The wrenching and potentially disastrous inability of the Canadian political system to reform the British North America Act in the late twentieth century has long seemed to be a challenge to draft the right “deal.” Assessed from the perspective of the 1860s, it seems more precisely a problem of how to assess and legitimize deals, a problem of parliamentary government.
* The two men met at least once. During a dinner party in England, probably after confederation, Macdonald remarked that he thought Bagehot the best authority on the British constitution. “I am glad to hear you say that,” said his left-hand neighbour, “for I am Mr Bagehot.” Given what is known of both men, it is quite possible that Macdonald knew exactly who his left-hand neighbour was, and that Bagehot would have guessed that he knew.
* Beset by ministerial scandals late in his career, Macdonald was unamused by the opposition member who suggested his cabinet now met all his requirements – except the respectability.
* The main change the British insisted on was a provision to further weaken the Senate by authorizing the cabinet to appoint extra senators in the event of a deadlock between Senate and House. The delegates consented, but insisted that the extra appointments must preserve the sectional balances they had established. This power was never needed until 1990, when extra senators were appointed to pass the Goods and Services Tax bill, which had been rejected by an opposition-dominated Senate.
* It is an odd – and unstudied – coincidence that the power of leadership selection was removed from MPs within a year of women achieving the right to vote and to participate in selecting MPs. Despite their newly won right to vote, women did not participate in the Liberal leadership convention of 1919. Conventions remained deeply hostile to female participation as late as 1976, when (according to her biographer) gender prejudice was a key factor that undermined Flora MacDonald’s campaign for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party.
*In The English Constitution, Bagehot quoted the comment of a friend elected to a genuinely powerful parliament: “I got into Parliament and before I had taken my seat I had become somebody.”37
CHAPTER EIGHT
Nation and Crown
THOMAS D’ARCY McGee, who turned forty in 1865, was a small, ugly, charming Irish-Catholic journalist with a complicated past. He had been an Irish rebel who recanted, a patriotic American who grew disillusioned, an anti-clerical who had made his peace with the Catholic Church, a reformer who had gone over to John A. Macdonald, and a teetotaller given to alcoholic binges. (Macdonald once instructed him he would have to quit drinking; the cabinet did not have room for two drunks.) In 1857 he had settled in Montreal, launched a newspaper, and got himself into the legislature. His constituents, Montreal’s Irish, were a narrow and not always secure power base, but McGee was funny, quick-witted, and a natural orator. He soon became popular in the House, and a prominent, more than a powerful, figure in Canadian affairs.
McGee was barely off the train from Boston in 1857 when he began advocating federal union, westward expansion, and the nurturing of a national literature for Canada. “A new nationality” became his platform and slogan. McGee had good reason to seek a nation. He despaired of Ireland, was an alien in Britain, and resented American intolerance of foreigners and Catholics. He was also a journalist, but unlike George Brown, the millionaire publisher of the Globe, or Edward Whelan, who was at least solidly established in his Charlottetown newspaper, McGee always scrambled to make a living. The national vision became a valuable stock in trade.
McGee travelled widely in British North America. With help from railway barons who had their own reasons to encourage such visions, he organized intercolonial good-will trips for politicians and public figures. By 1865, he had been to Atlantic Canada seven or eight times, when many Canadians were still asking him, “What kind of people are they?” Though he had never gone west of Canada West, McGee even outlined a plan for a separate province to be set aside for the native nations on the plains of the far North-West. He had begun to imagine a new country where none existed.
It was a vision upon which he launched many articles and speeches. Amid the tension of the confederation debate in the Parliament of the united Canadas early in 1865, McGee was the first speaker to make the House laugh. It was a feat he achieved consistently in that speech and throughout his public career, but he was just as adept at rolling, patriotic oratory. “I see in the not remote distance,” he declared in 1860, when there was no serious prospect of British North American union, “one great nationality bound, like the shield of Achilles, by the blue rim of ocean.… I see within the ground of that shield the peaks of the western mountains and the crests of the eastern waves.” In the confederation debate, he celebrated the beauty of the Canadian land, rejoiced that confederation would elevate “the provincial mind” to nobler contests, and welcomed the advent of “a new and vigorous nationality.”1
McGee’s passionate Canadianism – “not French-Canadian, not British-Canadian, not Irish-Canadian; patriotism rejects the prefix” – disquieted listeners for whom the prefixes defined patriotism. But “a new nationality” had gone into the language. McGee modestly disclaimed sole credit for the phrase (It’s always the same, he told the House: “Two people hit upon the same thought, but Shakespeare made use of it first”), but it popped up in many celebratory speeches during the 1860s. Anticipation of a “new nationality” was even written into the Throne Speech that Governor General Lord Monck read to the legislature at Quebec on the eve of the great debate on the Quebec resolutions – inspiring the rouges’ clever amendment, proclaiming that they were too loyal to want such a thing.
Bleu supporters of the coalition defeated Dorion’s amendment, and their unanimity was an early indication that they would not be swayed by attacks on the Quebec resolutions, but they did not much like doing it. McGee defended his phrase, and Macdonald made a point of using “the expression which was sneered at the other evening.” But George-Étienne Cartier was careful to say that confederation would create “a political nationality,” and he went on to stress that “the idea of unity of races was utopian – it was impossible. Distinctions of this kind would always appear.… In our own federation we should have Catholic and Protestant, French, English, Irish and Scotch, and each by his efforts and his success would increase the prosperity and glory of the new confederacy.”2
Cartier was glad to escape from awkward questions of nationality to the safer ground of monarchy. He celebrated the benefits of monarchical rule and French Canada’s love of monarchy. “If they had their institutions, their language, and their religion intact today, it was precisely because of their adherence to the British Crown,” he said. Confederation had been made, he said, “with a view of perpetuating the monarchical element.… the monarchical principle would form the leading feature.” In the Nova Scotia legislature, Charles Tupper said something similar, covering his declaration that the colonies should “advance to a more national position” with assurances that confederation would bind the new nation to the British Crown “by a more indissoluble tie than ever before existed.”3
McGee, for all his celebration of the Canadian land and the Canadian nationality, took the same stand. “We need in these provinces, we can bear, a large infusion of authority,” he said, and he wound up his speech in direct address to Queen Victoria: “Whatsoever charter, in the wisdom of Your Majesty and of your Parliament you give us, we shall loyally obey and fulfill it as long as it is the pleasure of Your Majesty and your successors to maintain the connection between Great Britain and these colonies.” Such frankly deferential talk was as common in confederation speeches as talk of the new nationality.4
It too had its pitfalls. Confronted with it, Dorion smoothly shifted his line of attack to declare that confederation’s advocates were reactionary tories, who “think the hands of the Crown should be strengthened and the influence of the people, if possible, diminished, and this constitution is a specimen of their handiwork.” A Halifax newspaper put the s
ame thought more vividly after the Charlottetown conference. When the delegates let their secrets out of the bag, said the Acadian Recorder, their constitution would prove to be “a real sleek constitutional, monarchical, unrepublican, aristocratic cat.”5
This view of confederation – something imposed on cringing colonial Canadians by the reactionary local agents of Imperial dictate – became part of the late-twentieth-century consensus, much more than the confederation-makers’ talk of a new nationality. The political scientist Peter Russell opened his survey of Canadian constitutional history, Constitutional Odyssey, by quoting a piously deferential Canadian declaration that confederation would “not profess to be derived from the people but would be the constitution provided by the imperial parliament.” Taking the statement at face value, Russell identified the 1867 constitution as an Imperial and monarchical imposition. It could not be considered a legitimate beginning for a sovereign community, Russell concluded. Like many theorists and politicians, he declared this failing made the work of the original constitution-makers irrelevant, deserving of the neglect lavished upon it.6
Walter Bagehot, who sometimes enjoyed playing the plain journalist taking the mickey out of rarefied theorists, might have enjoyed seizing on lines like these. In parliamentary government, Bagehot had insisted, monarchy was always part of the “dignified,” that is, ceremonial side of the constitution. Beneath the trappings of monarchy and aristocracy, which could mislead even the wisest scholars, political power in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, and even more in British North America, was securely in the hands of the representatives of the people. The confederation-makers knew that worshipful addresses to Victoria lent dignity to their business, but they also knew power lay elsewhere. Britain and British North America were disguised republics – in disguise certainly, but certainly republics, if republic meant a government derived from the people.
Bagehot understood as soon as he looked at the Quebec resolutions that the Senate and the governor general were going to be largely powerless in the new Canadian confederation. Dignified for ceremonial purposes they might be, but real power would rest securely in a Canadian House of Commons, elected to represent the Canadian people on a franchise as wide as any then existing in the world. The role of the monarchy was even more illusory. Bagehot did not take seriously the confederation-makers’ florid assertions of loyalty and devotion.
In The English Constitution, Bagehot had argued that, although the monarchy was integral to British society and tradition, it was not essential to parliamentary government itself. In his confederation editorials, which welcomed the rise of an independent nationality in Canada, he doubted whether Canada needed a monarchy at all. He even suggested that the confederation-makers were not entirely sincere in proposing one. “We are not quite certain this extra and, so to speak, ostentatious display of loyalty was not intended to remove objections which might have been entertained at home,” he said of the monarchical clauses of the Quebec resolutions.7
Bagehot was wrong to suspect the confederation-makers were insincere about the monarchy. But he would certainly have been right to mock the idea that confederation had been made by Imperial dictate. As late as 1841, Britain had imposed a made-in-London constitution on the mostly unwilling colonists of Upper and Lower Canada. But in 1862, with responsible government firmly established, the colonial minister informed the colonies that, if they worked out a plan of union, Parliament would pass it. When the colonies took up the offer in 1864, the constitution that emerged was indeed what McGee called it: “a scheme not suggested by others, or imposed upon us, but one the work of ourselves, the creation of our intellect and of our own free, unbiased, and untrammelled will.” By “us,” he meant the legislatures representing the people of British North America.8
The confederation deal hammered out by the British North Americans in conference had appalled most of the British colonial officials involved with it. Lacking parliamentary experience, lieutenant-governors like Gordon of New Brunswick and MacDonell of Nova Scotia never fully grasped the compromises that had produced the Quebec resolutions. When the Colonial Office requested clause-by-clause comments on the resolutions, they responded with contemptuous disapproval, demanding an assertion of central power on virtually every point. Officials in London were frequently just as obtuse about the political realities that made federal union a necessity. Expecting deference, not direction, from colonials, they largely ignored the elaborate division of powers worked out in the Quebec resolutions when they began to draft a text for the British North America bill.9
Fortunately, British politicians were more realistic. Colonial Office functionaries could still imagine they were administering an empire in North America, but British politicians understood that trying to intervene in Canadian domestic politics meant responsibility without power. Even on a constitutional measure that required action by the British Parliament, they avoided any policy commitment that was not endorsed by the colonial legislatures themselves. The British government formally accepted the Quebec plan for confederation, not merely as advice, but as “the deliberate judgment of those best qualified to decide upon the subject.” Bagehot approved. “It is not, that we know of, the duty of Parliament to see that its colonial allies choose constitutions such as Englishmen approve,” he said of the Quebec resolutions (though in this case, he did approve and thought Parliament also would).10
When Britain’s Liberal government collapsed in mid-1866, the outgoing colonial minister, Edward Cardwell, left two questions for his successor. First, could they draft a confederation bill that would get through Parliament quietly, without partisan division? More important, if the staff could draft such a bill, would the provinces accept the text? “This is of cardinal importance,” emphasized Cardwell about the second point. His Conservative successor, the thirty-five-year-old aristocrat Lord Carnarvon, agreed. Like his officials, he thought power in the new state ought to be centralized at Ottawa as much as possible. But he understood changes in that direction were possible “only with the acquiescence of the delegates … this must depend upon them.” Both ministers overruled their advisers to endorse the colonials’ choices. When Governor MacDonell of Nova Scotia proved intransigent, he was transferred to Hong Kong, glad to be off to a colony where he could actually wield power. Gordon of New Brunswick held his job only by shelving his doubts about confederation.11
George Brown, who went to Britain after the Quebec conference to sound out British reaction, wrote back to John A. Macdonald that the British government might criticize a few details of the seventy-two resolutions, but only for the sake of appearances. “I do not doubt that if we insist on it, they will put through the scheme just as we ask it.” Canadian politicians of the 1860s may have been more polite than Pierre Trudeau, who suggested that, since his patriation package had been ratified in Canada, the British Parliament should hold its nose and pass it. But British and Canadian politicians agreed in the 1860s that the political relationship was much the same.12
The bill drafted early in 1867 sailed through the Lords and Commons. Britain had been looking forward to British North American union for years, and there was no party division over its terms. This proved fortunate, since the British government was close to collapse in bitter debates about expanding the franchise, and no contentious measure could have passed. Lord Carnarvon, indeed, resigned from cabinet early in March 1867 to protest a bill that would give British men voting rights approaching those long enjoyed by men in British North America, but a new minister shepherded his confederation bill through to the final vote on March 12. Queen Victoria granted the royal assent to the British North America Act on March 29, 1867.
The confederation bill passed so speedily that some of its makers were discomfited. They noticed that even a measure concerning dog licences, introduced in the Commons after second reading of the British North America Act, provoked livelier debate. Macdonald later complained that confederation was treated like “a private bill uniting two or three Engli
sh parishes,” but he would not have tolerated changes to his bill, and British MPs were unlikely to waste time simply dignifying the passage of a bill when their only function was to approve it.13
Parliament’s refusal to heed the Nova Scotian anti-confederates permanently disillusioned Joseph Howe about British Imperial guardianship of small colonies like his, and his associate William Garvie fumed about the measure being rushed through with lazy contempt. But even sympathetic British politicians agreed that the British Parliament had, as Carnarvon said, no business considering private petitions asking it to overrule the Nova Scotia legislature. In any case, most Britons thought they were creating a union in which Howe’s dissidents were an insignificant minority. Bagehot dismissed Nova Scotian opposition with the cool disdain of someone at the centre of a centralized state. Nova Scotia’s dissidents, he said, “must perforce give way. For purposes like these, the four provinces … must be taken to be one, and in that view the federation has been voted in … by 3,800,000 to 200,000. No plebiscitum has ever been more free or more decisive.” The discontented Nova Scotians, he said, “must now content themselves like the discontented Scotch, by using the new resources the loss of their isolation will assure them.” Successful Canadian politicians, already learning about regional sensitivities in a federal state, would have been unlikely to express such a view so bluntly.*
British leaders accepted that they would be obliged to protect British North America if it were threatened, but they were ready to consider granting Canada outright independence if the colonists insisted on it. The confederation-makers, however, were so absolutely sincere in desiring both a monarchy and continued ties to Britain that British observers were struck by the “excessive timidity” with which British North America advanced toward its inevitable independence. Political independence and the “new nationality” somehow lived in harmony with monarchical deference.
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