John A

by Richard J. Gwyn

  At Quebec City, there was one revealing public discussion of this existential issue between French and English, though it involved neither Macdonald nor Cartier. It occurred right at the start of the conference, and it’s very likely that only Macdonald among the English-speaking delegates understood the significance of what was being said. Sir Étienne-Paschal Taché made a brief opening statement in his role as nominal premier of Canada. After pleasantries, he informed the delegates that Confederation would be “tantamount to a separation of the provinces, and Lower Canada would thereby preserve its autonomy together with all the institutions it held so dear.” Not one member of the “other” solitude rose to challenge or inquire about what the words “separation” and “autonomy” meant; by their silence, English Canadians sealed the pact.

  Here is the place for a footnote too important to be tucked away at the bottom of the page. Taché, avuncular in his appearance and genial in his manner, was highly regarded by his English counterparts as one of the gatekeepers between themselves and the near-invisible Canadiens. But Taché was also a passionate patriot. He showed this side of himself in a remarkable 1858 letter to a fellow Canadien politician. “The important thing to remember is that the unity we have just consolidated in Lower Canada ensures that we are the de facto rulers of the entire province [of Canada],” he wrote. “It may come that, in their impotent rage, we will soon be hearing weeping and gnashing of teeth from the Upper Canadians…. All the blustering of our enemies will vanish into thin air, while we go forward, govern, progress…. And we will do more: we will safeguard our institutions and preserve them from impure contact.” Fortunately for Macdonald, and for Canada, neither Brown nor the Globe ever learned about this other side of their gatekeeper.*122 Equally fortunately for Canada, no Canadien leader learned of Brown’s triumphant declaration to Anne that Confederation’s great accomplishment was that French Canadianism had been extinguished.

  Macdonald achieved all he really wanted just in getting the Confederation deal itself at Quebec City. Prince Edward Island pulled out from the pact later, as did Newfoundland, neither of these island colonies having any interest in the Intercolonial Railway or any fear of Americans attempting to invade by running the gauntlet of the Royal Navy. The approval of the Nova Scotia and New Brunswick delegates, though, meant that Macdonald had in his hand one-half of a continental-sized nation that would stretch to the Atlantic; the addition of the second half, stretching all the way to the Pacific, was specifically provided for in the Quebec Resolutions.

  Macdonald didn’t get what he had said on several occasions he personally would prefer to a confederation or federation—a “legislative union.” Such an arrangement was highly attractive to Britain, itself a “legislative union,” or unitary state, and one that had forged a “Union” with Scotland and had rejected repeatedly, and violently, any attempts at Home Rule, or self-government, in Ireland. Midway through the conference, Macdonald wrote to the businessman-politician Isaac Buchanan, “My great aim is to strengthen the general Legislature and Govt. as much as possible, and approach as nearly to a Legislative Union as is practicable.” Shortly after the conference ended, he wrote to a supporter, Malcolm Cameron, “If the Confederation goes on, you, if spared the ordinary age of man, will see both local Parliaments and Governments absorbed in the General Power.” Macdonald added, as hardly needed to be said, “But of course, it doesn’t do to adopt that point of view in discussing the subject in Lower Canada.”

  While Macdonald kept on saying this kind of thing, he may not have meant it. He may have been playing another set of his “long game.” He once even showed his hand in public. In the Confederation Debates in the Canadian legislature that followed the Quebec Conference, Macdonald engaged in an intriguing exchange with the High Tory M.C. Cameron, who challenged Macdonald that he would have “better shown [his] patriotism by waiting a little longer to accomplish it.” Macdonald interjected, “Accomplish what?” Cameron answered, “A legislative union of all the provinces.” Macdonald then gave his colleague a lesson in realpolitik. “I thought my hon. friend knew that every man in Lower Canada was against it, every man in New Brunswick, every man in Nova Scotia,*123 every man in Newfoundland and every man in Prince Edward Island. How, then, is it to be accomplished?” The “long game” that Macdonald thus was playing was to position himself at a constitutional extreme from which he could gracefully retreat, while using his concessions to gain in exchange yet more bits and pieces of a highly centralized federal system.

  That in fact is exactly what happened. Before the Confederation project was completed, Macdonald won a succession of important additions to the central power. Immigration and agriculture became joint jurisdictions rather than exclusively provincial concerns, and Ottawa gained the right to appoint the provincial lieutenant-governors, officials considered so powerful at the time that Macdonald described them as “chief executive officers.” Moreover, during the negotiations at the Quebec Conference, even though many delegates favoured a legislative union rather than a confederation—Brown†124 and Galt among the Canadians, and, among the Maritimers, Tupper and some senior men—Macdonald made no attempt to win approval for a legislative union. By not attempting seriously the impossibility of a legislative union, he got the possible—namely, as he expressed it and believed he had achieved, that “the Central Government assumes towards the local governments precisely the same position as the Imperial Government holds with respect to each of the provinces.”

  The constitution that emerged from Quebec City, and that went on to become the BNA Act, was almost certainly the most centralized constitution for a federation or confederation that’s ever been assembled. Macdonald secured all the four centralizing measures Alexander Hamilton had attempted to insert into the U.S. Constitution at Philadelphia in 1787—appointment of senators for life; federal appointment of state governors; the federal right to disallow state laws; and the granting of residual powers to the federal government. He also secured one centralizing authority, over “banking, incorporation of banks, and the issue of paper money,” that Hamilton never even thought of.

  Macdonald’s “long game” had another objective, one far more critical to his purpose than creating a strong central government for the sake of governmental efficiency. Confederation’s prime purpose was to impress Britain and the United States by a statement of national will; gathering together the British North America colonies was merely a means to that end. A central government that possessed, as he put it, “all the powers which are incident to sovereignty” would impress as the government of a nation rather than of some upgraded province or colony. To impress further, it would avoid what Macdonald saw as the “fatal error” that had almost sundered the United States—that of “making each state a distinct sovereignty, and giving to each a distinct sovereign power.” In the nation-state he was creating, therefore, sovereignty would reside, as in all real nation-states, at its centre.

  As it turned out, Macdonald would lose this part of his “long game”—in later sets. Quirky decisions by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London during the latter part of Macdonald’s post-Confederation term were an early cause. The underlying reason was that Canadians themselves wanted a decentralized confederation rather than Macdonald’s centralized one. Another reason was the most obvious one of all: immense distances kept the people of British North America apart from each other and turned them to their own local governments and away from the remote national one. Above all, Canadiens, soon to become Québécois, located their true national government not in Ottawa but in Quebec City. As to the future of federal-provincial relations, rather than Macdonald’s benign confidence about federal dominance, the shrewdest guess was the one made by that unnervingly perceptive critic Christopher Dunkin: the “cry” of the provinces, he predicted in 1865, “will be found to be pretty often and pretty successfully—‘Give, give, give.’”

  A closing note about the Quebec Conference. The most famous painting in Canadian hi
storiography is Robert Harris’s The Fathers of Confederation. Macdonald dominates the picture—because he’s in the centre, he’s standing rather than sitting, he’s tall (at five foot eleven he was above the average height for the time), he’s wearing a dashing white waistcoat inside his black frock coat, and, in contrast to the ponderous gravitas of most of the others, his posture is alert, watchful, purposeful. Harris painted it in 1884. By that time the building in which the event had taken place had burned down, and Harris improved the vista by painting in delicate arched windows in place of the square wooden casements of the original.

  This painting was lost in the 1916 fire that destroyed the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. Harris, by then seventy, refused a second commission but did touch up his original cartoon, or charcoal sketch. In 1964 the insurance company Confederation Life commissioned Toronto artist Rex Woods to recreate Harris’s 1884 version and presented it to Parliament as a Centennial gift. It now hangs in the Railway Committee Room of the Parliament Buildings.*125

  Macdonald’s mood after the comprehensive success at Quebec City was confident to the point of being cocky. Within a fortnight of the conference’s end, he was treating Confederation as if it were already an accomplished fact and was looking beyond to the administrative details of a post-Confederation government. On November 14, 1864, he wrote to Premier Tilley of New Brunswick, “Have you thought over the formation of the Govt—the Federal Govt I mean?—i.e. as to the number and composition of the Executive, the number and nature of the Departments & the general system of administration?” He made the same request to Nova Scotia’s Tupper the same day, adding, “I intend to commence next week to draft the Bill to be submitted for the consideration of the Imperial Govt.”

  His personal correspondence communicated the same assurance. A day after his letters to Tilley and Tupper, in a letter to Judge James Robert Gowan, Macdonald claimed the entire constitution as “mine.” In another letter at this time, he declared, “We do not pretend that it is at all perfect, or even symmetrical, but it was the result of a series of compromises which were necessary to secure the support of all classes.”

  To heighten his high spirits, events kept breaking his way. Midway through the Quebec Conference, the delegates heard worri some news that two dozen Southern Confederates hiding in Canada had staged a cross-border raid on the northern Vermont town of St. Albans, taking two hundred thousand dollars from three banks, killing one person and wounding another before fleeing back to Canada. The general commanding the American forces in the region gave his troops an order that if other Confederates made a similar sortie, they were to give hot pursuit right into Canada. President Lincoln refused to confirm the order, which would have breached Canada’s neutrality, and waited to see how Canada would respond.

  By bad luck, that response could not have been more thoroughly bungled. Most of the Confederates were arrested as soon as they arrived back in Canada from St. Albans. On December 13, their preliminary trial came up before Montreal magistrate Charles-Joseph Coursol. The defence lawyer made a convoluted argument for the prisoners’ temporary release; a confused Coursol assented, and the Confederate raiders instantly vanished. American newspapers, and many American politicians, were certain it was an anti-North plot. Four days later Washington gave notice that all Canadians would have to have passports to enter the United States. Privately, Macdonald expressed his fury at “the unhappy and mistaken decision of Coursol.” To an inquiring businessman, Macdonald’s response was nuanced adroitly. On the one hand, Macdonald wrote, there was no reason why “individuals or incorporated companies like Railways should not join in their exertions with Americans from the Western Frontier to procure its [the passport order’s] withdrawal.” On the other, “it would be extremely impolitic, and, indeed, defeat our object, if the Canadian Government went on its knees to the United States government.” Macdonald then gave the businessman a lesson in governance: an intervention by the Canadian government itself, he wrote, “would give Mr. Seward [the secretary of state] an exaggerated idea of the inconvenience and loss suffered by Canada and it [the order] would be kept up as a means of punishment or for purposes of coercion.”

  In fact, the released raiders were quickly rearrested and retried by a different judge, who subsequently ruled (very likely after being prompted by Macdonald) that they should be extradited to the United States.*126 To forestall future raids, Macdonald called up two thousand volunteers to stand guard along the border. As a further precaution, he organized a detective force, headed by Gilbert McMicken, “a shrewd, cool and determined man who won’t easily lose his head,” to provide intelligence on what was happening across the border. The flap died down, although, as always, not without calls by American newspapers, especially the New York Herald, for Canada’s annexation, if necessary by force. Of lasting consequence, though, was the decision by Congress not to renew the Reciprocity Treaty when it reached its due date in 1866, in reaction to what was seen to be Canadian favouritism towards the South. The combination of this cross-border free-trade pact, together with the immense demand generated by American military mobilization, had led to the growth of Canada’s economy at a faster rate than ever before in the nineteenth century.†127

  The immediate consequences of this mini-crisis, though, were all positive. Even the passport rule was soon withdrawn. As always, an external threat drew people together. Further, the St. Albans affair reminded Canadians of the threat about to be posed by the imminent victory of the North over the South. About the war itself, Macdonald now insisted on the strictest neutrality, urging it on a colleague with just a hint of regret: “We can’t help the South[,] and a naked expression of sympathy would do it no good and greatly injure us.” Nevertheless, the fact remained that once the American Civil War ended, the vast Federal armies might be demobilized—or, perhaps, mobilized to march northwards.

  To this threat, actual or perceived, two responses were possible: Confederation, which would signal Canada’s will to survive; as well, a helping hand from Britain. Macdonald now set out to secure both.

  NINETEEN

  Parliament vs the People

  If we do not represent the people of Canada, we have no right to be here. John A. Macdonald

  The sweeping success of the Quebec Conference was followed by the double afterglow of a triumphal tour of Canada by the Maritime delegates and the plaudits for the accomplishment expressed by British newspapers from the Times on down. Macdonald’s response to all this praise was to go on a prolonged binge. He performed like a tightly wound spring that, once released, flies all over the place and then collapses in a heap.

  The post-conference tour, which had the dual purpose of showing Canada to the Maritimers and showing off the Maritimers to Canadians, began in Montreal with a gala dinner hosted by Cartier. To encourage the delegates to complete their good work, the program of toasts included the verse “Then let us be firm and united / One country, one flag for us all; / United, our strength will be freedom / Divided, we each of us fall.” The cavalcade then moved to Ottawa, where Macdonald was to act as host. It began well: the crowds were huge and they escorted the visitors in a torchlight procession to the Russell Hotel, where they were to dine. As the gala’s principal speaker, Macdonald got to his feet, said a few words, then stopped and fell silent.*128 Galt had to fill up the vacuum with an extemporaneous speech. Macdonald rejoined the group when it left by train for Kingston, with succeeding stops planned at all the communities—Belleville, Cobourg, Port Hope—on the way to Toronto, where Brown would be host. But Macdonald never left Kingston. It’s safe to guess that he spent most of his time at Eliza Grimason’s tavern, periodically collapsing into the bed kept for him there.

  As all who knew him realized well, Macdonald, from this period on, would every now and then go on one of these binges and be unable to do anything until they were over. Then suddenly he would reappear as though nothing had happened, as full of vigour and zest as ever. His constitution was a minor marvel. Macdonald did enjo
y walking, but he never undertook any strenuous exercise. He ate lightly, not because he drank heavily as is frequently the case, but because he always ate lightly. A photograph of Macdonald taken at around this time—in 1863 by the famed William Notman of Montreal, and the front cover of this book—portrays him as lean and fit and impressively erect.†129 The photo also captures perfectly the distinctive quality of his eyes—amused, observant, commanding. It may have been Notman’s magic (all the more magical because he used only natural light), but absolutely nothing about the photo suggests a public figure with a single care in the world, least of all that of his having become, if irregularly, an out-of-control public drunk.

  After Macdonald had finished wrestling with whatever devils were assailing him, he went right back to the job at hand. With the Quebec Conference over and a constitution agreed on, the way ahead was clear. Macdonald needed now to get approval for the Confederation scheme first from Canada’s legislature, and then from the legislatures of the key Maritime provinces, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. As the climactic step, he needed the approval of the Parliament at Westminster. Thereafter, he could come back home with Confederation’s constitution in his pocket.