John A

by Richard J. Gwyn

  One intervening step was required, though. The British press had indeed been laudatory, but it had also expressed some disquieting notes. The Edinburgh Review, while applauding the accomplishment, had gone on to describe it as the “harbinger of the future and complete independence of British North America,” while the Saturday Review judged the achievement as “not so much a step towards independence as a means of softening the inevitable shock.” The Times, in its more orotund way, declared that while “nothing could be more in correspondence with the interests and wishes of this country” than Confederation, nevertheless “the dependency that wishes to quit us has only to make up its mind to that effect.” What Macdonald needed, then, was an official stamp of approval to Confederation from the Imperial government that could be waved in front of the Canadian and Maritime legislatures, and, as an additional reassurance, a cessation of talk in London about possible Canadian independence.

  For this vital but delicate mission, Macdonald chose Brown. It was a deft choice. Brown’s key qualifications were that he wasn’t Macdonald and that he was the leader of Canada’s largest party. He would carry in his person to London the message that support for Confederation was widespread. He would also allow Macdonald to get on with his immediate task of assembling the legislature and of figuring out how to secure as quickly as possible its agreement to the scheme.

  For Brown, this transatlantic trip had to be one of the most agreeable he ever made, not least because Anne went along with him. They travelled first to Edinburgh, and then Brown went on alone to London.

  On December 3, 1864, Brown called on the colonial secretary, Edward Cardwell, who received him almost as a brother. Cardwell had already drafted a memorandum setting out his views on the Quebec Resolutions; this, if Brown approved of it, he intended to dispatch to the governor general in Ottawa and to the Maritime lieutenant-governors. Brown not only approved but was ecstatic. “A most gracious answer to our constitutional scheme. Nothing could be more laudatory—it praises our statesmanlike discretion, loyalty and so on,” he wrote afterwards to Macdonald.

  Cardwell had one more bit of news of even greater import to pass on. Confederation, he told Brown, was a subject “of great interest…in the highest circles.” Brown immediately picked up the reference that Queen Victoria herself wanted Confederation for her distant colonies. He was so overcome by this confidence that he asked whether the Queen might come to Canada to open the first post-Confederation Parliament. Cardwell’s reply, no doubt couched in the correct circumlocutory phrases, was that Victoria, a grieving widow ever since the recent death of her beloved Prince Albert, was so emotionally shattered that it was “totally out of the question” for her even to open Parliament in next-door Westminster.

  Nothing else was denied Brown, and so by extension Canada’s Confederates. He went to Prime Minister Lord Palmerston’s country house in Hampshire and took a long stroll with the prime minister through the gardens. He met the foreign secretary and the rising political titan and fellow-Liberal William Gladstone. A bit carried away, Brown afterwards told Anne of his encounter with Gladstone: “Though we had been discussing the highest questions of statesmanship—he did not by any means drag me out of my depth.” Then hastily he added, “Don’t for any sake read this to Tom or Willie, or they will think I have gone daft.”

  Brown did have one concern to report to Macdonald: “There is a manifest desire in almost every quarter that ere long the British colonies should shift for themselves, and in some quarters evident regret that we did not declare at once for independence.” The cause, Brown said, was “the fear of invasion of Canada by the United States,” an affront that might compel Britain, for the sake of honour and of face, to make the futile gesture of intervening to try to save its colony. In fact Brown and Macdonald would have been even more concerned had they known of a letter sent at this time to Governor General Monck by the junior minister for the colonies, C.B. Adderley. In it, he reported, “Gladstone said to me the other day: ‘Canada is England’s weakness, till the last British soldier is brought away & Canada left on her own. We cannot hold our own with the United States.’”

  Britain was onside all right, but in its own way.

  Brown landed back in Canada on January 13, 1865. Two days earlier, Macdonald had passed a significant milestone—he’d reached the age of fifty. He either paid no attention to his birthday or marked it by consuming a bottle in his room in some boarding house. But for cronies, Macdonald was now alone. Hugh John, at the age of fifteen, was distant from his father, both because he had been brought up by Margaret and James Williamson in Kingston and because he was now beginning to feel the strain of being the son of a famous father. That fall, Hugh John entered the University of Toronto as an undergraduate.*130

  At this same time Macdonald was becoming increasingly concerned about the condition of his law practice. His law partner Archibald Macdonnell had died the previous spring, and ever since Macdonald had been discovering just how deeply his company was in debt, with some of the debts resulting from transactions of highly questionable probity, but for which he would be personally responsible. Brown, in one letter to Anne at this time, confided that “John A.’s business affairs are in sad disorder, and need more close attention.”†131

  Macdonald’s two escapes from solitude now were the Confederation project and drink.

  Macdonald in his prime. This photo was taken by the famous William Notman of Montreal in 1863. The two minutes of motionlessness required for a photograph at the time did nothing to dim his energy and vivacity.

  The Legislative Assembly met unusually early that year—on January 17, following Macdonald’s request to Governor General Monck. The members would need the extra time to debate and, all going well, approve the seventy-two Quebec Resolutions. Thereafter would come the debates in the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia legislatures about the same draft resolutions to establish Confederation.

  As if in anticipation of his impending triumph, Macdonald was advised of a tribute soon to be extended to him—he was to be given an honorary degree by Oxford University, the first Canadian to be so recognized.*132 It is probable, although not certain, that Monck also gave Macdonald early notice that, when it came time to form a government for the new nation (in about a year, it was generally expected), he would invite him to be its first prime minister. At Quebec City, Macdonald had raised himself to the status of the irreplaceable man; he was about to become the man.

  About winning approval of the draft constitution from Canada’s Legislative Assembly, Macdonald had no qualms. “Canada on the whole seems to take up the scheme warmly,” he wrote to Tilley. About opinion in his own Upper Canada, he was absolutely right: the only naysayers were a few Tory Conservatives worried that Confederation might weaken the country’s ties to Britain. In Lower Canada the prospects were more mixed, yet still predominantly positive. Rouge leader Antoine-Aimé Dorion had already published an anti-Confederation manifesto charging that the Quebec Resolutions would produce not a “true confederation” of sovereign provinces but a disguised legislative union in which the provinces would be mere municipalities and so unable to protect their electorates. As an example of the way Confederation lurched along, one step forward, one back, Galt at this same time was reassuring audiences of his fellow Lower Canada English-speakers that, precisely because the provinces would be merely “municipalities of larger growth,” controlled by a strong central government, there was no need for them to worry about being reduced to a minority in a French-dominated province. Fortunately, none of Cartier’s bleu members had blinked at any of these concerns, and this was all that really mattered in Lower Canada—soon to become Quebec.

  And then some of them did blink. The cause wasn’t a real problem but an apparent one—in politics, no different from a real problem. The Throne Speech read by Monck at the opening of the legislature included a call for Canadians to “create a new nationality.” This ambition was logical enough: everywhere, the reason for creating new nations,
as in Italy, which had come into existence just four years earlier, was either to create a new nationality or to liberate an old one from oppression. McGee had been calling for years for a “new nationality.” During the Quebec Conference, Prince Edward Island delegate Edward Whelan had got so caught up in the national vision that he dismissed his own province as “a patch of sandbank in the Gulf.” Even the cautious Oliver Mowat got into the nationalist spirit, although his exuberance may have been for show because, right after the conference, he announced he was leaving politics to become a judge in the chancery court. (Macdonald filled the vacant Reform cabinet slot by appointing the little-known W.P. Howland.)

  The problem was that all this talk about a Canadian nation and a Canadian nationality threatened the national distinctiveness of Canadiens. Adroitly, Dorion moved a resolution calling on members to disavow plans for a new nationality. It was defeated, predictably, but it gained the support of twenty-five French-Canadian members. If Dorion could find another hot button, he might yet be able to whip up an anti-Confederate storm in Quebec.

  On February 3, Macdonald moved that the House adopt the Quebec Resolutions. He made a brief explanatory statement, following up three days later with a two-hour speech. Subsequently, all the leading pro-Confederates—Brown, Cartier, Galt and McGee—had their say, as well as some of the far smaller number of anti-Confederates, notably rouge leader Dorion and Independent Conservative Christopher Dunkin. All these words, filling 1,032 double-columned pages, became known as the Confederation Debates.

  It was in his short statement that Macdonald made his key new contribution to the Confederation project. He had already anticipated the now well-known difficulty of implementing a new constitution or of making major changes to an existing one: that all those unhappy for any reason particular to themselves can vote No, and that all the Noes may add up to a deal-breaking majority, even though the reasons for many of them contradict each other. In Canada—inevitably—there was a further problem. Any division in an overall vote on a constitution can cause frictions to national harmony; a division caused by confrontations between races or religions, though, can shatter national unity. Two values were thus put into conflict—democracy and national unity. Macdonald’s choice, naturally, was for national unity over democracy.

  In his statement of February 3, Macdonald set out first to reduce to a minimum the extent of the legislature’s debate on the constitution. Rather than a discussion and a vote on each of the seventy-two clauses, there should be only a single vote, for or against the entire document.*133 The entire Confederation package “was in the nature of a treaty,” he said;†134each of its clauses had already been fully discussed and either agreed to or amended after compromises. “If the scheme was not now adopted in all its principal details as presented to the House,” he informed the members, “we could not expect it to be passed this century.”

  That mission accomplished, Macdonald moved on to his main argument: approval by the legislature’s members was all that was needed for the constitution to be passed. “If this measure received the support of the House,” he said, “there would be no necessity of going back to the people.” There was no need, that is, for the people to say what they felt, either in an election or in a plebiscite.

  That Macdonald wanted to avoid delay and division was the immediate, practical motive for his stance. But it was by no means the only one. He believed also, entirely genuinely, that the decision was the exclusive responsibility of the members of Parliament whom the people had elected to represent them, rather than that of the public at large. Canada’s constitution was to be for the people, but not of the people.

  On the same day that he spoke, Macdonald sent a letter to a supporter, John Beattie, setting out the philosophical justification for his policy. The constitutional package, he pointed out, had received “general if not universal favour.” The government had the right, therefore, “to assume, as well as the Legislature, that the scheme, in principle meets with the approbation of the Country, and as it would be obviously absurd to submit the complicated details of such a measure to the people, it is not proposed to seek their sanction.”

  Today, after the Meech Lake and the Charlottetown accords, no politician would advance such an argument, except one wishing to commit instant political suicide. Oddly, though, the constitutional change cherished most highly by the majority of Canadians, that of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, was never submitted for approval in a referendum.

  In the mid-nineteenth century, however, nothing that Macdonald said was in any way novel or shocking. Then, representative democracy was the norm. He was taking his stand on the side Edmund Burke had taken in his famous declaration to the electors of Bristol: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” It was the duty of elected members to make the decisions they judged the best; it was the duty of voters to elect those they judged best able to make those decisions.

  Today, most of that is an archaism. On almost all occasions now, MPs make the decisions that their party has already decided they should make. Voters today insist on contributing themselves—the system is known as direct democracy—to the making and the implementing of decisions. It could be said that the era of the divine right of kings was followed, comparatively briefly, by an era of the divine right of Parliament, and this is now giving way to an era of the divine right of the people.

  The mid-nineteenth century, though, was still the era of parliamentary supremacy. The Canadian version of it might have been small and parochial, yet it was a branch of the majestic Mother of Parliaments in London stretching back, often gloriously, at times bloodily, over the centuries. And the Canadian version had won for its people the great victory of Responsible Government. Its debates were widely followed, and reported nearly in full, in the newspapers. Its leading men—Macdonald, Cartier, Brown and McGee—were national celebrities, the only ones there were then. The widespread distaste for “partyism,” or for disciplined, organized parties, reflected the presumption that individual members would—certainly should—speak out for and vote for their personal beliefs, even their conscience, rather than just the partisan interests of their party. The doctrine of parliamentary supremacy was as much a part of all people’s upbringing as were the doctrines of their particular Christian faith. When Macdonald said, “Parliament is a grand inquest with the right to inquire into anything and everything,” everyone, except perhaps the dwindling number of populist Grits, would have agreed.

  The alternative doctrine of democracy not only had few supporters but was widely suspect. A prime reason was that democracy was an American idea. To Canadians, what was happening south of the border was not democracy but mob rule. Canadians, by contrast, assumed that they themselves enjoyed real liberty because their ultimate ruler was a constitutional monarch rather than an elected president who might become a dictator. That their head of state was essentially powerless was the reason, so hard for Americans to comprehend, why anti-democratic Canadians were genuinely convinced that they enjoyed more real freedom and liberty than their neighbours. Nor were critics of democracy without good arguments: in France it had led to the Terror, then to the dictatorship of Napoleon; in the United States, to the Revolution, then to the Civil War. And Macdonald’s arguments were persuasive. The Confederation project had got this far only because of “a very happy concurrence of circumstances which might not easily come again.” He appealed to members to “sacrifice their individual opinions as to particular details, if satisfied with the government that the scheme as a whole was for the benefit and prosperity of the people of Canada.”

  As thought Macdonald, so did almost everyone else. If, in Macdonald’s judgment, Americans were subject to “the tyranny of mere numbers,” to the Toronto Leader U.S. presidents were “the slave of the rabble,” to the Globe democracy was “one of those dreadful American heresies,” and to Brown American elections were a sham, bec
ause “the balance of power is held by the ignorant unreasoning mass.” McGee, during his speech in the Confederation Debates, said, “The proposed Confederation will enable us to bear up shoulder to shoulder, to resist the spread of this universal democracy doctrine.” In Lower Canada politicians thought the same way; so, still more vociferously, did the Catholic hierarchy. In Canada there were conspicuously no great debates about democracy as there had been in Britain during each of its Reform Laws.*135

  There nevertheless was a debate in Canada’s Legislative Assembly about whether a constitution should be sanctioned by the people or only by those few who happened to be members of the legislature. A Reform backbencher, James O’Halloran, addressed the issue directly. “When we assume the power to deal with this question, to change the whole system of government, to effect a revolution peaceful though it may be, without reference to the will of the people of this country,” he said, “we arrogate to ourselves a right never conferred upon us, and our act is a usurpation.” He went on, describing the people as “the only rightful source of political power.” Another backbencher, Benjamin Seymour, supported O’Halloran,*136 as did a few newspapers, such as the Hamilton Times, which declared forthrightly, “If their [the people’s] direct decision on the confederation question is unnecessary…we can imagine none in the future of sufficient importance to justify an appeal to them. The polling booths thereafter may as well be turned into pig-pens, and the voters lists cut into pipe-lighters.”

  A second debate on the issue of democracy occurred after the Confederation Debates had ended, when a Conservative member, John Hillyard Cameron, moved a motion calling for an election to be held before the constitution was enacted. The motion was defeated easily. The brief debate that followed, though, inspired Macdonald to muster his most extended and considered arguments to justify parliamentary supremacy over the will of the people.