Voting to Ratify, Join, and Subdivide Confederation
For as long as Confederation has existed, electors have been casting ballots in relation to it in one way or another — to approve, join, subdivide, make over, or leave. This chapter revisits the first three of these democratic experiences.
Back when a number of British North American colonies were negotiating to create Canada under the 1867 federal constitution that now governs ten provinces and three territories, a strongly held view was that voters ought to ratify such a major change in advance to give Confederation legitimacy and achieve a public embrace of forming a new country.
This concept was worthy enough that four of the thirteen other British colonies in North America that had earlier rebelled against King George III to form the United States — Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island — required a vote by their electors on the new constitutions replacing the old colonial charters, which “should take effect only after they had been considered, voted upon, and approved by the State’s voters.”1 The test wasn’t to prove whether one felt loyal to the Crown or rebelled against it. The vote was recognition of the need to gain popular endorsement for a fundamental change that would affect all concerned — the colonial state entering a larger political union, the United States, whose long-term success would depend on people buying into the deal.
Many members of Parliament in the pre-Confederation version of “Canada” — a constitutional union of two provinces, Canada East and Canada West, whose names in 1867 would change to Quebec and Ontario — felt the same imperative as those American colonists. They wanted to get popular ratification from those potentially becoming part of an enlarged new union. In 1866 twenty of Canada East’s elected representatives petitioned the secretary of state for colonies in Britain to restrain implementing Confederation until the colonial governments in British North America had a mandate from their people to create a larger country with a new constitution.
In support of their case, the MPs noted the irony that all elected representatives then advocating Confederation — not the least of them being John A. Macdonald — had previously spoken against the idea. What logic held that political leaders could change their minds yet not give everyone affected a chance to go through the same reasoning process? Confederation hadn’t been mentioned in either the 1861 or 1863 general elections, so these MPs correctly noted that the people had given no electoral mandate to proceed with so fundamental a change. The people of Lower Canada had “never had an opportunity of pronouncing a decision upon the question,” they pointed out. “Proper regard for their rights” and “every principle of sound statesmanship” required postponement of the final decision until it could be shown that “the measure be a good one and the people are really in favour of it.”
They added that because the current Parliament of Canada would expire in the summer of 1867 and the existing Parliament of Nova Scotia the following spring, those pending general elections should take place “and would necessarily turn on the question of Confederation.” The desirability of political union and the conditions on which it would be acceptable would be fully debated, they emphasized, resulting in “an election of Parliaments representing the settled convictions and the matured purposes of the people.”
A general election, of course, never turns on a single issue, no matter how important, yet this was the only option in that pre-referendum era. Candidates advocating a particular policy and winning a majority of seats were deemed to have “an electoral mandate,” and as crude as this mechanism can be, it is better than no public debate and vote on a transformative issue.
Those MPs reasoned that if a majority was favourable to Confederation, then decisions by parliaments elected under those circumstances “would go far to ensure the success of a system which at best could only be regarded as an experiment.” Confederation should be attempted only under the most favourable conditions and that, they argued, would include affirmative mandates in the pending elections. If the results were adverse to Confederation, however, “that fact alone would demonstrate the wisdom of the delay for which we plead.”
The petitioners traced promotion of Confederation “to the party or personal exigencies of Canadian politicians, and not a spontaneous or general desire among the people for fundamental changes in their political institutions, or in their political relations.” The petition further argued that details of the federal union agreement hadn’t been examined, in the way clauses of a bill are considered, in any of the provincial parliaments; that in Canada and Nova Scotia the people hadn’t had an opportunity of pronouncing on either the principle or the details; and that in New Brunswick, where an election had recently been held, “the people cannot be said to have assented to the Quebec scheme,” which was the only definite plan of union then under consideration.
That draft Confederation plan, worked out at Quebec City when delegates passed seventy-two resolutions to more explicitly express fundamental decisions made earlier at Charlottetown, included the constitutional framework for a new country. “We seek delay,” the MPs concluded, “not to frustrate the purpose of a majority of our countrymen, but to prevent their being surprised, against their will, or without their consent, into a political change which, however obnoxious or oppressive to them it might prove, could not be reversed without such an agitation as every well-wisher of his country must desire to avert.”2
The petition wasn’t acted upon. Parliament in the United Kingdom enacted the British North America Act, 1867, in the form colonial political leaders had drafted it under close guidance from John A. Macdonald.
Decades later historian and political scientist R. MacGregor Dawson concluded the cold shoulder given to their appeal was “the consistent reluctance to submit the question of federation to any popular verdict.”3 The most forcible opponent of popular ratification was Macdonald, who’d previously disdained Confederation, then changed his mind. The irony in his reason for not taking the matter to the people was that “the fickle public” couldn’t be relied upon. This desire to avoid an election or any form of ballot question, Dawson explained, “was conveniently explained as being in accord with British ideas of the functions of a representative legislature; but it also sprang from a shaky belief in the solid virtues of popular government.”
Denying a direct vote on the constitutional question of Confederation meant contending views cropped up instead through the second-best procedure — a general election. That, indeed, was all the twenty MPs from Lower Canada ever sought.
Across Atlantic Canada, absence of a process by which electors could directly debate and vote on the consequences of participating in Confederation saw the electoral system used as the next best thing. Voting for representatives who espoused strong views on Confederation transformed elections into a referendum-like procedure. In the 1860s, Nova Scotians, New Brunswickers, Prince Edward Islanders, and Newfoundlanders realigned themselves into either the “Confederation Party” or “Anti-Confederation Party.” Lines blurred as Liberals and Conservatives, the era’s primary political affiliations, reoriented themselves for battle over union. Although many Conservatives were for Confederation and many Liberals opposed, such partisan distinctions largely became secondary to supporting either Confederation or Anti-Confederation candidates.
In Nova Scotia, Conservative Charles Tupper, a “Father of Confederation,” had been elected Nova Scotia’s premier with a majority in 1863 and didn’t have to go to the polls until after Confederation took effect on July 1, 1867. Tupper’s majority in the assembly voted Nova Scotia into Confederation. He also organized a Confederation Party to counteract the Anti-Confederation Party led by Joseph Howe. Tupper then resigned to enter federal politics and was replaced as premier and leader of the Confederation Party by lawyer Hiram Blanchard, a Liberal in the House of Assembly who supported union. When the provincial election took place on September 18, 1867, Blanchard was unable to lead the Confederation Party to victory. Anti-Confederation candidates captured thirty-six of thirty-eight seats and formed a government under separatist Premier William Annand, a newspaper editor.
In that same trip to the polls, Nova Scotia voters also elected MPs to fill the new Canadian province’s nineteen seats in the House of Commons in Ottawa. Anti-Confederation candidates won all but one of them. Among the Anti-Confederate MPs was Joseph Howe, Nova Scotia’s champion in achieving responsible government and skilled writer and publisher, who’d strongly opposed Confederation. In a sense, Howe’s group was an earlier version of the one led a dozen decades later by Lucien Bouchard, head of the Bloc Québécois separatist MPs in Parliament. The lone pro-Confederation MP from Nova Scotia was Charles Tupper.
Years later historian Peter B. Waite would say it was “fortunate for Confederation” that Charles Tupper didn’t “test his electorate” in the province until after the new constitutional arrangement had taken effect. “Then, too late, it was clear that 65 percent of Nova Scotians opposed Confederation.”4
The general opposition of many Nova Scotians to Confederation was rooted in their existing self-government and identity, the Maritime community’s natural affinity to Britain, historic and economic ties with the New England states, and the fact they’d had no say in the matter. In the 1860s, Nova Scotia burgeoned in general prosperity. Throughout the Atlantic region, people knew Confederation would reorient commercial life toward the interior of the continent, unattractive to those whose economic well-being was anchored by international commerce and ocean shipping.
Despite Nova Scotia’s Anti-Confederation election results, Britain’s Colonial Office in London refused to allow the province to secede from Confederation. That forced Anti-Confederation leader Joseph Howe to “accept the inevitable,” as historian Colin D. Howell put it, “agreeing to enter Sir John A. Macdonald’s government in return for an increased provincial subsidy in 1869.”5
Binding Nova Scotia to Confederation took deal-making at the top levels of government, from brute exercise of power by London to payment of money by Ottawa. As for regular folk living with the consequences of being incorporated into a much larger and different country, they’d have to wait for another election when Confederation and Anti-Confederation candidates would again square off as stand-ins loosely approximating a Yes/No referendum on union.
By 1886, Nova Scotia’s secession movement was being led by Liberal premier William S. Fielding. Campaigning in a provincial election to “repeal” Confederation, or alternatively gain further increased subsidies from Ottawa, Fielding’s Liberals won twenty-nine of thirty-eight seats. Strongest separatist support came from areas tied to the traditional Maritime economy and the international shipping trade. Opposition to secession was greatest in areas beginning to industrialize, particularly coal mining areas and towns along the Inter-Colonial Railway linking the province to the continental interior.
Nova Scotia’s separatist movement under Fielding was somewhat counterbalanced the following year in the federal election of February 22, 1887, when the pro-Confederation Conservative Party won fourteen of Nova Scotia’s twenty-one House of Commons seats. For difficult decades, the Confederation issue simmered, and sometimes boiled over, with general elections the crude proxy for a referendum, providing the only ballot voters had to express their verdict on union.
New Brunswick’s Anti-Confederation Party, a coalition of Conservatives and “Reformers” (as Liberals often called themselves in those days), led by Albert J. Smith, won the 1865 election, but lost power two years later to the Confederation Party led by Peter Mitchell. The legislature produced by that election approved joining Confederation by a vote of thirty-eight to one, with the result that Confederation 150 years ago would begin with four provinces. In 1867’s federal election, Anti-Confederates won five of New Brunswick’s fifteen seats in the House of Commons.
People in the Atlantic region almost instinctively invented a referendum-like process, for the sheer need of one. Voters focused on a transcending issue, the way they do in referendums, with little heed to partisan loyalties. In New Brunswick, Anti-Confederation leader Albert Smith and Confederation leader Peter Mitchell were both Conservatives, while Samuel Leonard Tilley, a Liberal, was the most prominent leader of the Confederation forces. Tilley, like Howe in Nova Scotia, would eventually be enticed by John A. Macdonald into his government.
New Brunswickers were less worried than other Atlantic people about increasing links with the more proximate Quebec and Ontario economies, and the province’s Acadians saw advantages in a political union with French-speaking people in both those provinces. By 1870, the Confederate and Anti-Confederate parties in New Brunswick, having served their purpose, dissolved and earlier Liberal and Tory alignments reasserted themselves.
Prince Edward Island, despite hosting the first of three conferences devising Confederation, stayed aloof from joining. The colony was prospering in the 1860s, and, acculturated by the Islanders’ mentality, was jealous of its independence. In 1873, however, deep in debt from constructing a railway, the humbled province bailed itself out by joining Canada in exchange for Ottawa assuming its heavy financial obligations.
It was the same for Newfoundlanders. Despite even greater economic difficulties, a majority sought to remain outside Confederation and pursue their independent destiny. In an 1869 election, they elected twenty-one Anti-Confederation members to the legislative assembly, only nine for the Confederation Party.
Politics over these years became polarized between Confederation’s supporters and opponents — with a wide range of dubious claims, plenty of “emotion,” and other familiar aspects of decision-making by ballot that today Canadian critics of referendums still criticize. In a democracy, the views of people will out. If one means for expressing views is unavailable, the force of people’s beliefs will soon invent another. Whether beliefs about a major issue get vented in an election or through a referendum, it is not the voting process that “causes deep divisions.” Rather, in a healing democratic way, this ability to debate and mark ballots channels them.
Voting to Join Confederation, 1948
For England’s first overseas colony, Newfoundland, the prospect of joining thirteen other British colonies on the Atlantic seaboard to overthrow the British Crown never interested them in the way that it tempted quite a few Nova Scotians. Nor were Newfoundland’s inhabitants much interested in joining Confederation. They didn’t join in 1867, or in the years following, the way Prince Edward Island belatedly did. Instead, Newfoundlanders evolved into a self-governing British “dominion” as Canada itself would.
Newfoundland acquired powers of responsible government, an elected legislature, and self-governing dominion status with its own currency, customs duties, postal service, and other attributes of a country. In the 1930s, however, Newfoundland’s chronically fragile economy sputtered to a standstill amid worldwide depression. Financial bankruptcy exacerbated violence raging between Catholics and Protestants. Britain closed down the government, boarded up the legislature, and imposed direct rule from London under a system known as commission government. Being run by appointed commissioners was an ignominious fate: Newfoundland became Britain’s only colony to achieve self-government and then lose it.
After the Second World War, a referendum on Newfoundland’s future was proposed by the Labour government of British Prime Minister Clement Atlee. He’d toured Newfoundland after the war, appalled by conditions he found “worse than the most poverty-stricken parts of rural Portugal.” Britain was itself desperately coming to grips with its own financial predicament, severing colonial ties rather than renewing them. Unlike the African colonies, which would gain independence during the 1950s and 1960s and get financial and technical assistance from Britain, this sort of deal was impossible for Newfoundland in the hard postwar years when Britons themselves remained on rations.
In 1946 the British announced elections to choose a constituent assembly. One delegate to the Newfoundland National Convention, Joseph Smallwood, was elected by a wide margin in Gander. When he arrived in St. John’s that September, Smallwood found few others shared his hope for Newfoundland joining Confederation. The national convention’s mandate was to “make recommendations to His Majesty’s Government as to possible forms of future governments to be put before the people at a national referendum.”6 Newfoundlanders would exercise their right of self-determination democratically, by ballot.
The convention’s sessions became protracted. Gordon Bradley, Smallwood, and several others left for Ottawa, a delegation to clarify possible terms of union with Canada. Cabinet took a long time digesting all the implications. Prime Minister King and Justice Minister Louis St. Laurent learned payments to Newfoundland might exceed money going to the Maritime Provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island combined and “recoiled in horror at such a politically impossible outlay.”7 But in Ottawa, not for the first time, political emotion trumped financial circumspection. Canada’s government realized it had no choice except, in a phrase of the day, to “complete Confederation.” Being stingy about money had, after all, jeopardized negotiations with Newfoundland about joining Confederation in the nineteenth century. After ninety-nine days in Ottawa and a steady flow of telegrams demanding their return to St. John’s, Bradley and the delegation resurfaced in the city and reported Canada’s “terms of union” to the Newfoundland National Convention.
In the meantime, other possibilities had been considered. Pragmatic Newfoundlanders hoped to remain under commission government. Others advocated a return to dominion status and self-government, a small but independent country under the British Crown. A different group led by prominent St. John’s businessman Chesley Crosbie, father of John Crosbie of subsequent political fame in both Newfoundland and Canadian politics, actively sought terms of economic union with the United States. A close link had been forged between Newfoundlanders and Americans during the Second World War, with U.S. airbases and personnel becoming the largest component of the economy.
Only a minority of delegates wanted Confederation. However, fate handed a face card to Smallwood and the confederates. The government commission, still running things and in exclusive control of radio broadcasting, transmitted full daily broadcasts of proceedings from the national convention, a sensible prelude to the referendum by raising voters’ awareness of the issues. Of all delegates attending, Smallwood alone was a professional broadcaster. Using his radio experience to his advantage, he went over the delegates’ heads, reaching directly the scattered Newfoundlanders listening earnestly beside their radios in towns and outports.
When the Newfoundland National Convention finally voted on options it would recommend for the referendum, it produced only two choices: return to self-government with dominion status, or retention of commission government. Delegates defeated, by twenty-nine to sixteen, the motion to include Confederation on the ballot. Like their nineteenth-century Anti-Confederation ancestors, these delegates imagined they’d thwarted what the majority of them didn’t want. As it turned out, they’d committed a first-class political blunder. By denying the people the right to make a full choice about their future in the referendum, they created an issue and galvanized a cause. Bradley, Smallwood, and their small but well-organized band of confederates promptly charged that twenty-nine “dictators” were denying the people the right to choose.8
Gordon Bradley, taking quickly to the airwaves, attacked the “dictators” and appealed for a mass petition of protest from the people to the governor. Because these very same radio listeners had attentively followed the convention proceedings, some fifty thousand of them got the point and promptly signed the petition. The British government was equally dismayed by this bizarre recommendation from the convention — a referendum asking Newfoundlanders if they wished to remain in primitive colonial status under commission government, or wanted to go it alone as an independent self-governing country — neither option financially viable. The British contrasted those two choices with the prospect of joining prosperous Canada, which had offered terms of union that seemed comparatively irresistible. Keen to be rid of its problem colony, the British saw Canada as Newfoundland’s safest harbour, both willing and able to pay the high costs — for national pride in “completing Confederation.”
So, demonstrating the limited influence of a colonial constituent assembly upon an imperial power, the British government simply changed their recommendation by adding a third option: join Canada as a province. At the end of all their labours, observed historian S.J.R. Noel, “the National Convention might just as well never have met.”9 Yet the convention had at least served to launch the Confederationists into the referendum campaign under the leadership of Joey Smallwood.
Newfoundlanders would go to the polls on June 3, 1948, to choose (1) responsible government, (2) joining Canada, or (3) staying under commission government. The referendum campaign took shape quickly and was vigorously fought: forcing choice wouldn’t be easy. The convention, in voting down the Confederation option because most delegates didn’t want it, had also recommended just two options so that voters faced a clear choice on their future. The British, insisting that three possible futures be on offer, created a scenario in which, when ballots were counted the night of June 3, voters had given majority support to none. Responsible government got 69,400 votes (44.5 percent), Confederation won 64,066 (41.1 percent), and commission government, 22,311 (14.3 percent).
The British, having stipulated a clear majority would be needed, had added another requirement: if a second ballot was required, the option with fewest votes would be dropped in the runoff referendum. The second round of voting took place on July 22, 1948.
Those advocating the responsible government option — Newfoundland’s big money interests — had plenty of financial resources, but their forces were divided and poorly organized. On the Confederation side, Smallwood’s appeal to the “toiling masses” had established a populist touch, though very large amounts of campaign money had come secretly from Ottawa — not the Government of Canada, but the governing Liberal Party, which envisaged a particular future for the new island province. Smallwood had given no formal commitment to join the Liberals, but while he collected desperately needed votes from any pro-Confederation Tories, in Ottawa it was safely assumed he would do so when the voting was over. After Newfoundland became a province, it would have seven seats in Parliament, not a large number but “a useful addition to Liberal ranks,” as Richard Gwyn observed. “Campaign funds were a small price to pay for them.”10
In the second campaign, Newfoundland’s deep undercurrents of religious bigotry again roiled to the surface. In earlier times, election riots in Newfoundland sparked by impassioned animosities between Catholics and Protestants resulted in deaths. The 1948 campaign didn’t overheat that far, but the Catholic hierarchy’s support of responsible government and opposition to Confederation dramatically changed the political temperature. Archbishop Roche of Newfoundland “threw all of his very considerable influence into the fight,” and his church magazine, The Monitor, became “an openly political instrument in the cause of responsible government.”11 In language strikingly similar to that of earlier French-Canadian nationalists in Quebec, notes historian Noel, the Roman Catholic leadership did not deny that an independent Newfoundland would be poor but argued against material blandishments in favour of the preservation, in isolation, of simple spiritual values. Partisan entry into the campaign by the archbishop and the Catholic establishment became a misjudged action because it provoked an equal and opposite reaction from Protestants, changing the campaign’s flow abruptly. Protestants outnumbered Catholics two to one. Sectarianism rose to a fever pitch. This “sharpening of denominational lines in the second ballot could only benefit the Confederates.”12
Other factors changed, too. With more than twenty-two thousand people (14 percent of electors) having voted for commission government, their support was up for grabs, their ballots enough to turn the tide. Economic forces also played a part: areas where fishing was the primary occupation mostly wanted Confederation, which would expand markets, while the merchant and professional classes of St. John’s clung to the responsible government choice because that was how they’d continue to control the economy and exploit Newfoundlanders, getting richer by means of the low prices for fish and seal skins they grudgingly forked over to impoverished fishermen. There was, however, an exhilarating crescendo to the campaign’s final days when several prestigious Newfoundlanders and leading lights of St. John’s society broke ranks to publicly endorse the Confederation option.
The outcome was close: 78,323 votes (52.3 percent) for joining Canada versus 71,344 votes (47.4 percent) for responsible government. The overwhelming turnout, about 85 percent of electors, was almost as high as for the first ballot.
In Ottawa the referendum returns were nervously awaited. Before the vote, Prime Minister King pledged that the Canadian government would accept the colony into Confederation, provided Newfoundlanders demonstrated their decision for Canada “clearly and beyond all possibility of misunderstanding.” As Richard Gwyn commented, the margin of seven thousand votes “hardly fulfilled King’s conditions.” What would happen now?
The prime minister’s grey mood, and his well-honed penchant for fussy delay and obfuscation, could easily turn this “unclear” result into drifting confusion that would enable Newfoundland’s power brokers in St. John’s to press on with their eventual plan to link up with the Americans as a state of the Union. However, the PM’s principal secretary, Jack Pickersgill, vibrated with excited energy at the prospect of his home province, Newfoundland, becoming Canada’s tenth province. He understood King enough to anticipate his diffident state of mind. The morning after the vote Pickersgill swiftly studied statistics from all of King’s previous election campaigns. By 10:00 a.m., when the prime minister telephoned, he was surprised by his secretary’s enthusiasm.
“Mr. King, it is wonderful!” the Newfoundlander replied when asked his opinion on the voting. “Do you realize this is a larger majority than you received in any election except 1940?”
Following a pause while Pickersgill’s comparison sunk in, Canada’s now-smiling prime minister replied, “I hadn’t realized that at all. That puts a different light on the whole situation.”
Through the autumn of 1948, negotiations between representatives of Newfoundland and Canada produced final terms of union, even better for Newfoundland than those originally negotiated in 1947 and presented by Gordon Bradley to the national convention in St. John’s. Only one member of the Newfoundland delegation, Chesley Crosbie — who’d wanted Newfoundland to become a state in the American federal union and campaigned with a bottle of Coke in his hand — refused to sign the Terms of Union. The British were relieved, and got smartly about other business.
On March 31, 1949, Newfoundland joined Canada as the tenth province. This fulfilled the mandate, conclusively if grudgingly given, as the people of Newfoundland voted themselves into Confederation. The issues had been ventilated and examined from every angle. All Newfoundlanders had participated in forcing the choice.
Voting to Subdivide Canada: 1982, 1992
When Newfoundlanders voted to join Confederation, bringing new land to our country as an additional province, it was a contrast. Most provinces and territories resulted from subdividing the vast northern half of a continent already under Canadian jurisdiction.
After Confederation, the Northwest Territories’ broad continental expanse was sectioned for the province of Manitoba in 1870, Yukon Territory in 1898, the provinces Alberta and Saskatchewan in 1905, and northward expansion of Quebec and Ontario boundaries by 1912. The new boundaries of the reduced Northwest Territories were retained until the end of the twentieth century when a trio of referendums contributed to a final subdivision of it, establishing the eastern Arctic as Canada’s third territory, Nunavut.
In 1963 legislation was introduced in Parliament to divide the Northwest Territories into the Mackenzie (west) and Nunassiaq (east) territories, but with little support the proposal died. The government named A.W.R. Carrothers, law dean at the University of Western Ontario, head of a commission to study the evolution of governance in the territory, including division. Three years later his report concluded “within the next decade” no division should occur. Carrothers acknowledged, though, that the Northwest Territories’ sheer size probably made division inevitable eventually. His concerns: two separate governments would have less success dealing with Ottawa; fragmented hunting, trapping, and fishing areas would require aboriginal people to abide by the laws of two territories; the dividing line, once drawn, couldn’t easily be relocated for changing circumstances; and division would slow the advance to provincial status.13 The Northwest Territorial Council’s session in November 1966, despite approving Carrothers’s report, criticized his failure to adequately consult the people throughout the Northwest Territories. Many of his concerns were more theoretical than realistic, the North as seen by a Southern Canadian. The council stressed that any division of the Northwest Territories should be left for territorial people themselves to decide.14
The report suppressed talk of division for a decade. But in 1974 the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, representing the eastern Arctic’s seventeen thousand Inuit people, proposed settling their unresolved land claims through the concept of “Nunavut,” a separate eastern territory with its own government. Following this plan’s 1979 cabinet-level tweaking in Ottawa, the Inuit Tapirisat unanimously approved it in October 1980 at an annual general assembly held at Coppermine, Northwest Territories. Nunavut, meaning “our land” in Inuktitut, had now become the raison d’être for territorial division.
Inspired by this resurgence of division as a viable political act, the N.W.T. Legislative Assembly in 1980 declared its “commitment in principle to a major division of the present Northwest Territories into an eastern and a western territory, subject to the expressed will, by public debate and by plebiscite, of the people of the Northwest Territories showing preference for the establishment of one or two new territories.”15 The assembly also confirmed that if a majority voted Yes to the ballot question, this would be its mandate to request the Government of Canada to divide the Northwest Territories.
Under the proposal, Nunavut, the eastern half, would have a new capital, and the western half, Denendeh, meaning “Land of the People,” would have Yellowknife as its capital. Both would have jurisdiction and government powers in their reconstituted territories. Because neither section was inhabited exclusively by Inuit or Dene, it was important for any new regime to combine aboriginal self-government with community (or public) government.
Preparing for the ballot question in 1981, the Legislative Assembly enacted a Plebiscite Ordinance.16 N.W.T. legislators were resolved that only “true Northerners” should vote on land and governance policy and imposed on new residents a three-year waiting period before they could vote. A better filter to screen temporary workers and transients from voting is achieved by defining “ordinary residency,” as all Canadian election and referendum statutes do, in a way that eliminates as voters individuals just staying on an interim basis. Three years was far outside Canadian norms, and also excessive by the standards of both Yukon and the Northwest Territories’ own Elections Ordinances in which the rule is one-year residency before voting. The Charter’s stricture to impose only a “reasonable limit that could be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society” seemed offended.
Northern residents wanted to challenge their unfair disfranchisement by a court challenge, and as a member of the Northwest Territories Bar, I assisted their case.17 One of the plaintiffs, an Inuit woman born and raised in the North, had lived several years in northern Alberta before returning home to the Arctic. She discovered she had to wait three years to qualify for answering a ballot question. But with voting approaching, the court was unwilling to interfere with the legislature’s three-year hurdle.
Balloting on territorial division took place on April 14, 1982, with nearly nineteen thousand electors on the voting lists. Voting followed general referendum patterns. Turnout was 53 percent, of whom 56 percent said Yes to division, 44 percent, No.
A major step forward, forcing the choice put unaccustomed pressure upon all Northerners to reach a consensus and raised the stakes for N.W.T. aboriginal organizations and the federal government to resolve their impasse in land claims negotiation. “The extent to which native people can meet these two challenges,” suggested policy analysts Frances Abel and Mark Dickerson, “may well depend upon how strongly they desire control of their own affairs.”18
This vote was the first opportunity for northern residents to collectively register their views about a specific change in the constitutional status of their government. Until 1982 decisions about the Northwest Territories’ boundaries and constitutional arrangements resulted from top-down decisions taken by people not residing in the territory. This initiative by northern aboriginal organizations to propose division, and the response of the N.W.T. Legislative Assembly to put a ballot question before the people, introduced authentic democracy and ended top-down governing of the North. In November 1982, Indian Affairs and Northern Development Minister John Munro announced the Government of Canada’s agreement to division, conditional on prior resolution of land claim issues.
Within the territories, division was referred to the Constitutional Alliance of the Northwest Territories, a body composed of both the Nunavut and Western constitutional forums. By January 15, 1987, the alliance reached agreement on both the boundary and a plan to implement division of the territories. Two months later the N.W.T. Legislative Assembly approved the “Iqaluit Agreement” and recommended a ballot question on the proposed boundary. But the vote didn’t occur in 1987. In October 1989, the Legislative Assembly was still debating the creation of Nunavut.
Progress was slow because of significant disagreements over how to combine “community self-government” and “aboriginal self-government” in the Northwest Territories. Because the two systems are closely interrelated but not identical, comprehensive constitutional planning had to carefully distinguish between them. The situation’s complexity involved diverse peoples having different interests scattered across an immense territory. Contrasting views between Inuit and the Dene and Métis trace back centuries, although these aboriginal groups share common outlooks when dealing with the non-aboriginal population and Southern influences. Most Northerners, whether Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal, share a common goal: autonomy and self-government represented by provincial (or province-like) status.
Intersecting these cross-currents, the land claims process added further complication. Some claims had already been settled, others were pending, while more remained stalled. In some cases, boundary disputes existed between aboriginal groups. For the all-important boundary that would divide the territories, Dene of the western Arctic and Inuit of the eastern Arctic couldn’t agree on the proposed line. Also, land claims settlements were raising political disgruntlement elsewhere in Canada as taxpayers in the South faced paying multi-million-dollar settlements such as a $580 million bill for Nunavut to benefit seventeen thousand Inuit people.
Also slowing progress were serious concerns about a system of government based on race. The discriminatory three-year residency requirement restricting voting in the plebiscite was public evidence of a predisposition by Northern lawmakers to enact double standards. The N.W.T. Plebiscite Ordinance was a flashing red light about legal rights based on clumsily disguised racial criteria. This was seen by some, including lawyers immersed in work for aboriginal communities, as risking a Canadian form of apartheid, governance in which race would be the criteria for allocating rights. Yet striving for a more ethnically integrated system remained the focus, a quest helped by the non-racial approach of Northern Quebec Inuit leaders preparing for their own ballot question on governance in 1987.
On May 4, 1992, the Northwest Territories held its second referendum on division, this time about the exact location of the new boundary line. It was proposed to run north from the Manitoba-Saskatchewan boundary, zigzag west, then north again above the Alberta-Saskatchewan boundary to the North Pole.
Amendments to the Plebiscite Ordinance gave voting rights to a Canadian citizen who’d be eighteen by voting day and who’d lived in the Northwest Territories since May 4, 1989 — still three years. Although the Northwest Territories had fifty-eight thousand residents, the voters’ list showed only about twenty-six thousand registered, some nine thousand in the eastern Arctic and seventeen thousand in the western Arctic.
The ballot question was long and confusing, as noted in Chapter 12. The information pamphlet, published in ten languages, asserted that “while a plebiscite is similar to a territorial election, it is held only to collect information,” making it seem like census-taking.
From Ottawa, cabinet minister Tom Siddon and his Indian Affairs and Northern Development officials vigorously declared, in advance of a plebiscite, that division would proceed regardless of the balloting outcome — a majority No vote would not be grounds for scuttling Nunavut. This political intimidation of voters was unworthy of anyone seeking formation of a democratic consensus and public co-operation with government action. Given this edict from Ottawa, it seemed there was no reason anyone should even bother to vote.
In such a swirling context, the long-awaited boundary-line vote proceeded. Results from the 171 polls produced a margin of 54 percent Yes to 46 percent No. The campaign period offered a forum for popular participation in the evolution toward Nunavut, with the ballots providing an accurate reading of public sentiment on an extremely complex issue. Support for Nunavut in the eastern Northwest Territories, where four of five people are Inuit, reflected the same pattern as in the 1982 vote. Both referendums encapsulated the strong drive in the eastern Arctic to create Nunavut, which would give Inuit peoples effective control of a government slated to be created by 1999.
Voter response in the western half of the Northwest Territories was harder to analyze. Dene and Métis in principle supported Nunavut but opposed, in the words of Dene National Chief Bill Erasmus, “the imposition of a line and a method for determining legitimacy that does not take into account our inherent right, as a nation, to determine our own future.”19 Most land claims in the western Arctic were nowhere close to resolution.
Western Arctic non-Aboriginals found themselves in a particular quandary facing the ballot question. Residents in Inuvik whom I interviewed at the time had decided to set aside practical considerations, such as concern about “creating a second bureaucracy that would be expensive and inefficient,” to vote, instead, “on principle.” Ironically, they ended up casting ballots on opposing sides of the question.20 Yellowknife Chamber of Commerce President Jane Groenewegen said that “we’re in a no-win situation” because a Yes vote would support the Inuit while “shooting ourselves in the foot” and a No vote meant “raining on the Nunavut parade.”21
In the western Arctic, opposition to further dividing the Northwest Territories came from non-aboriginal residents viewing it as a needless expense and from the Dene seeing the proposed boundary line as violating respect for their traditional hunting and burial grounds. The Dene also opposed on principle any aboriginal peoples extinguishing their land rights, which had been central to the 1991 agreement between Ottawa and the Tungavik Federation of Nunavut (TFN).
In the May 4 referendum, a majority in the eastern Arctic, where voter turnout was high, cast ballots in favour of the division. In the western Arctic, with low voter turnout, the majority voted against division.
A third ballot question helped to further advance this contentious project later that same year. In November 1992, the Inuit themselves voted on their land claim deal, an integral component of the Nunavut proposal, and on the splitting of the Northwest Territories. Their agreement had evolved dramatically from earlier proposals, through negotiations over many years, and been signed on October 30, 1992, by the Government of Canada, the Government of the Northwest Territories, and the Tungavik Federation of Nunuvat. Under its terms, Ottawa would pay the Inuit $1.15 billion over fourteen years and confirm outright Inuit ownership of 350,000 square kilometres of land (an area half the size of Alberta) in exchange for the Inuit giving up aboriginal title to more than 80 percent of their traditional lands, territory the federal government and TFN would henceforth manage jointly. The Inuit would have the right to hunt, fish, and trap anywhere in Nunavut.
Voting between November 3 and 5, Inuit residents of the eastern Arctic overwhelmingly said Yes to the political accord. Of eligible voters, 9,648 went to their polling stations, an 80 percent turnout. People who didn’t cast ballots were counted as No votes, an unusual step, which nevertheless still made the 69 percent Yes a high level of approval.
“The people of the eastern Arctic have sought a new jurisdiction in this country consistent with their desire to govern themselves and manage their own affairs,” I said November 17 in the House of Commons, referring to the three referendum results. Throughout the process, the people and government of the Northwest Territories had been direct participants, creating the legislation for ballot questions in 1981, approving division by a majority vote in 1982, ratifying location of the boundary line in May 1992, and the Inuit in the eastern Arctic voting in November 1992 to adopt the plan for partnership participation in Nunavut. “Accordingly,” I informed the Commons, “the Government of Canada will be introducing legislation at the same time of the claim settlement legislation, to divide the Northwest Territories and set up Nunavut. A happy day, particularly because the people themselves have been directly involved in making these decisions.”
In Nunavut, 17,500 eastern Arctic Inuit have de facto self-government through the territorial legislature because they constitute 85 percent of the population, but other Canadians living there are equally eligible to vote. Although costly to maintain, Nunavut represents a system of government where local control prevails, where aboriginal self-government operates, yet where all residents participate within a public framework not based on race but on the legal equality of each person. The goal had been reached by pre-eminently democratic means, including direct voting by the people affected. Though non-binding, the three votes in 1982 and 1992 were stages in building historic momentum. Nunavut represented Inuit aspirations, grown stronger over the preceding two decades, to set up their own homeland, while for Ottawa, Nunavut became “a key symbol in its attempt to show Canadians and the world it is committed to native issues,”22 and how combining aboriginal self-government with public community government is a basis for the harmony needed for successful government by and for all people living in the North.