Nation and Crown
THOMAS D’ARCY McGee, who turned forty in 1865, was a small, ugly, charming Irish-Catholic journalist with a complicated past. He had been an Irish rebel who recanted, a patriotic American who grew disillusioned, an anti-clerical who had made his peace with the Catholic Church, a reformer who had gone over to John A. Macdonald, and a teetotaller given to alcoholic binges. (Macdonald once instructed him he would have to quit drinking; the cabinet did not have room for two drunks.) In 1857 he had settled in Montreal, launched a newspaper, and got himself into the legislature. His constituents, Montreal’s Irish, were a narrow and not always secure power base, but McGee was funny, quick-witted, and a natural orator. He soon became popular in the House, and a prominent, more than a powerful, figure in Canadian affairs.
McGee was barely off the train from Boston in 1857 when he began advocating federal union, westward expansion, and the nurturing of a national literature for Canada. “A new nationality” became his platform and slogan. McGee had good reason to seek a nation. He despaired of Ireland, was an alien in Britain, and resented American intolerance of foreigners and Catholics. He was also a journalist, but unlike George Brown, the millionaire publisher of the Globe, or Edward Whelan, who was at least solidly established in his Charlottetown newspaper, McGee always scrambled to make a living. The national vision became a valuable stock in trade.
McGee travelled widely in British North America. With help from railway barons who had their own reasons to encourage such visions, he organized intercolonial good-will trips for politicians and public figures. By 1865, he had been to Atlantic Canada seven or eight times, when many Canadians were still asking him, “What kind of people are they?” Though he had never gone west of Canada West, McGee even outlined a plan for a separate province to be set aside for the native nations on the plains of the far North-West. He had begun to imagine a new country where none existed.
It was a vision upon which he launched many articles and speeches. Amid the tension of the confederation debate in the Parliament of the united Canadas early in 1865, McGee was the first speaker to make the House laugh. It was a feat he achieved consistently in that speech and throughout his public career, but he was just as adept at rolling, patriotic oratory. “I see in the not remote distance,” he declared in 1860, when there was no serious prospect of British North American union, “one great nationality bound, like the shield of Achilles, by the blue rim of ocean.… I see within the ground of that shield the peaks of the western mountains and the crests of the eastern waves.” In the confederation debate, he celebrated the beauty of the Canadian land, rejoiced that confederation would elevate “the provincial mind” to nobler contests, and welcomed the advent of “a new and vigorous nationality.”1
McGee’s passionate Canadianism – “not French-Canadian, not British-Canadian, not Irish-Canadian; patriotism rejects the prefix” – disquieted listeners for whom the prefixes defined patriotism. But “a new nationality” had gone into the language. McGee modestly disclaimed sole credit for the phrase (It’s always the same, he told the House: “Two people hit upon the same thought, but Shakespeare made use of it first”), but it popped up in many celebratory speeches during the 1860s. Anticipation of a “new nationality” was even written into the Throne Speech that Governor General Lord Monck read to the legislature at Quebec on the eve of the great debate on the Quebec resolutions – inspiring the rouges’ clever amendment, proclaiming that they were too loyal to want such a thing.
Bleu supporters of the coalition defeated Dorion’s amendment, and their unanimity was an early indication that they would not be swayed by attacks on the Quebec resolutions, but they did not much like doing it. McGee defended his phrase, and Macdonald made a point of using “the expression which was sneered at the other evening.” But George-Étienne Cartier was careful to say that confederation would create “a political nationality,” and he went on to stress that “the idea of unity of races was utopian – it was impossible. Distinctions of this kind would always appear.… In our own federation we should have Catholic and Protestant, French, English, Irish and Scotch, and each by his efforts and his success would increase the prosperity and glory of the new confederacy.”2
Cartier was glad to escape from awkward questions of nationality to the safer ground of monarchy. He celebrated the benefits of monarchical rule and French Canada’s love of monarchy. “If they had their institutions, their language, and their religion intact today, it was precisely because of their adherence to the British Crown,” he said. Confederation had been made, he said, “with a view of perpetuating the monarchical element.… the monarchical principle would form the leading feature.” In the Nova Scotia legislature, Charles Tupper said something similar, covering his declaration that the colonies should “advance to a more national position” with assurances that confederation would bind the new nation to the British Crown “by a more indissoluble tie than ever before existed.”3
McGee, for all his celebration of the Canadian land and the Canadian nationality, took the same stand. “We need in these provinces, we can bear, a large infusion of authority,” he said, and he wound up his speech in direct address to Queen Victoria: “Whatsoever charter, in the wisdom of Your Majesty and of your Parliament you give us, we shall loyally obey and fulfill it as long as it is the pleasure of Your Majesty and your successors to maintain the connection between Great Britain and these colonies.” Such frankly deferential talk was as common in confederation speeches as talk of the new nationality.4
It too had its pitfalls. Confronted with it, Dorion smoothly shifted his line of attack to declare that confederation’s advocates were reactionary tories, who “think the hands of the Crown should be strengthened and the influence of the people, if possible, diminished, and this constitution is a specimen of their handiwork.” A Halifax newspaper put the same thought more vividly after the Charlottetown conference. When the delegates let their secrets out of the bag, said the Acadian Recorder, their constitution would prove to be “a real sleek constitutional, monarchical, unrepublican, aristocratic cat.”5
This view of confederation – something imposed on cringing colonial Canadians by the reactionary local agents of Imperial dictate – became part of the late-twentieth-century consensus, much more than the confederation-makers’ talk of a new nationality. The political scientist Peter Russell opened his survey of Canadian constitutional history, Constitutional Odyssey, by quoting a piously deferential Canadian declaration that confederation would “not profess to be derived from the people but would be the constitution provided by the imperial parliament.” Taking the statement at face value, Russell identified the 1867 constitution as an Imperial and monarchical imposition. It could not be considered a legitimate beginning for a sovereign community, Russell concluded. Like many theorists and politicians, he declared this failing made the work of the original constitution-makers irrelevant, deserving of the neglect lavished upon it.6
Walter Bagehot, who sometimes enjoyed playing the plain journalist taking the mickey out of rarefied theorists, might have enjoyed seizing on lines like these. In parliamentary government, Bagehot had insisted, monarchy was always part of the “dignified,” that is, ceremonial side of the constitution. Beneath the trappings of monarchy and aristocracy, which could mislead even the wisest scholars, political power in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, and even more in British North America, was securely in the hands of the representatives of the people. The confederation-makers knew that worshipful addresses to Victoria lent dignity to their business, but they also knew power lay elsewhere. Britain and British North America were disguised republics – in disguise certainly, but certainly republics, if republic meant a government derived from the people.
Bagehot understood as soon as he looked at the Quebec resolutions that the Senate and the governor general were going to be largely powerless in the new Canadian confederation. Dignified for ceremonial purposes they might be, but real power would rest securely in a Canadian House of Commons, elected to represent the Canadian people on a franchise as wide as any then existing in the world. The role of the monarchy was even more illusory. Bagehot did not take seriously the confederation-makers’ florid assertions of loyalty and devotion.
In The English Constitution, Bagehot had argued that, although the monarchy was integral to British society and tradition, it was not essential to parliamentary government itself. In his confederation editorials, which welcomed the rise of an independent nationality in Canada, he doubted whether Canada needed a monarchy at all. He even suggested that the confederation-makers were not entirely sincere in proposing one. “We are not quite certain this extra and, so to speak, ostentatious display of loyalty was not intended to remove objections which might have been entertained at home,” he said of the monarchical clauses of the Quebec resolutions.7
Bagehot was wrong to suspect the confederation-makers were insincere about the monarchy. But he would certainly have been right to mock the idea that confederation had been made by Imperial dictate. As late as 1841, Britain had imposed a made-in-London constitution on the mostly unwilling colonists of Upper and Lower Canada. But in 1862, with responsible government firmly established, the colonial minister informed the colonies that, if they worked out a plan of union, Parliament would pass it. When the colonies took up the offer in 1864, the constitution that emerged was indeed what McGee called it: “a scheme not suggested by others, or imposed upon us, but one the work of ourselves, the creation of our intellect and of our own free, unbiased, and untrammelled will.” By “us,” he meant the legislatures representing the people of British North America.8
The confederation deal hammered out by the British North Americans in conference had appalled most of the British colonial officials involved with it. Lacking parliamentary experience, lieutenant-governors like Gordon of New Brunswick and MacDonell of Nova Scotia never fully grasped the compromises that had produced the Quebec resolutions. When the Colonial Office requested clause-by-clause comments on the resolutions, they responded with contemptuous disapproval, demanding an assertion of central power on virtually every point. Officials in London were frequently just as obtuse about the political realities that made federal union a necessity. Expecting deference, not direction, from colonials, they largely ignored the elaborate division of powers worked out in the Quebec resolutions when they began to draft a text for the British North America bill.9
Fortunately, British politicians were more realistic. Colonial Office functionaries could still imagine they were administering an empire in North America, but British politicians understood that trying to intervene in Canadian domestic politics meant responsibility without power. Even on a constitutional measure that required action by the British Parliament, they avoided any policy commitment that was not endorsed by the colonial legislatures themselves. The British government formally accepted the Quebec plan for confederation, not merely as advice, but as “the deliberate judgment of those best qualified to decide upon the subject.” Bagehot approved. “It is not, that we know of, the duty of Parliament to see that its colonial allies choose constitutions such as Englishmen approve,” he said of the Quebec resolutions (though in this case, he did approve and thought Parliament also would).10
When Britain’s Liberal government collapsed in mid-1866, the outgoing colonial minister, Edward Cardwell, left two questions for his successor. First, could they draft a confederation bill that would get through Parliament quietly, without partisan division? More important, if the staff could draft such a bill, would the provinces accept the text? “This is of cardinal importance,” emphasized Cardwell about the second point. His Conservative successor, the thirty-five-year-old aristocrat Lord Carnarvon, agreed. Like his officials, he thought power in the new state ought to be centralized at Ottawa as much as possible. But he understood changes in that direction were possible “only with the acquiescence of the delegates … this must depend upon them.” Both ministers overruled their advisers to endorse the colonials’ choices. When Governor MacDonell of Nova Scotia proved intransigent, he was transferred to Hong Kong, glad to be off to a colony where he could actually wield power. Gordon of New Brunswick held his job only by shelving his doubts about confederation.11
George Brown, who went to Britain after the Quebec conference to sound out British reaction, wrote back to John A. Macdonald that the British government might criticize a few details of the seventy-two resolutions, but only for the sake of appearances. “I do not doubt that if we insist on it, they will put through the scheme just as we ask it.” Canadian politicians of the 1860s may have been more polite than Pierre Trudeau, who suggested that, since his patriation package had been ratified in Canada, the British Parliament should hold its nose and pass it. But British and Canadian politicians agreed in the 1860s that the political relationship was much the same.12
The bill drafted early in 1867 sailed through the Lords and Commons. Britain had been looking forward to British North American union for years, and there was no party division over its terms. This proved fortunate, since the British government was close to collapse in bitter debates about expanding the franchise, and no contentious measure could have passed. Lord Carnarvon, indeed, resigned from cabinet early in March 1867 to protest a bill that would give British men voting rights approaching those long enjoyed by men in British North America, but a new minister shepherded his confederation bill through to the final vote on March 12. Queen Victoria granted the royal assent to the British North America Act on March 29, 1867.
The confederation bill passed so speedily that some of its makers were discomfited. They noticed that even a measure concerning dog licences, introduced in the Commons after second reading of the British North America Act, provoked livelier debate. Macdonald later complained that confederation was treated like “a private bill uniting two or three English parishes,” but he would not have tolerated changes to his bill, and British MPs were unlikely to waste time simply dignifying the passage of a bill when their only function was to approve it.13
Parliament’s refusal to heed the Nova Scotian anti-confederates permanently disillusioned Joseph Howe about British Imperial guardianship of small colonies like his, and his associate William Garvie fumed about the measure being rushed through with lazy contempt. But even sympathetic British politicians agreed that the British Parliament had, as Carnarvon said, no business considering private petitions asking it to overrule the Nova Scotia legislature. In any case, most Britons thought they were creating a union in which Howe’s dissidents were an insignificant minority. Bagehot dismissed Nova Scotian opposition with the cool disdain of someone at the centre of a centralized state. Nova Scotia’s dissidents, he said, “must perforce give way. For purposes like these, the four provinces … must be taken to be one, and in that view the federation has been voted in … by 3,800,000 to 200,000. No plebiscitum has ever been more free or more decisive.” The discontented Nova Scotians, he said, “must now content themselves like the discontented Scotch, by using the new resources the loss of their isolation will assure them.” Successful Canadian politicians, already learning about regional sensitivities in a federal state, would have been unlikely to express such a view so bluntly.*
British leaders accepted that they would be obliged to protect British North America if it were threatened, but they were ready to consider granting Canada outright independence if the colonists insisted on it. The confederation-makers, however, were so absolutely sincere in desiring both a monarchy and continued ties to Britain that British observers were struck by the “excessive timidity” with which British North America advanced toward its inevitable independence. Political independence and the “new nationality” somehow lived in harmony with monarchical deference.
They did so because the politicians who negotiated the Quebec resolutions were determined to preserve the pomp and dignity of a constitution modelled on Britain’s – and equally determined that having one would not fetter their actions. Bagehot’s distinction between the dignified and efficient aspects of parliamentary government had not entered the vocabulary of politics in 1864, but the concept was no mystery to the seasoned parliamentarians who gathered at Quebec. Once they established that the efficient (that is, the power-wielding) parts of confederation were securely in parliamentary hands, they could see nothing but benefits in the dignified aspects Britain could provide in abundance. They were eager to remain loyal subjects of Queen Victoria’s Empire, even when there was no pressure on them to remain, even when some in Britain thought they should be striking out on their own.
The confederation-makers of the 1860s had many reasons to avoid challenging the new nation’s place in the old Empire, and also one hard, realistic, positive reason to embrace the Empire. In the 1860s, Canada needed Britain, needed it much more than Britain needed Canada. Canadian development depended on British capital, often supported by British government guarantees. Canadian exports depended on access to British markets, assisted by Britain’s maternal attitude. Above all, Canada was a small nation sharing a large continent with a huge neighbour, and that meant it needed to shelter under both the military force and the diplomatic influence that only Britain could provide.
D’Arcy McGee caught this sense in his confederation speech. There had always been a desire among the Americans for expansion, he said, “and the inexorable law of democratic existence” in the United States seemed to require appeasing that desire. “They coveted Florida, and seized it; they coveted Louisiana, and purchased it; they coveted Texas, and stole it, and then they picked a quarrel with Mexico, which ended by their getting California. They sometimes pretend to despise these colonies as prizes beneath their ambition; but had we not had the strong arm of England over us, we should not now have had a separate existence.” If you seek reasons for confederation under the Crown, he had said earlier, look to the embattled valleys of Virginia, “and you will find reasons as thick as blackberries.”14
Confederation should have given McGee scope to develop his entwined themes of nation and Empire. Though he was elected to the first House of Commons, he preferred the power of the pen over an uncertain future in politics, and Macdonald promised him a civil-service sinecure from which he could write on Canadian history and literature. But McGee’s insistence, even in Ireland itself, that the Irish must abandon republican violence in favour of a constitutional solution modelled on Canada’s, had made enemies. Ten months after confederation, Irish terrorists stalked him as he left a late-night session of Parliament and shot him dead at the door of his rooming house on Sparks Street. McGee’s death, coming just months after that of Ned Whelan, the other gifted writer among the makers of confederation, ended the likelihood that any of them would write a substantial account of it from the inside.
The Fenian raids into British North America during 1866 had strengthened McGee’s argument that the Canadian nation needed the British Empire to resist the American threat. Confederation’s propagandists had exploited the raids to the hilt. But the American threat went far beyond the comic-opera Fenian attacks or even the more disquieting, but still unlikely, danger of an American invasion. In the Quebec resolutions, the confederation-makers had proclaimed their ambition to annex the North-West, incorporate British Columbia, and build a transcontinental nation. To become practical possibilities, all those ambitions required American acquiescence and British support.
Just two years after confederation, it was British military muscle that would enable Canada to put armed force behind its negotiations with Louis Riel and the provisional government of Red River over Manitoba’s entry into confederation. W. L. Morton, the most geopolitically sensitive of confederation’s historians, long ago identified the bargain being made when Britain withdrew its Canadian garrisons in 1871. Britain was using confederation to disclaim a military presence in North America, confirming that it – and Canada – would not challenge American pre-eminence on the continent. On those terms, the Americans accepted the existence of a transcontinental Canada. It was a subtle enough bargain, with British disengagement as a bargaining chip to offer in exchange for American agreement not to seek the whole continent. Canada’s unilateral abandonment of the British alliance would not have strengthened its position in negotiation with its neighbour.
If Canada had somehow been cut loose from Britain’s Empire in 1867, it might indeed have survived. With good fortune and American restraint, it might even have achieved its westward expansion. Bagehot breezily concluded in 1867 that, if Canada became wholly independent, merely twenty years of growth would render it able to stand on its own feet, impervious to any American military threat. With or without British support, capital would have come, export markets would have been found. Canada would have developed foreign policies, armed forces, and other attributes of sovereignty merely at a more accelerated pace than it actually did.
But Canadian leaders had to contemplate those twenty years. No Canadian leader was willing to ask Britain to cut ties that would have been cut upon request. In the 1860s, Canada wanted the symbols of monarchy and Empire not least because it urgently needed the benefits of alliance with the most powerful state in the world. In 1864, when he was arguing that the colonies must unite to defend themselves better, George-Étienne Cartier said it was a good question whether Britain would fight to help Canada, and a few years later a British statesman doubted whether the colonials would ever fight for Britain in a European war. In fact, the British did accept that, if Canada needed protection, national honour would compel a British response, even at the risk of a nightmare war with the United States. By 1918, sixty thousand Canadian war graves proved the commitment cut both ways, but in the 1860s, Canada needed that alliance far more than Britain did.
There was no debate about monarchy and Empire in the 1860s, because there were almost no voices arguing against them. Financially, economically, politically, culturally, militarily, London was the capital of the world in the mid-nineteenth century, even more than Washington and New York were in the late twentieth. Even Antoine-Aimé Dorion and George-Étienne Cartier could speak unselfconsciously of “home” when they spoke of England. Joseph Howe in his anti-confederate phase did his best to suggest Nova Scotians were choosing between “London under the dominion of John Bull” and “Ottawa under the dominion of Jack Frost,” but the confederation-makers assiduously avoided forcing such a choice. Instead, Charles Tupper cited the Maritime provinces’ chronic lack of influence in London to prove that “if these comparatively small countries are to have any future whatever in connection with the Crown of England, it must be found in a consolidation of all British North America.”15
The alliance with Britain, so tangible, so “efficient,” in the 1860s, had by the mid-twentieth century dwindled to nothing but dignified traditions. There had been a moment around 1900 when English-Canadian “Imperial federationists” aspired to share in running the British Empire, but Britain’s long decline from Imperial might gradually took away most of the benefits the Imperial alliance had offered Canada in 1860 or 1900. Canada and Britain had clearly grown into foreign countries. Incorporating another country’s monarchy in its constitution was vastly more anomalous in the 1990s than it had been in the 1860s.
As Walter Bagehot grasped, and the experience of many nations has shown, parliamentary democracy thrives without monarchy. In Canada, an elected governor general, holding the same limited powers as the appointed one, would be more legitimate both in the exercise of those powers in a constitutional emergency and as a Canadian symbol around which the meaning of Canadian nationality could continue to be debated. The inability of modern constitutional negotiators to discuss the head of state surely indicated their inability to respond to Canada’s actual situation. A constitutional process that imitated the 1860s by including representatives of all shades of political opinion and by giving them time to debate the issues would surely find that issue arising, among many others. A constitutional process that debated such issues would gain legitimacy whatever it decided.
The monarchy helped the confederation-makers to bypass potentially awkward issues of the “nationality” of the societies being joined by the British North America Act. Nationalism was one of the defining concepts of the nineteenth century, but allegiance to monarchy allowed McGee to boast of a nation even as Cartier and Langevin emphasized that confederation did not require a single tribal nationality. Allegiance, however, was sharply separated from the exercise of sovereign power. Before and after 1867, the confederation-makers consistently identified the legislatures elected by the people as the legitimate source of political authority. Cartier carefully called that “political nationality,” and no threat to the French-Canadian nation he represented, but McGee could still frame the question of national allegiance in terms that resonated with men from whom “manliness” was always a vital touchstone. “For what do good men fight?” he asked the legislature. “When I hear our young men say as proudly ‘our federation’ or ‘our country’ or ‘our kingdom,’ as the young men of other countries do, speaking of their own, then I shall have less apprehension for the result of whatever trials the future may have in store for us.”16
On the eve of July 1, 1867, George Brown sat in the Globe offices in Toronto, back in his favourite role, writing for the newspaper. They were finishing the Dominion Day edition, and Brown wanted the front page for a long article. Maurice Careless captured the scene in his biography. He evoked Brown scribbling relentlessly through the hot night, sweating and gulping down pitchers of water and steadily handing out pages for the typesetters. He continued to write as the harassed night foreman warned that the mail train that would deliver the paper to eastern Ontario would soon be leaving. But the deadline for the eastern mail was missed, and then for the western mail, too. Then “Mr. Brown, all the mails are lost,” but Brown kept demanding a little more time. He ignored the pealing church bells at midnight, and he ignored the roar of artillery at dawn. Early in the morning, celebrating crowds gathered on King Street for a copy of the historic edition, and Brown was still writing. Finally, about seven in the morning, Brown declared, “There’s the last of it.” He handed over the final sheet of a nine-thousand-word history of confederation and went home to bed.17
Careless’s evocation of the article’s creation is wonderful, but Brown’s article was really rather dull. Loaded down with a conventional recital of history back to John Cabot, and with reams of unlikely economic statistics, this account by one of the insiders said almost nothing insightful about the way confederation was actually made. Even in its time, it must have been neglected in favour of the Globe’s descriptions of how Toronto would celebrate July first: the fireworks, the bonfires, the parades, the boat excursions, the roasting on Church Street of an immense ox purchased by public subscription from a Yorkville farmer, “the new farce ‘Dominion Day’ ” opening at the Royal Lyceum, even the grand balloon ascension hoped for at Queen’s Park (“if arrangements can be consummated with parties in New York”). Brown’s only really vivid line in the whole historical article was his opening, in which he offered that stirring and ambiguous phrase, “We hail the birthday of a new nationality.”
Brown’s true voice, the roar of the passionate politician, rang out more truly in the accompanying editorial. With the first federal election to be held later that summer, he warned with ungrammatical passion that “the only danger that threatens us is lest the same men who have so long misgoverned us, should continue to misgovern us still.”
These same men were just about to remove Brown from active politics. A year before, he had left the coalition government he had helped create in 1864. Brown had plunged back into partisan politics, intending to make his Ontario reformers the core of a pan-Canadian Liberal Party to sweep John A. Macdonald permanently from office. Macdonald, however, had already drawn many of Brown’s natural allies into his own coalition. Brown was no longer exactly “the impossible man,” but John A. Macdonald was making it impossible for him to hold on to political power. The Liberals would be badly defeated in the summer elections of 1867, and Brown himself would lose to a Conservative, Thomas Gibbs, who drew many reform votes to the confederation candidate. Brown never sat in the Canadian House of Commons he had done so much to bring into being. He would only go to Ottawa when a later Liberal leader appointed him to the Senate, which Brown had helped to ensure would never wield serious political power.
Brown was not too sorry to be out. He preferred journalism to politics and crusades over intrigues. If political success required honing the political adroitness that John A. Macdonald had, it was a price Brown was not willing, and probably unable, to pay.
When Brown and Macdonald were both dead, a wrangle continued among their partisans as to which was the true father of confederation. “Some inspired historians of Canada insist on referring to Macdonald as the father of confederation. He, who tried to prevent it until the last ring of the bell. To George Brown and to George Brown alone belongs the title,” insisted W. T. R. Preston, Oliver Mowat’s indispensable “Hug-the-Machine,” in his 1927 memoir My Generation of Politicians and Politics.18
The “inspired” historian who provoked Preston to sarcasm may have been Macdonald’s first biographer, Sir Joseph Pope. As a ten-year-old, Pope had watched his father, William Henry Pope, organizing the Charlottetown conference. He grew up to be John A.’s personal secretary and keeper of the Macdonald flame. In The Memoirs of John A. Macdonald, which he published upon Macdonald’s death, Pope dismissed Brown as a merely sectional leader. Smugly, he quoted Macdonald’s patronizing view of his rival: “He deserves the credit of joining with me; he and his party gave me that assistance in Parliament that enabled us to carry confederation.”19
This battle to identify a single hero in the confederation wars was renewed by two Toronto history professors in the 1950s. Donald Creighton relentlessly championed John A. Macdonald (“The day was his, if it was anybody’s,” was Creighton’s take on July 1, 1867) and Maurice Careless insisted there was also a place for George Brown, “the real initiator of confederation.” Later, there were ghostly echoes of the search for a father in the debates of the 1980s that set “the Trudeau constitution” against “the Mulroney deal.”
Concerning the 1860s, however, the quest for a father has always been misguided. The brilliance of the 1860s process was the way it permitted a George Brown to make a fundamental contribution to constitution-making, even as it kept him from executive authority. The confederation process let Brown, and much-less-prominent delegates, and even ordinary representatives like those who changed their minds in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, assert their aims and contribute their ideas without ever achieving unrivalled power. This was the success of a parliamentary process rather than a leader-driven, quasi-presidential one.
A clue to the success of the confederation-makers was inadvertently given in 1865 by one of their most incisive critics. Tearing the Quebec resolutions apart in the legislature at Quebec, Christopher Dunkin seized on some damaging statement made in New Brunswick by George Hatheway, “one of the gentlemen who took part in the negotiations.”
“Mr. Hatheway was not here at all,” shouted D’Arcy McGee across the floor.
Dunkin was unabashed. “I acknowledge I have not burdened my memory with an exact list of the thirty-three gentlemen who took part in the conference,” he said.20
Far from being an insult to them or a comment on Canadians’ amnesiac attitude to history, the anonymity, even in their own time, of most of the makers of confederation suggests a crucial ingredient of the constitutional achievement of the 1860s. The constitution-making of the 1860s drew in relatively minor figures from almost every political faction, several of whom dissented from the agreement their meetings reached. Their agreement was then reviewed by rather independent legislatures – four out of five of which at first declined to endorse it. The confederation-makers would have done well to have been more broadly representative, and their confederation might have been received more warmly had they seated even more political factions around the table. Still, their achievement should not be minimized.
In the 1990s, it was impossible for a regional or sectional representative, whether from the West, from Quebec, or from any class or ethnic bloc, to influence constitutional matters without becoming a first minister – or perhaps the head of a separate state. Yet a constitution for the twenty-first century would probably require, not eleven first ministers, but several times the thirty-six delegates of the 1860s in order to match the degree of inclusiveness they achieved. The efficient secret of Canada’s parliamentary government in the 1860s was its ability to incorporate in constitution-making even those it kept from power. It was an idea the 1860s were lucky to have and the 1990s desperately lacked.
* Ontario’s Richard Cartwright once complained of having to listen to the demands of “half a dozen small provinces” – when Canada had only seven provinces. But that attitude helps suggest why Cartwright was never very successful, beyond Ontario at least.