Subtle and powerful logic of his mind / Chilly as the fin of a dead fish
Two descriptions of Edward Blake
The better terms Macdonald had convinced Joseph Howe to accept were in fact quite modest. They merely brought Nova Scotia up to the level Leonard Tilley had secured for New Brunswick in the pre-Confederation negotiations. Edward Blake, the most prominent member of the Liberal Opposition in Ottawa and, simultaneously, a leading member of the Ontario legislature, considered the terms dangerous—not for the additional money Ottawa had to send to Halifax every year, but because of the constitutional precedent the new terms set. The money had to come from revenues raised by the federal government in the other provinces, even though they had not been given any opportunity to discuss and approve this change. To Blake, this affair raised a cardinal issue of Canadian politics: namely, “Who speaks for Canada?” in the phrase that so dominated late twentieth-century federal-provincial debates. Did the federal government alone have this role, or, instead, did Ottawa and the provinces conjointly, in some manner not mentioned in the constitution?
Until the twenty-first century, Edward Blake was the only Liberal leader who never became prime minister. He is also the only Canadian political leader of any party who was born in a log cabin. His father, William Hume Blake, of Anglo-Irish stock, emigrated, switched from the Anglican ministry to law, quickly built a successful practice, became a Reform politician and ended his career as head of the Ontario Court of Chancery. Edward himself was a standout at school and won the silver medal in classics at the University of Toronto. His law practice was an instant success, and by the time he entered politics in 1867, his wealth topped $100,000, an astounding amount for a man of thirty-three.
Blake was six feet tall and broad-shouldered, with a great wave of chestnut hair falling across a massive forehead. His speeches were masterpieces of organization, erudition and penetration, but they were also interminable, often stretching to five hours. Intellectually, he was exceptional: the historian Peter Waite has marvelled at “his powers of application, his range of knowledge, [and] the subtle and powerful logic of his mind,” while also describing him as “wound up like a spring.” Blake resembled some huge rare bird, beautiful but as clumsy as a dodo, repeatedly treading on the feet of those clustered around to admire him, as well as on his own. He was known to walk right by old friends without acknowledging them. Nothing he said ever touched anyone’s emotions, yet whenever he was criticized, he broke into tears. “Shut up in that great brain,” Waite continued, “he was unable in his groping, clumsy shyness to reach the people around him. He was outrageously sensitive to slights, real and imagined. He would also sleep or read a newspaper through the speeches of his political friends.” His handshake was described as “chilly as the fin of a dead fish.” As a cabinet minister and as party leader, he was forever resigning.
Blake inherited these psychological problems—“neurasthenia,” in the term of the time, manifesting itself in bouts of headaches, insomnia, exhaustion and nervousness—from his formidable father and his deeply pious mother, Catherine, who was determined that her son should be not just great, but also very good. Blake doubted his ability to share his mother’s Anglican faith, and once confessed to her that he could not achieve any emotional commitment to Christianity.* Unlike Macdonald, he was never a happy political warrior. He did, however, hold to the highest moral standards, once urging Macdonald to “understand the importance of legislating on general principles.” He died in 1912; his last request was that a single-word inscription should be carved onto his headstone: “Misunderstood.”
Liberal leader Edward Blake possessed the finest legal mind in Canada in the nineteenth century but his poor social skills presented him from reaching his full potential. (photo credit 5.1)
The relationship between Blake and Macdonald was prickly—though, on Macdonald’s side, respectful.† In October 1868, he sounded Blake out on whether he might accept the same position his father had held on the Court of Chancery. Macdonald told the incumbent, Philip VanKoughnet, a staunch Conservative who wanted to retire, “I said I had no right to ask him … without offering it to him—but under the circumstances would ask him to give me some idea whether he could take it.” Blake begged for time to consider the proposal. His father warned him, “Be on your guard,” but Catherine Blake told her son, “We have always found J.A.M. kind and considerate.” His father relented, saying the post “would afford leisure and opportunity for communion with God.” The plan came to a halt when the other judges declined to change their posts. Blake then wrote to Macdonald that this outcome “coincides with my own wishes.” It’s a toss-up whether Macdonald was trying to remove a formidable opponent from the political scene or to fill a key post with the best available person, as he did often in his judicial appointments. Beyond doubt, the Liberals wanted Blake to remain active in politics, and when VanKoughnet’s death a year later reopened the post they successfully pressured him to stay active in politics.
As the best legal mind in the country, Blake made his most significant contribution to Canada as a constitutional critic. At the hearings of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, Britain’s arbiter of the legal and constitutional doings of its colonies, Blake’s arguments on behalf of Ontario in several legal cases played a key part in shifting Canada’s constitutional character away from the centralized federation Macdonald had envisaged to a far more decentralized, province-oriented, federal system. Blake’s first step along this path took place in 1869, after Macdonald had introduced legislation in the House of Commons to authorize payment of the better terms he had promised to Howe and to Nova Scotia.
Blake spoke twice on this subject, first in the Commons in June 1869, and then in the Ontario legislature in November. In Ottawa, he argued that, because the British North America Act was British legislation, it could only be altered by the Parliament of Westminster, provided that all those who had been involved in drafting the constitution, including the four provinces, agreed. Clearly thinking of Quebec as the next supplicant for “better terms,” he posed the awkward question, “When will the floodgates now opened be closed again?” At Queen’s Park in Toronto, he went further, breaking radically new ground. “Our province [Ontario] agreed to part with a certain part of its jurisdiction upon certain conditions,” he said, and these conditions were embodied into an Imperial act that gave us security, “a charter of our rights.” He concluded precisely, “This compact under which we have surrendered so much of our rights is not alterable except by the power that made it.”
In both legislatures, Blake’s speeches were usually received in uncomprehending silence. On this occasion, a couple of Liberal MPs supported his arguments, and one Conservative broke ranks to point out that each Ontarian paid twenty-seven cents into the federal coffers and in return received only six, while in comparison Nova Scotians were about to get eighteen cents each, while paying in only five and a half.
The press dismissed Blake’s arguments as “political quackery.” Macdonald, well aware that legalisms seldom influence people’s minds, said nothing at all. The resolution for better terms for Nova Scotia passed easily. Yet Blake was the first to advance the concept of Confederation as a “compact” between the provinces, which had got together to create a federal government to fulfill certain common functions. The federal government thus was not, as people commonly assumed, the embodiment of the nation, with the provinces as junior governments.* At the time, all these arguments amounted to no more than clever legalisms. In practical terms, Ontario and Quebec had not even existed before Confederation, so they had lacked any government to speak for them; moreover, as colonies, they and the two newcomers, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, had possessed no right to negotiate, let alone sign a treaty. In recent years, however, Blake’s interpretation of Confederation—that a multiplicity speaks for Canada—has become far closer to the country’s political and legal character than Macdonald’s vision for it. Despite all his political shortcomings, Blake always had a better sense of the future than did the political master, Macdonald. In his speeches, Blake used the word “destinies” rather than “destiny” to describe how Canada was likely to develop, and he declared that the “separate interests” of each province had to be “directed by separate governments.”
Macdonald’s contrasting vision of Canada was not unitary, as often has been assumed. Thus, among other reasons, he wanted the federal government to be powerful so it could “protect the rights of minorities.” At the same time, it was no coincidence that the constitution of which he had been the principal author used throughout the term “union” rather than “federation.” Macdonald wanted to build a nation out of an entity that lacked any distinct identity or internal commonality other than that borrowed from Britain. To this end he had, as he said during the Confederation Debates of 1865, “given the General Legislature all the great subjects of legislation … all the powers which are incidental to sovereignty.”
About legal specifics, Macdonald was always far more reticent. Unlike Blake, with his quest for constitutional purity, his manner of progressing was pragmatic—he muddled through. “The whole of our present system is an experiment,” he explained to the Reverend John Cook on February 3, 1868. Cook had written to Macdonald denouncing the new Quebec legislature as “unmitigated humbug.” Macdonald replied that “the question is not whether your Local Parliament is of much use, as it is whether it will not serve as a safety valve and relieve us from the conflict of the races.” This letter, long overlooked, goes to the heart of Macdonald’s constitutional thinking. He sought harmony among all the races, religions and regions so that he could get on with the real task of building a continental nation.
To Macdonald, harmony between the federal government and the provinces was an essential component of this package. He spelled this goal out in a December 11, 1868, letter to Brown Chamberlin, editor of the Montreal Gazette: “The questions of conflict of jurisdiction have pretty nearly all developed themselves, and must ere long be settled,” he wrote. To settle them satisfactorily, “they should be approached in a statesmanlike spirit, and not in a vain attempt on the part either of the Local or Dominion Statesmen, to gain a victory.” He expressed satisfaction that “while you, an ardent Dominion man, say I yield too much, for the sake of peace, to the Provincial magnates,” those same provincial heavyweights claimed that he was invading their “Local rights and powers.” In his own mind, he was achieving a golden mean. Moreover, Macdonald was much closer to the Canadian character than was Blake, who, for all his advocacy of provincial rights, was really interested only in Ontario, quarrelling about the “better terms” offered to any new province and dismissing British Columbia as a barren “sea of mountains.”
With Nova Scotia now fully back in, Macdonald set out to increase his Atlantic catch. “What a glorious programme it would be to go down to Parliament next Session,” he wrote to Tupper at the start of 1869, “with Nova Scotia pacified, Newfoundland voluntarily joining & the acquisition of Hudson’s Bay.” Instead, Newfoundlanders wriggled off his hook.
Two delegates from the island, Frederick Carter and Ambrose Shea, had attended the 1864 Quebec City Conference and returned home Confederates. Although Carter went on to become premier, Newfoundland stood aside from joining the new nation, primarily because local merchants opposed it. Then a series of disastrous fishery failures put a third of the population on relief, and opinion shifted. The legislature approved draft terms of union, and had an election been held in 1868, as Macdonald devoutly hoped it would be, Newfoundlanders would almost certainly have endorsed union.
Carter, though, had promised to give voters a clear choice, and he delayed the election to 1869, allowing Newfoundlanders to decide their future democratically. By the time the election was held, an exceptional harvest of seals and cod had reversed public opinion yet again. The anti-Confederates had the merchants and the Catholic Church on side, as well as an exceptional orator, Charles Fox Bennett, who initiated a tradition of electoral hyperbole in Newfoundland by warning that Confederation would “send your sons to die on the desert sands of Canada.”* Of the thirty seats at stake, the Confederates won just nine.
Macdonald’s response was restrained. In a report to Governor General Lisgar, he dismissed a recommendation by Newfoundland’s governor, Sir Stephen Hill, that the election result be ignored and the island press-ganged into Confederation by Imperial decree. That would never do, Macdonald wrote, since “we have had an infinity of trouble with Nova Scotia … because the question was not submitted to the electors.” In a rare conversion to democracy, Macdonald concluded, “we should accept their decision.”
Macdonald never again raised his hopes about Newfoundland, wryly comparing the political effect of a single good fish catch to “the Bulls that we read of in Holy Writ, they ‘waxed fat and kicked.’ ” He remained as competitive as ever, though, never forgiving the defeat. In 1872, when Allan, the country’s leading ship owner, told Macdonald he planned to initiate a new shipping line between Montreal and Liverpool, with stops at Halifax and St. John’s, Macdonald responded: “As a matter of policy we had better let the Island feel all the inconvenience of isolation,” because “once the Canadian Government agreed that your Steamers should touch the Island, [it] could not well withdraw the assent.” The ever-confident Allan went ahead anyway, judging a lucrative mail contract for the island worth Macdonald’s wrath. Three-quarters of a century would pass before Newfoundlanders changed their minds about their relationship with Canada. The choice they made then would again be a democratic one.
* When Blake’s beloved daughter—“the flower of my life”—died in 1863, his mother told him, “The Lord I think in taking her meant to arouse yr attention to the madness & folly of living only for this world.” Such a comment would have unhinged any sane person.
† Blake’s attitude to Macdonald was predominantly scornful, but he could never quite escape the man. Once, he called at the Colonial Office in London to be greeted by a senior official who infuriated him by opening the conversation with “Well, I hope our friend Sir John Macdonald is getting along all right.”
* The “compact theory” of Confederation has always been credited to Quebec lawyer T.J.J. Loranger, who, in 1883 and 1884, published his two-volume Lettres sur l’interprétation de la constitution fédérale. Loranger was indeed the first to describe the concept at length, but its originator was Blake.
* The most hyperbolic rhetoric was in the dispatch sent to the Colonial Office by Governor Stephen Hill. The defeat, he reported, was due to the “ignorant, lawless, prejudiced body [of] … unfit subjects for educated and intellectual men to reason with.”