Indeed, the Canadian caucuses did not waver. Among the Upper Canadians, Sandfield Macdonald of Cornwall, ex-premier of the union and its staunchest defender, voted against the Quebec resolutions. So did Malcolm Crooks Cameron, a prominent Toronto lawyer and a deep-died tory, Joseph Rymal, a homespun Clear Grit farmer from Hamilton, and a few others. From early in the debate, however, it was clear they and a handful of others would not shake the Upper Canadian consensus in favour of confederation. George Brown had forged it through years of effort, and Macdonald’s adhesion made it unbreakable.
In Lower Canada, caucus solidarity was equally firm. Had the rouges’ charges – that confederation put the survival of French Canada at risk – stuck, Cartier and Langevin could not have prevented wholesale defections of bleu backbenchers to Dorion’s side. Instead, confederation gained supporters as the debate went on. Louis Archambault of L’Assomption came to the session intending to oppose confederation, he said. During the debate, he changed his mind. He would support confederation on the Quebec terms. Edouard Rémillard of Bellechasse, formerly a supporter of Dorion’s, told the House that, when it came to protecting the rights and institutions of French Canada, he had more confidence in Cartier than in his former leaders.
When an opposition member challenged him to put confederation to the people, George Brown predicted that, if the House failed to support confederation, the government would sweep every seat in Upper Canada in a snap election. In Lower Canada, Cartier and Langevin faced more doubters and more opposition. But, as the debate continued, they too seem to have grown more confident. Dr. Beaubien of Montmagny expressed a belief that was growing rather than wavering among the bleu backbenchers when he declared that he had found opinion leaders “in every parish” were coming to support confederation.
Beaubien was exaggerating. Particularly in rouge strongholds around Montreal and on the south shore, protest meetings and petitions denounced confederation. But initial suspicion of the Quebec plan had failed to develop into general hostility. The church hierarchy got over its shock at what one influential cleric called “the union of this fanatic [George Brown] with our statesmen.”26 Vigorously lobbied by Cartier and Langevin, and by Langevin’s clerical brothers, the bishops dismissed the rouges’ cry of alarm and came to support confederation very strongly. Even Henri Joly had to concede that Cartier had lulled the all-pervasive feeling of uneasiness the confederation plan had first provoked in Quebec into “a sleep of profound security.” The success of the bleus’ public-relations offensive reassured their supporters, and few of their elected members defected.
On March 10, 1865, the legislators of the united Canadas sat long into the night. After more than a month of debate (it would fill 1,032 pages in the transcript published soon afterwards), the Quebec resolutions came to a vote not long before dawn. Peter Waite found a sardonic report of the proceedings in the anti-confederate Stratford Beacon.
The House was in an unmistakeably seedy condition, having, as it was positively declared, eaten the saloon keeper clean out, drunk him entirely dry, and got all the fitful naps of sleep that the benches along the passage could be made to yield.… Men with the strongest constitutions for parliamentary twaddle were sick of the debate, and the great bulk of the members were scattered about the building, with an up-all-night, get-tight-in-the-morning air, impatient for the sound of the division bell. It rang at last, at quarter past four, and the jaded representatives of the people swarmed in to the discharge of the most important duty of all their lives.27
The members may have been jaded, tired, and hung-over, but by the time backbencher Thomas Ferguson of Simcoe County uttered the last words of the debate, they knew what they wanted to do. “I take upon myself,” said Ferguson, “though with great reluctance, the responsibility of voting for this measure.” It was hardly a clarion call but, reluctant or exultant, most of the others had made the same choice. They voted ninety-one to thirty-three in favour of a confederation on the terms agreed at Quebec. Despite the united opposition of the rouge members, confederation had received majority support from among francophone members.
After the vote, the alliance of the church and the bleus grew even stronger. Bishop Bourget, the powerful, ambitious bishop of Montreal, who had often clashed with Cartier on other issues, remained cool to the bleus’ coalition with George Brown and to confederation itself. As it moved toward ratification, however, clerical support for confederation would become nearly unanimous. Once the British Parliament passed the British North America Act early in 1867, the Quebec bishops issued a declaration that confederation, now the law of the land, must be accepted, respected, and made to work. Submission to lawful authority was orthodox church teaching, of course, but many clerics used the declaration as a fresh weapon in their old war with the rouges, even threatening to deny the sacraments to anyone who would vote for an anti-confederation candidate. The rouges’ attempt to position themselves as defenders of traditional, Catholic French Canada against the confederation threat had completely failed, and the clerical offensive helped ensure that the rouges were badly beaten in the general election of 1867.*
In fact, rouge opposition to confederation had begun to flag after the legislature approved the Quebec resolutions. There began to be hints that rouge hostility was less intense than rouge rhetoric. Even before confederation was completed, Le Pays, the leading rouge newspaper, began to argue that liberals should be seeking “to give more elasticity to the federal structure and to push back the centralizing elements … so as to make a veritable confederation.”28 By then, George Brown was busily wooing old rouge allies, seeking to build a liberal coalition that could challenge Macdonald and Cartier in the new confederation.
The reform of confederation, not its abolition, became the future course of most of the rouge opposition. Antoine-Aimé Dorion, Luther Holton, and other leading anti-confederates gradually conceded that confederation was not a plot against responsible government and became provincial-rights federationists. After confederation, in effect, they defended what had been Langevin’s reading of the Quebec resolutions against John A. Macdonald’s centralizing inclinations. In alliance with advocates of provincial autonomy like Ontario’s Oliver Mowat and reconciled anti-confederates of Atlantic Canada, they helped bring the Liberal Party to power in Ottawa in 1873.
Maurice Laframboise and young Joseph Perrault lost their seats in 1867, and Perrault left politics. But Henri Joly soon became a supporter of confederation who served as both premier of Quebec and lieutenant-governor of British Columbia. Antoine-Aimé Dorion became a founder of the Liberal Party and an Ottawa cabinet minister under Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie. The man who had argued that federal appointment of judges would be a threat to French Canada’s legal system ended his days as Sir Antoine-Aimé Dorion, Chief Justice of Quebec.
One of Dorion’s anti-confederate protégés was Wilfrid Laurier, a young rouge lawyer who launched his long public career in the fight against the Quebec resolutions. Laurier wrote in March 1867 that in confederation the union that had been intended to destroy French Canada had at last achieved its aim. But Laurier too came to accept that confederation did not threaten the survival of French Canada and its institutions. In 1894, when he was poised to become prime minister of Canada, his adviser Joseph-Israël Tarte foresaw a glorious union for “Quebec and the Mowat party,” a union that would respect “all races and all the agreements which were the basis of confederation.”29
Laurier’s 1896 victory would remove Hector Langevin permanently from power. After 1867, Langevin and Cartier had both preferred federal over provincial politics. Despite his annoyance that Macdonald received a knighthood and became sole prime minister, Cartier at first played a role in Ottawa similar to that he had known in the union. He acquired the territorial interests of the Hudson’s Bay Company for Canada, negotiated British Columbia’s entry into confederation, and helped launch the national railway. But Cartier’s power in Montreal was already wobbling. New alignments arose to chal
lenge his political networks, and he lost his seat in 1872. Then, brought down by kidney disease, he went off to his beloved London, with both his wife and his mistress in tow, and he died there in 1873. The Pacific Scandal was breaking in Ottawa, exposing the huge donations that railroad barons had made to Conservative leaders in exchange for the Pacific railway contract. Cartier’s old patrons in the Grand Trunk Railway had been squeezed out of the contract, but when he died his executors still thought it prudent to burn all his papers.
Hector Langevin succeeded Cartier as leader of the Quebec wing of the Conservative Party. He spent twenty more years wielding the high authority to which he had always aspired. In 1866, taking a new cabinet post with important patronage possibilities, Langevin had said it was a position where he could be useful to his friends while rendering service to his country. When Macdonald gave him a growing share of responsibility for party patronage on a national scale, his career, perhaps inevitably, was tarnished by spectacular corruption scandals. He had to resign from cabinet in 1891, and Laurier’s accession to power left him no avenue by which to return. Even before then, however, the power of Langevin and the bleu machine in Quebec had been broken.
In the post-confederation years, Langevin had become an Ottawa man, forced by his place in cabinet to acquiesce in Macdonald’s attacks on provincial power. His inability to prevent the cabinet from letting Louis Riel’s death sentence be carried out in 1885 helped destroy the Conservative Party in Quebec. The rights-of-the-provinces argument he had made so powerfully in 1865 became the property of Liberals, many of them his old rouge adversaries. In the wake of the hanging of Riel, Honoré Mercier built a nationalist coalition based on the vigorous assertion of provincial rights, traditional values, and clerical power. Mercier denounced Langevin for attempting to sit in Ottawa and control Quebec at the same time, and, in 1887, he swept to power as premier of Quebec. He and Oliver Mowat soon organized the first meeting of provincial premiers. Chaired by Mowat but held at Quebec, it proposed that the British North America Act be amended – to increase provincial powers, naturally. It was Mercier who first gave political sanction to the rising theory that confederation was a compact made between sovereign provinces and changeable by them.
For a century after 1860, Quebec got roughly the split which Cartier seems to have foreseen and Langevin defended. From the 1860s to the 1960s, French Canadians could participate in building a national state and a national economy if they chose to co-operate with the dominating English majority. Within Quebec itself, French Canada’s traditional leaders continued to direct a society in which French language, religion, and traditional culture held sway. For all who believed it was the destiny of Quebec to be rural, agricultural, traditional, and Catholic – and in 1865 that was almost everyone in Quebec’s public life – confederation confirmed Cartier’s and Langevin’s predictions much more than those of their critics and opponents in Quebec.
No one foresees the emergence of a saint. But Cartier and Langevin, both hard-headed, secular political managers, had helped create the environment in which Brother André thrived. As they intended, confederation helped Montreal consolidate its status as the financial and industrial capital of Canada, confirmed by the new national railroad as the gateway to the west. Industry thrived in the growing city, and resource industries blossomed throughout the province, often under English auspices. At the same time, the distinctly French-Canadian leadership of provincial society was preserved.
When Quebec controls its own land, several bleu members had declared in the confederation debates, it would be able to put an end to the migration to the United States that was bleeding the population of rural Quebec. After 1867, the province did launch “colonization” projects, guiding Quebeckers to the frontiers of Quebec rather than toward assimilation in New England. It was a priest, Father Antoine Labelle, who became the “apostle of colonization”; eventually he became Quebec’s deputy minister of colonization.
Clerical leadership of a public campaign such as land development was typical of the new Province of Quebec. The province had no department of education for a century; the province assisted the church to defend its authority in that field. The schools, colleges, technical institutes, and universities of French Canada were nearly all religiously run. It was the same with hospitals and charities. As industry grew, the church took a leading role in workers’ organizations and labour unions. Clerics became increasingly influential in cultural and intellectual life. The expanding responsibilities of the church symbolized how Quebec was simultaneously a modernizing society and a traditional one, a society with both the wealth to build Brother André’s shrine and the inclination to do so.
The miracle worker of Mont-Royal died at the age of ninety-one in 1937, and his death was soon followed by the initiation of efforts to see him canonized a saint. His mighty shrine to St. Joseph, already looming over the northern slopes of the city to which he ministered, was completed in 1957, twenty years after his death.
Considered from the end of the twentieth century, Brother André, in career and personality so different from George-Étienne Cartier, seems like the patron saint of the Quebec that Cartier sought to defend. Each represented a Quebec that wanted agriculture and the church to be the soul of Quebec – and yet provided no obstacle to economic development dominated mostly by English Canadians. By the time Brother André’s shrine was finished, however, those very policies had assisted in making French Quebec urban and modern and industrial. By then, it took a Maurice Duplessis to rule Quebec as if it were still the traditional society it had been in 1860. In his youth a student at the college where Brother André kept the door, Duplessis was a brutal, amoral, and sometimes hard-drinking politician. He was, however, le chef, the master of traditional French Canada as surely as Cartier in his prime had been.
After Duplessis’s death in 1959 came the “Quiet Revolution,” the explosive emergence of secular, modern, fashionable, relentlessly democratic Quebec. The Quiet Revolution seemed sudden and total because it was the abandonment of an illusion as much as a real social change. The demographics of Quebec had never been completely different from the rest of North America, and by the 1960s most Quebeckers, like other Canadians, were already leading urban ways of life. Quebec had moved beyond traditional faith and traditional agriculture, even when those things still defined it for the outside world and for itself. In the Quiet Revolution, Quebec abruptly abandoned the traditional image to seek new ways of defining and expressing itself in the modern world. Quebeckers began to reject clerical domination with the same determination that had gotten George Brown labelled as an anti-French bigot a century earlier.
If being rural farm families and devout, traditional Catholics no longer defined the French civilization in North America, what did? For many in Quebec, the answer was nationalism and the state. The Quiet Revolution dramatically changed the relationship between Quebeckers and what Cartier and Langevin had called “our religion, our institutions, and our laws.” Abruptly, the bargain on which they had brought Quebec into confederation looked obsolete. A new division of powers began to seem urgently necessary.
A new constitutional deadlock, much longer than the one that preceded the breakthrough of 1864, began to dominate Canadian politics in the late twentieth century. In Quebec, the dominant figure in that deadlock was Robert Bourassa. Much like Cartier and Langevin, he went almost alone into the constitutional conferences, the leader of a single party attempting to define the constitutional needs that would ensure the survival of a people. His task was even more difficult than theirs. In the 1860s, French Canada was a cohesive society, generally respectful and deferential to its political and clerical leaders. Cartier and Langevin were able to strike a deal which a broad cross-section of French-Canadian society could accept. Even though the bleus and the rouges fell into partisan division on confederation, Cartier’s bleus were powerful enough and popular enough to escape the consequences.
Robert Bourassa, a single party leader trying t
o incarnate both sides of a society absolutely divided as to whether federalism or separation was the choice best suited to the survival and flourishing of Quebec, was never so fortunate. Often distrusted by both federalists and separatists, accused by English Canadians of demanding too much, and by French Quebeckers of yielding too much, he was never able to see a new constitution ratified. Perhaps there exists a new constitutional settlement that will define Quebec’s distinct requirements for the twenty-first century as successfully as confederation did in the 1860s. But it hardly seems likely that any single leader or single party will be able to find it, or see it accepted in the new Quebec.
* A recent book, Marcel Bellavance’s Le Québec et la confédération: un choix libre? (Québec: Septentrion, 1992), argues that clerical interference on the side of confederation supporters should have invalidated the elections, but, given that all sides agreed that defending the influence of the church was one of Quebec’s vital requirements in confederation, it seems unreasonable to expect that the church should not have used that influence. New election laws a decade after confederation, however, prohibited the kind of direct political intervention the bishops made in 1867.
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