by Conrad Black
Much the most controversial measure was the Rebellion Losses Bill, which was well-accepted as it applied to victims of the events of 1837 and 1838 but evoked extreme controversy over what the Tory English claimed in the most violent terms was a craven and corrupt reward to “aliens and rebels,” as Allan MacNab rather loosely described large numbers of his French-speaking compatriots. MacNab and the Upper Canada solicitor general, William Blake, almost came to blows in the Assembly. The act excluded from benefit anyone convicted of an act of rebellion. Upper Canadian losses were paid from a fund collected in Upper Canada; it was proposed that Lower Canadian losses be paid from a general fund of the Province of Canada. This naturally enflamed the sensibilities of the susceptible (though here again, this was just the modest opening ripple of a pelagic wave of transfer payments that would flow from English to French Canada more than a century later). In fact, as the arithmetic worked out, it was not especially favourable to French Canadians, as LaFontaine laboriously explained, but this was a bold step in internecine Canadian relations.
Conditions were aggravated by the return of William Lyon Mackenzie, and the international press took note of the agitation. The New York Herald predicted the imminent secession of Canada from the British Empire (which in fact no one anywhere in the Canadas was seeking), and the Times of London, the most influential newspaper in the world, reported a tense struggle between “Royalists” and the sympathizers with “rebellion” and declared that Canada “hangs by a thread.” Elgin gave assent to the Rebellion Losses Bill on April 25, 1849. The governor’s carriage was stoned, with him in it, and fire bells in Montreal called out the mobs in emulation of the only larger French-speaking city in the world, where they had shown their explosive potential in driving out Louis-Philippe the year before. And in the highest Parisian tradition, the House of Assembly was stormed and sacked and burned to the ground, including the parliamentary library of twenty thousand books, as the mobs stoned firemen who came to extinguish the blaze. MacNab saved the portrait of the queen, but in the following three days the homes of Hincks and LaFontaine and the boarding house where Baldwin stayed were attacked and partially destroyed, and the governor’s carriage was again attacked, pursued by an assortment of vehicles, and Elgin’s brother was seriously injured.
The only incongruity in the comparison with Paris is that the mobs in this case were angry English Montrealers who resented liberality to the French majority of Lower Canada. These frictions, the product of ancient racial hatreds and the isolation of the two Canadas from each other, would be a long time passing. Montreal forfeited its right to continue as the country’s capital (which would then alternate in four-year terms between Toronto and Quebec), and to this day the city has its English-speaking population to thank for that. Both houses of the British Parliament debated the issue of the Rebellion Losses Bill in June 1849. The strongest critic, in force of argument, not ferocity, was William Ewart Gladstone, then forty and a rising former colonial secretary. Benjamin Disraeli spoke in support of the measure and of Grey’s conduct, but the principal substantive reply to Gladstone, who despite his thoroughness was afflicted by misunderstandings, came in a lengthy letter from Francis Hincks in the Times. Hincks was in London to arrange financing for his public works program, but also as a special envoy on the Rebellion Losses issue, and he met with Russell, Grey, Gladstone, and others. Hincks pointed out Gladstone’s errors in accusing Baldwin and LaFontaine of being ex-rebels, and Disraeli’s in surmising that there was an issue of French domination of English Canadians. Both British future prime ministers thought there had been no rebels in Upper Canada. Hincks, a capable editor himself (of the Montreal Pilot), wrote with exactly the appropriate combination of factual rigour and wry humour that “I should imagine that the author of Coningsby [one of Disraeli’s slightly racy novels] understands the meaning of getting up a ‘good cry’ to serve party purposes,” and generally reflected that “it is very unsafe for parties at a distance of three thousand miles to interfere in our affairs.… I claim for myself and my colleagues [in Upper and Lower Canada] that we have as much true British feeling as any member of that party which seems to wish to monopolize it.”56
Hincks supported his economic mission with a pamphlet entitled “Canada and Its Financial Resources,” and recorded that from 1824 to 1848 Upper Canada’s population had risen by 400 per cent and Lower Canada’s by 50 per cent (they were now both around 750,000) and that similar figures of growth were attained in every sector of the economy. The Canadas were the most prosperous part of the British world, and the ratios of public revenues to debt were very favourable. His mission to London was an overwhelming success on all fronts. Elgin and his ministers had all played difficult roles with great firmness and steadiness; the crisis passed and Canada moved a giant step closer to autonomous statehood under the sponsorship of the majestic British Empire.
Britain repealed the last of the protectionist Navigation Acts in 1849, which greatly opened up the harbours of Quebec and Montreal and the canalization of the St. Lawrence, and the expanded access to the lower Great Lakes accelerated rising prosperity. There were further reforms in 1850, including a reduction in postal rates, the establishment of separate school systems for Roman Catholics – a world-leading advance in religious toleration – and further judicial reforms. The radicals were now gaining strength, as English Canada started on what would long prove its vocation of being at the vanguard of reform. Clear Grits, as the left wing of the Liberals were called, demanded universal (adult male) suffrage, election even of the governor, secret ballots, no property qualifications for MPs, fixed term elections, a gentler judicial and usury regime for the poor, the end of primogeniture, and secularization of the Clergy Reserves. A group of followers of Papineau led by Antoine-Aimé Dorion (1818–1891) called itself the Parti Rouge and adopted a platform similar to that of the Upper Canada radicals and demanded the dissolution of the union of Upper and Lower Canada to boot.
Baldwin and LaFontaine attacked the Clergy Reserves issue in 1850, proposing the abolition of the Anglican privilege, but this would require repeal of the Imperial statute of 1840. The goal was to open up this vast Crown land holding to national development after wrenching it free of the inflexible grip of the Anglican (or any other) church. Hincks was for secularization but thought it impractical; LaFontaine was not in favour of secularization, as he thought the land should be dedicated to educational purposes; and Baldwin straddled the issue, elegantly enough but not convincingly. The fissures within the Great Ministry were obvious. On June 26, 1851, to open the divisions in the ministry, the radical factions pushed a cleverly designed bill in favour of abolishing the court of chancery. Baldwin lost the vote among his Upper Canadian colleagues because of the avarice of the elected members of the bar, and only was able to defeat the measure by reliance on LaFontaine. Robert Baldwin, ever the conscientious man, tired and sated by the victory of his long quest for responsible government, resigned on June 30, 1851. All sides graciously praised his achievements and his character, and LaFontaine announced that he would retire at the end of the session.
The Great Ministry passed into history, where its benign influence has been indelible. In the election that followed, Baldwin felt it his duty to stand for re-election but did not campaign and was uninterested in the outcome; he only felt it his duty to give his constituents the ability to vote for or against him. (He lost narrowly.) LaFontaine withdrew, but in 1853 was appointed chief justice of Lower Canada and exercised that role with great distinction until he died, a baronet, on February 26, 1864, aged fifty-six. Robert Baldwin retired completely to his comfortable Toronto home (Spadina), and declined, for reasons of health, his former protégé John A. Macdonald’s offer of the post of chief justice of common pleas in 1855 and a seat on the Legislative Council in 1858. He died on December 9 of that year, aged just fifty-four. Both men sacrificed their health and longevity to build a bridge between the solitudes of English and French Canada, entrench democratic rule in both, and e
nd any formal advantage of one group over the other. They were pioneers in building an officially bicultural parliamentary democracy and steered successfully through fierce gales on a middle course of democracy without mob rule, property without oligarchic privilege, and retention of the backing of the British Empire to deter the intrusion of the United States, while attaining the same rights for Canadians that British (and American) citizens enjoyed. They managed by the logic and irresistible merit of their goals as by the patience, moderation, and suavity of their methods. “Baldwin retained his Anglicanism, his colonial aristocratic attitude (he owned fifty thousand acres), and his attachment to the Crown.… He was too cold, too correct, too consistent, and like Aristides, too just, for popularity, but it is to him more than to any other one man that Canada owes self-government.… LaFontaine committed his people … to constitutionalism. Lower Canada, thanks to him, was not to become a precedent for Ireland. No aspirations towards the widest possible future for the race were to be abandoned, but in the future, these were to be realized at the polls and through debate, not through gunpowder.”57 They were unswervingly principled, tolerant of any reasonable opposition, and had no interest in office for the mere sake of holding it. They came into public life with a purpose and left it when the purpose was accomplished, like Cincinnatus, or Washington. The debt of all Canadians to them, 170 years later, is very great.
4. The Hincks–Morin Government, 1851–1854
The opposition to the Reform government was divided between the anti-conservative rouges of Canada East, who were somewhat anti-clerical and well to the left of the Reformers in social and constitutional policy, and the Clear Grits in Canada East, who were rabidly anti-French and anti-Roman Catholic, but also rather populist and anti-establishment. The leader of the rouges was Antoine-Aimé Dorion, and of the Clear Grits George Brown, the founder and editor of the Toronto Globe. Brown opposed aid to separate schools, distrusted the French influence in the government, was opposed to any state favoritism to any church, and suspected the regime of not wishing to secularize the Clergy Reserves. These issues were aggravated by what was called “the papal aggression question,” imported from Britain, because the Roman Catholic Church in Great Britain had reconstituted itself on a diocesan basis after a lapse of three hundred years since it was shattered and suppressed by the apostate Henry VIII. This was what the great theologian, Roman convert, former vicar of Oxford, and future cardinal John Henry Newman in one of his most famous addresses called the Second Spring. Such was the fragility of religious tolerance even in advanced corners of the British world that so innocuous an event could be widely construed as aggression.
In a by-election in Ontario in the spring of 1851, Brown had stood and Hincks did not give him the Reform endorsement. Brown was defeated, it was believed, especially by him, by the influence of Irish and German Roman Catholic immigrants. Baldwin resigned from office that June, and Brown withdrew from the Reform party and ended all connection with it in July. On the retirement of Baldwin and LaFontaine, a new government was formed headed by Francis Hincks, the financier and former tenant of the Baldwin family, newspaper editor, and capable public administrator, who had earned widespread respect as inspector general in the Great Ministry, and Augustin-Norbert Morin, co-author with Louis-Joseph Papineau of the now rather quaint Ninety-Two Resolutions of 1834 and Speaker of the Legislative Assembly through the profound debates of the Baldwin–LaFontaine era. He consented to serve as co-leader with Hincks, and they had an agreed division of work. Hincks, the man of commerce, was chiefly concerned with railways, public works, and trade and tariffs, and Morin, as provincial secretary and commissioner of Crown lands, pursued the old bugbears of the abolition of the seigneurial regime, separate schools in Canada West, where they were a good deal more contested a concept, for obvious reasons, than in French Canada, and the transformation of the Legislative Council into an elected House. The seigneurial and Legislative Council issues were the last hangovers from Morin’s days as a sidekick of Papineau, and he was concerned to clear away the detritus of revolutionary disaffection in Lower Canada, which he had sloughed off personally more than a decade before.
Hincks and Morin advised Governor General Elgin to dissolve the Assembly for new elections, which were held in December 1851, and returned the Reform majority pretty much as it had been. The new industrial passion was railroads, and they did offer astounding prospects of moving people and freight with unimagined rapidity and in undreamed-of volume. There was naturally a competition between Canada and the United States, as there had been in the fur trade, to develop rail lines to the west and from the interior of North America to the Atlantic, or to water that connected to it. Hincks had been the champion of the Guarantee Act in the previous government, which had opened the era of Canadian public and private sector cooperation in great projects with assurances of a government guaranty of 6 per cent interest for the debt of railways of more than seventy-five miles once they had been half built. Once installed as co-leader of the government, Hincks got back to work on a plan for joint financing by Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick of a railway from Halifax to Windsor or Sarnia, on what was then the western boundary of Canada and a point of entry into the United States. Hincks was dealing with the premiers of the two Atlantic provinces: Edward Chandler of New Brunswick and Joseph Howe of Nova Scotia. The two provinces wanted separate routes to the sea, as Howe was opposed to Saint John, New Brunswick, being given direct access to such a railway, as it would increase its ability to compete with Halifax. Hincks went to Halifax and gave such a powerful speech in favour of his plan (which Chandler supported and made both cities an ocean terminus of the line) that Howe was persuaded and graciously changed his position. The only remaining roadblock was the professed reluctance of the Imperial government to assist a plan that would be vulnerable to American attack in the event of hostilities. Hincks returned to Britain to persuade Westminster to assist the railway and to repeal its 1841 Clergy Reserve Act and enable the Canadas to legislate their own solution. He was also seeking a reciprocity trade agreement with the United States. (Derby, the former Lord Stanley, and Disraeli were now in office, with Disraeli as chancellor of the exchequer and leader of the House of Commons.)
Hincks found the new colonial secretary, Sir John Somerset Pakington, very unsympathetic, and Hincks, with an agility at moving between the public and private sectors shared by few others in Canadian history, concluded that British government support, if available at all, would be very late and heavily conditionalized. He negotiated financing in the City of London for a main rail route from Montreal to Toronto and Hamilton as a private sector undertaking. Pakington fully justified Hincks’s foreboding by ignoring him and informing Elgin directly that the Clergy Reserve Act would not be modified or repealed, and he rejected Hincks’s proposal to enhance the possibilities for a trade reciprocity arrangement with the United States by granting American vessels free navigation of the St. Lawrence River. Hincks called upon Pakington again and told him that “there will be no end of agitation in Canada if the attempt be made to settle this question permanently according to public opinion in England instead of that of the province itself.” 58 Despite the desperately slow progress toward responsible government that had finally achieved its object, and all the unsatisfactory superannuated generals and humdrum careerists that the British generally inflicted on the Canadas as governors, and the reactionary reflexes of even otherwise rather liberal colonial secretaries such as Russell, this was a surprising disappointment to descend on the visiting chief minister of a colony that now had over 10 per cent of Britain’s population and formidable prospects and was considerably more prosperous per capita than the Mother Country.
This was the worst decade of the Irish famine, and emigration to Canada from the British Isles increased from 25,000 per year in the early part of the 1840s to almost 50,000 per year near the end of the decade. It peaked in 1847 with 90,000 arrivals at Quebec City, 40,000 of whom eventually reached Toronto, a ci
ty of only 20,000 at the start of the year. (The Roman Catholic and Anglican churches cooperated admirably in settling these people.) From 1841 to 1851, the population of Canada West increased from 452,000 to 952,000, while that of Canada East grew in the same period from 697,000 to 890,000. The force of English-speaking immigration seeking an English-speaking but British destination thus enabled this inland colony to outstrip Lower Canada despite the mighty Quebec birthrate. There were at this point about 550,000 people in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, so these colonies together had almost as many citizens as had the Thirteen Colonies at the start of the American Revolution seventy-five years before (this excludes the Americans’ 500,000 slaves at that time). Only the need for British protection from the American appetite for national expansion condemned Canadians to the patient rote of petitions and importunity to which the British, for a while longer, subjected them, de haut en bas, though more from indifference than from disdain. In his hostility to the French and to Roman Catholics, George Brown quickly became the leading opposition figure from Canada West, and that province, which had been quite happy with parliamentary representation equal to Canada East’s when Canada East was more populous, now railed vituperatively against under-representation opposite the French papists.
Hincks, though a life-long supporter of representation by population, sagely told the Assembly, “The truth was that the people occupying Upper and Lower Canada were not homogeneous.… They differed in feelings, language, laws, religion, and institutions, and therefore the Union must be considered as one between two distinct peoples, each returning an equal number of representatives.”59 Baldwin, LaFontaine, and Hincks, and not at this point Brown, grasped what was essential for Canada to be viable: the French Canadians had to be numerous and tenacious enough to be durable; they had to be joined by an at least equal number of English-speaking non-Americans; the two groups had to work out their own arrangements, as they were doing in what was set up just a decade earlier by Durham and Sydenham with the impossible and discreditable ambition of assimilating and acculturating the French; and the whole would need the protection of the British, however patronizingly furnished, until Canada was strong enough no longer to be irresistible bait to the expansionist ambitions of the United States.