John A

by Richard J. Gwyn

  The constitution itself, as Macdonald had wanted from the start, amounted to a prescription for a highly centralized confederation, very likely the most centralized confederation ever conceived (not least because it granted to the central government the power to disallow provincial legislation). Indeed, as the historian Peter Waite has written, “One might almost say that Canada has become a federal state in spite of its constitution.”*161 It was indeed plausible, as Macdonald kept saying in private letters, that the provinces might wither away to municipalities.

  The fact was, though, the provinces did exist. They were accountable to their voters through political mechanisms—of organized parties, elections and parliamentary debates—identical to those of the “senior” government. They were also, as was inherent in so vast a country, incomparably closer to their people. As Macdonald had schemed for all along, the federal government was accorded not just extensive powers but all the unassigned powers, and as well a national override power. Yet although the newcomers, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, lost some of their existing powers on joining Confederation, they still wielded considerable ones. The two reborn “internal” members, Quebec and Ontario, gained powers greater than their institutional ancestors had ever possessed (if only because, back then, all power resided with the governors general).

  Macdonald, moreover, failed to anticipate the consequence to his centralized scheme of the absence from federal jurisdiction of one vital power. Post-Confederation, just as before, Canada was still only a colony; responsibility for foreign affairs remained in London. Ottawa, unlike Washington, could not summon up national support on the grounds that it was responsible for Canadians’ doings and reputation in the wider world. In the absence of any shared sense of national identity across the country (really, until the 1960s), the vacuum was bound to be filled by provincial identities. This flaw in Macdonald’s concept of the new nation was recognized by Goldwin Smith in an almost eerily perceptive article for Macmillan’s Magazine in March 1865. There he wrote that while “the sentiment of provincial independence among the several provinces of British North America is at this moment merged in the desire of combining against the common danger [the United States]…[w]hen the danger is overpast, divergent interests may reappear and the sentiment of independence may revive…especially in the French and Catholic province.” It was because national identity was pallid for so long that provincial identities commanded so much support.

  In no sense was the British North America Act a constitution made for the people. There was nowhere in it any ringing “We, the people” proclamation. It was, instead, a constitution made for governments. Over the decades, the balance between centralization and decentralization of governmental powers has settled down into pretty much what most Canadians want. Pragmatism has triumphed over principle, and muddling through over theory. Macdonald would disagree with the resulting decentralization, but as a pragmatist and as a believer that politics is about people, he would be delighted by the process.

  Today, just one part of the British North America Act—now the Constitution Act, 1867—is familiar to any number of Canadians. It is widely known that the Fathers of Confederation defined their new nation by the talismanic mantra of “Peace, Order and good Government.” It is also widely known that this self-description contrasts radically with the idealistic but aggressive aspiration laid upon Americans by their constitutional call to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In fact, this phrase occurs not in the constitution of the American people but in their Declaration of Independence. But it’s the contrast between these two rallying cries, and the illumination it provides about national differences, that matter.

  Except that most of this is untrue. More exactly, it is true symbolically, but untrue substantively.

  The phrase actually contained in the documents laid before the delegates at the Quebec Conference of 1864 (from which came the greatest part of the BNA Act), and at the start of the Confederation Debates in the Canadian Parliament in 1865 and at the London Conference, was “Peace, Welfare and good Government.” The second, unfamiliar, term, “Welfare,” was used here in the sense of well-being. It was only at the last moment before the constitution was introduced into the Parliament at Westminster that “Welfare” was replaced by “Order.”*162 The actual change was most probably made by the British legal draftsman Francis Reilly; and no evidence exists that Reilly ever discussed his choice of words with Macdonald or with any Canadian.

  To get to the heart of the matter, no evidence exists that at any time throughout any of the three Confederation conferences, or during the long debate in the Canadian legislature, anyone paid the least attention to the phrase itself. The more than one thousand double-columned pages of the published Confederation Debates contain only a handful of references to “Peace, Welfare and good Government” (as it then was); moreover, it was raised almost always in discussions about the narrow issue of marriages and divorces.†163

  The reason why no one paid any attention to the phrase was straightforward: it actually meant very little. It amounted to a kind of legal boilerplate that was inserted routinely into all kinds of British colonial constitutions—from Newfoundland to New Zealand to New South Wales, from Ceylon to the Cape Colony (of South Africa), from Sierra Leone to St. Helena. The use of this phrase can be dated all the way back to 1689.*164 It appeared in every Canadian constitution before Confederation, from the Royal Proclamation of 1763†165to the 1841 Act of Union, which conjoined Upper and Lower Canada. The phrase that Canadians now embrace as distinctively their own was thus employed in the service of just about any entity in the Empire for which a constitution was needed.

  Perhaps the most insightful comment ever made about the ways by which national communities acquire their particular character was from British-born international scholar Benedict Anderson. According to him, almost all of them amount to “imagined communities.” Few citizens in any of these societies know many other citizens personally, “yet in the minds of each,” wrote Anderson, “lives this image of communion.” People, that is to say, become what they are by the way that they think they are.

  Not long after the Second World War, Canadians took cognizance of the fact that the British Empire was vanishing from the map and that its role as global hegemon had been taken over by the United States. Canada was threatened by being absorbed into this new imperium, of being reduced to a kind of virtual colony. Cross-border differences therefore became central to national existence itself, because if no differences existed, survival became pointless. In 1961 the historian W.L. Morton published The Canadian Identity, a book composed of four major lectures that he had given. In this work, Morton expressed the notion of a radical difference between Canada and the United States from their very beginnings. “Not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” wrote Morton, “but peace, order and good government, are what the national government of Canada guarantees.” So far as this author has been able to determine, Morton was the first person to present the concept that the “Peace, Order and good Government” of Macdonald’s constitution is Canada, in the same way that Jefferson’s “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is the United States.

  Not long afterwards, “Peace, Order and good Government”—known to Ottawa insiders as POGG—was elevated into a defining national invocation. It has gone on to become the one item of our original constitution that almost every Canadian can recite—and holds to fiercely.*166

  It’s as though, when Canadians learned of the phrase “Peace, Order and good Government” for the first time in the sixties, they, in the mysterious way by which the collective will can exert itself, said more or less simultaneously, “That’s us.” The constitution’s real patriation can thus be dated from the early sixties rather than from its formal enactment in 1982. It was during those years that the people of Canada made the constitution—at the very least one vital part of it—their constitution. Maybe it’s coincidence, maybe it’s karma, but Macdonald, as a conse
rvative, could not have defined the purpose of a constitution better than as “Peace, Order and good Government.”†167

  At the time, Macdonald won just about everything he wanted. All the last-minute changes made in London strengthened the power of the central government. The federation would indeed be as close to a “legislative union” as was politically practical. These, though, were tactical accomplishments. In themselves, Confederation and the constitution that necessarily accompanied it amounted to not much more than a political fix of a political problem—“deadlock”—that the politicians, Macdonald included, had created themselves. That purpose could have been achieved as easily, almost certainly more so, by a “mini-federation” encompassing just the United Province of Canada. Such a nation, though, would have been a rump of a nation. What was being created instead was, at least potentially, a continental nation—one that would be, or could be, a real nation, marked at its birth by the extravagant ambition both of its geographical reach and of its commitment to British law and British political institutions. As such, it made a commitment to be and to remain that most improbable of all political communities—an un-American nation within North America. First, Macdonald had imagined a Canadian community of this kind; then, in London, he realized it.

  All that remained now were details. Howe took his arguments for delay to as many people as he could secure introductions to in Britain. Lord Carnarvon heard him out politely, but without response; almost all the others showed the same indifference. All that remained between Macdonald and his final triumph was a thin red line of British MPs—few of them interested in the colonies at the best of times, and all of them now totally absorbed by the crisis over the Reform Bill and the prospect of an imminent election.

  In Macdonald’s circumstances—he knew by now he would soon be invited formally to become the first prime minister of the new nation—many would have gloated or at least have celebrated. Instead, Macdonald stayed close to Carnarvon, fussing and worrying over the last details. His one celebratory gesture was to slip over to France for a few days’ holiday when things had quieted down.

  Once the delegates had finished their last fixes, Francis Reilly, the legal draftsman, worked overtime through the first week of February to render it into proper parliamentary form. The bill was set in type under conditions of strict confidentiality through the nights of February 6 and 7. On February 12 it was introduced into the House of Lords—there, rather than the Commons, because that’s where Carnarvon had his seat. The debate was scheduled for February 19, 1867.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Two Unions

  My diaries as Miss Bernard did not need such precautions but then I was an insignificant spinster & what I might write did not matter; now I am a great premier’s wife & Lady Macdonald & “Cabinet secrets and mysteries” might drop unwittingly from the nib of my pen. Lady Macdonald, in the first entry of her new diary, July 5, 1867

  In the brief gap between the last few days of haggling over the clauses of the constitution and the document’s actual introduction into the Parliament at Westminster in the form of the British North America Bill, Macdonald found time for one other assignment. He got married. His second wife was Susan Agnes Bernard, the sister of Hewitt Bernard, his principal civil service aide, originally his private secretary, and now head of his staff at the Attorney General’s Department—and also his friend and apartment mate at the “Quadrilateral,” a house on Daly Street in Ottawa.

  Their marriage was a union of mutual self-interest. He, now on the verge of becoming prime minister of the Dominion of Canada, would soon need a hostess and a chatelaine. She, by now aged thirty-one, needed to escape a future of ever-diminishing choices. Besides asymmetric needs, they possessed in common one defining quality: each revelled in the exercise of power. Agnes, in the diary that she began right after the first Dominion Day,*168 expressed her addiction the more self-critically: “I also know that my love of Power is strong, so strong that I sometimes dread it; it influences me when I imagine I am influenced by a sense of right.” To Macdonald, power was like a comfortable old suit he had no need to apologize for wearing. “I don’t care for office for the sake of money, but for the sake of power; for the sake of carrying out my own view of what’s best for the country,” he once said.

  Susan Agnes Bernard. She is still five years away from marrying Macdonald, young and slender here, unlike in later photographs. She appears to be wearing a costume.

  They differed in quite a few respects, from religiosity, of which Agnes possessed an excess, and he little if at all, to her far greater capacity for physicality, as in the epic ride she would take through the tunnels and curves of the Rocky Mountains on the cowcatcher of a Canadian Pacific Railway engine while, most of the time, her grumpy husband, the prime minister, remained rooted in his seat in the special car laid on for them.

  The difference between them that defined their relationship was that, while Macdonald respected Agnes, was always polite and considerate, and never deviated in his loyalty, she adored him, if not at the start of their union, which was in no sense a love match, then soon after, and ever after, completely and joyously and defencelessly. Although strong and confident in so many respects, as Agnes Bernard most certainly was, at times not merely cajoling him but outright bullying him, and later ruling Ottawa society like a moralizing martinet, she, in her relationship with Macdonald, seemed always to be running to catch up to him while trying never to show how hard she was trying. “I have found something worth living for—living in—my husband’s heart and love,” she wrote in the diary. Her most revealing comment about herself to herself was “I often look in astonishment at him,” referring, surely, both to astonished delight in his almost infinite variety, and even more to her delighted amazement that he should be hers.

  Although the marriage was arranged with speed, the courtship between them extended over more than a half-dozen years and may have included an earlier offer of marriage. The original obstacle to any union was, of course, Macdonald’s drinking. Bernard would later tell his fellow deputy minister Edmund Meredith that he had done “everything to dissuade his sister from the marriage.” To resolve the obstacle, Bernard got Macdonald to sign a marriage contract that committed him to pay sixteen thousand dollars into a trust for Lady Macdonald, thereby protecting her and any children of theirs, but also benefiting Macdonald, since this money could no longer be claimed by his creditors.*169 To raise the initial funds, Macdonald sold one hundred acres of land in Kingston and deposited his life-insurance policy into the trust. As dowry, Lady Macdonald brought neither money nor looks. A contemporary described her as “tall, tawny, and…rather ‘raw-boned’ and angular.”

  In later photographs, particularly as she became, at one and the same time, stouter and more commanding, she comes across as stern and censorious. In the one early photograph taken before their marriage, she is much slimmer and, if not exactly attractive, wholly agreeable rather than the gorgon she came to be. One photograph of her inclining backwards over a chair conveys not just her physical exuberance but a clear awareness of her own sexuality. (Mid-nineteenth-century photographs showed women to disadvantage: the long period of motionlessness required for the exposure invested men with a portentous gravitas but diminished women’s natural animation.) She was highly intelligent, well travelled, well read, accustomed to social situations and fluent in French. Bilingualism, though, didn’t cause Agnes to share Macdonald’s partiality to French Canadians: “The French seem always wanting everything, and they get everything,” she wrote crossly. She was also strong, determined and thoroughly bossy.

  She was born in Jamaica in 1836, the only daughter among the four sons of a wealthy sugar-plantation owner, Thomas Bernard.*170 Following her father’s death from cholera, Agnes and her mother moved to England and then, in 1854, to Barrie, Ontario, where her brother Hewitt was practising law. There, just turned twenty, she revealed her fearlessness about physical adventure by ice-fishing and by tobogganing even at night, “tea
ring down a steep forest roadway and scudding away, breathless, disheveled and nearly shaken to death, over the frozen surface of some lonely pine-fringed lake,” as she later portrayed it in a magazine article. Agnes may have been describing here one of her attractions to Macdonald: her physical boldness and athleticism would have reassured him that she would not turn into another wifely invalid like Isabella. The decisive influence on her girlhood had surely been her mother, Theodora, a deeply religious woman of demanding and domineering piety. Theodora’s death, in 1875, caused the minister who broke the news to a distraught Agnes to “fear for [her] sanity.”

  In 1858, Hewitt had become Macdonald’s secretary, and the future couple—Macdonald by now a newly bereaved widower—had a brief encounter at a concert in Toronto. Agnes’s later recollection was acute: “A forcible, yet changeful face, with such a mixture of strength and vivacity, and his bushy, dark peculiar hair as he leaned on his elbows and looked down.” Macdonald’s recollection had about it a distinct dollop of his “soft sawder”: he praised her “very fine eyes,” while taking care to avoid getting their colour wrong by not mentioning it. (Agnes’s eyes, like her hair, were in fact a striking jet black.)

  When the government moved to Quebec City, the Bernards moved with it. They both attended the Valentine’s Day Ball that Macdonald organized with such panache in 1860. Some kind of relationship appears to have developed as a result, with Macdonald later calling on Theodora at Hewitt’s suggestion that he meet his mother—his unmarried sister being of course the real reason for the arranged encounter. There were rumours of a marriage proposal made but rejected. While Macdonald was by now famous and powerful, besides being charming and witty, he was also a notorious drunk. It’s easy to guess that Theodora put her foot down and that Hewitt, despite his loyalty to Macdonald, confirmed the damning reports. Anyway, Macdonald had no pressing need then for a chatelaine and hostess. In 1865 the distaff Bernards moved on to London, where they occupied a grand house on Grosvenor Square. Of life in England, Agnes commented shrewdly that it was “a delicious country for the rich, but I should hate it for the poor,” while the middle class had to “toady and fawn.”