added to Prince Edward Island’s delegation.
Whelan makes an odd figure among the makers of confederation, at least among the anti-democratic, élitist fathers we take for granted. He was of working-class origins, raised by his mother and largely self-educated. He never had money or any security beyond what an Island printing office provided, and he had built his political career as a troublemaker and an agent of change. He once declared that all of history was an endless battle of aristocratic power against “the humbler classes of society, the men of small means and limited education.” In the cause of the humbler classes, he was capable of calling loyalty to the Empire “old rubbish” and the British constitution “a mockery, a sham, and a delusion.” Smashing the existing state of property relations on Prince Edward Island was the foundation of his twenty-year political career there.1
In the tributes given him after his early death, everyone said Ned Whelan was “convivial.” There are just hints that he ate and drank too much and neglected his family. His power base lay with the Island’s Irish Catholic minority, but he was a backsliding Catholic and occasionally a thorn in the bishop’s side. Yet neither his confrontational politics nor his private life made him an outcast. He was generally acknowledged as Prince Edward Island’s liveliest orator on any subject from Shakespeare to educational reform. He ran the Island’s best newspaper, the Examiner, and filled it with his perceptive and wide-ranging writing. Though he was just forty in 1864, Whelan had been in Island politics since 1846 and he had never lost an election. In 1864, he was in opposition, but he had been a cabinet minister during most of the 1850s.
A perceptive political tactician, Whelan understood why he had been invited to join the delegation going to Quebec. As an opposition member who favoured union, he was doubly useful to provincial secretary (and confederation advocate) William Henry Pope, usually his bitter foe, who seems to have secured his appointment, along with that of an establishment tory, Heath Haviland. Whelan and Haviland would become Pope’s strongest pro-confederation allies among the increasingly sceptical delegates from the Island.
Whelan was the only confederation delegate to note the political calculation behind the recruiting of opposition members to the conferences. “Politicians are generally cunning fellows, and those in the several Maritime governments showed this quality to great advantage when they appointed members of the opposition,” he told a Montreal banquet in October, “because if the people of the several provinces should be so unwise as to complain, … the opposition would have to bear the censure as well as those in the administration.” 2
Whelan, so clear-eyed about why he had been invited, was none the less happy to participate. No apolitical ambassador, he saw himself “representing the opinions of the liberal party” at the conference, and he had his own political agenda to pursue. Whelan had endorsed confederation mostly for its promise to bring the changes he wanted for the Island, and he wanted his views on this confederation heard, whatever the political risk. He boarded the Queen Victoria in high enthusiasm. From shipboard he sent back a promise to his readers to report on “the ancient and historic city” and its “mazy, crooked, narrow, and bewildering streets,” as well as “the great question of inter-colonial union.” He had never been to Quebec – or any part of the united Canadas – before.3
Whelan had a magpie curiosity about people and places, but he was also temperamentally inclined to argue all his political stances back to principles. This makes him doubly curious, for historians have been at pains to insist that the makers of confederation were plain-speaking pragmatists, not philosophers. It was a point of pride, almost, for the historians of the 1960s to declare that the makers of confederation, as Donald Creighton put it in his forthright way, “saw no merit in setting out on a highly unreal voyage of discovery for first principles.” In the pragmatic, end-of-ideology 1950s and early 1960s, historians preferred to see the constitution-makers as politicians to their fingertips, manoeuvring their way with one eye on the voters and the other on Westminster toward any deal that seemed possible.4
Since then, Creighton’s praise has often been turned into a rebuke to the delegates, used to characterize them – and their confederation – as unintellectual, reactionary, and incapable of assimilating big ideas. Professor Russell backhands the Canadian constitution as “a practical, though not philosophical accord.” Writer George Woodcock, less restrained, sneers at it as “a makeshift document cobbled together by colonial politicians.”5
If historians and political scientists do challenge this aphilosophical view of confederation, they do so by invoking the name of Edmund Burke. This is no compliment. In the twentieth century, Burke has become perhaps the most spectacularly out-of-fashion political philosopher in the canon. Few who point to Burke’s influences on the makers of confederation mean to honour them by the identification.
Edward Whelan would not admit being a disciple of Edmund Burke. An Irish Catholic immigrant with more than a little sympathy for Irish nationalism and Irish rebels, he preferred as his role model Henry Grattan, who, as the founder of a short-lived Irish parliament in the late 1700s, was a hero to mid-nineteenth-century Irish nationalists. Edmund Burke was Irish, but he had made his career in London and had opposed Grattan’s plans for Ireland. To Whelan, he seemed entirely too English and too conservative. Whelan ranked Grattan far above Burke both as orator and thinker.6
As an ink-stained newspaperman in a small town in a small colony where politics were mostly known for their petty viciousness, Whelan wrote to meet deadlines rather than out of philosophical contemplation. He had gone to work at Joseph Howe’s newspaper office at the age of eight, and his further education, at a modest Catholic institute in Halifax, ended at nineteen when he moved to Charlottetown to launch his own newspaper. He had none of the cultivated leisure of Burke in England or Madison and Jefferson among the American founding fathers. No philosophical giant, simply someone who had absorbed Howe’s – and the age’s – love for wide reading, debate, and self-improvement, Whelan was never intimidated by ideas. He cited English political writer “Junius” for the motto of one of his Charlottetown papers and Euripides for another, and he studded his speeches with literary and historical references in the best Victorian fashion.7
Whelan expressed and acted on a philosophy of government virtually extinct today, easily caricatured and easily misunderstood, but characteristic of his era and shared by many of his fellow makers of the Canadian constitution. Despite Whelan’s urge to make government an engine of social change in Prince Edward Island, that philosophy was indeed best exemplified and argued out by Edmund Burke. And so, arriving at Quebec in October 1864, Whelan brought with him the ghost of Edmund Burke to haunt the proceedings of the conference. We cannot take that conference’s measure without measuring Burke’s shadow on it.
In life, Edmund Burke never walked the ramparts of Quebec. Born in Ireland in 1729, he went to London as a student, and remained near there as a writer, a political adviser, and a member of Parliament, mostly in opposition, until his death in 1797. He went once to France, but rarely anywhere else. He did not visit North America, even when he was the London agent for the colony of New York in the years before the American Revolution, and he made few substantial references to Canadian matters.
In Whelan’s day as in ours, Edmund Burke was most famous as the author of Reflections on the Revolution in France, a spectacular polemic, one of the greatest in the language. Published in 1790, Reflections condemned every part of the French Revolution, even its rights-of-man, Liberté-Égalité-Fraternité phase, before the Terror and the rise of Napoleon soured many of Burke’s fellow citizens on it. Burke called ceaselessly not merely for resistance to revolutionary France but for war, “a long war,” to confront, contain, and overthrow the revolution abroad and to repress its admirers in England.
The uncompromising force and rhetorical brilliance of Reflections made it an inspiration for every counter-revolutionary tract for the next two centuries. Reflections was also an impassioned declaration of the sacredness of the Bourbon monarchy, with a paean to the glories of Marie Antoinette that today is incomprehensible. “The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone!” was the lesson Burke drew from the queen’s fall from the elevated sphere where he had once worshipped her, “glittering like the morningstar, full of life and splendor and joy.”8
More deeply, Reflections was an argument against abstract theories of government and in favour of tradition – seemingly, in favour of any tradition, no matter how unjust (or actually because of its injustice, in the view of those who saw Burke as the paid apologist of the ruling class). While its subject was France, Reflections was addressed to Burke’s British compatriots. It was an argument against political change in Britain.
Reflections has remained Burke’s most famous work, the one most often anthologized and reprinted. It is frequently taken as the essence of Burke’s political philosophy. As disciples of Burke, therefore, the confederation-makers are often declared to be not merely averse to change, but positively hostile to it and to democracy, national autonomy, and most of the values that have held sway in the twentieth century. Ned Whelan’s case suggests, however, that the lessons they drew from Burke were hardly so simple.
As a counter-revolutionary monarchist and impassioned defender of the British constitution, Burke might be expected to be a blimpish Imperialist, celebrating the blessings of British rule worldwide. Yet, during the American Revolution, Burke consistently supported the cause of the American colonists, even when he was a member of the Parliament that was waging war against the Thirteen Colonies. He devoted decades to a probing criticism of Britain’s empire in India, going so far as to argue that, in ruling India, Britain’s goal should be “studying the genius, the temper, and the manners of the people, and adapting to them the laws that we establish” – an incomprehensible and subversive notion to most of the builders of the British Raj. The Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien has discovered inside Burke the tribune of Protestant England an Irishman with deep sympathies for oppressed Catholic Ireland. Burke opposed Whelan’s hero Grattan because Grattan’s Irish Parliament, despite the rhetoric of national independence that attracted Whelan, had mostly empowered Irish Protestants to oppress Irish Catholics more effectively.9
Burke was hardly more favourable to Imperial power in his comments about British North America. Canada, a minor appendage to the more consequential Thirteen Colonies, was mostly beneath his notice, but his few remarks about it were strikingly unsympathetic to the cause of Empire. Burke had condemned Britain’s deportation of the Acadians as both evil and self-defeating. “We did, in my opinion, most inhumanly, and upon pretenses that in the eye of an honest man are not worth a farthing, root out this poor, innocent, deserving people, whom our utter inability to govern, or to reconcile, gave us no sort of right to extirpate.” 10 In 1780 he attacked Acadia’s successor colony, Nova Scotia – then serving as a vital bulwark in Britain’s war against the Americans – as an “ill-thriven, hard-visaged, and ill-favoured brat,” and an endless, useless drain on the British taxpayer.11 In 1774, just a decade after the conquest of New France, he made a proposal to empower the conquered French Canadians that would have been startling in Lord Durham’s day – and long after. “Give them English liberty, give them an English constitution,” he told Parliament about the Canadians, “and then, whether they speak French or English, whether they go to mass or attend our own communion, you will render them valuable and useful subjects of Great Britain.”12
Why did Burke consistently dismiss the whole basis of British Imperial rule in Canada? Burke was an anti-imperialist at the heart of the Empire, and his anti-imperialism grew from the same roots as his counter-revolutionary fervour. He believed British political usages were best for Britain because they had evolved in Britain for British needs, and he believed all governments should, in effect, be grown rather than invented according to a theory. Against the theoretical Enlightenment philosophy of the rights of man, adopted enthusiastically by slave-holding Virginians and despotic French revolutionaries, Burke preferred the actual rights that Englishmen had evolved ad hoc over centuries. In his opposition to building governments on a theory lay the root of the Reflections’s attack on the French Revolution and the root of its defence of the British constitution.
But if the constitution that had evolved in Britain was appropriate for Britain, it followed that it might not be appropriate for societies that had evolved differently. In an age that had made General Wolfe a heroic martyr, Burke was sceptical of governments rooted in conquest. He argued that ties between a nation and its colonies could only be rooted in common interests and a shared heritage, never in coercion. His willingness to let colonies go if those ties could not be sustained was, of course, heresy and treason to the handfuls of Protestant Englishmen struggling to maintain and to justify their authority over the Catholics of Ireland, the Hindus of India – and the French population of Canada.
Despite his horror of change based on nothing but abstract theories of man or government, the author of the counter-revolutionary bible had not even been a reliable supporter of the status quo at home. The worshipper of Marie Antoinette might be expected also to have idolized George III. Yet to read Burke on George III is to move from the counter-revolutionary propagandist of the Reflections to a vigorous opponent of royal power. In domestic politics, the British tradition that Burke extolled and defended was the Whig tradition of parliamentary supremacy. Whigs looked proudly back to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when England’s Stuart dynasty was deposed and the Dutch Prince William of Orange was made King of England as a constitutional monarch, obliged to seek and follow the advice of Parliament.
The Glorious Revolution fell short of completely or permanently shearing British kings of their independent power. The active, young King George III of the 1760s had often chosen prime ministers for their assent to his policies and then struggled to bring Parliament into line. In Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents, a long essay he wrote on this subject in 1770, Burke had argued that the king and his cabinet were not truly responsible to Parliament, that they consistently interfered in and circumvented the workings of Parliament. Thoughts on the Causes attacked the covert influence the king still maintained and the way royal influence corrupted parliamentarians, who too often served the king’s will rather than the interests of the nation. That kind of Parliament, said Burke, became “the best appendage and support of arbitrary power that ever was invented by the wit of man.”13
The political power of the monarch and his friends was no dead issue in the 1770s. In the midst of the American Revolutionary War, Burke and his parliamentary allies who supported American independence fought a long war against royal influence and royal power. King George had made the refusal of American independence a question of personal dignity, even when it was clear that granting independence was essential to ending the war. In 1779 George declared, “Before I will ever hear of any man’s readiness to come into office, I will expect to see it signed under his hand that he is resolved to keep the empire entire.” That royal will still shaped national policy.14
In 1782, the peace faction in the Commons, strengthened by every defeat in the colonial war, struck back. After the British disaster at Yorktown, the party of which Burke was a key strategist demanded, with the backing of a parliamentary majority, that “the king must not give a veto” to American independence. This blunt demand, rooted in the principle that any interference with parliamentary control over national policy was simply unconstitutional, brought George III to the brink of abdication. When the king swallowed his pride and kept his throne by accepting Parliament’s decision on the independence of the United States, a crucial step in securing parliamentary sovereignty had been taken. Burke briefly became a cabinet minister in a government committed, with the king’s very unwilling consent, to accepting the independence of the former colonies. Since then, no British monarch has successfully withstood the will of the House of Commons on a significant matter of public policy.
It was his advocacy of reducing the monarch from a power in politics to a symbol who reigned but did not rule that made Edmund Burke a congenial figure for Canadian politicians of Edward Whelan’s sort. For all his angry radicalism in other areas, Whelan was an orthodox child of Burke in his campaign to promote parliamentary government. Responsible government had brought Whelan into politics in 1846, at the age of twenty-one. He had wrapped himself in the rights of Englishmen and the “defence of the constitution,” in language that paraphrased Burke’s struggle against George III. Like other reformers from Newfoundland to Upper Canada, he pushed Burke’s argument that the elected legislature must control the executive branch. He likened governors and their advisers to arbitrary monarchs, and portrayed fellow reformers as loyal subjects and defenders of the constitution, even in the midst of their agitation for change. Looming inevitably behind them was the parliamentary Burke. The Burke they quoted, however, was not the defender of Marie Antoinette but the crusader against arbitrary royal authority, who nevertheless avoided any tinge of disloyalty by his deference to monarchy as a symbol.
After the achievement of responsible government in 1847, the doctrine that governors must defer to elected representatives was adopted throughout British North America. Paraphrases of Burke rolled out instinctively whenever a governor like Arthur Gordon needed to be educated about colonial political realities – or indeed, whenever colonial politicians bridled against the wishes of the Colonial Office. Charles Tupper used such arguments as confidently as Edward Whelan, and it hardly proved that either of them was a political philosopher. The argument that power must belong to elected parliamentarians was the fundamental assumption of mid-nineteenth-century Canadian politicians. Burke, an impeccably British ancestor, provided much of the rhetorical splendour which the confederation-makers mustered on this issue. In British North America, he was a force for change, not continuity.
The British Parliament whose power Burke himself had fought to expand was a very curious one. The House of Commons Burke defended against royal autocracy was itself wildly unrepresentative of the people of Britain. Britain in Burke’s time – and at the time of Canadian confederation as well – was governed by a Parliament for which few Britons could vote. Many MPs held parliamentary seats controlled by a single aristocratic patron. Burke himself held such a seat for most of his parliamentary career, and he unapologetically defended the unreformed House of Commons. In Thoughts on the Causes, his attack on the political powers of the king, he associated “the natural strength of the kingdom,” which Parliament represented, not with the people, but with “the great peers, the leading landed gentlemen, the opulent merchants and manufacturers, the substantial yeomanry.”15
That narrow definition of who should elect the House of Commons was barely beginning to change in Britain in the 1860s. When the confederation plan was being debated in Canada, the hot controversy of British politics was a bill intended to increase – slightly – the number of men eligible to vote. Opposition was deep and strong, and the issue made and broke British governments in the 1860s.
Was Britain’s unreformed Parliament the model the makers of confederation extolled when they quoted Burke? A surprising number of our historians and political scientists have assumed it was. But the makers of confederation managed to combine reverence for parliamentary rule with a commitment to a broadly based electoral franchise totally unlike Britain’s. Edmund Burke had defended the dominance of a handful of property owners in the British Parliament on the grounds that, in truth, they dominated British society. The tightly limited circle of British voters, he had argued, actually modelled and represented real power in British society, just as it should.
In the North American colonies, however, property and the vote had always been very broadly held. There were rich and poor in British North America, but the distinction between them was much smaller than in Britain. Unlike their British counterparts, most families in nineteenth-century Canada could and did acquire property sufficient to give the household head the vote. The same principles that decreed a narrow electoral franchise in Britain supported a broad franchise in British North America.
The issue of voting power in Canada had once been hotly debated in Britain, and Edmund Burke himself had joined the debate. In 1791, when the British government drafted constitutions for the newly created colonies of Lower and Upper Canada, it wanted to prevent them from drifting, like the lost Thirteen Colonies, into hostility and independence. How was that to be done? The Constitutional Act of 1791 was intended to create societies like that of Britain, where long-established patterns of deference would buttress a lasting commitment to Britain, its monarchy, and its Empire. The Canadas would remain loyally British, argued the authors of the Constitutional Act, if they became societies led by a wealthy, secure, respected, and politically privileged local aristocracy, supported by an established church.
As late as the 1840s, John Beverley Robinson, then chief justice of Upper Canada, “bone and sinew of the Family Compact,” a beneficiary and a defender of the Constitutional Act of 1791, could still advocate “the control of numerous landlords over a grateful peasantry” as the way British North American society ought to be run. He defended the rule of “the most worthy, intelligent, loyal and opulent inhabitants … of high character, of large property, and of superior information” as the proper government for Upper Canada, as for Britain itself. Robinson always said, and believed himself justified in saying, that he was merely defending the constitution the Crown had bestowed on British North America in 1791.16
But in this interpretation of the English constitution, the conservative Robinson could not claim the support of the conservative Burke. In 1791, Edmund Burke had argued against the objectives that Robinson came to hold sacred. In the British House of Commons debate on the bill that created Upper Canada, he asserted his view that societies were organic, the product of history and tradition. Government, he always held, should be a reflection of society as it actually existed, not a tool for re-inventing society. “Let the Canadians have a constitution formed on the principles of Canadians and the English upon principles of Englishmen … but let there be no wild theories,” he declared. It was useless and wrong, in other words, to try to conjure into being a Canadian aristocracy, simply to bind the colony to the mother country. Even at the risk of losing Imperial control over Canada, Burke endorsed a French-Canadian government for French Canada, just as he had endorsed an American government for the American colonists and proposed an Indian government for India.17
The 1791 act, with its provisions for encouraging a Canadian landed gentry, was Upper and Lower Canada’s constitution from 1791 to 1841. But, as Burke predicted, no Canadian aristocracy took root. The appointed councils that dominated Canadian government between 1791 and the 1840s came to represent, not an independent landholding gentry, but a handful of petty office-holders, dependent on the Crown’s patronage. Canadian reformers, presenting themselves as loyal defenders of the rights of Englishmen, argued with all the more force that the constitution of 1791 had to be adapted to local circumstances. The logic of the British constitution, they had been saying since the 1820s, required that, since property was widely held in the Canadian colonies, political power had to be widely held. Political power in British North America, they argued, was the birthright of the elected assemblies, not the appointive councils of the would-be gentry. They dismissed the other view, the ostensibly conservative one advocated by Robinson, as fundamentally unconstitutional.
The reform interpretation triumphed so completely in British North America in the 1840s that, by the 1860s, it was a non-controversial orthodoxy. Old-fashioned “compact tories,” hanging on to Robinson’s views, had been pushed aside by conservative politicians like Macdonald and Tupper, ready and very much able to secure electoral support for their brand of conservatism. Reformers and conservatives, whatever their other differences, had all become parliamentarians. On the role of parliament, they were all Burkeans, which (despite Burke’s counter-revolutionary aura) meant they had all accepted what had been reform arguments and had become orthodoxy after the winning of responsible government in 1847.
What elected representatives had lacked before responsible government was not representativeness; they had always been close to their voters and elected on a remarkably broad franchise for the times. What they had lacked was power. The makers of confederation, as heirs and beneficiaries of the long struggle to secure the authority of elected assemblies over the executive arm of government, quite naturally held an exalted view of representative bodies. Here again, Burke was a crucial exemplar. Once more, he has made the makers of confederation liable to a charge of being conservative reactionaries when they were actually being notably progressive.
The classic statement of the right and duty of parliamentarians to make up their own minds and to vote, not simply as pipelines for their constituents but in accordance with their own convictions, was Edmund Burke’s. In 1774, Burke was invited to stand for Parliament in the city of Bristol. To sit for Bristol, then England’s second-largest city and its most important west-coast port, would be a promotion from holding a seat through the patronage of a landholding aristocrat. Holding that seat would make Burke a significant figure in Parliament. Yet Burke was frank in telling the voters of Bristol how he expected to act as their member of Parliament. He would not let them tell him how to vote.
Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinions high respect; their business unremitted attention.… But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living.… Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.18
Late-twentieth-century opinion often condemned this view of the parliamentarian’s role. Burke’s declaration was frequently cited as simple élitism, a permission for politicians to dismiss with disdain the ignorant masses who merely elect them. But Burke argued that parliamentary representation was in fact worthless unless parliamentary study and debate could lead representatives to reach informed conclusions, even to change their minds. As for his supposed contempt for voters, it is worth observing what happened to his parliamentary career as Bristol’s representative.
Burke did follow his own counsel as Bristol’s member of Parliament, and he managed to offend many of the voters there. By 1778 he was clearly in danger of losing his seat. It was a risk he was prepared to run. “He should not blame [his constituents] if they did reject him,” he wrote. “The event would afford a very useful example, on the one hand of a senator inflexibly adhering to his opinion against interest and against popularity; and, on the other, of constituents exercising their undoubted right of rejection; not on corrupt [grounds], but from their persuasion that he whom they had chosen had acted against the judgement and interest of those he represented.” Soon after, with his defeat certain, Burke withdrew his candidacy on the eve of the election and ceased to be member for Bristol after a single term.19
After his defeat in Bristol, Burke was able to stay in the House of Commons only by acquiring once again a seat controlled by an aristocratic patron. He retained the title of member of Parliament, but lost the clout that came from being elected by a key constituency. In modern terms, it was as if a potential party leader had thrown away a House seat for a Senate appointment. Burke took the demotion in stride, for he was more a philosopher in politics than a typically ambitious politician, and relied more on his voice in the House than on raw political power. But few conventional politicians would so willingly have thrown away the Bristol seat. Burke’s experience, in fact, proved that elected parliamentarians who were cavalier about their constituents’ wishes put their careers in jeopardy. Whatever their theoretical freedom, few conventional politicians were as reckless as Burke was about disagreeing with the voters.
Having fought for a generation to secure the rule of the elected assemblies against appointive governors and councils, Canadian politicians of the mid-1800s held an exalted view of the status of a parliamentary representative. They frequently spoke in Burkean tones of Parliament’s independence, and of a legislator’s obligation to consider the national good, not simply the local interest. They consistently argued that the elected assembly was the body where legislators should make up their mind and cast their votes according to their convictions.
In 1856, Edward Whelan defended one of his votes in the Prince Edward Island legislature with a paraphrase of Burke. “I have always entertained the notion – and I think I shall never abandon it – that when a member is sent here, he does not appear in the character of a delegate to carry out a certain code of instructions, but rather to act in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience and judgement, and to pursue that policy best calculated to promote the interests, not of his own constituents only, but those of the whole Island at large. It is right that a member should consult with his constituents on public questions, as I frequently take an opportunity of doing, and endeavour to ascertain their opinions and, if possible, reconcile them to his own, should there be any disagreement, but I do not conceive it to be any part of the duty of a member to sacrifice his own conscientious convictions to suit the views of any class of men.”20
Whelan did not identify Burke, who was far from his favourite philosopher, as the source of his idea or his language, but the similarity is inescapable. Like most Canadian politicians, Whelan both was and was not a Burkean on this point. Canadian politicians endorsed in principle the independence of legislators, but they held no sinecure seats of the kind Burke had waiting for him. They faced broadly based and well-informed electorates, which would not tolerate representatives who did not heed those who elected them. The inescapable fact is that Whelan was much closer to and much more dependent on the voters than Burke had ever been. Whelan believed deeply in the authority of parliamentarians, but he hardly needed Burke’s Bristol example to know that disregarding his constituents as flagrantly as Burke had done would simply be political suicide.
The makers of confederation did not much believe in political suicide, and they rarely practised it. Indeed, their relations with voters were much closer than those of later members of Parliament. Nineteenth-century Canadian politics provided many more examples than the late twentieth century of politicians deserting their party out of fear of, or respect for, their constituents.
In that context, the arguments of Edmund Burke, so often echoed by the makers of confederation, achieve a new poignancy in the Canadian context. The struggle of the first half of the nineteenth century in Canada was for responsible government – an executive answerable to the elected parliamentary majority. With responsible government achieved, Parliament had real power and parliamentarians celebrated their independence and authority – all the more so because of the wary eye they had to keep on the voters back home.
During the twentieth century, that situation was reversed. Disciplined and docile legislative caucuses came to understand themselves to be responsible to the party leadership, rather than vice versa. The consequence of this huge accretion of executive power was starkly visible in constitutional politics. At Charlottetown and Quebec in 1864, large, bipartisan parliamentary delegations made constitutions. Leadership was collective. Every delegate was aware he could be held to account by his legislature as well as his constituents. In the late twentieth century, small executive conclaves made the constitutional deals. Leadership was personal. Each government leader, sure of support from his caucus, shouldered the full burden of representing his province. Each took any suggestion of opposition participation, and any likelihood for serious legislative review, as insults to first-ministerial prerogatives.
The great principles of confederation-era parliamentary democracy in Canada – a broad franchise and the constant responsibility of the executive branch to the elected legislators – were clear in theory in the 1830s. They became established in practice after 1847. By the end of the 1850s, with the absorption or marginalization of Clear Grit and rouge ideas of direct democracy, they were the undisputed ideology of Canadian political life. That battle had been decided. The philosophy of it was not contested and did not need to be argued.
As a result, the constitution-makers who gathered at Quebec in October 1864 did not need to spell out the overarching political philosophy of the new nation – though they could, when they chose. George Brown, Ned Whelan, D’Arcy McGee, and many others could roll out hours of rotund Victorian rhetoric in praise of constitutional monarchy. But only one lonely resolution of the seventy-two approved at Quebec in October 1864 may be considered “philosophical.” The fourth resolution declared that, in Canada government would be administered “according to the well-understood principles of the British constitution.” This was later incorporated into the preamble of the British North America Act of 1867 as a government “with a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom.” 21
It sounded simple, but it spoke volumes. There was a tome buried there, and much of it was a gloss on Burke’s constitutional ideas. The British and Canadian constitutions would be similar in principle but, given their electoral franchises (determined by their very different social structures), who sat in government would be utterly at variance in the two countries. They were “similar in principle,” yet Britain had one House of Parliament devoted to a hereditary aristocracy and an established church, and another whose members were elected on an extremely narrow franchise, in a country where very few householders could vote. In Canada, the upper house would be almost entirely irrelevant, while the lower house, the one that made the government, would be elected by most of the adult male population.
The British and Canadian constitutions might be similar in principle, but they would be operated by societies that were hugely different. The Canadian reading of British constitutionalism gave colonial parliamentarians of the confederation era a tremendous sense of legitimate authority, and they wanted to be free to use it. By proposing a constitution similar “in principle” to that of the United Kingdom, the Canadians actually endorsed a government “formed on the principles of Canadians,” as Burke had proposed in 1791.
Edward Whelan certainly believed in using the powers of the state. As a cabinet minister in George Coles’s reform government in the 1850s, he had been part of a government that had introduced universal manhood suffrage and given Island children a free, non-denominational public-school system. Other confederation-era politicians had been similarly activist. Leonard Tilley’s New Brunswick governments invested in public health and public-works projects, introduced universal manhood suffrage, and adopted the secret ballot. In Nova Scotia, conservative and reform governments both promoted railways and mines and invested in the public-school system.
In Canada East, George-Étienne Cartier and his bleu supporters wound up the seigneurial regime inherited from New France and modernized and codified the old civil law. They built spectacular public works like the Victoria Bridge at Montreal. The bridge, which opened to great fanfare in 1860, was only the most visible symbol for state support of railways and other industries. Cartier, the Grand Trunk Railway’s legal counsel, was also that railway’s most prominent parliamentary advocate when railways were the largest development projects in British North America. In Canada West, reform and conservative leaders introduced new layers of city and county government and expanded public works and public schooling. Scores of mid-nineteenth-century courthouses, city halls, and other public buildings that still stand throughout Ontario and Quebec are testimony to the burst of state activity just before confederation.
In Colonial Leviathan, a study of these events, the historians Allan Greer and Ian Radforth speak of “the unprecedented expansion of state institutions and the increasing attempts at government supervision of civic life,” once the decades of conflict between appointed executives (which had controlled the institutions of state) and elected assemblies (which had controlled the public revenues) ended after 1847. In all this activity, the politicians were doing more than simply spending money. They were conscious and proud of using the state to mould better citizens.22
This was not only the state’s role, of course. The temperance movement of the time sprang from the same impulse, seeking to do away with drunken idleness and create a sober, industrious, diligent citizenry. In Quebec, it was the Catholic Church, not the state itself, which expanded schools, hospitals, and other public institutions. Throughout the colonies, charitable societies, churches, and the state worked hand-in-hand to reform and guide the poor, the drunken, the ill-educated, the young, and the female toward the bourgeois standards of conduct judged universally appropriate. To this end, the mid-nineteenth century, seemingly so conservative, saw an expansion of public activity unmatched by any other period until the explosion of Keynesian economic planning and social-welfare programs in the mid-twentieth century.
Virtually all of this public activity, it seems fair to guess, would have been anathema to Edmund Burke. Burke was hostile to most forms of state action. He believed government must reflect the shape of society, not reshape it. Burke did not believe government could do much more than defend the liberty of its citizens. “The state ought to confine itself to what regards the state,” he wrote, and his list of what regarded the state was very short. For the poor to expect government to improve their condition, for example, was delusory. The state should not try to relieve their misery even in the midst of a famine, he said. “Patience, labour, sobriety, frugality, and religion should be recommended to them; and all the rest is downright fraud,” he declared. “It is not in breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God, that we are to place our hope of softening the divine displeasure.”23
In defence of parliamentary authority, the confederation-era politicians of British North America were wonderfully skilful disciples of Edmund Burke. On the role of the state, however, it is hard to see Burke’s influence at all. Conservative or reform, they were determined to put state power firmly under the control of the people’s representatives. With that achieved, they delighted in their new freedom, not to restrain the state, as Burke would have advised, but to use state power in pursuit of their goals.
Edward Whelan was certainly no Burkean quietist. The issue that had shaped his political career was the explosive one of land ownership. Whelan always advocated a two-plank platform: defending the constitution and smashing the “landocracy.” Defending the constitution meant securing responsible government – a bold project in 1846, but one that could be shielded under the mantle of Burke. Smashing the landocracy, however, was both socially and politically radical. It meant breaking up the great estates that owned most of the land of Prince Edward Island, and it meant confronting rival politicians whose fortunes, as well as principles, were threatened. In an era when property was sacred, Whelan wanted Prince Edward Island to attack the property rights of the great landlords who owned most of the Island and kept most of its farmers as insecure tenants.24
Though it was flaring up when the confederation delegates met at Charlottetown in 1864, the land issue had dogged Island governments for years. Premier George Coles’s government, in which Whelan served, had promised in the 1850s to end the absentee landlord system and to help Island farmers buy the lands they had worked for generations. It passed legislation to coerce Island landlords to sell their estates. The land reforms, however, were consistently vetoed by the British government. This was hardly surprising: any British cabinet of the 1860s consisted largely of landed proprietors, men for whom large landed estates were the basis of society and government, to say nothing of their own wealth, standing, and political power. Prime Minister Palmerston, one of whose close relatives owned a Prince Edward Island estate, haughtily dismissed any move against the Island landowners as an attack on property that should not be permitted anywhere in the Empire.25
Whelan, a cabinet minister in the government that had passed the laws, saw Britain’s actions as an attack on responsible government itself. “It is degrading and humiliating to the colony,” fumed Whelan, “that the proprietors – most of them, or many of them absentees, and quite irresponsible, should exercise so arbitrary an influence at the Colonial Office, as to render nugatory the deliberate action of our legislature. This is a species of despotism.” London’s intransigence meant Coles’s government was unable to deliver on its promises to the tenant farmers who had elected it. It was defeated in 1859. In opposition, Whelan’s bitterness grew, and his commitment to constitutional reform wavered. “Talk about the glorious privileges of the British Constitution! We live under a constitution of dispatches dictated according to the caprice of absentee land proprietors,” he snarled in 1860.26
Whelan then began to speculate about a social contract between the governed and the governing that would have horrified Edmund Burke. “Loyalty with me is not a blind sentiment. The sentiment which springs from a mutual return of advantages is the loyalty which … we owe to that sovereign who rules over us.… Prince Edward Island has generally exhibited much more loyalty than, under the circumstances of the case, she was perhaps justified in showing.” Spoken in a legislature of the British Empire, particularly by a Catholic Irishman, such talk of “a mutual return of advantages” – and the implied right of subjects to abolish the contract when they chose – carried a whiff of revolution.27
In 1864, still in opposition, with the landocracy as entrenched as ever, Whelan got an opportunity to endorse the bold measures his words of 1860 suggested. In May 1864, Island farmers founded the Tenant League. They declared they would not pay rent and would resist any sanctions that might ensue, forcibly if necessary. Support for the League spread across the Island. Rents went unpaid. Horn-blowing lookouts surrounded bailiffs who went to enforce payment or to carry out evictions, and, at the sound of the horns, angry crowds gathered to drive the bailiffs back to Charlottetown. The delegates to the Charlottetown conference who went driving through the Island countryside were visiting a landscape in which defiance of lawful authority was almost universal. Within a year, companies of the British army would be needed to aid the civil power in Prince Edward Island.
The Tenant League members were the people for whom Whelan had been fighting the landocracy since the 1840s. They included many of his own voters in the Second Kings riding. And their cause was his: defeat of the landocracy. If Whelan believed the Crown had forfeited its claim to the allegiance of the Islanders, the rise of the Tenant League should have been his moment to declare himself.
Instead, Edward Whelan condemned the Tenant League, and he did so unequivocally. He went back to the other fundamental principle he had declared in 1846: defence of the British constitution. The landlords must be confronted, he wrote in a long newspaper article on the league, but the law had to be respected. “No man has a right to resist the laws for the attainment of any public object … until all the resources under the constitution have been exhausted,” Whelan wrote.28
Whelan’s attack on the Tenant League, which bitterly antagonized its members, seems to have had several motives besides his conviction that it was wrong in principle. As a practical matter, Whelan believed defiance of the law would fail, and in failing would set back the legitimate cause. “It may be no difficult matter to bag a bailiff or an agent now and then, but to attempt to bag a company or a regiment of troops would be another affair,” he predicted long before troops had been called for. As an Irish Catholic, Whelan probably also guessed that defiance of the law would be more dangerous for the Catholic minority than for Protestant Islanders. League membership cut across Catholic–Protestant divisions, but if religious differences were exploited to divide the tenants, as had often been done before, many League leaders would be protected by their membership in the Protestant ascendancy. Whelan’s fellow Catholics would not.29
At bottom, however, Whelan was returning to the faith in parliamentary measures that had been wavering in 1860. By the fall of 1864, Whelan thought his faith was about to be vindicated. A new event had given fresh strength to his arguments. Forcible resistance seemed not only wrong and dangerous, but unnecessary. The new event was confederation.
Before the Charlottetown conference, Whelan had dismissed a union of the colonies as meaningless – unless it freed the Island from the interference of the Colonial Office and the landlords. That view was widely shared. When Arthur Gordon of New Brunswick floated the idea of uniting the three Maritime provinces, Leonard Tilley and Charles Tupper made sure the proposal included a plan for buying out the Island’s landlords. During the conference itself, George Coles pushed for that commitment. The Canadian visitors, particularly George-Étienne Cartier, who had assisted the buying out of the seigneurial landlords of Canada East, were encouraging. The conference passed no resolutions on the Island lands, but Coles said that they had accepted the principle of breaking up the estates. John Gray of New Brunswick, well known to Islanders for his role in a commission that had attempted to settle the land question in 1861, said as much at one of the Charlottetown banquets. Denouncing tenancy as the greatest drawback to the Island, he publicly confirmed that “the removal of this grievance would certainly follow as the result of colonial union.” 30
Between the Charlottetown and Quebec meetings, Edward Whelan exulted. Confederation would drive landlordism “to the wall,” he wrote in the Examiner. Once confederation was achieved, he saw at once, the new federal government would stand between the Island and the Colonial Office. Island legislation to assist the tenants would no longer be vetoed by the landlords’ powerful friends in London. And, most wonderful, confederation would end the problem that had always vexed Island reformers: how to finance the end of tenancy. The much larger treasury of the federated colonies could readily provide money for a fund that would assist poor farmers to buy their land.31
Whelan became a sudden and permanent convert to confederation about the time of the Charlottetown conference, and with good reason. He had found the promise of an end to the Island’s most intractable social and political problem – and also a solution to the issue that was estranging him from his restless Tenant League constituents. Even a rival newspaper, hostile to confederation, admitted that, if the new confederation could buy out the landlords, “the islanders almost to a man will hold up both hands for the union.” If confederation could end landlordism peacefully and profitably, Whelan would have a victory for parliamentary principles – and fine prospects for re-election and a return to power. No wonder the confederation proposal had restored his faith in constitutional measures.32
Whelan came from a generation that had done well by the British constitution. In the aftermath of the disastrous and counter-productive 1837 rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada, reformers like him had re-dedicated themselves to change through constitutional means, and they had won. Proclaiming their absolute loyalty to the constitution, they had successfully turned the system of government inside out. The rule of appointed governors and their appointive councils had given way to the rule of legislatures elected on a broad public franchise and sympathetic to vigorous state initiatives.
In defeat and opposition in the early 1860s, Whelan’s constitutional faith had wavered. The Tenant League’s adoption of extralegal means, however, drew Whelan back to his fundamental faith that constitutional means were, both tactically and as matters of principle, the right ones. In September 1864, confederation looked to Whelan a fresh step in constitutional reform. It promised not only a glorious transcontinental destiny but also an end to landlordism, the last vestige of the bad old days that still lingered in Prince Edward Island. As the Queen Victoria ploughed through the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the next great reform triumph must have seemed to lie just over the horizon.
Quebec delivered a shattering disappointment to those hopes. In the Island delegation, Coles and Whelan, espousing liberal principles, sat with landowners like Edward Palmer and Heath Haviland, who were deeply suspicious of any change that might threaten their standing. Even though they fought bitterly amongst themselves, both groups asserted the rights of Islanders against central authority. The Island delegates quickly became the most obstreperous critics of the plan the Canadian delegates were putting forward. Demanding provincial equality in the Senate and more seats in the House, the Islanders challenged the rep-by-pop deal by which the Canadians had agreed on a federal union.
The Canadians began to denounce Island arguments as the complaints of greedy malcontents. And suddenly the proposal to buy out the Island’s landlords vanished from the confederation agenda. Possibly the Islanders’ demands had irritated the Canadians into closing the purse strings. Perhaps a dawning recognition that the Canadians were not going to live up to the land commitment made at Charlottetown helped ignite the hostility of the Islanders. Whatever the case, the Canadians would not budge on the land question. Support for confederation evaporated in the Island delegation. A land purchase, said Andrew Macdonald, was the only advantage he could see in confederation, but the motion that he and Coles put was not even included in the minutes of the meeting. The Islanders voted, often alone, against one resolution after another, and Whelan seems to have voted with the Island majority.
By the time the delegations returned to Prince Edward Island, George Coles, the leader of Whelan’s party, had changed course dramatically. Since Charlottetown, he had favoured confederation as the way to end landlordism. When confederation failed to deliver, he made common cause against it with Edward Palmer, who had always resisted both it and any challenge to landlords’ rights. In rejecting confederation, Coles had made an astute political calculation. With the tempting prospect of an end to landlordism snatched away, the tough take-it-or-leave-it offer of confederation seemed mostly an affront to Island pride and self-sufficiency. Mass meetings across the Island condemned the idea of confederation. By an overwhelming majority, the legislature in Charlottetown instructed the government to have nothing to do with colonial union of any kind. In a couple of years, Coles would ride the anti-confederate crusade back to the premier’s office.
Edward Whelan would come back into office with Coles, but Whelan had not repudiated confederation. Although he had voted against many of the resolutions at Quebec, he told the Island legislature, “we got what I think should be accepted as a compromise.” At Quebec he had been fascinated by glimpses of the complex, diverse political world that confederation would create. He had caught the national vision, and he began to make disparaging jokes about “this patch of sandbank in the St. Lawrence.” He also seems to have calculated that federal union and the removal of Colonial Office interference would quickly make landlordism extinct, whether the money was provided or not. All through 1865, 1866, and 1867, he stood among the tiny, unpopular minority of Island confederates.33
Whelan, of course, held no sinecure post. He had to win his seat in every election, and, in 1867, the unpopularity of his views caught up with him. Anti-confederates resented his support for union. Tenant League supporters resented his refusal to support them. The bishop of Charlottetown and the local priest resented his blunt declarations that clerics ought to stay out of politics. The Irish community, Whelan’s core constituency, shared all three resentments. Whelan lost a by-election in the spring of 1867 and was out of politics when confederation went ahead on July 1 without Prince Edward Island. He was dead before the end of the year, not yet forty-four.
Even serious historians have been tempted into suggesting that Whelan died of a broken heart, a kind of martyr for the confederation cause. Surely this is nonsense. Whelan was a seasoned political pro. He would hardly have pined away over a by-election, and his confidence that Prince Edward Island would soon embrace confederation had not wavered. “He was a fast liver,” said one of his reporters in an obituary, and photographs of Whelan suggest the beefy, thick-necked look of a man who worked too hard, ate too much, and drank too often. Almost certainly he died of these enthusiasms, and not from heartbreak.*
Whelan’s legacy seemed small. Edward Palmer once accused him of saying little during the Quebec conference because he was too busy making notes of the proceedings. Whelan admitted as much, but if he intended to make his fortune with a book about confederation, he never got the chance. All he produced was a small compilation of speeches from the conference banquets, “a very humble and unpretending affair,” in his own words. It cost him £150 to print, “and I haven’t received a shilling for it yet,” he told a friend. The larger book, if there was one, never appeared. Whatever notes he kept at Quebec were probably lost with all his papers in a house fire a few years after his death. His only surviving child drowned in 1875.34
Even his political predictions mostly went awry. He thought confederation would end landlordism, while Tenant League actions threatened only disaster and defeat. Instead, the tenants broke the landlords themselves. Whelan expected the landlords would invoke the law to smash the illegal resistance with armed force. But in face of the rent strike, it was the landlords who wavered. Leading landlords soon declared themselves ready to sell out to the tenants, and a wave of purchases eroded the great estates. Once they themselves became landowners, Island farmers shed their radicalism – but it had been the threat of forcible resistance, not Whelan’s parliamentary tactics, that had won their fight.
Whelan also predicted that Prince Edward Island would soon beg to be allowed into confederation. Reckless investments in railways did force the Island to seek terms, but by 1873 Canada was at least as eager as the Islanders to complete the union. Prince Edward Island persuaded Ottawa to guarantee six Commons seats, two hundred miles of railways, permanent communications with the mainland, and generous financial terms. There was a large grant to complete the buying out of the landlords, and in 1874 Prince Edward Island began the expropriations of large estates that Whelan had advocated twenty-five years before. Terms less generous than these would have secured the support of the Island’s delegation, and perhaps the Islanders as well, in 1864. Governor General Lord Dufferin, officially visiting the new province in 1873, wrote Prime Minister Macdonald that Islanders were “quite under the impression that it is the dominion that has been annexed to Prince Edward Island, and in alluding to the subject I have adopted the same tone.”35
Did Edward Whelan’s support of an unpopular confederation and his condemnation of the radical Tenant League prove he had betrayed the humbler classes and gone conservative? Had he begun to endorse the authority of a parliamentary élite over the wishes of the people? Hardly. Just after the Quebec conference, he declared he would defer “reverently” to public opinion, since the issue of confederation had to be put to the public. Confederation could only be ratified, he said, in “the several local legislatures, the constituencies of each province in public meetings assembled, and at the hustings.” When the Island legislature declared in 1866 that it would never accept confederation on any terms, Whelan offered a lonely dissent: it would be up to the people to accept or reject confederation, and if they eventually accepted it, no legislative veto should stop them.36
Whelan’s commitment to both democracy and confederation, his insistence that confederation was both right for his province and the right way for “the humbler classes of society” to fight the landocracy, suggests the underlying radicalism that still attended the idea of responsible government. Responsible government and parliamentary democracy had been reform causes in British North America; it was only by yielding to them that conservative politicians had surged back to power in the 1850s and 1860s. But Whelan still expected parliamentary democracy and confederation to change the world, not to conserve it. That enduring activist strain confirms what a flexible instrument the British constitution still seemed in the 1860s. The other confederation-makers, whatever their goals, were more like him than not in their eagerness to use parliamentary government to do things, not to prevent them.
During one of the Sunday breaks of the Quebec conference, Edward Whelan found a few moments to visit the monuments and battlefields of the city. He told his readers he was still “nearly a stranger to the historic places in this old city,” but he hoped to have a chance to remedy that before leaving Quebec. Edmund Burke, also a lover of history and tradition, might have shared Whelan’s eagerness to explore the ramparts and ancient landmarks of Quebec. We can imagine the two of them haunting the sites of the Quebec conference like quarrelsome ghosts, deeply in harmony over the value of parliamentary government, deeply divided on the uses of the state.37
Burke’s warnings against all kinds of state activism were largely unheeded in Whelan’s day. Burke, who thought the governments of his day had no business either feeding the poor or funding the colonization of Nova Scotia, would have been appalled by Whelan’s enthusiasm for using the Canadian state to expropriate private property in Prince Edward Island and to build railways across the continent. In the late twentieth century, however, echoes of these ideas of Burke’s once more reverberated loudly. Few modern “neo-conservatives” were quite so explicit about the necessity of letting the poor starve, but Burke’s insistence that the state must not try to change the society it served was alive and walking the corridors of power in the 1990s.
Parliamentary government, however, the idea on which Burke and Whelan were in harmony, commanded very little reverence in late-twentieth-century Canada. In the 1990s, not even parliamentarians gave more than lip service to the notion that a parliamentary seat was, or should be, a significant and important office. Sadly, it was where Burke and Whelan were most compatible – in believing that parliamentary government was a legitimate and effective way to resist arbitrary authority and to articulate the will of the nation – that the legacy of both had become most wraithlike and insubstantial.
* Circumspect accounts of unexpected deaths in Victorian times invite speculation about either alcoholism or syphilis, but Whelan’s decline seems too rapid to suggest either. George Coles became insane within a year of regaining office in 1867, and died insane in 1875, aged sixty-five. That Coles, by all reports a solid, respectable, bourgeois paterfamilias, may have been one of the classic gentlemanly victims of Victorian syphilis seems impossible to confirm but cannot be ruled out.