The election of a federal Conservative government in 1911 began a new chapter in federal-provincial relations. Indeed, it witnessed the beginning of a new form of federalism that gradually replaced the genuine or classical version of the previous several decades. Robert Borden’s new Conservative administration had a very different view of federalism than Laurier’s Liberal government, and Canada was about to experience a sea change in the relations between Ottawa and the provinces.
By 1911 the task of building the Dominion from sea to sea had been largely achieved. Ottawa’s remaining responsibilities were less important and less costly, but the surge of global prosperity was still running strong and Ottawa had spare cash to spend. Federalism is characterized by competition between the centre and the provinces as each regime strives to maintain or increase its power, ensure its re-election, and satisfy the needs and demands of its constituents. So Borden’s Conservatives were soon looking for new things to do and new ways to spend money.
They did not have far to look, because the cost of provincial responsibilities was rapidly increasing, especially for roads, education, and welfare. Borden therefore decided to help the provinces with their affairs. And since governments and politicians like to control the money they spend, Ottawa began attaching conditions to its grants. The twentieth-century federal invasion of provincial jurisdiction had begun. It has continued ever since, in fits and starts, leading to a form of mixed federalism in which Ottawa is involved in almost every matter of “exclusive” provincial responsibility. The movement was almost entirely one-sided as there are almost no examples of provinces invading federal jurisdiction, and certainly none that provoked the political crises that often resulted from federal encroachment on provincial affairs. Classical or genuine federalism has never been restored and never could be.
Borders and Natural Resources
Before getting involved with the provinces, however, Borden had debts to pay. The Conservative regimes in Manitoba and Ontario had helped him win, and they both wanted their borders extended northwards. On April 1, 1912, Manitoba’s border was moved from 53 to 60 degrees latitude and along the Hudson Bay shoreline to include the rivers draining the prairies. Ontario and Quebec were both expanded north to include all of the Hudson Bay Lowlands, with their new mutual border fixed at 79 degrees longitude. Manitoba grew by 350 per cent, and Ontario and Quebec more than doubled. Manitoba eventually gained access to the sea with a railway to Churchill on Hudson Bay; Ontario, with a railway to Moosonee on James Bay. The three provinces were satisfied, but others thought that they too should receive something from Ottawa. Saskatchewan objected on the grounds that it should have access to the sea, and the Maritime provinces demanded money as they had contributed to the purchase of the territory back in 1870. Borden ignored their complaints; they were just part of the game of federalism.
Another issue fared less well. Ottawa still controlled natural resources in the Prairie provinces, but by 1911 the argument that it needed them to promote settlement was irrelevant. The three Prairie provinces expected that resources would be turned over to them. Borden had promised to do so in the 1908 election, but now he did not like the idea of helping Liberal administrations in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Pressure on Ottawa produced no movement. A conference between the three premiers and Borden led to a standard delaying tactic, as Borden asked them for a written report. Nothing came of that, and Borden said that the issue had to be discussed with the other provinces. That guaranteed failure, because other provinces would demand some compensation. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 provided further excuse for delay and the issue remained unresolved.
Ottawa’s Invasion of Provincial Jurisdiction
Borden’s new government proceeded with plans to help all the provinces address their needs. There was no political advantage in increasing the subsidies that had been declining for years, but specific programs would be quite visible and hence politically attractive. The first such program provided support for the construction of local roads and highways, although anything purely “local” was a matter of “exclusive” provincial responsibility. Without an amendment to the BNA Act, such a program would be a technical violation of the constitution. The grants also carried conditions that would lead to federal involvement in the administration of the money, and that meant both duplication and interference. Liberal opposition parties in Ottawa and the provinces opposed the program on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.
Provincial governments, whether Conservative or Liberal, did not object to this violation of rights because they stood to receive funds to help meet the burgeoning need for more and better highways. Federal conditions might not be much different than their own and meeting them was seen as a small price to pay for the larger roads budgets. Liberal premiers, however, believed that a Conservative federal government would ensure that more money went to Conservative provincial regimes, which was a very valid concern. The bill passed the House of Commons in November 1912, but was vetoed by the Liberal-dominated Senate as a violation of the constitution. Interestingly, Ottawa made no attempt to build an interprovincial highway, which would have been fully within its jurisdiction.
The First World War and Federalism
Developments in Europe soon put Ottawa’s new approach to federalism on hold. On August 4, 1914, Great Britain declared war on Germany. As a colony, Canada was automatically at war, but the degree of Canada’s contribution was a matter for Canadians to decide. Fortunately for the relations between Ottawa and the provinces, most Canadians were enthusiastic in their support for the war effort. One of the first manifestations of this spirit involved a rare example of a province invading federal jurisdiction over defence. Three days before Britain’s declaration of war, British Columbia’s Premier Richard McBride bought two submarines that had just been built in the Seattle dockyards, an action that was constitutionally, legally, and financially questionable, if not illegal. A few days later, a grateful federal government bought them from McBride, Canada’s first war hero.
Throughout the war the provinces strongly supported Ottawa, and powerful provincial politicians joined the federal cabinet. Everyone understood that peace and unity were necessary on the home front in order to fight the war in Europe. Federal, provincial, and municipal politicians of all parties took leadership roles in supporting recruitment, selling bonds, and promoting the war. The constitution gave Ottawa all the powers it needed to fight a war. On August 14, Parliament passed the War Measures Act, transferring its constitutional powers to Borden’s cabinet, allowing it to govern through the simple issuance of government orders rather than the cumbersome process of legislation. That Act effectively suspended the entire constitution, including any provincial powers Ottawa chose to override. Ottawa took control of many matters that were under provincial authority, such as prices and wages or civil and property rights. In effect, Canada became a unitary state for the duration of the war plus one year. There were numerous and serious problems in Canada during the war, but they did not become federal-provincial issues because of the high level of co-operation among all the governments and the willingness of provincial governments to place the war effort above their local needs and rights.
One issue later led to serious and continuous problems between Ottawa and the provinces, and that was Ottawa’s method of financing the war. Ottawa could collect any type of revenue, but the provinces were limited to direct taxes. After 1867, Ottawa made no attempt to collect direct taxes, so by 1914 it was an established convention that the provinces alone collected them. That situation changed as a result of Canada’s enormous losses fighting in Europe. By 1917, the size of the Canadian contingent could not be maintained by voluntary recruitment, and Ottawa decided to introduce conscription. Many Canadians objected. The war had created an economic boom with enormous profits for some companies and their shareholders, that is, for the rich. People demanded that if Ottawa was going to conscript the sons of the poor, it must also conscript the money of the rich. Therefore, to soften opposition to military conscription, the government decided to collect direct taxes from corporations and individuals as a wartime measure that was clearly linked to military conscription.
Those earning over $2,000 paid a minimum tax of 1 per cent, and thirty thousand Canadians and many corporations were paying income tax by 1918. The tax accounted for less than 1 per cent of government revenue, but the administration to collect it was established and the rich survived the experience of paying it. After the war, Ottawa decided to continue collecting direct taxes. There was good justification as the war created huge federal expenses, including a massive debt to pay off, annual interest on that debt, heavy costs for health and pensions for veterans and their families, and the cost of various post-war adjustments. In addition, in 1917, two transcontinental railways had to be nationalized and amalgamated into the Canadian National Railway, with Ottawa assuming its huge debt. Ottawa’s income tax then created a new and serious problem for the provinces. Citizens were more willing to pay taxes to the distant federal government than to their provincial ones, so Ottawa’s tax limited the degree to which taxpayers would tolerate higher provincial taxes. This magnified the existing fiscal imbalance, the fact that Ottawa was able to collect more revenue for its responsibilities than the provinces could collect for theirs.
The Great War changed forever the way Canadians acted and thought, and federal-provincial relations was just one of many areas that were affected. It is in the nature of governments to wield as much power as they can, and Ottawa was reluctant to give up the enormous power the war had bestowed on it. Soon after the war, it became clear that the pre-war balance between the provinces and Ottawa would not be restored, as there were strong arguments for extending or even making permanent parts of the transfer of provincial power that had taken place. One factor was that Ottawa now had a strong and successful bureaucracy with fewer federal responsibilities to keep it occupied, while provincial administrations had stagnated for four years with their more limited roles and small budgets.
The war created major problems related to the health and pensions of veterans. Health and welfare were provincial responsibilities, but soldiers and veterans were federal, and that blurred the lines between Ottawa and the provinces regarding the health and welfare of hundreds of thousands men and women and their families. Federal programs to deal with their post-war care included pensions, health facilities, a program to deal with venereal disease, and the establishment of a number of employment offices to help veterans reintegrate into the peacetime economy. The provinces welcomed these federal initiatives and willingly participated in such programs because they were needed, they were caused by the war, they were usually small and of limited duration, and they did not pose fundamental challenges to provincial rights. These excellent examples of federal-provincial co-operation were largely phased out in the 1920s. In 1919, the federal government also established a Department of Health primarily to deal with the Spanish flu, an epidemic directly related to the war that killed as many Canadians as the war itself.
Other federal programs definitely upset the provinces. As he had done in 1911, Borden began launching programs in areas of provincial jurisdiction in matters not related to the war, programs for which the provinces were to pay half the cost, but that also carried conditions the provinces had to meet. The program providing assistance for technical education was criticized by Ernest Lapointe, the leading Quebec Liberal MP, on the grounds that it was a violation of provincial jurisdiction. Another program supported local highway construction, paying 40 per cent of the cost, but subject to federal standards. This was the first program in which Ottawa insisted that the provinces make matching grants. The provinces entered these schemes as they could not afford the rapid expansion of highways that the new age of cars and trucks required.
Ottawa also announced a program to build houses that would help address a lack of construction during the war, as well as provide jobs for veterans. Few things could be as “local” as a private house on a little piece of property—housing was clearly within provincial jurisdiction. Federal bureaucrats wanted to dictate standards for size, cost, construction materials, and water supply. Ontario pointed out that an additional set of housing standards would produce endless and needless complications. A compromise was reached in which provinces submitted plans and if Ottawa accepted them, it could not then interfere in their implementation. Thousands of houses were built before the program lapsed in 1921.
Growing Resistance to Ottawa’s Invasion of Provincial Responsibilities
These programs were significant in other ways. Ottawa argued that it had to continue collecting direct taxes in order to pay for the war, but part of that revenue was now going towards programs in provincial jurisdiction that the provinces could not adequately fund because their revenue sources were being squeezed out by Ottawa’s continued collection of direct taxes. This was a vicious circle financially, administratively, and politically. Other patterns were emerging: in different provinces, Ottawa was paying varying portions of the costs of different programs and setting different levels of conditions, creating a patchwork of programs, and making federalism more asymmetrical. Each program forced provinces to shift their spending towards priorities set by Ottawa, although each province’s priorities differed from those of Ottawa and from those of other provinces. Ottawa was starting to influence, if not dictate, provincial spending decisions and impose uniform policies in spite of the very different needs of the provinces.
Quebec had not objected to the concentration of power in Ottawa during the war, but now Premier Louis-Alexandre Taschereau’s Liberal government was determined to modernize and develop the province with a network of roads, hydro-electricity, and more social welfare programs. The federal government was involving itself in all these matters, and in November 1920, Taschereau gave a major speech criticizing federal intervention in provincial matters. Until that time, relations between Ottawa and Quebec had been quite cordial because Ottawa had restricted its actions to federal responsibilities as outlined in the BNA Act. Now Ottawa was deliberately and systematically encroaching on provincial turf, and Quebec was becoming a critic of the federal government. Taschereau’s 1920 speech was the first indication that Quebec would resist federal encroachment, a battle that has gone on ever since. The English-speaking provinces did not object as strongly, establishing another pattern in which Quebec and the other provinces reacted differently to Ottawa’s incursions. Eventually, these issues and patterns almost led to the breakup of the country.
Taschereau’s opposition came at a favourable time. The wartime concentration of power in Ottawa’s hands was a temporary phenomenon, even though Ottawa had been somewhat successful in clinging to it after the war. The wartime shift in the balance of power had interrupted, but not reversed the trend towards greater provincial activity. The importance of the functions assigned to the Dominion’s central government in 1867 was still declining, while the importance of responsibilities assigned to the provinces was mushrooming with the need for roads, social welfare, urban infrastructure, education, and support for local industry. The 1920s would see a further relative weakening of federal power as Ottawa entered a period of minority governments and weak majority ones.
The phase-out of the post-war programs was facilitated by the 1921 election of the federal Liberals under William Lyon Mackenzie King. He did not believe Ottawa should be involved in provincial matters. That belief was reinforced politically by the fact that his largest contingent of MPs came from Quebec, whose government, elites, and people did not believe that any government should be heavily involved in social issues, especially the federal one dominated by English-speaking Canadians. King’s view was reinforced economically by the fact that Ottawa had huge debts to pay for the war and the nationalization of the railways. King had matured under Laurier’s vision of Canada, and intervention in provincial affairs was identified with Conservatives, with Macdonald and Borden, with the War Measures Act, and with conscription. All of these were poisonous politically in Quebec. Across Canada, the predominant political-economic philosophy still suggested that matters such as economic decisions, health, and social welfare were best left to companies, individuals, families, churches, and charities.
The Courts Define Federal and Provincial Roles
During the war and post-war period, the courts were also active in further defining the respective roles and powers of the federal and provincial governments. An important example was the Alberta Insurance Reference case of 1916. It dealt with a 1910 federal law that required all insurance companies to have federal licences. The Supreme Court decided that the law exceeded federal power, and the JCPC in London agreed; both decisions restricted Ottawa’s power under its responsibility for trade and commerce. In the Board of Commerce case of 1922, the Supreme Court again reinforced a more narrow interpretation of Ottawa’s responsibility for trade and commerce.
The 1914 War Measures Act overrode provincial responsibilities, but its legitimacy came into question in 1918 when Ottawa issued an order stating that provinces required federal approval to issue bonds. Quebec challenged it, and Ottawa backed down. Another important case involved Ottawa’s 1919 Combines and Fair Prices Act, which attempted to control prices. Three years later, the courts rejected it on the grounds that there was no current national emergency that would justify such intervention in the economy. Other cases, such as Reciprocal Insurance, determined that Ottawa could not declare an action to be criminal and then claim responsibility for that matter because Ottawa had responsibility for criminal law.
The Snider case of 1925 marked another serious restriction of federal power. In 1907, Ottawa passed the Industrial Disputes Investigation Act, allowing the federal Ministry of Labour to appoint a board to deal with industrial strikes and lockouts. In 1925, the Toronto Electric Commission asked for a board to be appointed to deal with its labour problems, an action that was challenged on the grounds that the matter was in provincial jurisdiction. Several courts upheld the law, but the JCPC in London overturned it on the grounds that labour relations were matters of property and civil rights, and there was “no emergency putting the national life of Canada in . . . peril.”
The effect of this series of court cases, dating back to the 1880s, was to ensure that Ottawa’s residual power under peace, order, and good government could only be used by the federal government to intervene in provincial affairs if there was a genuine national emergency affecting more than one province, that is, if the peace and order of Canada were actually threatened. Local disputes such as a strike in Toronto clearly did not meet that test. Ottawa was persistent though, and in 1928, it licensed a fish cannery on the grounds that since the fishery was federal, processing fish must also be federal. The Supreme Court regarded that as an exaggeration, and the JCPC agreed. Though these decisions restricted the federal government’s potential power, Ottawa continued to manage its own responsibilities quite well, and Canada survived in spite of the fact that Ottawa did not regulate things like fish-processing plants, liquor licences, insurance companies, and local labour disputes.
New technologies often raised questions as to which government should regulate them. Travel by airplane had become practical with some flights being within provincial borders while others crossed provincial or national borders. In 1919, Ottawa passed a law regulating air travel, which Quebec challenged in 1927. The courts declared that air travel was a matter of national importance, so Ottawa won that battle. Radios were another important new technology that required regulation, with some radio stations having purely local audiences while other broadcasts reached audiences in other provinces or the United States. Ottawa sought to regulate them, and Quebec’s challenge to the federal Radiotelegraph Act of 1927 failed.
The fact that Ottawa had won two battles after a long series of defeats did not represent any new transfer of power to Ottawa or any real reversal of trends in the balance of power between the two orders of government. The cases were entirely different, and the decisions made sense, even if some disagreed with them. Basically when Ottawa tried to exceed its powers, the courts usually supported the provinces; when new technologies came along that were national rather than local in scope, the courts made them federal responsibilities. That conformed to the BNA Act’s definition of the difference between general and local responsibilities and between federal and provincial jurisdiction.
Old Age Pensions
Federal-provincial relations entered a new phase in the late 1920s. The issue was old-age pensions, and the result was the specific, deliberate, successful, and permanent entry of Ottawa into an “exclusive” area of provincial jurisdiction. Attitudes towards social welfare reflected values, which differed between French Catholics and English-speaking Protestants. Welfare was therefore made a provincial responsibility in 1867. Later in the century another significant difference emerged, in that Quebec’s French Catholics trusted their Church rather than their government on such matters, while other Canadians increasingly wanted governments, rather than churches, to administer social welfare programs.
The BNA Act accommodated such differences extremely well, and by 1920, there were nine provinces in five geographic or economic regions and the differences between provinces were greater than in 1867. Under the constitution, each province could, if its citizens demanded, develop a pension program according to its own circumstances, politics, views, needs, and capabilities. For several decades, the provinces had in fact been introducing social welfare programs for needy groups such as the blind and single mothers. The provinces had discovered that the costs of new programs usually exceeded estimates, and they were therefore carefully approaching other forms of welfare acutely aware of the many demands on their limited budgets, and the fact that budgeting is often a zero-sum game: the more they spent on welfare, the less there would be for everything else.
The possibility of a federal plan was debated in the early 1920s, and in 1925, a House of Commons committee recommended one. This was a problem for Mackenzie King because welfare was provincial, and it was thought that a purely federal plan would require a constitutional amendment, a course of action he did not want to pursue. There was an argument, however, that a shared-cost program with the provinces might not require an amendment because any province joining the federal plan would, in effect, be giving its consent to the change. The Conservative opposition argued that if Ottawa could pay 50 per cent without an amendment, then it must also be able to pay 100 per cent, and welfare either was or was not in provincial jurisdiction. Quebec was strongly opposed to any federal program, BC favoured a federal-provincial scheme, and the other provinces waited to see what a federal plan would entail.
When the draft legislation was debated, Mackenzie King took the position that the constitution prevented Ottawa from introducing a purely federal plan. He managed to dodge the issue throughout 1925, but in 1926, his minority government was facing a scandal that threatened to topple his regime. His survival depended on the votes of just a few western Labour MPs. Two of them—James S. Woodsworth and Abraham A. Heaps—decided to take advantage of the situation to achieve their goal of a federal pension program. They offered to support either a Conservative or a Liberal government if it brought in a pension plan. The Conservatives rejected the offer out of hand; Mackenzie King agreed to a shared-cost plan against the wishes of some of his ministers. Woodsworth and Heaps held their noses to avoid the smell of the scandal, King survived the crisis, and Canada received its first major federal welfare program. The plan was approved on March 26 by a vote of 123–120, but was then defeated in the Senate by a vote of 45–21 as a violation of the constitution. King had the Commons pass it again in 1927 and persuaded Liberal Senators to let it stand.
That year, Ottawa entered the provincial field of social welfare in violation of the constitution. Three leading Quebec lawyers, including future prime minister Louis St. Laurent, provided Quebec Premier Taschereau with the legal opinion that the program was beyond the power of the federal government. Taschereau did not challenge it in the courts, probably because Quebec was the only province opposing it on constitutional grounds, and he did not want to stand in the way of the other provinces. Instead he proposed a federal-provincial conference to find a solution satisfactory to all parties. That never occurred, and the constitutionality of the program was never challenged in the courts.
BC joined the program, followed in 1929 by the three Prairie provinces and Ontario. The Maritime provinces could not afford their 50 per cent, and Premier Taschereau refused to participate on constitutional grounds, so none of the needy seniors in the four eastern provinces received pensions. Canada then had two types of provinces, those with a pension scheme and those without, another example of asymmetrical federalism. Ottawa’s share of the burden was paid from taxes collected in every province so the program transferred money from the four eastern provinces to the five western ones. Paradoxically, the Maritime provinces were poorer than the ones where their money was spent. In 1931, Ottawa increased its share to 75 per cent, disproving Mackenzie King’s arguments that federal involvement was legal providing it paid only 50 per cent of “provincial” plans. With that increase in federal funding, Nova Scotia and PEI signed on in 1933, followed by New Brunswick in 1935. Quebec knuckled under in 1936 for the same reason that King knuckled under in 1926—its minority provincial government needed support from other MLAs to avoid political defeat. An argument was advanced that the program was “voluntary,” because, in theory, the provinces did not have to join. History clearly demonstrated the opposite: the provinces could not avoid joining, because their taxpayers would not tolerate paying for a scheme from which they received no benefit.
The 1927 pension plan marked the emergence of a new theory concerning federalism, a theory known as the “spending power.” According to it, since the Fathers of Confederation had given Ottawa the power to raise revenue by any means, the federal government therefore had the power to spend it on anything it wanted, be it individuals, provinces, or organizations. And if provinces “voluntarily” accepted federal funds, then they had accepted that the federal plan was within Ottawa’s constitutional power. There was no discussion of such an idea during the Confederation debates, and in contrast, the BNA Act stated several times that the provincial responsibilities were “exclusive,” and they could hardly be exclusive if Ottawa could spend money in those areas. The theory of the “spending power” also ignored the fact that federalism was adopted specifically to ensure that Ottawa could not interfere in welfare, education, health, and culture in Quebec. It is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that any French-Canadian politician would have accepted a statement in the constitution that allowed Ottawa to spend money on these matters, and the Fathers of Confederation could not have reconciled such a clause with the term “exclusive” that defined provincial matters.
The 1927 federal Old Age Pension Plan was questionable on other grounds. The money Ottawa paid for its share of pensions in the nine provinces was collected in those nine provinces. Had their citizens wanted their taxes spent on welfare, they had every opportunity to pressure their provincial governments to launch such programs. Indeed, that is exactly what the citizens were demanding and what their provincial governments were doing as fast as their finances allowed. Priorities varied from province to province, as did resources and needs, so the “one-size-fits-all” federal program on pensions distorted public spending on everything else. Ottawa also introduced the program on the principle of “take it or leave it,” with Ottawa dictating the conditions but actually paying less than half as the provinces had to pay their half plus administrative costs. Need also varied widely between provinces due to demographics, family patterns, and standards of living. The program was thus most valuable to the Maritimes and least attractive to Quebec. The cost of living varied everywhere, so the value of the pension also varied between provinces, between regions within provinces, and between urban and rural areas. On paper it was “one-size-fits-all,” but Canadians came in a wide variety of sizes!
Battles over Natural Resources
In the late 1920s, several other battles were unfolding between Ottawa and the provinces over a perennial problem—control of natural resources. One battle was in central Canada, where Ottawa was still fighting Ontario and Quebec for control of the development of hydro-electricity. Ontario wanted to exploit the vast potential of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers, the latter in co-operation with Quebec. Rivers were natural resources, a provincial matter. Mackenzie King wanted to build or improve locks on both rivers, and navigation was a federal matter. He also wanted to use the revenue from electricity sales to pay for the locks. The politicians and civil servants in Ottawa concluded that federal control over navigation gave it control of the water that produced the electricity. That suggested the rather strange fiction that boats could sail through a hydro generating plant.
Ontario’s Conservative Premier Howard Ferguson regarded Ottawa’s position as completely unacceptable. If Ottawa could use its authority over locks to control the electricity generated beside them, it could control the hydro-electric power on any river within the province that was navigable anywhere. Interpreting that broadly, as Ottawa was prone to do, could give the federal government control over a considerable portion of Ontario’s economy, since it was increasingly based on cheap hydro-electric power. This was a new and perplexing development, as Ottawa had not previously questioned Ontario’s complete control of power plants at Niagara, where Ontario co-operated directly with a foreign government, namely the state of New York.
Ferguson argued that Ottawa’s responsibility for navigation on some river could not give it control of power generation, and such an interpretation would transform Canada from a federal union into a unitary state. Quebec’s Premier Taschereau, who was even more concerned with Ottawa’s penchant for interfering in provincial jurisdiction, supported Ferguson. To cement his alliance with Taschereau, Ferguson repealed a law known as Regulation 17, which had restricted the use of French in Ontario’s schools to the great annoyance of Quebec. Taschereau then publicly backed Ferguson in a speech at the centenary of the founding of the University of Toronto. With Ferguson on the platform, Taschereau gave a very clear account of his view of Confederation:
Every Canadian must understand that 60 years ago we formed not a homogeneous country but a confederation of different provinces for certain purposes, with a distinct understanding that each of these provinces should retain certain things . . . traditions, creed, laws, national aspirations, language, and a heritage were abandoned by none of the contracting parties. To live and endure the spirit as well as the letter of Confederation must be respected.
These disputes had a serious long-term effect on Canada. Since Confederation, Ontario had viewed appeals to the JCPC in London as essential for protecting provincial jurisdiction from federal encroachment. In the 1920s, Ottawa wanted to patriate the constitution and make it a Canadian, rather than British, Act of Parliament. Ontario was opposed because the federally appointed Supreme Court would then replace the JCPC as the final arbiter of federal-provincial disputes. Since the two governments were competing in various legal disputes, that was the equivalent of one of the teams in a hockey game appointing the referees, a blatant conflict of interest. Quebec agreed. Provincial opposition would postpone the patriation of the constitution for half a century and ultimately make amendment extremely difficult. In 1931, Ontario obtained British agreement that sections of the BNA Act that affected provinces could not be amended without provincial agreement. It was the logical conclusion of the federal-provincial disputes the JCPC had heard over the previous half-century, and it was one of the greatest victories ever for provincial rights.
Another dispute over resources broke out when the Prairie provinces once more put the question of control of natural resources on the federal-provincial agenda. By then, Ottawa’s excuses for retaining control were hardly credible, but the issue had become more complicated. At first, the Prairie provinces had been satisfied with the compensation Ottawa provided for the loss of revenue from those resources, but by 1920, they calculated that Ottawa had earned more than it had returned to them and they wanted that money. At the same time, BC demanded the return of the unsettled land in the Peace River valley that it had transferred to Ottawa to help pay for building the CPR some forty years earlier.
Mackenzie King applied his most successful tactics—he procrastinated while creating difficulties in the way of a solution. In negotiations with Alberta in 1926, Ottawa insisted that when it handed over the lands that had been set aside to finance schools, Alberta had to administer those lands according to the terms of the 1905 Alberta Act. That meant that Ottawa would still be dictating how the lands were used after passing ownership of them to Alberta. These conditions threatened to re-open the 1905 debate over separate schools, which was always a potentially explosive issue. John Brownlee’s United Farmers government resented the attempt to impose federal views on education, and the negotiations stalled. King had important allies in the West, however, and one of them, Saskatchewan’s Liberal Premier Stuart Gardiner, convinced King that the situation was simply too unjust to remain unresolved.
A federal-provincial conference in 1927 produced agreement. This time, the Maritimes did not object as Ottawa was meeting many of their demands with a separate agreement, and Ontario and Quebec were more concerned about their own fight with Ottawa over control of hydro-electricity. With agreement in principle, all that remained was the details. With those, King resorted to the politics of divide and conquer, hoping to negotiate a deal with the province that would accept the least and then force the others to accept the same terms. By 1929, he had negotiated deals with the three Prairie provinces, and agreement with BC followed in February 1930. The deals came into effect in 1930 through an amendment to the BNA Act, sixty years after Manitoba entered Confederation as a second-class province, forty-five years after the completion of the CPR, twenty-five years after the creation of Alberta and Saskatchewan as second-class provinces, and twenty years after almost all good agricultural land had been settled. The timing could not have been worse; within months, the Great Depression made any remaining agricultural land almost worthless, and the decline in the price of minerals and lumber made further exploitation of the non-agricultural land less profitable.
Maritime Grievances Boil Over
While King was fending off the western provinces, he was also facing growing demand in the Maritimes for a fundamental correction to the original Confederation bargain. After the First World War, a combination of circumstances wrecked the Maritime economies. Young, educated people fled the region in search of jobs, leaving fewer workers to support an aging population. As the region’s proportion of Canada’s population declined, its representation in the House of Commons fell from forty-three MPs in 1883 to thirty-one in 1921—fewer voices crying out for more attention. At the same time, Maritimers watched in frustration as the Prairies obtained provincial status, special financial treatment, overrepresentation in Parliament, extension of borders for Manitoba, and special freight rates, while Ontario and Quebec received huge extensions of territory. In the late 1920s, ancient grievances and current frustrations exploded in the Maritime Rights Movement. The governments, business and professional groups, and the general populace of all three provinces demanded a fair share of the advantages of participation in the Canadian common market. Their specific demands were for transportation policies that recognized their needs, tariffs that protected their coal and steel industries, and support for the development and use of Maritime ports.
After winning the 1926 election, Mackenzie King responded to the pressure partly because the Conservatives were gaining votes in the Maritimes. King’s short-term response was typical—he appointed a commission to investigate the complaints. The Duncan Commission duly documented the serious deterioration in the Maritime economies and provided numerous recommendations to address the problems. Mackenzie King then made another typical response by providing the minimal concessions that he calculated would meet enough of the concerns to defuse the protest movement. Ottawa increased its grants to Nova Scotia by $875,000, to New Brunswick by $600,000, and to PEI by $125,000. It reduced freight rates by 25 per cent and promised assistance to improve harbour facilities. These concessions made things better and allowed provincial politicians to claim some victories in their relations with Ottawa. The Depression then struck the fragile Maritime economies and the hardships of the 1920s started to appear like good times.