In 1856, Edward Whelan defended one of his votes in the Prince Edward Island legislature with a paraphrase of Burke. “I have always entertained the notion – and I think I shall never abandon it – that when a member is sent here, he does not appear in the character of a delegate to carry out a certain code of instructions, but rather to act in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience and judgement, and to pursue that policy best calculated to promote the interests, not of his own constituents only, but those of the whole Island at large. It is right that a member should consult with his constituents on public questions, as I frequently take an opportunity of doing, and endeavour to ascertain their opinions and, if possible, reconcile them to his own, should there be any disagreement, but I do not conceive it to be any part of the duty of a member to sacrifice his own conscientious convictions to suit the views of any class of men.”20
Whelan did not identify Burke, who was far from his favourite philosopher, as the source of his idea or his language, but the similarity is inescapable. Like most Canadian politicians, Whelan both was and was not a Burkean on this point. Canadian politicians endorsed in principle the independence of legislators, but they held no sinecure seats of the kind Burke had waiting for him. They faced broadly based and well-informed electorates, which would not tolerate representatives who did not heed those who elected them. The inescapable fact is that Whelan was much closer to and much more dependent on the voters than Burke had ever been. Whelan believed deeply in the authority of parliamentarians, but he hardly needed Burke’s Bristol example to know that disregarding his constituents as flagrantly as Burke had done would simply be political suicide.
The makers of confederation did not much believe in political suicide, and they rarely practised it. Indeed, their relations with voters were much closer than those of later members of Parliament. Nineteenth-century Canadian politics provided many more examples than the late twentieth century of politicians deserting their party out of fear of, or respect for, their constituents.
In that context, the arguments of Edmund Burke, so often echoed by the makers of confederation, achieve a new poignancy in the Canadian context. The struggle of the first half of the nineteenth century in Canada was for responsible government – an executive answerable to the elected parliamentary majority. With responsible government achieved, Parliament had real power and parliamentarians celebrated their independence and authority – all the more so because of the wary eye they had to keep on the voters back home.
During the twentieth century, that situation was reversed. Disciplined and docile legislative caucuses came to understand themselves to be responsible to the party leadership, rather than vice versa. The consequence of this huge accretion of executive power was starkly visible in constitutional politics. At Charlottetown and Quebec in 1864, large, bipartisan parliamentary delegations made constitutions. Leadership was collective. Every delegate was aware he could be held to account by his legislature as well as his constituents. In the late twentieth century, small executive conclaves made the constitutional deals. Leadership was personal. Each government leader, sure of support from his caucus, shouldered the full burden of representing his province. Each took any suggestion of opposition participation, and any likelihood for serious legislative review, as insults to first-ministerial prerogatives.
The great principles of confederation-era parliamentary democracy in Canada – a broad franchise and the constant responsibility of the executive branch to the elected legislators – were clear in theory in the 1830s. They became established in practice after 1847. By the end of the 1850s, with the absorption or marginalization of Clear Grit and rouge ideas of direct democracy, they were the undisputed ideology of Canadian political life. That battle had been decided. The philosophy of it was not contested and did not need to be argued.
As a result, the constitution-makers who gathered at Quebec in October 1864 did not need to spell out the overarching political philosophy of the new nation – though they could, when they chose. George Brown, Ned Whelan, D’Arcy McGee, and many others could roll out hours of rotund Victorian rhetoric in praise of constitutional monarchy. But only one lonely resolution of the seventy-two approved at Quebec in October 1864 may be considered “philosophical.” The fourth resolution declared that, in Canada government would be administered “according to the well-understood principles of the British constitution.” This was later incorporated into the preamble of the British North America Act of 1867 as a government “with a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom.” 21
It sounded simple, but it spoke volumes. There was a tome buried there, and much of it was a gloss on Burke’s constitutional ideas. The British and Canadian constitutions would be similar in principle but, given their electoral franchises (determined by their very different social structures), who sat in government would be utterly at variance in the two countries. They were “similar in principle,” yet Britain had one House of Parliament devoted to a hereditary aristocracy and an established church, and another whose members were elected on an extremely narrow franchise, in a country where very few householders could vote. In Canada, the upper house would be almost entirely irrelevant, while the lower house, the one that made the government, would be elected by most of the adult male population.
The British and Canadian constitutions might be similar in principle, but they would be operated by societies that were hugely different. The Canadian reading of British constitutionalism gave colonial parliamentarians of the confederation era a tremendous sense of legitimate authority, and they wanted to be free to use it. By proposing a constitution similar “in principle” to that of the United Kingdom, the Canadians actually endorsed a government “formed on the principles of Canadians,” as Burke had proposed in 1791.
Edward Whelan certainly believed in using the powers of the state. As a cabinet minister in George Coles’s reform government in the 1850s, he had been part of a government that had introduced universal manhood suffrage and given Island children a free, non-denominational public-school system. Other confederation-era politicians had been similarly activist. Leonard Tilley’s New Brunswick governments invested in public health and public-works projects, introduced universal manhood suffrage, and adopted the secret ballot. In Nova Scotia, conservative and reform governments both promoted railways and mines and invested in the public-school system.
In Canada East, George-Étienne Cartier and his bleu supporters wound up the seigneurial regime inherited from New France and modernized and codified the old civil law. They built spectacular public works like the Victoria Bridge at Montreal. The bridge, which opened to great fanfare in 1860, was only the most visible symbol for state support of railways and other industries. Cartier, the Grand Trunk Railway’s legal counsel, was also that railway’s most prominent parliamentary advocate when railways were the largest development projects in British North America. In Canada West, reform and conservative leaders introduced new layers of city and county government and expanded public works and public schooling. Scores of mid-nineteenth-century courthouses, city halls, and other public buildings that still stand throughout Ontario and Quebec are testimony to the burst of state activity just before confederation.
In Colonial Leviathan, a study of these events, the historians Allan Greer and Ian Radforth speak of “the unprecedented expansion of state institutions and the increasing attempts at government supervision of civic life,” once the decades of conflict between appointed executives (which had controlled the institutions of state) and elected assemblies (which had controlled the public revenues) ended after 1847. In all this activity, the politicians were doing more than simply spending money. They were conscious and proud of using the state to mould better citizens.22
This was not only the state’s role, of course. The temperance movement of the time sprang from the same impulse, seeking to do away with drunken idleness and create a sober, industrious, diligent citizenry. In Quebec, it was the Catholic Church,
not the state itself, which expanded schools, hospitals, and other public institutions. Throughout the colonies, charitable societies, churches, and the state worked hand-in-hand to reform and guide the poor, the drunken, the ill-educated, the young, and the female toward the bourgeois standards of conduct judged universally appropriate. To this end, the mid-nineteenth century, seemingly so conservative, saw an expansion of public activity unmatched by any other period until the explosion of Keynesian economic planning and social-welfare programs in the mid-twentieth century.
Virtually all of this public activity, it seems fair to guess, would have been anathema to Edmund Burke. Burke was hostile to most forms of state action. He believed government must reflect the shape of society, not reshape it. Burke did not believe government could do much more than defend the liberty of its citizens. “The state ought to confine itself to what regards the state,” he wrote, and his list of what regarded the state was very short. For the poor to expect government to improve their condition, for example, was delusory. The state should not try to relieve their misery even in the midst of a famine, he said. “Patience, labour, sobriety, frugality, and religion should be recommended to them; and all the rest is downright fraud,” he declared. “It is not in breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God, that we are to place our hope of softening the divine displeasure.”23
In defence of parliamentary authority, the confederation-era politicians of British North America were wonderfully skilful disciples of Edmund Burke. On the role of the state, however, it is hard to see Burke’s influence at all. Conservative or reform, they were determined to put state power firmly under the control of the people’s representatives. With that achieved, they delighted in their new freedom, not to restrain the state, as Burke would have advised, but to use state power in pursuit of their goals.
Edward Whelan was certainly no Burkean quietist. The issue that had shaped his political career was the explosive one of land ownership. Whelan always advocated a two-plank platform: defending the constitution and smashing the “landocracy.” Defending the constitution meant securing responsible government – a bold project in 1846, but one that could be shielded under the mantle of Burke. Smashing the landocracy, however, was both socially and politically radical. It meant breaking up the great estates that owned most of the land of Prince Edward Island, and it meant confronting rival politicians whose fortunes, as well as principles, were threatened. In an era when property was sacred, Whelan wanted Prince Edward Island to attack the property rights of the great landlords who owned most of the Island and kept most of its farmers as insecure tenants.24
Though it was flaring up when the confederation delegates met at Charlottetown in 1864, the land issue had dogged Island governments for years. Premier George Coles’s government, in which Whelan served, had promised in the 1850s to end the absentee landlord system and to help Island farmers buy the lands they had worked for generations. It passed legislation to coerce Island landlords to sell their estates. The land reforms, however, were consistently vetoed by the British government. This was hardly surprising: any British cabinet of the 1860s consisted largely of landed proprietors, men for whom large landed estates were the basis of society and government, to say nothing of their own wealth, standing, and political power. Prime Minister Palmerston, one of whose close relatives owned a Prince Edward Island estate, haughtily dismissed any move against the Island landowners as an attack on property that should not be permitted anywhere in the Empire.25
Whelan, a cabinet minister in the government that had passed the laws, saw Britain’s actions as an attack on responsible government itself. “It is degrading and humiliating to the colony,” fumed Whelan, “that the proprietors – most of them, or many of them absentees, and quite irresponsible, should exercise so arbitrary an influence at the Colonial Office, as to render nugatory the deliberate action of our legislature. This is a species of despotism.” London’s intransigence meant Coles’s government was unable to deliver on its promises to the tenant farmers who had elected it. It was defeated in 1859. In opposition, Whelan’s bitterness grew, and his commitment to constitutional reform wavered. “Talk about the glorious privileges of the British Constitution! We live under a constitution of dispatches dictated according to the caprice of absentee land proprietors,” he snarled in 1860.26
Whelan then began to speculate about a social contract between the governed and the governing that would have horrified Edmund Burke. “Loyalty with me is not a blind sentiment. The sentiment which springs from a mutual return of advantages is the loyalty which … we owe to that sovereign who rules over us.… Prince Edward Island has generally exhibited much more loyalty than, under the circumstances of the case, she was perhaps justified in showing.” Spoken in a legislature of the British Empire, particularly by a Catholic Irishman, such talk of “a mutual return of advantages” – and the implied right of subjects to abolish the contract when they chose – carried a whiff of revolution.27
In 1864, still in opposition, with the landocracy as entrenched as ever, Whelan got an opportunity to endorse the bold measures his words of 1860 suggested. In May 1864, Island farmers founded the Tenant League. They declared they would not pay rent and would resist any sanctions that might ensue, forcibly if necessary. Support for the League spread across the Island. Rents went unpaid. Horn-blowing lookouts surrounded bailiffs who went to enforce payment or to carry out evictions, and, at the sound of the horns, angry crowds gathered to drive the bailiffs back to Charlottetown. The delegates to the Charlottetown conference who went driving through the Island countryside were visiting a landscape in which defiance of lawful authority was almost universal. Within a year, companies of the British army would be needed to aid the civil power in Prince Edward Island.
The Tenant League members were the people for whom Whelan had been fighting the landocracy since the 1840s. They included many of his own voters in the Second Kings riding. And their cause was his: defeat of the landocracy. If Whelan believed the Crown had forfeited its claim to the allegiance of the Islanders, the rise of the Tenant League should have been his moment to declare himself.
Instead, Edward Whelan condemned the Tenant League, and he did so unequivocally. He went back to the other fundamental principle he had declared in 1846: defence of the British constitution. The landlords must be confronted, he wrote in a long newspaper article on the league, but the law had to be respected. “No man has a right to resist the laws for the attainment of any public object … until all the resources under the constitution have been exhausted,” Whelan wrote.28
Whelan’s attack on the Tenant League, which bitterly antagonized its members, seems to have had several motives besides his conviction that it was wrong in principle. As a practical matter, Whelan believed defiance of the law would fail, and in failing would set back the legitimate cause. “It may be no difficult matter to bag a bailiff or an agent now and then, but to attempt to bag a company or a regiment of troops would be another affair,” he predicted long before troops had been called for. As an Irish Catholic, Whelan probably also guessed that defiance of the law would be more dangerous for the Catholic minority than for Protestant Islanders. League membership cut across Catholic–Protestant divisions, but if religious differences were exploited to divide the tenants, as had often been done before, many League leaders would be protected by their membership in the Protestant ascendancy. Whelan’s fellow Catholics would not.29
At bottom, however, Whelan was returning to the faith in parliamentary measures that had been wavering in 1860. By the fall of 1864, Whelan thought his faith was about to be vindicated. A new event had given fresh strength to his arguments. Forcible resistance seemed not only wrong and dangerous, but unnecessary. The new event was confederation.
Before the Charlottetown conference, Whelan had dismissed a union of the colonies as meaningless – unless it freed the Island from the interference of the Colonial Office and the landlords. That view
was widely shared. When Arthur Gordon of New Brunswick floated the idea of uniting the three Maritime provinces, Leonard Tilley and Charles Tupper made sure the proposal included a plan for buying out the Island’s landlords. During the conference itself, George Coles pushed for that commitment. The Canadian visitors, particularly George-Étienne Cartier, who had assisted the buying out of the seigneurial landlords of Canada East, were encouraging. The conference passed no resolutions on the Island lands, but Coles said that they had accepted the principle of breaking up the estates. John Gray of New Brunswick, well known to Islanders for his role in a commission that had attempted to settle the land question in 1861, said as much at one of the Charlottetown banquets. Denouncing tenancy as the greatest drawback to the Island, he publicly confirmed that “the removal of this grievance would certainly follow as the result of colonial union.” 30
Between the Charlottetown and Quebec meetings, Edward Whelan exulted. Confederation would drive landlordism “to the wall,” he wrote in the Examiner. Once confederation was achieved, he saw at once, the new federal government would stand between the Island and the Colonial Office. Island legislation to assist the tenants would no longer be vetoed by the landlords’ powerful friends in London. And, most wonderful, confederation would end the problem that had always vexed Island reformers: how to finance the end of tenancy. The much larger treasury of the federated colonies could readily provide money for a fund that would assist poor farmers to buy their land.31
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