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Process mattered to me as an observer of Canada’s seemingly endless struggles to reach and ratify a new constitutional deal. After twenty-five years of unsuccessful wrangles, I took for granted that a
legitimate process was what was lacking. In his book
Meech Lake: The Inside Story
, Professor Patrick Monahan has argued otherwise, insisting that complaints about “process” were merely a “rallying cry for those who objected to Meech for other reasons.” As an unelected adviser, Professor Monahan was virtually “in the room” at Meech Lake, and I claim none of his expertise about the content of that accord. But this book grew out of the sense that how the deals were made was far and away the most important obstacle to successful and persuasive constitutional reform in Canada in the 1980s and 1990s; indeed, that if there were a legitimate process, it might be possible to make and ratify a constitution.

It was on questions of that sort that the experience of the original confederation-makers seemed worth re-examining. This book is a reading of some political history as if confederation mattered.

I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council through a Work-in-Progress grant awarded to this work.

I would also like to thank executive producer Bernie Lucht and producers Alison Moss and Jill Eisen of CBC-Radio’s “Ideas,” where some of these ideas germinated. Alec Fiorentino and Ivan Chorney of Excelsior Collectors Guild in Ottawa helped turn my interest to the makers of confederation. Christopher Dafoe of
The Beaver: Exploring Canada’s History
solicited an article on the subject. Beth MacAulay and Kristopher Churchill assisted me with research at different stages.

I hold that a writer ought to be able to leave work on the desk and lead a normal life outside working hours, but this book sometimes impinged on that schedule. I am deeply grateful to my wife, Louise Brophy, and my children, Elizabeth and Kate, for their tolerance in this and their support in so many other ways.

I
N THE
1860s, western alienation began at Yonge Street, and George Brown was the Preston Manning of the day.

In the 1860s George Brown led a feisty, crusading regional party named Reform, and he expressed grievances that were more than regional. Like their late-twentieth-century counterparts, Brown’s reformers wanted to change political life in Canada. Stubbornly, a perpetual minority, they insisted on their own particular program. They persisted even though the political establishment agreed that adopting reform’s principles would shatter the compromises on which the fragile national consensus depended. Brown’s ideas, said the men of the political centre, were fanatical and bigoted. They would sow dissension among the founding peoples and divide the regions one from another. Pushed to their logical consequences, they would destroy the union. For the sake of unity, there could be no place for George Brown or his radical ideas in the governing of the country.

The longer Brown was excluded from the ruling consensus, the more fiercely his regional supporters backed him. His faction grew
stronger in what was then the West. He was marginal, prickly, alienated, and his only moment of power had been a fiasco – and yet he held a kind of veto over political development in the country. By the 1860s, George Brown was the impossible man. A “governmental impossibility,” one of his former allies, now estranged, had called him, and his enemies took it up like a chant. But Brown could make government by his rivals nearly impossible, too. They could barely keep him out, but they couldn’t imagine letting him in, either.

From this awkward position, George Brown became one of the architects of the most successful round of constitutional negotiations ever held in this country. He did it in partnership with men whom he hated and who despised him. And he did it on the policy of federalism, which seemed almost as much an impossibility as he was. The idea of a federal union of all of Britain’s North American colonies had been around forever. Politicians of every stripe had trotted it out again and again, and they had never moved it one inch toward reality. When Brown began to promote federalism in 1859, even his supporters took it for a diversionary tactic more than a declaration of principle. As the 1860s began, constitutional change seemed simply not feasible.

Blockages, deadlocks, impossibilities – familiar aspects of late-twentieth-century Canadian politics – were the very stuff of political life in British North America in the years before confederation. George Brown, both a headstrong cause and a frustrated victim of the great political deadlocks of the mid-nineteenth century, is worth considering for more than merely antiquarian reasons. Fortunately, we have the means to consider his experience; a century after his immersion into impossibility, George Brown had the happy fate of becoming the subject of one of the most readable, engrossing histories written in Canada, J. M. S. Careless’s remarkable biography
Brown of the Globe
.
¹

Encountered as a labelled spine on the library shelf, “Careless Brown of the Globe” may produce only a joke and a turning away. The two thick volumes, now more than thirty years old, seem to
promise another respectful tombstone biography of another Victorian worthy, the kind of history book that is saluted more than read – and not even saluted very often. As the masterwork of a skilled historian inspired to a peak performance by the right subject, they deserve better. Sadly, however, they now need the same defence Careless once gave Brown himself. In his preface, Careless laments that George Brown “is generally envisaged among the ‘fathers’ of confederation as a stern, white-headed Old Testament patriarch – instead of the vigorous, exuberant man of forty-five that he was at the time.” Brown, urges Careless, “deserves rescuing from the indifference and near-ignorance that Canadians so often display about their past.”

So indeed do confederation and all its makers, for Brown is hardly unique. Except for John A. Macdonald, who everyone knows was a drunk, the men whom we call the fathers of confederation blur together, a single stultifying mass of white-haired patriarchy. The confederation they made seems boring because it seems irrelevant, and it seems irrelevant because it seems to have been so easy, indeed inevitable. Professor Russell speaks for a consensus when he gives us a group that was like-minded in its ruling assumptions, unanimous in its agreements, and unencumbered by the constraints of democracy. So it is useful to rediscover that Canadian politics in the 1860s was as full of hatreds, conflicts, suspicions, and impossibilities as it was in the late twentieth. George Brown is a wonderful guide to all those conflicts and obstacles, and he even offers a clue as to how to overcome them.

Careless’s vigorous, exuberant man in his forties was already a political veteran in the 1860s – he had held a seat in the colonial assembly since 1851. He was also influential and becoming wealthy. As the editor and publisher of the most important newspaper in British North America, the
Globe
, he made his opinions heard throughout the colonies. Most people who heard them might have agreed with Careless’s “vigorous” and “exuberant,” but they used other terms too: hothead, smasher, extremist, bigot.

Brown talked of union, but his career had flourished amid poisonous hatreds. For all his talk of building a nation, he was a fervent southern-Ontario patriot, and the fierce pride he took in his own fast-growing, prosperous region dismayed all the other regions. He resented French-Canadian and Roman Catholic influence over the union that already existed between the future Ontario, then Canada West, and the future Quebec, then Canada East. Catholic Canada East mostly loathed him as a bigot. He talked of federation with the Maritime colonies and expansion to the West, but he hardly knew the East, and his interest in the prairie West was frankly imperial. He talked of co-operation – but he had helped provoke endless splits in his own reform coalition. With his great conservative rival, John A. Macdonald, he nursed a venomous mutual hatred. The two men had not spoken in years, unless they were hurling invective at each other in the legislature.

Brown was good at invective. He liked polemics, and he was always ready to assume he knew just what Canada West required. That kind of thing had made him a success in the newspaper business almost from the moment he founded the
Globe
in March 1844. Young Brown, not yet twenty-five and an immigrant newcomer when he started the paper, quickly proved himself as a publisher and as a hard-headed businessman. The
Globe
began as a weekly, moved to two, and then three, issues a week, and became a daily in its tenth year. Brown marketed his paper energetically, taking advantage of the new railroads to offer same-day delivery in Hamilton and London and other centres all over the province. As circulation grew, he poured money into better presses, larger premises, new wire services, and a widening network of correspondents.

It was a good time for Brown to offer himself as the tribune of Canada West, a good time for a vigorous, useful newspaper. What had been Upper Canada was putting aside the homespun days of being Montreal’s up-country frontier dependency. It was beginning to display the strengths that would make it the powerhouse of the new confederation. The population, swelled by constant immigration
from Britain, was surging past a million. The farmlands were filling up. The commercial towns were prospering. Railroads now linked them to each other and to their markets.

The busy, prosperous, proud people of Canada West read the
Globe
for its news, its advertising, and its features – in its second year it ran a new Dickens novel as a serial – and many who abhorred Brown’s politics read the
Globe
for those qualities. But Brown’s
Globe
was above all pungently political. Its creed was the political faith Brown had absorbed and made his own in his family’s literate, well-informed, politically active milieu in Scotland. That faith was classical British constitutionalism, which rooted the liberties of Englishmen (and Scotsmen, and potentially colonials, too) in parliamentary government under the Crown. British constitutionalism had seemed backward and out-of-touch in the republican climate of New York City, where Brown and his father lived for five years after they first crossed the Atlantic in 1837. In Canada, however, such views put Brown firmly on the progressive side of the key political battles. It is difficult, at this remove, to imagine that parliamentary government could be controversial and could make Brown hated or loved or dismissed as impossible, but it is worth the effort.

The first controversial cause Brown championed in the
Globe
was the thing called responsible government. To state Brown’s position today is to provoke wonder as to what could have been controversial. Simply, Brown believed that politicians elected by the voters, not a governor appointed from Britain, must control the making of domestic policy. Specifically, the governor should defer in policy matters to his executive committee – the cabinet, as it was already being called. And the cabinet in turn should be selected from, and responsible to, the elected legislature. It is now hard to imagine the Canadian governor general being descended from powerful, policy-making autocrats. But in 1845 there were such governors, and the curbing of their authority was the hottest of political issues.

The British North American colonies of 1845 were emphatically not self-governing. Most men, though no women, voted, and they
had been electing assemblies since 1792 in “the Canadas,” as far back as 1758 in Nova Scotia. The assemblies they elected had some real power, including powers of taxation. But the governor in each colony had powers too, including control of revenues that often left him in little need of the tax monies that only the legislature could provide.

The governor answered to Britain’s government, not to the colony’s voters. He was usually an aristocrat experienced in colonial administration or in service in the British cabinet itself, and the British government intended him to carry out its colonial policy. He also represented, at least in theory, a firm personal authority. Buttressed by the prestige of Britain and his own aristocratic standing, he could expect to be honoured as a figure worthy of respect and deference from all, immune to the factional strife of petty locals. In 1845, the governor in each British North American colony still appointed his own cabinet (it was then called his council) to run the departments of government under his direction.

This system had worked badly. For all the governor’s personal authority, his broad powers seemed arbitrary instead of dignified – and the elected assembly had enough sense of its own importance to resent the limitations upon it. So governors and assemblies fought, and in the Canadas the fight veered outside the confines of legitimate government. In 1837, rebellions against arbitrary government had exploded in both Upper and Lower Canada. When the rebellions were crushed, the governors emerged stronger than ever. When the two troublesome colonies were stuck together in the united Province of Canada, the intention was as much to buttress British authority as to yield power to either of them.