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Finally, Leonard Tilley voiced a gathering consensus about Maritime union and confederation. Confederation seemed possible, he said, but Maritime union would not help confederation and, given its difficulties, would probably delay it. “If we get the confederation now,” Tilley said breezily, “we could easily unite the Maritime provinces … afterwards.” If we want to, some of his audience perhaps added silently.

With that settled, Maritime union was disposed of as a serious alternative. The Maritimers adjourned their discussion of Tupper’s motion and invited the Canadians back in. Brown summed up in a phrase. “The conference gave the Canadian delegates their answer – that they were unanimous in regarding federation of all the provinces to be highly desirable,
if the terms of union could be made satisfactory –
and that they were prepared to waive their own more limited question until the details of our scheme could be more fully considered and matured.”
¹⁹

The delegates took the next day off. Though there would be further sessions, that agreement on Wednesday, September 7, marked the effective end of the Charlottetown conference. Simultaneously, it had launched the Quebec conference. Maritime union had been shelved; substantive discussions of the terms of a federal union were now required. The Canadians had already planned to invite the Maritimers to Quebec if the Charlottetown sessions succeeded, and within a few weeks new delegations were being appointed to gather there on October 10.

Charlottetown had done more than dispose of Maritime union, however. The conference had endorsed the principle of a federal union of the British North American provinces – a union in which the central government would be supreme, but in which local legislatures would retain significant powers. This was the principle of the British North America Act in a nutshell. This was Canada in a nutshell, in fact.

Not all, or even half, of that agreement had been achieved at the conference table in what is now the Confederation Room at Province House. Around the business sessions developed an extraordinary social whirl. The politicians of the united Canadas and those of the Maritime provinces hardly knew each other, and their occasional previous dealings had most often led to acrimonious failure. On the delicate and momentous matters that had come to dominate the Charlottetown conference, they needed to sound out each other’s sense of what was essential and what was unacceptable, what each
might offer and what each would demand. For the business to succeed, they needed to know something about each other, and that was where Charlottetown had its great and memorable success.

Charlottetown hospitality was constant and exhausting. The first night, the Island’s lieutenant-governor held a lavish dinner at his waterfront residence. The next day, after the conference adjourned at three, William Pope invited delegates to his home for an elaborate “luncheon” of Island delicacies: oysters, lobsters, and champagne. “This killed the day,” reported George Brown, “and we spent the beautiful moonlight evening in walking, driving, or boating, as the mood was on us.”
²⁰

The social calendar remained crowded for the rest of the week, even as the business sessions ground through their agenda. After Galt’s financial presentation, a late lunch aboard the
Queen Victoria
was followed by a grand dinner at Colonel Gray’s country estate, “Inkerman.” On the Monday, George Coles, the Island opposition leader, gave
his
luncheon. Next day, it was the turn of Edward Palmer to offer the late luncheon. That night Lieutenant-Governor George Dundas and his wife hosted a grand ball at Government House – “a very nice affair, but a great bore for old fellows like me,” wrote Brown to his wife, Anne, who was visiting Scotland. On the following days, there would be another reception aboard the
Queen Victoria
, excursions to the country and the north-shore beaches, and yet another ball at Province House.

For Peter Waite, “the beginning of confederation” could be precisely dated. It happened when the Canadians began pouring from their plentiful stores of champagne aboard the
Queen Victoria
on Saturday, September 3, after the second day of their presentation. They were celebrating, he wrote, “the heady discovery of a national destiny.” Waite had Brown’s evidence to back up his claim. “Cartier and I made eloquent speeches,” said Brown about that shipboard party, “and whether as the result of our eloquence or of the goodness of our champagne, the ice became completely broken, the tongues of the delegates wagged merrily, and the banns of matrimony between
all the provinces of
BNA
having been formally proclaimed … the union was formally proclaimed and completed.” Champagne flowed like water, commented Waite, “and union talk with it. The occasion took hold of everyone. Champagne and union.… Here was a metamorphosis indeed: this transformation of the dross of reality into the gold of personal conviction.”
²¹

Champagne and union inspired a lot of cynical comment, to the effect that confederation was made when a conspiracy of politicians got drunk together at the public expense. But confederation at Charlottetown had two requirements. Men who had good reason to consider themselves legitimate representatives of the electorates of five future provinces had to be persuaded that confederation was both worthy and feasible. In the business sessions, the politicians confronted serious issues and fundamental principles. In the sunshine and the dinners and the country excursions, they established the trust that helped the business sessions go forward. Charlottetown’s social sessions and business sessions worked in tandem.

At the closing ball, the most lavish yet, the delegates tried blending business and sociability. George Brown heard that at 2:00 a.m, after the dancing and the dinner, “the Goths commenced speech-making and actually kept it up for two hours and three-quarters, the poor girls being condemned to listen to it all.” Brown himself had gone to bed early and avoided such horrors. The next morning, as the delegations left for Halifax, one newspaper correspondent noted that most of the statesmen were as befogged as the harbour.
²²

Charles Tupper was surely there to the end, and his attention to the poor girls, though unrecorded, may well have been more assiduous than Brown’s. Charlottetown had been a triumph for Tupper. As the leader of the largest Maritime province and the most bullish enthusiast among them, both for Maritime union and for confederation, he was crucial in forging Atlantic Canada’s welcome to the Canadian proposal. John A. Macdonald told Joseph Pope, his official biographer, that he had concluded on the first day of Charlottetown that Tupper was exactly the man needed for the accomplishment
of confederation. While this smacks of Macdonaldian bonhomie, it strikes the right note about Tupper’s influence at Charlottetown, and the two men did forge a political alliance that lasted almost thirty more years. In time, their sons would become law partners and cabinet colleagues. Tupper was enamoured of big opportunities and had the personality to dominate most gatherings. Charlottetown must have been glory to him.

After Charlottetown, Tupper never doubted the feasibility or the worth of confederation. He took ruthless measures to get it through, and in the following decades confederation carried him to Ottawa, to Washington, to London, to the prime minister’s office, and to a baronetcy. It opened the way for his sons and daughters to move from Nova Scotia to Ottawa, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and London, to political honours, legal prominence, and social eminence. Confederation opened to the Tuppers all the larger horizons that the delegates toasted as the champagne flowed and the ice broke aboard the
Queen Victoria
in Charlottetown harbour.

Yet Tupper had done his vital work before the conference started, when he made Charlottetown an all-party conference. Whether it was in the business sessions, or in the champagne-fuelled sociability aboard ship, or in the great houses, the politicians had let down their guard precisely because their rivals were beside them. At Charlottetown, Tupper abandoned once and for all his previous concerns that confederation might be an impractical dream. But for him and all the politicians in the room, practicality meant political practicality as much as anything. As Tupper began to make up his mind to support confederation, the leader of the Nova Scotia opposition, Adams Archibald, and Halifax’s most powerful newspaperman, Jonathan McCully, were in the room making the same decision. Leaders of government and opposition from the other provinces were making the same simultaneous commitment. Even Island rivals like Edward Palmer and George Coles, who days earlier had been competing over which would be most determinedly hostile to any
threat to Island independence, were joining the gathering consensus that the thing was possible.

The explosion of enthusiasm and ambition at Charlottetown was possible because of the diversity of participation – Tupper’s gift to the process. Multi-party participation was the
sine qua non
that enabled the politicians to consider endorsing the new ideas without worrying about being blindsided back home. Tupper, the hard-edged, high-stakes political battler, would never have made the large commitments he made at Charlottetown if he had anticipated that what seemed so enticing in the sunshine of Charlottetown would be turned into a partisan fight at home. Given the pre-Charlottetown views of McCully and Archibald, they surely would have opposed it, had they not been there.

The men of Charlottetown could be converted by union and champagne because they saw their rivals being converted at the same time. That Joseph Howe, Timothy Anglin, Antoine-Aimé Dorion, and other political leaders who did not attend soon became confederation’s fiercest critics confirms how essential broad participation was – and how confederation might actually have been achieved more easily had participation in the conferences been even broader.

The bipartisanship of Charlottetown started a brief constitutional tradition. The Charlottetown delegations would be joined at Quebec in October 1864 by a two-party delegation from Newfoundland. Bipartisanship prevailed immediately after confederation as well. Even during the Red River uprising of 1869-70, the delegation which negotiated Manitoba’s entry into confederation represented a broad cross-section of anglophone and francophone Métis and recent settlers. When British Columbia negotiated its entry to confederation in 1871, its autocratic lieutenant-governor would have nothing to do with those who advocated responsible government such as Amor de Cosmos and John Robson. Parliamentary government came to British Columbia only with confederation (and both de Cosmos and Robson became premiers). Nevertheless, the B.C. delegation
that settled terms with Ottawa did include representatives of both Vancouver Island and the mainland, as well as both advocates and sceptics about confederation.

Prince Edward Island broke the bipartisan tradition. When it decided to enter confederation in 1873, it did so amidst a partisan squabble over which side could get most and give up least in the deal-making. A Conservative government, with better ties to John A. Macdonald in Ottawa, displaced a Liberal one, and brought Prince Edward Island into confederation without the participation of its rivals, initiating a long and mostly counter-productive tradition of partisan constitutional deals. But even in the twentieth century, some sense of the value of bipartisan constitution-making endured: an all-party constitutional assembly preceded Newfoundland’s decision to seek terms with Canada in 1949. Only with the new initiatives of the 1960s did executive federalism come to be taken for granted.

At Canada’s late-twentieth-century constitutional conferences, at Meech Lake in 1987 and Charlottetown in 1992, the first ministers in their executive conclaves quickly reached unanimity – by excluding all their rivals. They meant well and they worked hard, only to find themselves assaulted and finally defeated by partisan attack and local resentment. Eager to float above the political landscape as fathers of the new confederation, they made themselves irresistibly juicy targets for every opposition leader who lined up to declare that
he
would have gotten more and given up less.

Charles Tupper, a political brawler and not a man to shed tears for losers, would surely have sneered at the defeated makers of the Meech Lake accord, the would-be confederation-makers who failed to get their deal through. Bringing his rivals to Charlottetown had been no act of kindness. Tupper did it as much to protect his hide as to ensure success. But it did both. Bipartisanship gave the results a legitimacy no modern constitutional initiative has achieved. The premiers of Meech Lake failed where he succeeded, because they
followed their presidential egos when he followed his parliamentary guile. In its strategic calculation and in its understanding of parliamentary necessities, it demonstrated in Tupper and his confrères a parliamentary sagacity never matched in the constitutional efforts of the late twentieth century.