ROBERT DICKEY, the lawyer and businessman from Charles Tupper’s home town of Amherst, had been government leader in Nova Scotia’s upper house and a delegate to both the Charlotte-town and Quebec conferences. Despite his ties to Premier Tupper, he began to dissent from the developing consensus at Quebec. He supported the unpopular arguments of New Brunswick’s Edward Chandler for a loose federation, in which sovereignty would be vested in the individual provinces, and he complained that the financial terms proposed at Quebec would bankrupt Nova Scotia. After he came home, Dickey released a letter declaring he had “had the misfortune to differ from my colleagues in several important details of the scheme.”1 Since he still hoped to see union take place, Dickey was glad to see Tupper’s better-terms resolution ratified in 1866. But his apostasy had been a boon to the anti-confederate cause, and it was not forgotten by the winners. Dickey was dropped from the delegation Nova Scotia sent to London for the final confederation talks later that year.
Dickey did became a senator in 1867, but he nursed ambitions of becoming lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia. The appointment was the prime minister’s to give, but Sir John A. Macdonald was dubious. He brought up Dickey’s disloyalty during the confederation crisis. Was Dickey really a loyal supporter and worthy of this reward?
Dickey assured the leader he was indeed a loyal party man. “I shall support you whenever I think you are right,” he said.
“Anyone will support me when they think I am right,” Macdonald retorted. “What I want is a man that will support me when I am wrong!” Dickey never did become a lieutenant-governor. Macdonald offered the office as bait to recruit one anti-confederate Nova Scotian after another.2
This may not be entirely a true story. Dickey is only one of the putative victims in the versions that exist. But who was the butt of Macdonald’s wit hardly matters; this has always been a story about Macdonald’s ruthless pragmatism in the use of men and of power. It adapts easily into a criticism of the cynical amorality of his era. Poor Dickey, who had been absolutely right about Nova Scotia’s need for better terms, was first denied the opportunity to help negotiate improvements, and later punished for being right too soon.
The misfortunes of Robert Dickey offer more than a lesson in cynicism about nineteenth-century politics. They point directly to the fundamentals of political leadership in the confederation era. And leadership inevitably brings to the fore John A. Macdonald, so far a minor figure in this account of the making of confederation.
Macdonald is the only politician of his era who still conveys a personal image – so much so that it has become hard to see his peers around him. His vivid personality still half-attracts, half-appals, much as it did in his own time. (Weeks into a progressive drunk, Macdonald once horrified an election crowd by vomiting on the stage when he got up to answer his opponent – and then won them back by saying, “I don’t know how it is, but every time I hear Mr. Jones speak it turns my stomach.”) When Macdonald died, Wilfrid Laurier, his successor as the master of Canadian politics, declared that the life of Sir John A. Macdonald “is the history of Canada.” More than a century later, that verdict, at least on the history of confederation, remains widely held.3
Laurier also said that “for the supreme art of governing men, Sir John Macdonald was gifted as few men in any land or any age were gifted.” To get at the leadership secrets of John A. Macdonald and their place in the constitution-making of the 1860s, there is a useful guide in a late-nineteenth-century connoisseur of political leadership, the English journalist Walter Bagehot.
In the years when confederation was being made, Walter Bagehot was a supremely fortunate young man in his late thirties. He came from a family that was very much part of the educated, well-to-do “ten thousand” who were Britain’s acknowledged rulers. He had been to university. He had been called to the bar but never had to practise. For several years he held the kind of position in his father’s bank that was influential and well-paid but left him abundant time to write literary essays. He had run for Parliament and been not much disappointed to lose. Wonderfully connected and well-informed, he was an amused and sceptical observer of politics and finance. He was blissfully married to an MP’S daughter, and in 1861 his father-in-law had secured him his dream job: editing the family’s magazine, the Economist.
The Economist had been founded to preach free trade and individual responsibility. Bagehot shared that faith, but he gave it an infusion of wit and style and tough-minded political analysis. The weekly editorial “leaders” he wrote for the Economist for the rest of his life made the magazine what it has been ever since: literate and ruthless at once, the pragmatic adviser to people who had money and power and intended to keep them and use them effectively.
Immersed in the politics, society, and finance of London, the Economist naturally saw the colonies as distant and not very interesting; Bagehot could hardly help but condescend. Still, running the Empire was part of the Englishman’s burden, so the Economist kept an eye on colonial developments. Starting in 1864, Bagehot offered his readers concise opinions on all the key developments in British North America’s debates on confederation. Just weeks after the formation of the coalition at Quebec, Bagehot declared that “the latest intelligence from Canada is the most important which has reached us for some years,” though he credited the initiative to a “Mr. Browne.” In the following months his spelling improved. By the end of the year, the Economist had published four very enthusiastic Bagehot articles on the progress made at Charlottetown and Quebec and the constitution that was being proposed. “The object of the American colonists, it is clear from every clause of the resolutions, is to form a nation,” he declared after perusing the Quebec resolutions in November 1864.4
In the months when he was taking occasional note of the confederation conferences, Bagehot was also busy writing The English Constitution, the book which, along with the Economist, preserved his fame. Published in book form in the year of confederation, The English Constitution was remarkably vivid for a text in political theory. In The English Constitution was born the aphorism that to scrutinize the working of monarchy too closely is to “let in daylight upon magic.” In Queen Victoria’s heyday, it cheerfully characterized the Queen and her son the Prince of Wales as “a retired widow and an unemployed youth.”5 Elsewhere Bagehot deflated a not-quite-first-rank English politician with the throwaway line, “If he were a horse, no one would buy him.” Throughout, The English Constitution was remarkable for its clear-eyed, unsentimental look at how power and leadership were exercised in a constitutional monarchy.
The English Constitution was also remarkable for its class prejudice. Racial minorities and women were largely beneath Bagehot’s gaze, but he was deeply alarmed by the prospect that Britain might grant voting rights to men of classes lower than his own. Bagehot thought himself principled in his insistence that the elected representatives of the people of Britain must continue to be chosen by “the ten thousand.” “The masses of England are not fit for an elective government,” he wrote in The English Constitution, and it was simply self-defeating to give votes to people incompetent to choose their representatives intelligently. “The working classes contribute almost nothing to our corporate public opinion and therefore the fact of their want of influence in parliament does not impair the coincidence of parliament with public opinion,” said The English Constitution.6
Despite his deep hostility to votes for working people, Bagehot faintly regretted the impossibility of universal manhood suffrage in Britain. By keeping its population uneducated and in servitude, he wrote, Britain had left them too ignorant to vote. But he conceded that a literate population, one with widespread prosperity and relative social equality, could enjoy universal suffrage without disaster. This thought inspired the only reference to British North America in The English Constitution: “Where there is not honest poverty, where education is diffused, and political intelligence is common, it is easy for the mass of the people to elect a fair government. The idea is roughly realized in the North American colonies of England.” For a moment, Bagehot had grasped that British North America had both representative government on the British model and voting rights far broader than those existing in Britain itself.7
Bagehot was too much an Englishman of “the ten thousand” to pursue this thought. It was impossible, really, to consider whether the English constitution might be working better in a colony than at home. Phrases from The English Constitution appeared in Bagehot’s articles on confederation, but Canadian processes did not influence The English Constitution. To tease out how Bagehot’s analysis of power and leadership might apply in a society of (by English standards) social equality, general education, and widespread participation in civil society – in British North America, that is – we have to read Canadian evidence into the Bagehot description.
The key to The English Constitution was Bagehot’s dictum that all constitutions have “dignified” and “efficient” parts. “Dignified” parts could command respect and wield influence – as the monarch did, and the great aristocrats of Britain often did – but real power to govern lay with the “efficient” parts. The analyst’s challenge, said Bagehot, was always to discern which was which. In The English Constitution, Bagehot used this device to cut through the blather about the British government. He dismissed lofty notions of Britain’s “balanced” constitution of monarchy, Lords, and Commons. “A republic has insinuated itself beneath the folds of a monarchy,” Bagehot declared; Britain had become a state where the people’s representatives were supreme. In phrases he might have borrowed from George Brown’s analysis of the Canadian Senate, Bagehot argued that, in a parliamentary government with two chambers, only the more representative one could have real power. Accordingly, the House of Lords had become “a subordinate assembly,” dignified but without significant political power, and sure to be defeated in any serious confrontation with the Commons. Bagehot saw at once it would be the same with the Canadian Senate proposed in the Quebec resolutions, and he approved.8
That left only the House of Commons, but Bagehot was just as hard on the Commons. The Commons, he said, was “a big meeting,” and everyone knows nothing ever gets done in a big meeting. Practical leadership lay with the cabinet, which put structure into the Commons’s discussions and, even more, with the prime minister who dominated the cabinet. The rise of cabinet government had brought about what Bagehot called “the close union, the near complete fusion, of the executive and legislative powers” in the English constitution. Britain was “a disguised republic” whose “president” was the prime minister, said Bagehot. Under the constitution proposed by the Quebec conference, he saw, Canada would be the same.9
The British constitution, however, provided a control upon the prime minister and his cabinet. An elected president, like the American one, held office for a fixed term of office. Whether or not he proved right for the job, those who made him president had no power over him between elections. A prime minister, however, was a president whose electoral college was the House of Commons, and the Commons was always ready and able to throw out a prime minister at a moment’s notice. In Bagehot’s view, the power to make and destroy governments, not the power to make laws, was the root of the Commons’s power. In The English Constitution, he imagined a prime minister dismissing the often-heard suggestion that the Commons had not been accomplishing much lately. It had kept him in office, the prime minister might say, and keeping or dismissing him was its only really important job. Without the power to sustain or to dismiss the prime minister and cabinet, said Bagehot, the House would become merely a debating society. It would join the dignified parts of the constitution, while power migrated elsewhere.
Prime-ministerial leadership was the crucial subject of The English Constitution. Bagehot had learned about leadership by close observation of British politics, and he illustrated his book with lively references to many British statesmen, now mostly forgotten. Neither his book nor his editorials on confederation mentioned John A. Macdonald.* But if he could have put aside his essential Englishness, Walter Bagehot might have found in Macdonald the perfect illustration for his case about leadership. What Bagehot set out in a book-length argument about parliamentary leadership, John A. Macdonald had always known in his fingertips.
For Donald Creighton, John A. Macdonald was confederation, Creighton left behind the widely held impression that confederation was made by Macdonald; that Cartier, Brown, various docile Maritimers, some bankers and railway magnates, and the Colonial Office all followed the lead of his visionary statesmanship. In fact, Macdonald was at first a minor figure in the making of confederation, even though he was joint leader of the government of the Province of Canada. In the spring of 1864, he opposed George Brown’s federalism initiatives, standing among a handful of doubters, virtually all the rest of whom became anti-confederates. It was George-Étienne Cartier’s sudden willingness to deal with Brown which brought in Macdonald. In June 1864, the parties led by Cartier and Brown were the essential elements in the confederation coalition. Macdonald, leading only a handful of Upper Canadian politicians, had to follow Cartier or be dropped from power. Walter Bagehot, watching from faraway London, had it essentially right when he wrote of the new Canadian coalition as the Cartier–Brown ministry.
Once Macdonald came in, however, he came in strongly. He had spent a decade learning how to cobble together majorities in the fractious Canadian legislature, where he personally rarely had more than a handful of loyal followers. Whatever his coolness to federalism as a political philosophy, he quickly saw that the complicated regional, ethnic, and ideological coalitions of a confederated Canada would give wonderful scope for the skills he had been honing. He could dominate the politics of a confederated Canada as he would never dominate a union of Brown’s Ontario and Cartier’s Quebec. First, however, he began to dominate the conferences.
Macdonald signed the guest book at Charlottetown as “cabinet maker.” It was a fair self-assessment. Bagehot could have recognized in the Macdonald of the 1860s all the skills of a superb parliamentary manager. From long experience – he had first been elected in 1844, at the age of twenty-nine – Macdonald knew both the business of campaigning and the machinery of public administration. As a lawyer and attorney-general, he knew the legalities, precedents, and principles of legislative and constitutional drafting. But parliamentary leadership – putting together majorities – was personal, and personal skills were where Macdonald shone.
When David Thompson, an unrepentant old Clear Grit farmer-politician, returned to the Commons from a long illness in the 1880s, he got brief, distracted greetings from his party leaders, Edward Blake, a fastidious Toronto barrister, and Richard Cartwright, a dour and rigid Kingston financier. “Davey, old man,” cried John A. Macdonald a moment later, “I’m glad to see you back.” Thompson had never in his life voted with Macdonald, but he admitted it went increasingly against the grain that his enemy was better company than his friends.10
Dozens of similar stories testify to Macdonald’s persuasive charm. One perceptive Macdonald historian, Keith Johnson, has suggested there was a dark, cold, private soul beneath Macdonald’s affable surface.11 But if his humour and sociability were mostly on the surface, they sufficed. Joseph Rymal, another Grit rival, marvelled over Macdonald’s ability to cajole his supporters in the House. “Good or bad, able or unable, weak or strong, he wraps them around his finger as you would a thread. I have seen some of them … denounce the measures of government and say ‘Well, I can’t go that!’ and still I have known these gentlemen long enough to believe that they would go it, and after there was a caucus they did go it every time.”12
A colleague put it more admiringly. “Often when council was perplexed and you had made things smooth and plain, I have thought, ‘There are wheels in that man that have never been moved yet,’ ” said Archibald McLelan, the one-time anti-confederate from Nova Scotia who sat in Macdonald’s cabinets for years.13 For his part, Macdonald once joked that his ideal cabinet would be “all highly respectable parties whom I could send to the penitentiary if I wished.” * Lacking that power, he used his persuasive powers instead.14
Macdonald was good on the floor of the House, too. He was not notably an orator. George Brown, who took pride in his own oratorical powers, dismissed Macdonald’s prepared address in the confederation debates as “a very poor speech for such an occasion.” 15 Macdonald did better later in the debate, and in a crisis he could speak strongly. With his government on the line in 1873, he rallied wavering members with a passionate five-hour argument, fuelled by gin delivered in water glasses from three different supporters, each unaware of what the others were doing. But his great strength was the casually wielded authority, which, Bagehot argued, parliaments preferred over oratory. During the confederation debates, an opposition member tried to score a point by tying Macdonald to some procedure in a long-ago debate over a temperance bill. “I don’t remember,” confessed Macdonald. “I don’t generally go for temperance bills,” and in the laughter that followed, the House acknowledged his authority to ignore the challenge.16
It was not all laughter, however. “The great leaders of parliament … all have a certain firmness,” Bagehot thought, and Macdonald, with a majority at his back, used it without compunction, whether in the double shuffle of 1858 or in ruthlessly closing down the confederation debate when the New Brunswick election disaster seemed likely to give the Canadian anti-confederates an opening.17
It was the same with smaller matters. Joseph Rymal had been a popular and respected member of Parliament for decades when Macdonald gerrymandered his seat out of existence in 1885. “Mr Speaker, I am not made of such material that I can beg for justice,” declared Rymal. “I can ask you in a plain and manly way to do what is right, but I cannot fawn and be a sycophant.” Macdonald was unmoved, and his majority voted Rymal’s seat into oblivion.18
For the photography session that recorded the delegates at Charlottetown, Macdonald crouched casually at the centre of a long line of standing delegates, so the eye was drawn to him automatically. Robert Harris gave him the same central status in the Quebec painting. But despite his important role in both conferences, Macdonald was one delegate among many, and not always in the majority. He had never fought for federalism and did not conceal his conviction that “absolute power … must reside somewhere” (the phrase is Bagehot’s and appears in The English Constitution and several times in the Economist’s articles on confederation, but the opinion was also Macdonald’s). That view was problematical, given the necessity of a federal union. Cartier, Langevin, and the Maritimers had frequently to rein in their colleague’s acknowledged preference for legislative union.
At Quebec, Macdonald argued adroitly and yielded grudgingly, but what made him indispensable was his organizing. Approval by Prince Edward Island had never been essential to confederation, and by the end of the conference George Coles was undisguisedly hostile, yet Mercy Coles’s diary shows Macdonald working relentlessly on the Coles family – and charming Mercy, if not her father. To all the delegates and hangers-on, he seemed endlessly present, more sociable than Brown, more comfortable than Cartier, more at home than any of the Maritimers, more authoritative than anyone.
It seems to have been the same behind the closed doors of the conference. Macdonald did not control even his own delegation, but his skills as an organizer had free rein. Though he made several of the major formal presentations, these were probably less important than his ability to work the room and identify potential coalitions, to draft compromise texts during the recesses, and come back to coax the resisters. For Macdonald, Quebec meant the exercise of these skills in endless days at the conference table, in late nights of resolution-drafting and early-morning briefings, and even in the midst of the lavish hospitality of the conference. His Sunday-night dinner with the Coles family, at which he entertained Mercy Coles “with any amount of small talk,” was almost certainly aimed at softening her father’s stand on the eve of Oliver Mowat’s crucial resolution on provincial powers, and Mercy noted that, at 9:00 p.m., their guest was off to another political soirée. Although Macdonald vanished into a gin bottle as soon as the confederation tour reached Ottawa, even straitlaced Mercy Coles understood.19
In the thirty months between Quebec and the official proclamation of confederation by Queen Victoria, Macdonald’s letterbooks show him relentlessly keeping in touch even with minor players. He maintained a correspondence with Colonel Gray of Prince Edward Island even when the confederation cause was clearly hopeless there. (One letter concluded, “Pray present my best regards to those of the Prince Edward Island delegation whom you may meet, always excepting Messrs Palmer and Coles,” who by then were implacably opposed to confederation. He and Gray even discussed the merits of asking Britain to legislate the Island into confederation against its will.) Macdonald did more than write letters. During the second New Brunswick election, when Leonard Tilley sent his plea for “forty or fifty thousand of the needful” to Macdonald, Macdonald arranged the cash transfer quickly and discreetly.20
When confederation had been ratified by the legislatures at Quebec, Fredericton, and Halifax, one more gathering of convention delegates remained to be held. The delegates moved on to London, this time to supervise the rewriting of Quebec’s seventy-two resolutions into the formal language of a bill for the British Houses of Parliament. The Colonial Office had already assigned legal draftsmen, and the colonial delegates were expected merely to consult on matters of detail and nuance.
Politics had intervened, however. As we have seen, delegates from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick headed for London under instruction to try for “better terms,” and by mid-1866, those from Canada also had a wish list. The Quebec resolutions had made education a provincial responsibility, but sectarian schools that had official status at the time of confederation would be able to seek federal protection against provincial moves to limit or abolish them. The Canadian legislature had failed to pass promised legislation to provide Protestant schools of Quebec the official status they sought. At the insistence of Alexander Galt, the Canadian delegation intended to insert the protection (for minority schools in both Quebec and Ontario) directly into the constitution, despite all the assurances that the Quebec terms were a treaty that could not be amended.
Lord Carnarvon, the young English politician who had just become colonial secretary, wanted nothing to do with colonial controversies. He “proposed” that the delegates should confer among themselves and “narrow their points of difference, if any, to the smallest compass, so as to leave as little as possible for my decision and arbitration.” The London conference proceeded, therefore, in two stages. In December 1866, the delegates negotiated among themselves, working steadily through all seventy-two of the Quebec resolutions. Then the bill itself was drafted early in the new year.21
Reopening the Quebec resolutions was no easy matter. The delegates’ debates at London seem to have been as fractious and free-flowing as at Quebec. Even the degree to which the delegates were free to debate was contentious. Peter Mitchell argued that New Brunswick’s “better terms” resolution empowered them to reopen only the handful of matters that he considered particularly contentious. Charles Fisher, no less dedicated a confederate, retorted that he had heard forty different objections in New Brunswick. He intended to follow his own judgement.22
John W. Ritchie, the new Nova Scotia delegate who had replaced Robert Dickey, said plaintively that “in the legislature of Nova Scotia it was understood that all matters should be entirely open.” William Howland and William McDougall of Upper Canada, however, declared the Canadian legislature had approved the Quebec resolutions and nothing else; their hands were tied, they said. Somehow, the conference permitted this exchange to be summed up with the extraordinarily vague statement that “We are quite free to discuss points as if they were open, although we may be bound to adhere to the Quebec scheme.”23
Hector Langevin had been to both Charlottetown and Quebec and had gone on the tours afterwards. But his letters home suggest how little friendship confederation had created among the men most responsible for making it. McDougall was ambitious but lazy, Langevin wrote, Galt was impetuous and too easily swayed, and Tupper made enemies by his bluntness. Howland was second-rate, and Fisher was mediocre. Among the Maritimers, only Leonard Tilley really impressed him, though he liked McCully and expressed some respect for one or two others. The delegates attended many banquets in London, but the one really sociable moment shared by most of them came in February, when John A. Macdonald married Agnes Bernard, the sister of his long-time aide and conference secretary, Hewitt Bernard.24
Langevin considered himself and Cartier as ranking number two and three among the delegates, but even Cartier now struck him as unreliable. He spent too much time in London’s great society, Langevin thought, leaving Langevin to cover all the details. Langevin spent the conference fearful that, while Cartier caroused, the English and the English Canadians were still plotting to turn confederation into a tightly centralized legislative union. “This has been settled,” he thundered when the form of the Senate came up for debate among the colonial delegates. He wrote to his family that he had to remain constantly alert and combative to protect the interest of French Canada. “I go my own way. When someone wants to block me, I show my teeth and I bite if I have to.” Langevin was determined that the bill would remain substantially unchanged from what had been negotiated at Quebec. “I have had to see it, review it, review it again, and then re-review it whenever anyone else has put their hand to it.”25
Even in the midst of his distrust and frustration, Langevin did not doubt who was number one among the delegates. “Macdonald is a sly fox,” he wrote. “He is well briefed, subtle, adroit, and popular. He is the man of the conference.” At the London conference, there were no more neutral chairmen. The delegates unanimously agreed Macdonald should have the job. Later, as Macdonald increasingly took precedence over him, Cartier would grouse that it was only the accident of being the cabinet member with the greatest seniority that gave Macdonald the right to chair the conference, but political longevity was only one of Macdonald’s qualifications. The delegates had accepted “the ablest man in the province,” in Governor General Monck’s phrase, as first among equals.26
A week into the conference, Macdonald managed to set his hotel room on fire after falling asleep while reading by candlelight, but he carried on despite his serious burns. He steered the discussions, summed up the consensus, and wrote up the resolutions with Hewitt Bernard. The colonists’ meetings wound up on December 24, 1866. Macdonald formally delivered them to the Colonial Office on Christmas Day. Several significant details had been added, but the bargain struck at Quebec two years earlier remained essentially unchanged.
Drafting the bill itself proved as difficult as the negotiations among the colonial delegates. The Colonial Office staff, always dubious about federalism and seemingly oblivious to the hard-fought trade-offs the colonial politicians had made, drafted a bill that recklessly breached the Quebec agreements in order to reinforce the central power. With Langevin hotly suspicious that Macdonald was colluding with the English to further his own centralizing aims, Macdonald supervised the final tense exchanges between the delegates and the British officials. Redrafting went on through January and February of 1867. In the end, the British North America bill went to Parliament with minimal alterations in the colonials’ plan.*
The pressures, deadlines, tensions, and suspicions of the London sessions were a nearly perfect environment for the exercise of Macdonald’s parliamentary skills. Frederic Rogers, the deputy minister at the Colonial Office and a man not much inclined to defer to colonials, paid Macdonald a tribute that was also an acute accounting of his abilities. “Macdonald was the ruling genius and spokesman,” Rogers said of the London conferences,
and I was very much struck by his powers of management and adroitness. The French delegates were keenly on the watch for anything which weakened their securities; on the contrary, the Nova Scotia and New Brunswick delegates were very jealous of concessions to the arrière province; while one main stipulation in favour of the French was open to constitutional objections on the part of the home government. Macdonald had to argue the question with the home government on a point on which the slightest divergence from the narrow line already agreed on in Canada was watched for – here by the English, and there by the French – as eager dogs watch a rat hole; a snap on one side might have provoked a snap on the other; and put an end to all the concord. He stated and argued the case with cool, ready fluency, while at the same time you saw that every word was measured, and that while he was making for a point ahead, he was never for a moment unconscious of the rocks among which he had to steer.27
When the confederation bill was introduced into Parliament, Walter Bagehot declared his approval in the Economist. He thought the new nation should be named “Northland” or “Anglia,” instead of “Canada.” He wondered why a Senate was necessary at all, and he repeated his doubts about federalism. But he declared it a bill with few defects, one that served a good purpose and deserved all-party support in the British Parliament.28
Bagehot’s enthusiastic approval reflected the views he had stated in The English Constitution, which was just about to be published. He saw in the British North America Act the essence of the English constitution, adapted to Canadian conditions. Indeed, his chief complaints involved attempts to include “dignified” holdovers which he thought unnecessary and ill-suited to Canada – like the monarchy.
But these were quibbles. In Bagehot’s view, parliamentary government and presidential government were the pre-eminent alternatives for “government by discussion” – his phrase for the self-government of free peoples. Canadian confederation reassured him that the parliamentary system was not an historical accident unique to Britain. It could indeed be exported to other countries. North America would have more than one form of constitutional liberty from which to choose, said Bagehot, and, as a good freetrader, he was glad to see this competition of alternative modes of government. In the British North America Act, he had foreseen the twentieth-century flourishing of parliamentary government, not only in Britain’s settler colonies, but in nations as diverse as India, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, and Japan.29
John A. Macdonald once said that, until confederation, he never knew what it was to govern. Before then, he had held power for a decade, but always insecurely, and usually as a dependent partner. Despite being so late to convert to confederation, he became its earliest and greatest beneficiary, for it launched his remarkable career as a parliamentary prime minister. After the London conference, he was the inevitable choice to form the new nation’s first government, and the Crown further marked his pre-eminence with a knighthood – to the fury of Cartier and several other coalition partners, who received lesser honours or none at all.
Canadian politics after 1867 provided a wonderful opportunity for Macdonald’s skills as a parliamentary politician. George Brown had left the Canadian coalition in mid-1866 and was eager to restore party politics as soon as possible. But Macdonald, with the levers of power in hand, was steps ahead of him, using the coalition to draw potential rivals into his orbit. Conservative allies like Cartier and Tupper moved readily into national politics, but Macdonald also convinced many of the reformers who had helped define confederation that they had a duty to help run the new country. Nova Scotia’s Adams Archibald, New Brunswick’s Leonard Tilley, and Ontario’s William McDougall helped ensure that Macdonald’s “Liberal–Conservative” party would dominate the first federal Parliament. Brown was left trying to reassemble a reform coalition from disgruntled anti-confederates in Quebec and the Maritimes. In the first federal election, Brown lost to a coalition candidate.
In 1868, Macdonald made perhaps the most extraordinary recruit to his coalition. Joseph Howe was not only a bitter anti-confederate, but also a lifelong reformer and a stern political moralist. When he admitted sadly that there was no future in opposing confederation, it was Tilley of New Brunswick who saw a deal could be made, but it was Macdonald who nailed it down. He happily offered federal funds to Nova Scotia, and in exchange persuaded Howe to join his cabinet. Howe, who had long been seeking a larger stage on which to test his skills, now found it in Ottawa politics, not in the Imperial civil service at London. By recruiting Howe, Macdonald tore the heart out of anti-confederate opposition in Nova Scotia, and strengthened his own party in the process. His Liberal–Conservatives, almost wiped out there in the anti-confederate sweep in 1867, would themselves sweep Nova Scotia in the 1872 election.
Macdonald was proving himself superbly adept at what Bagehot understood as the essential business of a parliamentary leader – putting together parliamentary majorities from the materials at hand, however unlikely. During the confederation debates, Christopher Dunkin had predicted that the great diversity of the new nation would create difficulties in assembling a cabinet backed by a coherent majority. “That cleverest of gentlemen who shall have done this for two or three years running,” he said sarcastically, “had better be sent home to teach Lords Palmerston and Derby their political alphabet. The task will be infinitely more difficult than the task these English statesmen find it none too easy to undertake.” Cartier bobbed up to say he foresaw no difficulty, but it was Macdonald, not Cartier, who surmounted the very real difficulties for a quarter-century. The first time, he seems to have done it while drunk. On June 23, 1867, a week before the first Canadian cabinet was to take office, Alexander Galt wrote to his wife that Macdonald was “in a constant state of partial intoxication” and the coalition was about to break up. But it did not, and Galt accepted office as minister of finance.30
Beneath the recruiting of cabinet colleagues and parliamentary allies, something deeper was going on. Even as he worked to assemble and maintain parliamentary majorities in the way Bagehot would have approved, Macdonald was seeking to build a party system that would free him from endlessly having to coax, cajole, and bully allies and rivals into line behind him. Bagehot could have identified what Macdonald’s intention was. In The English Constitution, Bagehot described one great threat to parliamentary government. A prime minister could, he feared, became so powerful that he did not have to worry about his parliamentary support. Bagehot illustrated the danger with funny stories of one prime minister describing loyal and naive new backbenchers as “the finest brute votes in Europe,” and another leader, confident his caucus would follow him, saying blandly about the problems in a bill he had just introduced: “This is a bad case, an indefensible case. We must apply our majority.” But the problem was serious. Instead of being under perpetual review, Bagehot reasoned, a prime minister who was able to dictate to his caucus would be a president, beyond all control for years at a time.31
Bagehot saw that, if MPS became more loyal to their party than to their constituents and simply voted as their leader told them to, the Commons would be merely a talking shop. This was one of the reasons he feared universal suffrage. “I can think of nothing more corrupting or worse for a set of poor ignorant people than that two combinations of well-taught and rich men should constantly offer to defer to their decision and compete for the office of executing it.” Party caucuses were essential to organize the “big meeting” of parliamentary politics, but Bagehot feared that, if the parties grew too powerful, Parliament would abruptly shift from the efficient to the merely dignified side of the English constitution. There would remain no check on prime ministerial authority.32
Powerful parties were only a remote threat to the gentlemanly politics of Bagehot’s England of “the ten thousand.” Once again, Bagehot might have seen the future in the colonies, for John A. Macdonald was already far ahead of the English theorist.
Macdonald excelled at cabinet-making and the construction of parliamentary caucuses, however temporary and fragile, but presiding over such caucuses was always risky and demanding. There was always the danger that a Robert Dickey would suddenly decide his leader was wrong and refuse to vote with him. In fact, a sudden collapse in parliamentary support had been the almost inevitable fate of British North American leaders before confederation. The fight over confederation itself had caused secure majorities to evaporate beneath both Charles Tupper and Leonard Tilley in 1865. A year later, anti-confederates William Annand and Albert Smith found themselves similarly abandoned. In both Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, backbenchers had instructed their governments not to proceed with confederation, and both governments had meekly submitted. Even in 1866, when Leonard Tilley urged that a hint of Canadian openness to “better terms” would help him in his struggle to regain power in New Brunswick, Macdonald and Cartier could not oblige. The backbenchers of Canada East, said Macdonald, would desert to a man if their leaders deviated from the deal struck at the Quebec conference. The loyalty of Quebec’s bleus had long been exceptional in Canadian politics, yet Hector Langevin had been terrified that the backbenchers would desert Cartier if Quebec’s public opinion, particularly clerical opinion, turned against confederation.
It was little different after confederation. In 1873, it was Macdonald’s turn to suffer the defection of a secure majority. After a hard fight against a fast-rising Liberal Party, Macdonald and his party had won a fifty-seat majority in the 1872 federal elections. Then the newspapers published Macdonald’s secret telegrams (“I must have another ten thousand”), which revealed the victory had been greased by huge cash transfusions Macdonald had received from the financiers who were to get the contract for the transcontinental railway. The “Pacific scandal” erupted.
With a majority, a late-twentieth-century Macdonald would be immune to parliamentary rebuke, and some unelected ethics commissioner would have to tell him to resign. In 1873, however, governments answered to the House of Commons. Conservative backbenchers, disgusted by the revelations or simply fearful of their constituents’ wrath, turned into “loose fish” as the debate raged, and the loose fish soon shoaled towards the opposition. The House decided John A. and his government had become a liability and turned them out of office less than a year after the general election.
When he was tossed from the prime minister’s office, Macdonald avoided being dumped by what remained of his own caucus. To general astonishment, the disgraced leader of 1873 led his party back to power in the 1878 federal election. He would not be defeated again. From 1878 to his death in 1891, even as he was growing into the grand old leader of Canadian politics, Macdonald worked incessantly to reduce his vulnerability to the kind of parliamentary rebuke he had suffered in 1873. He did that by building a disciplined and obedient political party, and he did that mostly by patronage.
“In the distribution of government patronage, we carry out the true constitutional principle: whenever an office is vacant it belongs to the party supporting the government,” Macdonald said unapologetically.33 As prime minister, he supervised the appointment of station-masters, customs officers, and postal clerks, and he never considered this time wasted. He wanted men in every riding who could be trusted to support the party because they owed it for some office or appointment. He called this kind of politics “the long game.” “Depend on it, the long game is the true one,” he declared. His franchise bill of 1885 authorized him to appoint a federal revising officer – a loyal party member appointed by patronage – to supervise federal elections in each riding. Not only could he gerrymander the Liberal Joseph Rymal out of the House, but he could also threaten independent-minded backbenchers of his own party. When the bill went through, Macdonald called it “the greatest triumph of my life.”34 Macdonald was not the only one seeking such triumphs. His old nemesis Oliver Mowat, the Christian statesman, employed the same tools to build a Liberal Party machine in Ontario. “In Ontario there was an ethical line drawn between patronage and corruption,” writes S. J. R. Noel, the historian of Mowat’s party machine, and Mowat walked the line with a clear conscience. Like Macdonald, Mowat insisted there could be no impropriety in patronage, so long as the appointees were competent. With the help of William Preston, a professional organizer with the wonderful nickname “Hug-the-Machine,” Mowat made dozens of Liberal supporters into Ontario government inspectors, agents, trustees, and even rain-gaugers. Faced with temperance demands to control alcohol, Mowat readily agreed that all taverns should be inspected and licensed. The temperance movement was pleased, but so was the party, for every licence inspector appointed was a loyal Grit.35
As the parties grew stronger, few candidates could hope any longer to be elected without the support of these loyal party workers and the party machine. The price of that support was loyalty. Soon, says historian Noel, Mowat “had no need to bargain in the lobbies of the legislature with capricious independents and local patrons who would never lend more than their conditional or nominal support to any leader.”36
Yet even with their machines primed and their caucuses tamed, leaders like Mowat and Macdonald did not enjoy unchallenged authority. Party leadership could still be removed at a moment’s notice. In 1880, Alexander Mackenzie, former prime minister and leader of the Liberal opposition in Ottawa, was abruptly replaced when his backbenchers decided they preferred Edward Blake to lead them. In 1896, the Conservative cabinet forced the resignation of Prime Minister Mackenzie Bowell – “a weak, vain, decent old mediocrity,” in historian Peter Waite’s phrase, which seems to be the kindest thing anyone has said about him – in the hope that Charles Tupper could save them from Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberals. But the era of independent members who could topple a government or unseat a leader was waning. Far-sighted leaders were using the party machines to drain the pool of loose fish.
Disciplined party organizations flexed their muscles in all democratic societies late in the nineteenth century. In Britain, Liberal leader William Gladstone invented “the platform” and began to run national campaigns focused on the leader. Soon the British Labour Party demolished the cosy, gentlemanly politics of “the ten thousand” through national campaigns aimed at the masses of working-class voters who had finally been enfranchised. (Walter Bagehot, who died in 1877, was spared from seeing it.) In Canada, Macdonald’s “National Policy” platform also directed attention away from local candidates to the party and its leader. It was after Macdonald’s death, however, that Canada became unique among parliamentary democracies in the steps it took to reduce the ability of backbenchers to influence their leaders.
In 1919, the Liberal Party, split by the conscription crisis of 1917 and left leaderless by the death of Wilfrid Laurier, turned a policy conference it had planned into a leadership convention. William Lyon Mackenzie King wrapped himself in the mantle of Laurier, won the race, and became the first Canadian party leader chosen by a party convention rather than by the parliamentary caucus. The party hailed the convention that chose Mackenzie King as a great advance over the older method, and every other party followed its example. Since 1919, federal and provincial parties in Canada have chosen their leaders in mass party gatherings.*
Canadians have celebrated leadership conventions as a way to let the people participate directly in government, and the selection process has expanded steadily. Instead of being gatherings of a few hundred, dominated by the party brass, conventions came to involve thousands of delegates choosing among candidates who spent millions of dollars on elaborate media campaigns. In the 1980s, the parties began to abandon conventions themselves in favour of even more broadly based processes, in which a hundred thousand or more party members could cast leadership ballots.
Canadian politicians and analysts have always identified mass membership participation in the choice of party leaders as a triumph of democracy. The cost, barely noticed, was the abrupt loss of what little influence elected members of Parliament still had over their leaders. Mackenzie King understood his new authority perfectly. He never sent his cabinet colleagues to the penitentiary, but he sometimes kept their signed resignation letters on file, and he used one when his defence minister tried to stand up to him in the conscription crisis of 1944. King emphasized to his caucus as often as necessary that, since it could not challenge his leadership, it could not challenge his policies. He represented the party and was answerable to it, not to them, and he controlled his MPS ruthlessly.
Being “answerable” to the party was no great burden to King; the Liberal Party did not meet again in convention until he chose to retire in 1948. King had made “Parliament will decide” his maxim, and he trotted it out whenever he wished to avoid a decision. He knew that, so long as his party won the general elections, Parliament would decide what he told it to. Since the other parties still acted as if Parliament was the essential forum, King’s Liberal Party enjoyed remarkable success for a generation. Macdonald would have admired, and envied.
King actually had substantial parliamentary skills and might have prospered as a party leader answerable to caucus. John Diefenbaker was the first Canadian to become a party leader and a prime minister on the strength of a “grass-roots” leadership campaign. Sweeping to the leadership of his party and then the country on the strength of his personal appeal to voters. Diefenbaker soon demonstrated his inability to work within the machinery of parliamentary government. Since his cabinet and caucus had no authority to challenge him, Diefenbaker’s party was thrown into years of turmoil when he refused to relinquish the party leadership, even in defeat.
Still, the principle that Canadian party leaders should be immune to parliamentary control survived. In 1988, when the opposition Liberal caucus members in Ottawa had the same kind of dissatisfaction with their leader as their ancestors had felt with Alexander Mackenzie in 1880, a majority of them signed a declaration that John Turner must resign. Unlike Mackenzie, however, Turner could defy the members of Parliament. Claiming “democratic legitimacy,” because he had been chosen by a leadership convention, Turner obliged the dissident majority to recant. Turner led his party into the 1988 election and resigned only after the party’s defeat.
The independence of Canadian party leaders has been most spectacularly underlined in provincial, rather than national, politics. William Vander Zalm, elected premier of British Columbia soon after winning a leadership convention in 1986, ran an erratic one-man government that alienated many of his cabinet and caucus members, few of whom had wanted him as leader. As he became mired in scandals in 1991 and fell precipitously in the polls, virtually all wanted rid of him. All accepted, however, that Vander Zalm was not answerable to them. They dutifully supported him in office until a conflict-of-interest commissioner (an unelected civil servant personally appointed by the premier) told Vander Zalm he must go. Almost all his party’s elected members lost their seats in the election that followed.
By the late twentieth century, it had become understood in Canadian politics that backbenchers were responsible to their leaders, rather than vice versa, even when blind allegiance ensured their imminent defeat. This faith in the leader’s unlimited authority was as strong in new “grass-roots” parties as in established ones, and it was accepted in regional blocs as well as national parties. Even the occasional proposals to “strengthen” Parliament, usually by encouraging party leaders to “allow” more “free” votes on matters of limited importance to them, confirmed the absolute power of leaders over their followers’ votes. By the time Pierre Trudeau joked that members of Parliament were nobodies fifty yards from the House of Commons, it was unclear why he would invoke the fifty-yard rule.* In the name of participatory democracy, the elected representatives of the Canadian people had become the only individuals in the country without any political opinions of their own.
When general elections in Canada cost $100 million, almost all of it funnelled through the political parties (heavily subsidized by taxpayers), virtually no one could be elected except on the parties’ terms, and most proposals to change the system, through proportional representation and “recall” initiatives, for instance, were aimed at weakening individual members even more. In other countries with parliamentary governments, the power of political parties – and their leaders – had also expanded greatly. But from Australia to Japan, and almost everywhere else that the parliamentary system endured, elected representatives still retained a veto over party leadership and party policy.
Bob Hawke launched his career as the most successful prime minister of recent Australian history in 1983 when the Australian Labour Party caucus, worried about its electoral chances, dumped its leader and chose Hawke in a hastily convened meeting on the day the Conservative government called a federal election. Hawke went on to win the election and to dominate Australian politics for a decade. In 1992, however, the caucus that had chosen him decided on the eve of another election that Hawke, the sitting prime minister, had become a liability. Leading the challenge to Hawke was Paul Keating, a rival who had left Hawke’s cabinet to contest the leadership from the backbenches. Even though Australia was much less regionally diverse than Canada, Hawke and Keating fought their battle by seeking support from the powerful regional blocs within the Labour Party caucus. Keating won. He replaced Hawke as party leader and prime minister, and defied the polls by leading Labour to an upset majority victory.
In New Zealand, it was policy struggles that fuelled leadership battles. In the 1980s, David Lange’s opposition to nuclear testing in the South Pacific made him perhaps the only world-renowned prime minister New Zealand ever had. But as New Zealand’s deficit worsened, Lange and his finance minister became embroiled in economic policy disputes. Unable to hold his caucus’s support on a matter of fundamental party policy, Lange was bounced from the party leadership and the prime ministership.
The most famous beneficiary and victim of caucus control over parliamentary leadership was British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. As a woman and as a politician with a combative personality and strong policy views, Thatcher was the kind of candidate who could never have won a leadership convention. Caucus colleagues identified her leadership potential, and their support enabled her to depose an incumbent leader and go on to lead the British Conservative Party to three consecutive election victories. Then, while Thatcher was still at the peak of her influence as a world leader, her caucus dumped her as swiftly and ruthlessly as it had chosen her. By then, the British Labour Party had moved to the Canadian system of letting the party at large select party leaders. Its leader, Neil Kinnock, was described by veteran British political commentator Peter Jenkins as the kind of leader “who could not conceivably have come to the fore” except by leadership convention.38 Against him, Thatcher’s replacement, John Major, won an upset victory.
The crisis that had provoked Britain’s Conservative Party caucus to depose a sitting prime minister was a deeply unpopular new tax, the “poll tax.” Prime Minister Thatcher had been determined to implement it in defiance of the public mood, even though most of her backbenchers feared it would make their re-election impossible. Deposing Thatcher enabled the backbenchers to kill the poll tax, and enough of them survived the ensuing election to keep the Conservatives in power. Their aim was saving their seats, that is, but the result was that a prime minister with a majority government had been prevented from implementing an unpopular policy.
Almost simultaneously, the Canadian prime minister, Brian Mulroney, introduced his own unpopular taxation measure, the Goods and Services Tax. It, too, helped provoke a disastrous slide in party popularity, but Mulroney’s backbenchers understood they had no right to interfere in either policy issues or party leadership. They dutifully voted to impose the new tax. Mulroney retired at a time of his own choosing. His hapless backbenchers, obliged to defend the new tax under a new leader chosen by a leadership convention, suffered annihilation in the 1993 election.
John A. Macdonald was joking – and understood to be joking – when he told Robert Dickey he wanted backbenchers who would support him even when they thought he was wrong. Macdonald would have enjoyed such support, and he worked diligently to bring about a rough approximation of it. But he never lived in an era of absolute party leaders. He was a brilliant parliamentary leader because his prime ministership was always subject, not only to ratification at general elections, but also to constant, critical, informed parliamentary review of a kind his late-twentieth-century successors never had to fear. That is, Macdonald as prime minister was responsible to a parliamentary majority – rather than it being responsible to him.
This reflection on parliamentary leadership in a book about the making of confederation in the 1860s has seemed worthwhile because the changed nature of leadership has constitutional significance. Despite the late-twentieth-century consensus that confederation was imposed by an undemocratic and anti-democratic élite, confederation in the 1860s was not a prime ministerial measure. It was not a party measure. It was not a cabinet measure. It was, above all, a legislative measure.
In order to woo sceptical, independent-minded legislators, confederation’s advocates in 1864 had been obliged to recruit bipartisan delegations. These delegations engaged in heated debates on the way to a consensus they thought might win the support of their legislative colleagues, even though several of the delegates, as well as most of the excluded political factions, continued to dissent. The confederation proposals that emerged at the conferences were vigorously tested in all the legislatures, in debates that were listened to because every legislator was potentially a recruit to either side. “Loose fish” did triumph over party leaders, at least temporarily, in all four Atlantic provinces. They did not in either Canada West or Canada East, but they could have if confederation had not satisfied them, and leaders like Hector Langevin feared that they might.
The ratification of confederation in British North America between 1864 and 1867 was a deeply imperfect process. An electoral system that excluded women for their gender and men for their lack of property was far too narrowly based. Substantial, politically active minorities, such as the Acadians of New Brunswick and the Catholics of several provinces, were shockingly under-represented in the process. Aboriginal nations and racial minorities such as black and Chinese Canadians were almost completely disenfranchised. All parties applied crude and gamy techniques of persuasion to legislators and voters alike, and the system provided few opportunities for redress. No one spoke of a charter of rights.
Nevertheless, amidst the heated battles, the furious allegations, and the deep-rooted opposition that confederation provoked during the 1860s, the Canadian constitution that came into effect on July 1, 1867, had been judged – and finally endorsed – by legislatures of elected representatives who maintained substantial independence from, and ultimately a veto upon, the governments that were responsible to them. Doubts, resentments, and even deep opposition remained. But the process by which the new constitution had been negotiated and ratified had conferred on it a legitimacy that was celebrated by its supporters, acknowledged grudgingly by opponents, and – above all – generally accepted by the Canadian population that would begin to govern itself under it.
Superficially, constitution-makers had things much easier in the 1980s and 1990s. To produce the British North America Act for five small colonies with barely three-and-a-half-million people in the 1860s, thirty-six mutually hostile and politically diverse delegates had to engage in weeks of intense negotiation, and their draft agreement was subjected to two years of vigorous, open-ended, and unpredictable legislative debate. By comparison, the Meech Lake accord of 1987, drafted by lawyers and bureaucrats, required barely a day of discussion by the first ministers – the famous “eleven white men in a room.” Slated for ratification by docile legislatures almost entirely subservient to executive control, it was derailed almost by accident. The patriation round of 1981 had been similarly exclusive, and Quebec in particular never accepted the legitimacy of the process, which produced what came to be known as “the Trudeau constitution.” The process leading to the Charlottetown accord of 1992 included more public comment, but its final terms were once more a matter of executive decree. The 1992 referendum, in which voters were invited either to ratify the accord or be held liable for the destruction of the country, reflected the widespread belief that “democracy” and “direct democracy” were the same thing – and Parliament largely irrelevant. Though it ignited passionate debate among Canadians, the referendum was a very limited substitute for genuinely representative scrutiny of the terms of the deal.
In the late twentieth century, Canada continued to govern itself through parliamentary forms. But the long quest for more “direct” participation in government had – paradoxically – conferred enormous power upon first ministers. It was not that the politicians sought to be dictators. They submitted to leadership conventions, fought election campaigns, occasionally held referendums, and followed the polls devoutly. But they and their advisors made constitutions in a vacuum, because the only ongoing, effective control upon them – control by legislatures – had largely ceased to operate. Parliament no longer provided a forum in which elected representatives could test and potentially reject executive initiatives. Except for the election-night tallying of which party leader controlled the most seats and would become prime minister, a seat in the Commons had become largely ceremonial. Dignity was not a word much associated with late-twentieth-century Canadian parliaments and parliamentarians, but Walter Bagehot would have said that they had indeed shifted from the efficient to the dignified side of the constitution.
Would John A. Macdonald, that connoisseur of power, have envied the vast freedom conferred upon his successors as prime ministers and premiers? Perhaps not. Macdonald, like all the confederation-makers, had undergone his apprenticeship to politics in the moment when “responsible government” was shiny, fresh, and new. He wielded executive power ruthlessly when he could, and he always sought to maximize it. But in his day, elected legislators had only recently wrested power from unelected, arbitrary executives. They guarded their new responsibility jealously, and they used it both to make or unmake governments and to veto or ratify policies. No policy could achieve legitimacy without their consent. In nineteenth-century Canada, the great convenience of ruling by executive decree was understood to be cancelled out by its lack of legitimacy – as Oliver Mowat demonstrated to Macdonald so convincingly in the fight over the power of disallowance. By the late twentieth century, that understanding had largely been lost.
The wrenching and potentially disastrous inability of the Canadian political system to reform the British North America Act in the late twentieth century has long seemed to be a challenge to draft the right “deal.” Assessed from the perspective of the 1860s, it seems more precisely a problem of how to assess and legitimize deals, a problem of parliamentary government.
* The two men met at least once. During a dinner party in England, probably after confederation, Macdonald remarked that he thought Bagehot the best authority on the British constitution. “I am glad to hear you say that,” said his left-hand neighbour, “for I am Mr Bagehot.” Given what is known of both men, it is quite possible that Macdonald knew exactly who his left-hand neighbour was, and that Bagehot would have guessed that he knew.
* Beset by ministerial scandals late in his career, Macdonald was unamused by the opposition member who suggested his cabinet now met all his requirements – except the respectability.
* The main change the British insisted on was a provision to further weaken the Senate by authorizing the cabinet to appoint extra senators in the event of a deadlock between Senate and House. The delegates consented, but insisted that the extra appointments must preserve the sectional balances they had established. This power was never needed until 1990, when extra senators were appointed to pass the Goods and Services Tax bill, which had been rejected by an opposition-dominated Senate.
* It is an odd – and unstudied – coincidence that the power of leadership selection was removed from MPs within a year of women achieving the right to vote and to participate in selecting MPs. Despite their newly won right to vote, women did not participate in the Liberal leadership convention of 1919. Conventions remained deeply hostile to female participation as late as 1976, when (according to her biographer) gender prejudice was a key factor that undermined Flora MacDonald’s campaign for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party.
*In The English Constitution, Bagehot quoted the comment of a friend elected to a genuinely powerful parliament: “I got into Parliament and before I had taken my seat I had become somebody.”37