They did so because the politicians who negotiated the Quebec resolutions were determined to preserve the pomp and dignity of a constitution modelled on Britain’s – and equally determined that having one would not fetter their actions. Bagehot’s distinction between the dignified and efficient aspects of parliamentary government had not entered the vocabulary of politics in 1864, but the concept was no mystery to the seasoned parliamentarians who gathered at Quebec. Once they established that the efficient (that is, the power-wielding) parts of confederation were securely in parliamentary hands, they could see nothing but benefits in the dignified aspects Britain could provide in abundance. They were eager to remain loyal subjects of Queen Victoria’s Empire, even when there was no pressure on them to remain, even when some in Britain thought they should be striking out on their own.
The confederation-makers of the 1860s had many reasons to avoid challenging the new nation’s place in the old Empire, and also one hard, realistic, positive reason to embrace the Empire. In the 1860s, Canada needed Britain, needed it much more than Britain needed Canada. Canadian development depended on British capital, often supported by British government guarantees. Canadian exports depended on access to British markets, assisted by Britain’s maternal attitude. Above all, Canada was a small nation sharing a large continent with a huge neighbour, and that meant it needed to shelter under both the military force and the diplomatic influence that only Britain could provide.
D’Arcy McGee caught this sense in his confederation speech. There had always been a desire among the Americans for expansion, he said, “and the inexorable law of democratic existence” in the United States seemed to require appeasing that desire. “They coveted Florida, and seized it; they coveted Louisiana, and purchased it; they coveted Texas, and stole it, and then they picked a quarrel with Mexico, which ended by their getting California. They sometimes pretend to despise these colonies as prizes beneath their ambition; but had we not had the strong arm of England over us, we should not now have had a separate existence.” If you seek reasons for confederation under the Crown, he had said earlier, look to the embattled valleys of Virginia, “and you will find reasons as thick as blackberries.”14
Confederation should have given McGee scope to develop his entwined themes of nation and Empire. Though he was elected to the first House of Commons, he preferred the power of the pen over an uncertain future in politics, and Macdonald promised him a civil-service sinecure from which he could write on Canadian history and literature. But McGee’s insistence, even in Ireland itself, that the Irish must abandon republican violence in favour of a constitutional solution modelled on Canada’s, had made enemies. Ten months after confederation, Irish terrorists stalked him as he left a late-night session of Parliament and shot him dead at the door of his rooming house on Sparks Street. McGee’s death, coming just months after that of Ned Whelan, the other gifted writer among the makers of confederation, ended the likelihood that any of them would write a substantial account of it from the inside.
The Fenian raids into British North America during 1866 had strengthened McGee’s argument that the Canadian nation needed the British Empire to resist the American threat. Confederation’s propagandists had exploited the raids to the hilt. But the American threat went far beyond the comic-opera Fenian attacks or even the more disquieting, but still unlikely, danger of an American invasion. In the Quebec resolutions, the confederation-makers had proclaimed their ambition to annex the North-West, incorporate British Columbia, and build a transcontinental nation. To become practical possibilities, all those ambitions required American acquiescence and British support.
Just two years after confederation, it was British military muscle that would enable Canada to put armed force behind its negotiations with Louis Riel and the provisional government of Red River over Manitoba’s entry into confederation. W. L. Morton, the most geopolitically sensitive of confederation’s historians, long ago identified the bargain being made when Britain withdrew its Canadian garrisons in 1871. Britain was using confederation to disclaim a military presence in North America, confirming that it – and Canada – would not challenge American pre-eminence on the continent. On those terms, the Americans accepted the existence of a transcontinental Canada. It was a subtle enough bargain, with British disengagement as a bargaining chip to offer in exchange for American agreement not to seek the whole continent. Canada’s unilateral abandonment of the British alliance would not have strengthened its position in negotiation with its neighbour.
If Canada had somehow been cut loose from Britain’s Empire in 1867, it might indeed have survived. With good fortune and American restraint, it might even have achieved its westward expansion. Bagehot breezily concluded in 1867 that, if Canada became wholly independent, merely twenty years of growth would render it able to stand on its own feet, impervious to any American military threat. With or without British support, capital would have come, export markets would have been found. Canada would have developed foreign policies, armed forces, and other attributes of sovereignty merely at a more accelerated pace than it actually did.
But Canadian leaders had to contemplate those twenty years. No Canadian leader was willing to ask Britain to cut ties that would have been cut upon request. In the 1860s, Canada wanted the symbols of monarchy and Empire not least because it urgently needed the benefits of alliance with the most powerful state in the world. In 1864, when he was arguing that the colonies must unite to defend themselves better, George-Étienne Cartier said it was a good question whether Britain would fight to help Canada, and a few years later a British statesman doubted whether the colonials would ever fight for Britain in a European war. In fact, the British did accept that, if Canada needed protection, national honour would compel a British response, even at the risk of a nightmare war with the United States. By 1918, sixty thousand Canadian war graves proved the commitment cut both ways, but in the 1860s, Canada needed that alliance far more than Britain did.
There was no debate about monarchy and Empire in the 1860s, because there were almost no voices arguing against them. Financially, economically, politically, culturally, militarily, London was the capital of the world in the mid-nineteenth century, even more than Washington and New York were in the late twentieth. Even Antoine-Aimé Dorion and George-Étienne Cartier could speak unselfconsciously of “home” when they spoke of England. Joseph Howe in his anti-confederate phase did his best to suggest Nova Scotians were choosing between “London under the dominion of John Bull” and “Ottawa under the dominion of Jack Frost,” but the confederation-makers assiduously avoided forcing such a choice. Instead, Charles Tupper cited the Maritime provinces’ chronic lack of influence in London to prove that “if these comparatively small countries are to have any future whatever in connection with the Crown of England, it must be found in a consolidation of all British North America.”15
The alliance with Britain, so tangible, so “efficient,” in the 1860s, had by the mid-twentieth century dwindled to nothing but dignified traditions. There had been a moment around 1900 when English-Canadian “Imperial federationists” aspired to share in running the British Empire, but Britain’s long decline from Imperial might gradually took away most of the benefits the Imperial alliance had offered Canada in 1860 or 1900. Canada and Britain had clearly grown into foreign countries. Incorporating another country’s monarchy in its constitution was vastly more anomalous in the 1990s than it had been in the 1860s.
As Walter Bagehot grasped, and the experience of many nations has shown, parliamentary democracy thrives without monarchy. In Canada, an elected governor general, holding the same limited powers as the appointed one, would be more legitimate both in the exercise of those powers in a constitutional emergency and as a Canadian symbol around which the meaning of Canadian nationality could continue to be debated. The inability of modern constitutional negotiators to discuss the head of state surely indicated their inability to respond to Canada’s actual situation. A constitutional pro
cess that imitated the 1860s by including representatives of all shades of political opinion and by giving them time to debate the issues would surely find that issue arising, among many others. A constitutional process that debated such issues would gain legitimacy whatever it decided.
The monarchy helped the confederation-makers to bypass potentially awkward issues of the “nationality” of the societies being joined by the British North America Act. Nationalism was one of the defining concepts of the nineteenth century, but allegiance to monarchy allowed McGee to boast of a nation even as Cartier and Langevin emphasized that confederation did not require a single tribal nationality. Allegiance, however, was sharply separated from the exercise of sovereign power. Before and after 1867, the confederation-makers consistently identified the legislatures elected by the people as the legitimate source of political authority. Cartier carefully called that “political nationality,” and no threat to the French-Canadian nation he represented, but McGee could still frame the question of national allegiance in terms that resonated with men from whom “manliness” was always a vital touchstone. “For what do good men fight?” he asked the legislature. “When I hear our young men say as proudly ‘our federation’ or ‘our country’ or ‘our kingdom,’ as the young men of other countries do, speaking of their own, then I shall have less apprehension for the result of whatever trials the future may have in store for us.”16
On the eve of July 1, 1867, George Brown sat in the Globe offices in Toronto, back in his favourite role, writing for the newspaper. They were finishing the Dominion Day edition, and Brown wanted the front page for a long article. Maurice Careless captured the scene in his biography. He evoked Brown scribbling relentlessly through the hot night, sweating and gulping down pitchers of water and steadily handing out pages for the typesetters. He continued to write as the harassed night foreman warned that the mail train that would deliver the paper to eastern Ontario would soon be leaving. But the deadline for the eastern mail was missed, and then for the western mail, too. Then “Mr. Brown, all the mails are lost,” but Brown kept demanding a little more time. He ignored the pealing church bells at midnight, and he ignored the roar of artillery at dawn. Early in the morning, celebrating crowds gathered on King Street for a copy of the historic edition, and Brown was still writing. Finally, about seven in the morning, Brown declared, “There’s the last of it.” He handed over the final sheet of a nine-thousand-word history of confederation and went home to bed.17
Careless’s evocation of the article’s creation is wonderful, but Brown’s article was really rather dull. Loaded down with a conventional recital of history back to John Cabot, and with reams of unlikely economic statistics, this account by one of the insiders said almost nothing insightful about the way confederation was actually made. Even in its time, it must have been neglected in favour of the Globe’s descriptions of how Toronto would celebrate July first: the fireworks, the bonfires, the parades, the boat excursions, the roasting on Church Street of an immense ox purchased by public subscription from a Yorkville farmer, “the new farce ‘Dominion Day’ ” opening at the Royal Lyceum, even the grand balloon ascension hoped for at Queen’s Park (“if arrangements can be consummated with parties in New York”). Brown’s only really vivid line in the whole historical article was his opening, in which he offered that stirring and ambiguous phrase, “We hail the birthday of a new nationality.”
Brown’s true voice, the roar of the passionate politician, rang out more truly in the accompanying editorial. With the first federal election to be held later that summer, he warned with ungrammatical passion that “the only danger that threatens us is lest the same men who have so long misgoverned us, should continue to misgovern us still.”
These same men were just about to remove Brown from active politics. A year before, he had left the coalition government he had helped create in 1864. Brown had plunged back into partisan politics, intending to make his Ontario reformers the core of a pan-Canadian Liberal Party to sweep John A. Macdonald permanently from office. Macdonald, however, had already drawn many of Brown’s natural allies into his own coalition. Brown was no longer exactly “the impossible man,” but John A. Macdonald was making it impossible for him to hold on to political power. The Liberals would be badly defeated in the summer elections of 1867, and Brown himself would lose to a Conservative, Thomas Gibbs, who drew many reform votes to the confederation candidate. Brown never sat in the Canadian House of Commons he had done so much to bring into being. He would only go to Ottawa when a later Liberal leader appointed him to the Senate, which Brown had helped to ensure would never wield serious political power.
Brown was not too sorry to be out. He preferred journalism to politics and crusades over intrigues. If political success required honing the political adroitness that John A. Macdonald had, it was a price Brown was not willing, and probably unable, to pay.
When Brown and Macdonald were both dead, a wrangle continued among their partisans as to which was the true father of confederation. “Some inspired historians of Canada insist on referring to Macdonald as the father of confederation. He, who tried to prevent it until the last ring of the bell. To George Brown and to George Brown alone belongs the title,” insisted W. T. R. Preston, Oliver Mowat’s indispensable “Hug-the-Machine,” in his 1927 memoir My Generation of Politicians and Politics.18
The “inspired” historian who provoked Preston to sarcasm may have been Macdonald’s first biographer, Sir Joseph Pope. As a ten-year-old, Pope had watched his father, William Henry Pope, organizing the Charlottetown conference. He grew up to be John A.’s personal secretary and keeper of the Macdonald flame. In The Memoirs of John A. Macdonald, which he published upon Macdonald’s death, Pope dismissed Brown as a merely sectional leader. Smugly, he quoted Macdonald’s patronizing view of his rival: “He deserves the credit of joining with me; he and his party gave me that assistance in Parliament that enabled us to carry confederation.”19
This battle to identify a single hero in the confederation wars was renewed by two Toronto history professors in the 1950s. Donald Creighton relentlessly championed John A. Macdonald (“The day was his, if it was anybody’s,” was Creighton’s take on July 1, 1867) and Maurice Careless insisted there was also a place for George Brown, “the real initiator of confederation.” Later, there were ghostly echoes of the search for a father in the debates of the 1980s that set “the Trudeau constitution” against “the Mulroney deal.”
Concerning the 1860s, however, the quest for a father has always been misguided. The brilliance of the 1860s process was the way it permitted a George Brown to make a fundamental contribution to constitution-making, even as it kept him from executive authority. The confederation process let Brown, and much-less-prominent delegates, and even ordinary representatives like those who changed their minds in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, assert their aims and contribute their ideas without ever achieving unrivalled power. This was the success of a parliamentary process rather than a leader-driven, quasi-presidential one.
A clue to the success of the confederation-makers was inadvertently given in 1865 by one of their most incisive critics. Tearing the Quebec resolutions apart in the legislature at Quebec, Christopher Dunkin seized on some damaging statement made in New Brunswick by George Hatheway, “one of the gentlemen who took part in the negotiations.”
“Mr. Hatheway was not here at all,” shouted D’Arcy McGee across the floor.
Dunkin was unabashed. “I acknowledge I have not burdened my memory with an exact list of the thirty-three gentlemen who took part in the conference,” he said.20
Far from being an insult to them or a comment on Canadians’ amnesiac attitude to history, the anonymity, even in their own time, of most of the makers of confederation suggests a crucial ingredient of the constitutional achievement of the 1860s. The constitution-making of the 1860s drew in relatively minor figures from almost every political faction, several of whom dissented from the agreement their meetings reached. Their a
greement was then reviewed by rather independent legislatures – four out of five of which at first declined to endorse it. The confederation-makers would have done well to have been more broadly representative, and their confederation might have been received more warmly had they seated even more political factions around the table. Still, their achievement should not be minimized.
In the 1990s, it was impossible for a regional or sectional representative, whether from the West, from Quebec, or from any class or ethnic bloc, to influence constitutional matters without becoming a first minister – or perhaps the head of a separate state. Yet a constitution for the twenty-first century would probably require, not eleven first ministers, but several times the thirty-six delegates of the 1860s in order to match the degree of inclusiveness they achieved. The efficient secret of Canada’s parliamentary government in the 1860s was its ability to incorporate in constitution-making even those it kept from power. It was an idea the 1860s were lucky to have and the 1990s desperately lacked.
* Ontario’s Richard Cartwright once complained of having to listen to the demands of “half a dozen small provinces” – when Canada had only seven provinces. But that attitude helps suggest why Cartwright was never very successful, beyond Ontario at least.
POSTSCRIPT
If We Had a Parliamentary Democracy …
I DID NOT THINK I was nostalgic for the 1860s. But I finished this book about the making of confederation in the spring of 1997, when a federal election campaign was dominating the news. Against that spectacle, I could not help envying some aspects of the politics of British North America in the era of confederation.
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