1867

“On all great subjects, much remains to be said.”

—Walter Bagehot

D
URING THE
collapse of the Meech Lake constitutional accord – a collapse I watched with some regret but with a surprisingly strong blend of contempt and anger – I took up Donald Creighton’s thirty-year-old
The Road to Confederation
. I had never worked seriously on nineteenth-century political history, and much of Creighton’s story was, frankly, news to me. One detail about the way the deal was made became stuck in my mind. Creighton mentioned in passing that Nova Scotia’s premier, Charles Tupper, was invited to the constitutional conference at Charlottetown in 1864 – and Tupper refused to go unless the leader of the opposition would go with him.

This astonished me. I could not imagine any of today’s imperial first ministers ever considering such a proposal. I could not help wondering what might have happened if they had. But Creighton offered no explanation for Tupper’s odd gesture, and when I asked some of Canada’s leading historians about it, none had any coherent explanation.

As I read further, it began to seem that the nineteenth-century makers of confederation worked with constitutional machinery rather similar to what exists today. Yet actions like Tupper’s suggested they operated the machine differently. George Bernard Shaw once said that English and Americans are divided by a common language, and we have the same problem with our nineteenth-century constitution-makers. I began to wonder if a translation was possible, and if there were comparisons for our time in the processes for constitutional deal-making that the confederation-makers employed in the 1860s. This book is the product of that wondering.

As I tried to grasp the constitutional deal of the 1860s, I grew aware of how deeply unfashionable an exercise it was. If we have had one element of consensus amid our present constitutional wrangles, it lies in the agreement that we are wholly superior to those dead white males, the “fathers” of confederation. We probably know that John A. Macdonald was witty and a drunk, but we are unlikely to think his ideas on constitution-making have anything to do with us. “When the boys went down to Charlottetown,” said Brian Mulroney disdainfully in 1990, “they spent a lot of time in places other than the library. There was no public participation.” “The constitution of Canada must be a modern document,” began one of Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s constitutional proposals, with all the confidence of a platitude, as if our modern industriousness enables us to dismiss tradition and change our constitutions like hemlines.

Our experts take the same view. Peter H. Russell, to take one of the most accomplished of our political scientists, is massively learned in constitutional law and has been deeply involved in the recent decades of constitutional struggle. In the historical sketch with which this wise and humane observer of our national difficulties opens his book
Constitutional Odyssey –
its revealing subtitle is
Can Canadians Become a Sovereign People? –
Professor Russell allows only that the constitution-makers of the 1860s did not act “in a totally undemocratic matter,” before dismissing their beliefs and processes out of hand. His book, which is indeed hugely informed
and deeply thought-out, proceeds on the understanding that our inheritance from 1867 is worthless, that we are compelled to begin afresh to become what we have never been.

Professor Russell gets no argument from our historians. In the years before the Centennial celebrations of 1967, Canada’s leading historians filled a shelf with books about confederation. And then they stopped. In the last thirty years, there has scarcely been a single new book about how confederation was made in the 1860s. Nineteenth-century high politics has vanished almost entirely from the agenda of the Canadian historical profession and the historical popularizers. The books are out of print, the documents almost unavailable, and the issues undebated. The historians of thirty and forty years ago became supremely unfashionable, and no one has begun to take a fresh look at their subjects.

Meanwhile, all the questions about constitution-making have changed. On the eve of the Centennial, there was inevitably a triumphal and celebratory mood in even the most scholarly treatises. Confederation had endured, and Donald Creighton read out the lesson: The fathers had decreed that a tightly centralized Canada was both the right answer and the inevitable one. Evidence to the contrary hardly seemed worth examining, and minor issues of just who had been in the room could be neglected. Today, when we have no such confidence about confederation, we find that the histories of the 1960s do not address the issues that seem most important.

The more I looked into the histories of confederation that languished on the shelf, the more contemporary analogies I wanted to pursue. I wanted to explore Charles Tupper’s odd stance in 1864 – and what might have happened if contemporary premiers had responded similarly when invited to Meech Lake in 1987. I found myself comparing today’s assumptions about leadership against the tactics that worked for John A. Macdonald. What did it imply for our pursuit of unanimity that about one in four of the men honoured as the “fathers of confederation” dissented from the confederation proposals of 1864 – or that four of their five legislatures at first refused
to ratify a deal endorsed by premiers and opposition leaders alike? What did Hector Langevin, arguing
in favour
of the confederation settlement, mean when he declared that French Canadians were a separate people? Reading such questions into the 1860s, I found myself trying to take seriously the way their constitutional deal was made, and made to seem legitimate – not because they had all the answers, but because they help us to think differently about the way these matters are attempted today.

This book does not presume that the makers of confederation were heroes. Even on the discreet testimony of the triumphal histories and biographies, some seem to have been quite appalling human beings. Some of their strongest shared beliefs – that women must not vote, to cite only one – have no place in our world. Many of the accommodations they made to the circumstances of the 1860s need neither be justified nor imitated today.

Still, the political world of the citizens of the 1860s was not a separate universe from ours. In the midst of our repeated constitutional failures, we should not be so quick to condescend to their successes. Amidst the endless efforts to strike a constitutional “deal” that would become legitimate and lasting, I thought it might be worthwhile to interrogate the deal-makers of the 1860s about the deal-making processes that seemed to work then.

Considering historical analogies for present circumstances went against my habits as an historian. I have constantly preferred history’s potential to offer examples of how gloriously foreign the past is, rather than to present didactic lessons. Nevertheless, the 1860s experience with constitution-making might enlighten us on several points:

This book considers how these lessons took hold in the politics of the 1860s. It is not by any means a complete account of confederation. Because I was interested mostly in the process by which a deal was made, and made to seem legitimate, I neglected a host of conditions specific to the 1860s: railway economics, the American civil war, tariffs and taxes, rivalries of region and class and religion, to name just a few. All these were vital in their time, but it was the processes of deal-making I was trying to follow.