1867 (15 page)

Whelan also predicted that Prince Edward Island would soon beg to be allowed into confederation. Reckless investments in railways did force the Island to seek terms, but by 1873 Canada was at least as eager as the Islanders to complete the union. Prince Edward Island persuaded Ottawa to guarantee six Commons seats, two hundred miles of railways, permanent communications with the mainland, and generous financial terms. There was a large grant to complete the buying out of the landlords, and in 1874 Prince Edward Island began the expropriations of large estates that Whelan had advocated twenty-five years before. Terms less generous than these would have secured the support of the Island’s delegation, and perhaps the Islanders as well, in 1864. Governor General Lord Dufferin, officially visiting the new province in 1873, wrote Prime Minister Macdonald that Islanders were “quite under the impression that it is the dominion that has been annexed to Prince Edward Island, and in alluding to the subject I have adopted the same tone.”
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Did Edward Whelan’s support of an unpopular confederation and his condemnation of the radical Tenant League prove he had betrayed the humbler classes and gone conservative? Had he begun to endorse the authority of a parliamentary élite over the wishes of the people? Hardly. Just after the Quebec conference, he declared he would defer “reverently” to public opinion, since the issue of confederation had to be put to the public. Confederation could only be ratified, he said, in “the several local legislatures, the constituencies of each province in public meetings assembled, and at the hustings.” When the Island legislature declared in 1866 that it would never accept confederation on any terms, Whelan offered a lonely dissent: it would be up to the people to accept or reject confederation, and if they eventually accepted it, no legislative veto should stop them.
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Whelan’s commitment to both democracy
and
confederation, his insistence that confederation was both right for his province and the right way for “the humbler classes of society” to fight the landocracy, suggests the underlying radicalism that still attended the idea
of responsible government. Responsible government and parliamentary democracy had been reform causes in British North America; it was only by yielding to them that conservative politicians had surged back to power in the 1850s and 1860s. But Whelan still expected parliamentary democracy and confederation to change the world, not to conserve it. That enduring activist strain confirms what a flexible instrument the British constitution still seemed in the 1860s. The other confederation-makers, whatever their goals, were more like him than not in their eagerness to use parliamentary government to do things, not to prevent them.

During one of the Sunday breaks of the Quebec conference, Edward Whelan found a few moments to visit the monuments and battlefields of the city. He told his readers he was still “nearly a stranger to the historic places in this old city,” but he hoped to have a chance to remedy that before leaving Quebec. Edmund Burke, also a lover of history and tradition, might have shared Whelan’s eagerness to explore the ramparts and ancient landmarks of Quebec. We can imagine the two of them haunting the sites of the Quebec conference like quarrelsome ghosts, deeply in harmony over the value of parliamentary government, deeply divided on the uses of the state.
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Burke’s warnings against all kinds of state activism were largely unheeded in Whelan’s day. Burke, who thought the governments of his day had no business either feeding the poor or funding the colonization of Nova Scotia, would have been appalled by Whelan’s enthusiasm for using the Canadian state to expropriate private property in Prince Edward Island and to build railways across the continent. In the late twentieth century, however, echoes of these ideas of Burke’s once more reverberated loudly. Few modern “neo-conservatives” were quite so explicit about the necessity of letting the poor starve, but Burke’s insistence that the state must not try to change the society it served was alive and walking the corridors of power in the 1990s.

Parliamentary government, however, the idea on which Burke and Whelan were in harmony, commanded very little reverence in late-twentieth-century
Canada. In the 1990s, not even parliamentarians gave more than lip service to the notion that a parliamentary seat was, or should be, a significant and important office. Sadly, it was where Burke and Whelan were most compatible – in believing that parliamentary government was a legitimate and effective way to resist arbitrary authority and to articulate the will of the nation – that the legacy of both had become most wraithlike and insubstantial.

T
HE HOSTS OF
the Quebec conference hoped the old city and its spectacular site would welcome the visitors with a Laurentian fall to match the Island summer that Charlottetown had provided so lavishly in September. But before the delegates arrived, Quebec City’s blazing autumn colours were whirled away in an early snowstorm. Mercy Ann Coles, who came from Prince Edward Island with her father, the ex-premier, would grumble to her diary about watching endless rain pound down on the roof outside her hotel window. Nevertheless, Quebec City could glitter even in the rain. With its viceregal court and its military garrison, in an era when the court and the officer corps were the acme of society, Quebec offered unparalleled conditions for dignified celebration.
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The liveliest descriptions of the Quebec conference’s ceremonial side come from women. Frances Monck, the governor general’s niece, who had left her baby in Ireland to visit Quebec, met many of those who had come “to arrange about a united kingdom of Canada.” In the diary she kept, she generally approved of what she saw of the conference, looking with amused toleration even upon the Catholic
clergy’s edict against intimate dancing. Charles Tupper she found forward in his courtesies. George-Étienne Cartier struck her as “the funniest of little men,” always lively and amusing, and apt to break into song after dinner. She thought George Brown handsome and D’Arcy McGee remarkably ugly. During one conference dinner, Edward Chandler of New Brunswick told her “a great deal about the happiness of slaves, and how miserable they are when emancipated.”
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Frances Monck assessed the ceremonial side of the conference with the detachment of one long used to the elegant entertainments of the British aristocracy. Mercy Coles, one of many delegates’ wives and daughters who came along to Quebec, was better placed to express a colonial view of the conference. She had grown up in the small town of Charlottetown, in the home of a successful middle-class brewer who also happened to be premier. Neither Mercy nor her father would have got in the door of English society of the kind Frances Monck knew, but George Brown had been much taken with the Coles women when he met them in Charlottetown. As soon as the Coles family settled at the Hotel St. Louis (“a very nice hotel and every comfort one can wish for”), Mercy was surrounded by ministerial admirers from Charlottetown – not only Mr. Brown, but also Cartier, Macdonald, and McGee. “Major Bernard tells me we are to have grand times,” she wrote the night she arrived. “The first word almost he said was ‘I hope you brought the irresistible blue silk.’ ” She had.

In her diary Mercy Coles seemed oblivious to the conference itself, which she could not attend and about which her father seems to have told her little. Constrained by mid-Victorian ideas about a woman’s role, she shopped with a daughter of Upper Canadian delegate William McDougall and gossiped about the daughters of New Brunswickers Steeves and Fisher (“The Misses Steeves seem to be possessors of the parlour downstairs. I think they never leave it. There is a Mr Carver who seems to be the great attraction. He is a beau of Miss Fisher’s but they monopolize him”). She saw the sights around Quebec in a party led by Premier Gray, whose invalid wife
was home in Charlottetown with barely a month to live. She even put up with bad behaviour from D’Arcy McGee (“Before dinner was half over he got so drunk he was obliged to leave the table. I took no notice of him. Mr Gray said I acted admirably”).

At the end of the first week of the conference, Mercy Coles fell ill; indeed, she may have had diphtheria. After Colonel Gray’s homeopathic remedies failed, her parents called in Dr. Tupper, and Tupper attended to her before and after conference sessions for ten days (“Dr Tupper came in and found me out of bed standing in my bare feet. Get into bed this minute, he said, you want to catch your death of cold. I tumbled in pretty quickly, he felt my pulse and looked into my mouth and said you are a good deal better”). In her sickbed, Mercy Coles missed most of the great balls and dinners of the Quebec conference and had to content herself with collecting the photographic visiting cards of the delegates (“Mr Tilley gave me such a nice card of himself. All the gentlemen have been having their likenesses taken. Papa’s is only tolerable”). When she was able to dine in company again, she was delighted by the kind inquiries of John A. “The conundrum!” she wrote as Macdonald, trying to draw George Coles away from his deepening disaffection from the Quebec plan, courted his family.

Edward Whelan was another admiring observer of the social whirl attending the Quebec conference. “If the delegates will survive the lavish hospitality of this great country, they will have good constitutions – perhaps better than the one they are manufacturing for the confederation,” he wrote home. Whelan had argued against secrecy in the conference, but felt bound by the rules. In the reports he sent his newspaper in Charlottetown, he was circumspect about the decisions being made.
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Instead he described every dinner and ball. Whelan even hinted that the intercourse of Maritimers and Canadians was not restricted to dancing and dining. In an afterdinner speech at the end of the conference, he paid tribute to the way the Maritime delegates had been “caressed” by their hosts. “This was not intended to apply to the fair ladies of Canada,” he said to
appreciative laughter. “For the delegates all being married men were, of course, like Caesar’s wife – above suspicion.” Perhaps Whelan had special targets among his fellow delegates as he went on, “If not so circumstanced, they would be as dead as Julius Caesar long ago!” Whelan had left his own wife at home.
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After another ball, which lasted until three in the morning, Whelan wrote, “I think it would be advisable to be somewhat reticent hereafter regarding the social parties in which the delegates engage in this stupendously hospitable city, lest it be supposed they do nothing but frolic.” In fact, the social whirl of Quebec, though more sustained and more glitteringly adorned, was actually less significant than Charlottetown’s. At Charlottetown the entertainment had helped build the trust that convinced the delegates to proceed to Quebec. At Quebec, however, the work of drafting a constitution had to be faced.
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The hours the delegates spent in conference at Quebec suggest the gravity with which they faced the task. They gathered on sixteen different days between October 10 and October 27. They failed to meet only on the two Sundays, and they averaged over six hours a day in formal session. At first they sat from 11 a.m. until 4 p.m., but, as they warmed to the work and its difficulties, they revised that schedule into a 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. session, followed by a second session from 7:30 p.m. until midnight. The afternoon break was not for leisurely teas, but for additional lobbying, caucusing, committee work, and the drafting of resolutions. Throughout the Quebec conference, the delegates permitted themselves only a fifteen-minute lunch break, during which they grabbed lunches in the next room – this in an era when civil servants with a six-and-a-half-hour workday always took a two-hour lunch.
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Whelan marvelled that “the cabinet ministers – the leading ones especially – are the most inveterate dancers I have ever seen,” and Mercy Coles described her father coming home from a ball “with every stitch of clothes wringing wet with perspiration. He never had
such a time.” But mostly the delegates joined the dancers after midnight, and mostly they went back to work early the next morning. Reporters who were turned away from the doors of the working sessions described the conference much as Mercy Coles did, by its glittering hospitality and its rivers of champagne. For the delegates, however, Quebec meant mostly a conference room heaped with papers and hot with debate, and the drumbeat of rain at the windows.