Confederation had critics in Quebec. The bleus were the largest but not the only political party in Quebec. Ranged against them were the rouges, proud heirs of Papineau’s Patriot cause. (In the parliamentary debate on confederation, Cartier’s dismissive reference to Papineau would provoke them to a furious defence of the man “every true French Canadian holds in veneration.”11) In the 1860s, the rouges offered French Canada a political vision almost the reverse of Cartier’s. They were liberals and sometimes radicals, heirs of the French and American revolutions. Where bleus defended traditional society and an alliance with English Canada, rouges proposed both a secular society and a French one, a Quebec independent of both clerical and British influence.
Federalism in itself was not necessarily anathema to the rouges. In other circumstances, they might have been natural federalists. In 1858, when Antoine-Aimé Dorion had been George Brown’s unfortunate fellow victim of the double shuffle, they had been struggling to shape a common policy that would give each section of the Canadas greater autonomy to run its own affairs. Dorion still led the rouges. Far from being an embittered old rebel, he was liberal more than radical. Four years younger than Cartier, he too was a middle-class Montreal lawyer with commercial interests, and he was perfectly fluent in English. Unlike previous rouge leaders, he was a practising Catholic. Under his influence, the rouges were mellowing, in a society where clerical influence was on the rise. If Cartier could talk with Brown, why should not Dorion?
But rouges and reformers had drifted apart. Cartier, whose credentials as a defender of tradition were secure, could consider the leap to accepting rep-by-pop. The rouges no longer could. In the conservative Quebec of the 1860s, it was radical enough for rouges to question clerical authority by defending freethinking intellectuals and secular education. For them also to waver from the defence of sectional equality seemed suicidal. When Brown and Cartier began talking about federalism in the spring of 1864, Brown hoped to bring rouge leaders into the coalition. Instead, the rouges took up the traditional bleu repudiation of rep-by-pop, proposing that the sectional equality of Canada East and Canada West should be entrenched forever. The rouges stayed out of the coalition of 1864 and declared themselves opposed to its federal policy.
Cartier, the only provincial leader willing to bear the risk of making confederation alone rather than have to share credit for it, seems to have been glad to find the rouges so hostile to the coalition. It was said that, when Brown and Cartier met to form their new partnership, Cartier only embraced Brown after making sure no rouge leaders were following the western reformer into the room. Instead, the rouges would attack the bleus for making a unprincipled surrender to George Brown. They accused Cartier of endangering French Canada simply to preserve his hold on power. Bleus retorted that the rouges had turned away from federalism “not by patriotism or national spirit, but simply by party spirit.”12
The isolation of the rouges left them out of the constitutional process. Quebec became the only province where the main opposition party did not have delegates at the confederation conferences. Had Dorion and one or two of his rouge colleagues joined the negotiations at Quebec, they could have strengthened the reform-minded, provincial-rights caucus there. Their readiness to challenge Cartier would have forced clarification of issues he was willing to blur, and their participation should have improved both the resolutions and the debates about them which followed. If dissatisfied, the rouges could still have repudiated the outcome of the conference, as several members of the Maritime delegations soon did. Instead, Quebec was the only province where one party presumed to negotiate for a divided population. The rouges, having had no part in making the new constitution, were certain to oppose it.
In February 1865, the legislators of the united Canadas gathered again in the building where the confederation terms had been negotiated in October. The vital order of business was a resolution requesting the Imperial government to enact a new constitution for British North America based on the Quebec resolutions. The rouges launched their attack on it with their usual parliamentary skill. Governor General Monck, in his Throne Speech, had looked forward to the rise of “a new nationality” under confederation. Dorion swiftly moved that, as French Canadians and loyal subjects of the Queen, they wanted no new nationality. Confederation’s supporters found themselves obliged to vote down this apparently unimpeachable statement of loyalty, as if confederation’s aim was to assimilate the French and break up the Empire.
In the debate on the resolutions themselves, Dorion, his followers, and anglophone allies Luther Holton and Lucius Huntington launched withering attacks on the agreement. How could confederation protect British North America against the United States when it simply created a longer border to defend? Why promote a customs union between colonies which had no trade ties? What good were bold promises that union would bring intercolonial railways if confederation was, as Dorion put it, only “another haul at the public purse for the Grand Trunk,” which would bankrupt all the colonies together?13
What about this crazy idea of letting the government appoint members of an unelected upper house? Rouges condemned it as reactionary and autocratic, a tory plot to reimpose the rule of unelected councils sure to be hostile to French Canada. The federal union was at once too centralized and too dependent on the will of the Maritime provinces, they said. Dorion urged the union to solve its own problems rather than “going on its knees and begging the little island of Prince Edward to come into this union.” Henri Joly, rouge member for Lotbinière, concluded a string of criticisms by proposing the rainbow as confederation’s symbol. “By its slender and elongated form, the rainbow would afford a perfect representation of the geographical configuration of the confederation. By its lack of consistence – an image without substance – the rainbow would represent aptly the solidity of our confederation.” 14
Mostly, however, the secular, freethinking rouges took up the natural grounds of the conservative bleus: confederation as a threat to the institutions, religion, language, and way of life of French Canada. The rouges stressed the danger of ethnic conflict, tried to show the Catholic Church was opposed to the union, and denounced confederation’s originators as the implacable English enemy, the heirs of Lord Durham. “The union having failed to produce assimilation,” said a rouge newspaper, “they have turned to a more powerful, more terrible instrument: federation.” 15
In his fiery contribution to the legislative debate, Joseph Perrault, rouge member for Richelieu, made much of this theme. Perrault was no nostalgic Patriot. Just twenty-seven, he was an agronomist, trained at English universities, who urged modernization for Quebec’s farms. But facing the confederation plan, he made embattled tradition the theme of a long speech, packed with historical references. He argued that it had been the ambition of the English since long before the conquest “to destroy the influence and the liberties of the French race” in Canada. Confederation was the work of George Brown, the “imported fanatic,” “the man most hostile to Lower Canadian interests.” It would be “a fatal blow to our influence as French Canadians” and “decreed our national downfall.” French Canadians would find it would be “disastrous to their institutions, their language, and their laws” and “threaten their existence as a race.” Perrault acknowledged he was in favour of “the creation of a great political organization spread over an immense territory” – but not “at the price of our absorption.” 16
Other rouges made similar declarations. It was the terms of confederation, not federal union itself, that inspired their wrath. “The confederation I advocated,” said Antoine-Aimé Dorion, “was a real confederation, giving the largest powers to the local governments and merely a delegated authority to the general government – in that respect differing in toto from the one now proposed.” He declared that the Quebec conference had proposed a legislative union in disguise, with “local governments whose powers will be almost nothing, which will only burden the people with useless expenses.” 17
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p; This was the crucial point. The rouges and their allies pointed to the unequal division of powers, to the federal authority to disallow, to federal appointment of the lieutenant-governors and judges. They highlighted every clause that emphasized central power and every statement delegates had made extolling strong national authority. They seized on all the elements designed to create a strong central government – and found them too strong. The English-Canadian majority had gained rep-by-pop, they charged, while French Canada would receive a provincial government whose powers were only illusory.
Why had French Canada’s representatives at Quebec allowed this to happen? It was treason, said several of the rouges, and Cartier was the traitor. He had undertaken a cynical betrayal of French Canada. Maurice Laframboise, rouge member for Bagot, accused Cartier of assisting the disappearance of the French-Canadian race for the promise of a baronetcy. Henri Joly compared him to a banker who had been entrusted with the fortune of the French Canadians – their nationality – and sacrificed it without a scruple, for private gain.
If political opinion in Quebec endorsed the rouge charge that the bleus had failed to safeguard its interests in so fundamental a matter, Cartier and his party would be finished. On November 8, 1864, a bleu journalist wrote ominously to one of Cartier’s cabinet colleagues, “I won’t hide from you that there is a certain malaise among our warmest, most devoted friends. It will need much prudence and zeal – both at the same time – to keep them all beneath our banner. Don’t trust too much in Cartier. He is surrounded by flatterers who don’t express the feelings of most people.” 18
The recipient of that letter was Hector Langevin, bleu politician, solicitor-general of Canada East, and a delegate at Charlottetown and Quebec. Like Cartier, with whom he had articled, Langevin was the lawyer son of a mercantile family, though his home and power base was Quebec City, not Montreal. At thirty-eight, he stood second to Cartier among Quebec’s confederation-makers. One of Langevin’s brothers was an aide to a bishop, another about to become a bishop himself.
Langevin had decided early he was too ambitious to be a priest; he seems to have aspired all his life to be a “grand fonctionnaire.” Even at thirty-eight, he was a stout, formal figure with a fussy little goatee. In later years, he grew fatter as he grew more powerful, and he joked contentedly that “a minister should be a man of gravity, if he wants to weigh in the balance.” Langevin’s personal life was much more conventional than Cartier’s. He was always lonely when politics separated him from his wife and children. Never very sociable, he stood a little apart from the dinners and balls of the confederation process. Personal style, ambition, and the traditional Quebec–Montreal rivalry all kept him slightly removed from his leader. By the London conference of 1867, he would come to think Cartier spent too much time fighting for confederation in the salons of the great and powerful, leaving Langevin alone at the conference table to struggle with all the vital details of the legislation. (The other bleu delegate at the Quebec conference, a remarkably self-effacing politician named Jean-Charles Chapais, from Kamouraska, said barely a word in the conference or the legislative debate. He was dropped from the London delegation.)19
Still, Langevin understood that “my political future depends entirely on the success of the measure.” He had to stand with Cartier. On February 21, 1865, well after the senior ministers had made their speeches, Langevin rose in the Parliament of the united Canadas to defend both his leader and confederation. In a long and powerful speech, Langevin appealed to ambition, saluting confederation because “we have become sufficiently great” for it. He quoted reams of financial statistics. He argued tangled issues of national defence and arcane matters of church-state relations. He even defended the appointive Senate.20
But the issues Hector Langevin kept coming back to were the national interests of Quebec. French Canadians were “a separate people,” he declared. They could never accept a position of inferiority, and he denied they would have to. “The central or federal parliament will have the control of all measures of a general character … but all matters of local interest, all that relates to the affairs and rights of the different sections of the confederacy will be reserved for the control of the local parliaments.” This talk of a new nationality that had alarmed the rouges meant the creation of a great country and a powerful nation, he said, but not at all the dismantling of “our different customs, manners, and laws.”21
Unlike Cartier, Langevin was willing to confront the most explosive issue of confederation in Quebec: the threat to local autonomy pointed to by its critics. Lieutenant-governors would be appointed by the federal government, he agreed, but that would give them no more authority for “arbitrary acts” against the local government than the existing constitution gave to the governors appointed from Britain. The power to disallow local legislation had indeed been shifted from “a second or third class clerk” in the Colonial Office to a responsible government in Ottawa. But under responsible government, Imperial London had rarely used that power, and Langevin denied that a cabinet in Ottawa would have broader grounds for using disallowance against the provinces. In any case, should Ottawa try, members from every province would oppose it, “lest they should one day experience the same treatment.”
Oliver Mowat, gone to the chancery bench, was not in the Canadian legislature to argue the case he would make as premier of Ontario, that responsible government made provincial sovereignty inevitable. (Christopher Dunkin, who became so incisive a critic of the Quebec resolutions, had told Mowat when he left for the bench that his participation had been the best guarantee something good would come of the conference.) Langevin, however, was rooting his case in the same set of ideas Mowat would defend as premier of Ontario. In the late twentieth century, praise for responsible government would sound like the merest cliché of platform oratory. But to the politicians of the 1860s, conscious heirs of the achievement of that principle, it mattered vitally. Responsible government was the sovereignty of the 1860s.
Antoine-Aimé Dorion had charged that the Quebec delegates had plotted to produce “the most illiberal constitution ever heard of in any country,” because confederation would obliterate responsible government. “There will be no such thing as responsible government attached to the local legislatures.” The appointive Senate, the powers confided to Ottawa, federal disallowance, lieutenant-governors dominating the provinces – all these proved confederation was a tory plot against the people, Dorion said. Confederation was not only an misallocation of powers between local and central governments. It was an attempt to restore arbitrary power against the influence of the people.22
Langevin confronted the rouge leader directly. “Now we enjoy responsible government,” he cried. “This great constitutional guarantee we take with us into the confederation.” Étienne Taché, titular head of the Canadian coalition and a living link to the campaign for responsible government, had declared earlier in the debate that the war of races in Canada had been extinguished “on the day the British government granted Canada responsible government.” Langevin argued on the same grounds that a self-governing people could not be oppressed. Within confederation, Quebec was and would remain distinct. Since responsible government had been preserved in the confederation settlement, he insisted, “our position then is excellent, and all those who frankly give expression to their opinions must admit that the representatives of Lower Canada at the Quebec conference have carefully guarded her interests.” 23
Langevin gave his long speech to a noisy House. He was frequently interrupted and frequently flung out charges of his own. But his most impassioned moment came in response to Henri Joly’s image of Cartier as a corrupt banker who had squandered the treasures entrusted to him. Langevin gave a long survey of Cartier’s achievements and turned Joly’s image inside out. “The country,” he said of Cartier – and by “country,” he meant French Canada – “confided to him all its interests, all its rights, all its institutions, its nationality, its religion … and he restored them gu
aranteed, protected, and surrounded by every safeguard in the confederation of the British North American provinces.” Langevin concluded with one final insistence that confederation “will afford the best possible guarantee for our institutions, our language, and all that we hold dearest,” and sat down amidst cheers.24
Despite speeches of great length, detail, and sometimes even power, the Canadian Parliament’s debate on the Quebec resolutions was weakened by a hint of inconsequence. The members had been told at the start that they could not change the resolutions, no matter how long they debated. “These resolutions were in the nature of a treaty,” John A. Macdonald said several times as he launched the debate. They were the result of long negotiation and many compromises among several provinces. If each legislature began to revise the terms of the treaty, “we could not expect to get it passed this century.” 25
Macdonald’s cheerful refusal to countenance any change to the agreement made at Quebec troubled even some of his supporters. It infuriated his opponents. They denounced it as more evidence of the anti-parliamentary arrogance of the confederation planners. But Macdonald could refuse to be troubled with the inconvenience of amendments only because he and his partners were sensing that the House was behind them. No nineteenth-century ministry could count on passive, complaisant support from its backbenchers the way twentieth-century party leaders could. Had enough of the Canadian backbenchers seen trouble for themselves in the confederation resolutions, Macdonald would not have been so highhanded. Both Charles Tupper and Leonard Tilley had returned from the Quebec conference to discover they could not get the Quebec resolutions through their legislatures, despite the large majorities their parties enjoyed. They each backed down. In Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, the legislatures made sure the Quebec terms were not even brought up for debate, while Tupper and Tilley eventually sought approval for resolutions that held out hope of “better terms.” Macdonald and Cartier would have done the same if their seats in government depended on it. They persevered only because they calculated they had the votes to do so.
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