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The judicial war Mowat and Macdonald would fight between 1878 and the 1890s involved a long series of cases about provincial authority and the right of Ottawa to override provincial law. In 1880, John Wellington Gwynne of the new Supreme Court of Canada gave Macdonald just the verdict the prime minister wanted. “The Dominion of Canada is constituted a quasi-Imperial power,” he ruled “… while the provincial governments are, as it were, carved out of, and subordinated to, the Dominion.… Nothing can be plainer … than that the several provinces are subordinate to the Dominion government.”36
Mowat would have none of this. “I claim for the provinces the largest power which they can be given,” he told the Ontario legislature in 1882. “It is the spirit of the B.N.A. Act and it is the spirit under which confederation was agreed to. If there was one point which all parties agreed upon, it was that all local powers should be left to the provinces and that all powers previously possessed by the local legislatures should be continued unless expressly repealed by the B.N.A. act.… The provinces are not in any accurate sense subordinate to the Parliament of Canada; each body is independent and supreme within the limits of its own jurisdiction.” 37
Defending Ontario against Ottawa’s interference made good politics in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, it revived the crusading fervour of the old Ontario reform tradition. The lawyer and journalist David Mills, who would one day succeed Mowat as federal minister of justice under Wilfrid Laurier, denounced Macdonald’s use of the power of disallowance as “war upon responsible government.” Macdonald’s cabinet was a “Star Chamber,” he wrote, and it was attempting to impose an autocratic and tyrannical power upon the free people of Ontario. Macdonald himself was a new King James II – significantly, James was the monarch deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the triumph of Parliament over autocratic monarchy was confirmed in England.38
John A. Macdonald’s attempts to use federal power simply strengthened Mowat’s hold on Ontario. Since every quarrel with Ottawa increased his popularity at home, Mowat did not flinch from rhetoric as inflamed as Mills’s. “Confederation was well worth maintaining if the constitution was faithfully administered,” he told the Ontario legislature in 1882. “But if [the provinces’] power of passing laws within their own legitimate sphere was to be subject to the whim of a minister or ministers at Ottawa, … then it was not worth maintaining.”39
Mowat did not need to pursue this separatist threat seriously. He had one more constitutional court to which he could appeal. In the 1880s (until 1950, in fact), Supreme Court of Canada judgments could be appealed to an Imperial tribunal, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (which sometimes included judges from Canada and other Commonwealth nations, but which sat in London). At the Privy Council, Mowat won a string of resounding victories that killed the federal power of disallowance and permanently established the provinces as powerful partners in confederation. “The object of the [British North America] act was neither to weld the provinces into one, nor to subordinate provincial governments to a central authority,” said the Privy Council in 1892. At last, Mowat had someone reading the provincial-powers clauses of the British North America Act the way he thought he had drafted them in 1864. “In so far as regards those matters which by section 92 are specially reserved for provincial legislation, the legislation of each province continues to be free from the control of the Dominion, and as supreme as it was before the passing of the act.”40
The privy councillors had decreed that, whatever the British North America Act said about disallowance, interference with the workings of a responsible government in its own sphere was fundamentally unjust. The words remained unchanged, but Ottawa lost the power of disallowance, much as the Colonial Office had lost it with the coming of responsible government. The equitable principles of interpretation upon which Mowat had built his legal career had triumphed over the black-letter rules in which Macdonald had put his trust.
At the end of the Quebec conference, with his baggage gone and the train waiting, George Brown scribbled a note to his wife. “You will say our constitution is dreadfully tory – and it is – but we have the power in our hands (if it passes) to change it as we like. Hurrah!” This has always seemed a poignantly sad prediction. Brown’s party would be out of power in Ottawa for most of the rest of the century, and the constitution drafted at Quebec largely resisted formal amendment for more than a hundred years. But perhaps at some point during the conference, Brown had had Mowat at his elbow, Mowat with his enigmatic smile and his equity-lawyer mind, hinting that Canada West would find the federal government’s big guns as easy to discredit as the autocratic rule of the bad old days before responsible government.41
The Mowat resolutions on the division of powers and Alexander Galt’s financial resolution were the last large issues of the Quebec conference. Galt’s financial proposals were another demonstration of the Canadians’ control of the Quebec agenda. Mowat’s resolutions had confirmed that the provinces would receive the revenues of their Crown lands and would be entitled to levy direct taxes. But direct taxes were almost unknown and much feared in the 1860s. (George Brown, who took his free-trade principles seriously, was rare in his eagerness to see direct taxation of property replace customs tariffs as a main source of public revenue). On the whole, the financial terms gave blunt evidence of Canadian primacy. Although the Maritime provinces had substantial net assets and the Canadas substantial liabilities, Galt’s resolution transferred to the federal government most of the assets and liabilities of the old provinces. The federal government would also acquire control of customs duties and tariffs, though the sea-trading Maritimes needed low tariffs much more than the revenue-hungry Canadas did.
Had these fiscal proposals been introduced at the start of the conference, they might have launched intense, even fatal, disagreement. Even in the last days, with confederation almost a fait accompli, the financial terms provoked hard bargaining. Soon after Galt introduced them on Saturday, October 22, they were handed over to a committee for further work. When the committee members – Galt and Brown for Canada, Tilley, Tupper, Pope, and Shea for the four Atlantic delegations – returned on Wednesday, they proposed new details but no fundamental change. Tilley, who had an eye for a balance sheet, had secured for New Brunswick a special grant of $63,000 a year for ten years. Tupper, less preoccupied with monetary details, got nothing similar for Nova Scotia. As part of the bargaining, the delegates had also agreed on a railway from Quebec to Halifax – considered a boon to the Maritimes and particularly to Halifax, but long viewed sceptically by Upper Canadians. Prince Edward Island, perhaps to teach it a lesson about the perils of resisting the Canadians on so many issues, got nothing for its land problem.
The conference wound up at Quebec on Thursday, October 27. A ceremonial tour of the Canadas followed. Some delegates left for Montreal on the afternoon train, but the key ones spent most of the day in a desperate scramble to get the resolutions into coherent form and caught the night train at 9:00 p.m.
What they had produced in their sixteen days of arguing and voting was a strikingly utilitarian document. There is no poetry in the Quebec resolutions. The colonists had addressed the philosophical questions of government in the responsible-government struggles two decades earlier. They treated their constitution as a machine for running governments, and their resolutions were almost entirely about governmental mechanics. Explosive issues of language, religion, ethnicity, and national identity were not ignored, but they were left almost entirely unstated in the text.
“Since they had entered the province of Canada,” reflected Nova Scotia delegate Robert Dickey about the experiences of the Quebec delegates, “the managers of railways had contributed in a very great degree to their pleasure, comfort, and accommodation.” The railwaymen, who understood exactly what the new nation could mean for railway development, had been keeping in touch at the St. Louis Hotel throughout the conference.42 When it ended, they were happy to lay on special trains to take t
he delegates wherever they chose to go. After Charlottetown, the delegates had gone on to Halifax, Saint John, and Fredericton, giving speeches and promoting their new proposal everywhere. Now the railways would speed the Quebec delegations through the Canadas. In their last official session, held at the St. Lawrence Hotel in Montreal on Saturday, October 29, the delegates formally adjourned the Quebec conference, and the Charlottetown conference too, at least until Maritime union returned to the political agenda. Then it was more speeches, more dinners, more champagne.
The weather at Montreal was as bad as at Quebec, and a military review and fireworks display in honour of the delegates was cancelled, but there was another lavish ball. At a six-hour luncheon the next day, the delegates described their agreement to a large and enthusiastic crowd. Then they and their families went by Ottawa River steamer to Ottawa. They dined in the spectacular new parliament buildings, still under construction. Then, in a few whirlwind days on the railways, they visited Prescott, Kingston, Belleville, Cobourg, Toronto, Hamilton, and even Niagara Falls. Conference secretary Hewitt Bernard refused to give in to the agonies of gout, but John A. Macdonald succumbed to drink at Ottawa. Mercy Coles, having the time of her life, was much more forgiving of him than she had been of D’Arcy McGee two weeks earlier. At each town, there were tours and civic receptions, and even George Coles and Edward Palmer were persuaded to say kind things about confederation – which they were later to regret.
The very brief stop at Cobourg was made mainly to gratify the local delegate, James Cockburn, a loyal supporter of Macdonald, who, so far as the record shows, had said not a single word throughout the conference. But the tour was acutely political, too, for the decisions of Quebec still had to be ratified. The men of the confederation conferences were merely delegates, with no power to bind their respective provinces. The Quebec resolutions were merely their proposals, and would lack all official standing until given legislative approval. “I should see no objection to any consultation on the subject amongst the leading members of the governments concerned,” the colonial secretary had instructed the colonies in 1862, “but whatever the result of such consultation might be, the most satisfactory mode of testing the opinion of the people of British North America would probably be by means of resolution or address proposed in the legislature of each province by its own government.” Only the legislatures could grant legitimacy to the Quebec resolutions.43
The delegations at Quebec represented the cabinets of all five provinces, as well as three of the four political parties of the united Canadas and both leading parties in each of the Atlantic provinces. From the perspective of the late twentieth century, when the functions of Canadian legislatures had become largely ceremonial, it was difficult to imagine that legislative approval of the Quebec resolutions would have been more than a formality. In the 1860s, however, no legislature could be taken for granted. To get their plan through, the delegates had to begin to seek public approval as part of the campaign to win legislative approval.
So the grand tour of the Quebec delegations coincided with a flood of press coverage in newspapers controlled by the delegates – and in the hostile press as well. The resolutions, and commentary on them, were soon published throughout British North America. So were the speeches the delegates made to public meetings at all the stops on their tour. Their opponents were soon organizing counter-demonstrations, but for a time the confederation delegates had a clear advantage. The largest of their post-Quebec public meetings was in Toronto, late at night on Thursday, November 3. With Mercy Coles watching from her window at the Queen’s Hotel on Front Street, Tupper, Tilley, and Toronto’s own hero of the hour, George Brown, stood on a gallery just beneath her and spoke to five thousand cheering citizens.
That was almost the end. The festive excursion to Niagara Falls was the last gathering of the personnel of the great confederation conference. When her family parted from the others after a visit to the falls (“I can’t, it is quite impossible to describe them. They far exceeded anything I ever expected to see”), Mercy Coles was grief-stricken.44 It was time for the delegates to face the reactions back home.
* At Quebec, the delegates spoke of a “legislative council,” not a Senate. Throughout, I use the name that was adopted later.
* Only in the 1980s did the appointive Senate begin to challenge the authority of the Commons by rejecting important measures that were thought to lack popular support. It was able to justify its actions only because the Commons was widely held to have forfeited its own traditional role as an independent check on arbitrary government.
* One of his fellow practitioners was more explicit. “That’s the business I like,” said Skeffington Connor about chancery law, “the pace dignified and slow, the pay handsome, and a gentlemanly understanding among practitioners to make it handsomer.”
CHAPTER FIVE
If Brother André Went to Parliament Hill
SHORTLY BEFORE confederation, twenty-year-old Alfred Bessette left Quebec’s rural d’Iberville County and the relatives who had raised him and went seeking work in the United States. In the 1860s, emigration was carrying a flood of young people like him from the crowded farms of rural Quebec to the factory towns of New England. Unlike most of them, young Bessette did not stay in the States. Small and sickly, he proved as ill-suited to the American factories as to the farms where he had grown up. Shortly after confederation, the young man returned home, to bleak prospects.
Soon, however, Alfred Bessette found a vocation. He had always been given to prayer, penance, and meditation, and his local curé encouraged him to approach the Congrégation de Sainte-Croix, a clerical order that had recently opened a college nearby. For an illiterate son of the rural peasantry, the priesthood was beyond reach, but the Congrégation included lay brothers who devoted themselves to manual labour in imitation of St. Joseph the carpenter, and Bessette joined these. At the order’s college in Montreal, Alfred Bessette gave up his name and became Brother André. In time, he was assigned to be the college doorman – in effect, to be a household servant to the teaching order and its students. It seemed an appropriately humble vocation for one of the weakest and most vulnerable children of rural French Canada. Yet, during his decades of service as doorman and servant, Brother André would become one of the pre-eminent men of early-twentieth-century Quebec.1
Brother André began to visit the poor and sick of the neighbourhood around the college. He also began to work cures. During his charitable visits, Brother André would offer to rub sores or disabled limbs with oil that he collected from the lamps at the statue of St. Joseph in the college chapel. Many professed themselves cured, often instantly. Admiration for the humble brother’s healing skills and his holiness began to spread. Devout Montrealers seeking relief from illness or injury made their way to the doorman’s cell. Brother André attributed all his feats to his patron saint and insisted he was only St. Joseph’s “little dog.”
To have a miracle-working cult arising in Montreal initially dismayed sophisticated Catholics and some of the Catholic hierarchy. But Brother André’s simple piety disarmed his critics, and his popularity among working-class Montrealers became immense. He won tolerance and support, and then he won permission to build a shrine to his saint on the slopes of Mont-Royal near his college. St. Joseph’s shrine became a place of pilgrimage, a minor North American Lourdes, with Brother André as its guardian and guiding spirit. Pilgrims left alms, and in 1915 the small shrine was removed to make way for a vast church, the Oratoire Saint-Joseph.
For the rest of his life, Brother André devoted himself to caring for the pilgrims and completing his shrine. As devotees flocked to the Oratoire, and stories of cures multiplied, Brother André humbly but ceaselessly solicited the millions of dollars his shrine required. He would talk to anyone, pray with anyone, take an offering from anyone. By the 1920s, frail and elderly, he travelled widely every year to raise funds, but he was particularly cherished by the poor Montrealers to whom he preached quiet Christian
acceptance of life’s hardships, even as he sought to heal their pain. Montreal shops displayed collection boxes for Brother André, in much the way they might now support cancer research or environmental protection. Brother André became a talismanic figure for French Canada, but particularly for francophone Montreal. The simple, devout, barely literate son of the rural peasantry had become to Montreal what the parish curé was supposed to be for rural farm families of Quebec: a familiar friend and counsellor, the benefactor of a village society secure in the embrace of traditional ways.
Except, of course, Montreal was not a rural village. It was a big city, growing and industrializing since before confederation and reaching a million in population before Brother André’s death in 1937. Hundreds of thousands of francophone Montrealers lived in walk-up apartments, worked in factories, and worried about the rent and crime and unemployment. They lived lives not very dissimilar from those of urban workers elsewhere in North America. One of the miracles of Brother André, simple pastor to a great metropolis, was to help his people retain something of their comforting traditional way of life in the modern, anonymous, secular world of the city.
In Brother André’s lifetime, religion and agriculture were said over and over to define the essence of French Canada, to be the shields that guarded French civilization on an English continent. From the 1850s to the 1960s, many of Quebec’s leaders believed its security lay in being at heart rural and agricultural. Only as a nation of devout Catholic farm families was Quebec safe from the urban, secular, materialist values of English Canada and the Americans. They sometimes said (in a metaphor now mercifully extinct) that English Canada might be the husband, authoritative and worldly, but French Canada would be the wife, perhaps deferential but the nurturer of culture and faith. To be true to itself, Quebec would remain a Catholic society and a traditional one.