1867 (31 page)

Once Macdonald came in, however, he came in strongly. He had spent a decade learning how to cobble together majorities in the fractious Canadian legislature, where he personally rarely had more than a handful of loyal followers. Whatever his coolness to federalism as a political philosophy, he quickly saw that the complicated regional, ethnic, and ideological coalitions of a confederated Canada would give wonderful scope for the skills he had been honing. He could dominate the politics of a confederated Canada as he would never dominate a union of Brown’s Ontario and Cartier’s Quebec. First, however, he began to dominate the conferences.

Macdonald signed the guest book at Charlottetown as “cabinet maker.” It was a fair self-assessment. Bagehot could have recognized in the Macdonald of the 1860s all the skills of a superb parliamentary manager. From long experience – he had first been elected in 1844, at the age of twenty-nine – Macdonald knew both the business of campaigning and the machinery of public administration. As a lawyer and attorney-general, he knew the legalities, precedents, and principles of legislative and constitutional drafting. But parliamentary leadership – putting together majorities – was personal, and personal skills were where Macdonald shone.

When David Thompson, an unrepentant old Clear Grit farmer-politician, returned to the Commons from a long illness in the 1880s, he got brief, distracted greetings from his party leaders, Edward
Blake, a fastidious Toronto barrister, and Richard Cartwright, a dour and rigid Kingston financier. “Davey, old man,” cried John A. Macdonald a moment later, “I’m glad to see you back.” Thompson had never in his life voted with Macdonald, but he admitted it went increasingly against the grain that his enemy was better company than his friends.
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Dozens of similar stories testify to Macdonald’s persuasive charm. One perceptive Macdonald historian, Keith Johnson, has suggested there was a dark, cold, private soul beneath Macdonald’s affable surface.
¹¹
But if his humour and sociability were mostly on the surface, they sufficed. Joseph Rymal, another Grit rival, marvelled over Macdonald’s ability to cajole his supporters in the House. “Good or bad, able or unable, weak or strong, he wraps them around his finger as you would a thread. I have seen some of them … denounce the measures of government and say ‘Well, I can’t go that!’ and still I have known these gentlemen long enough to believe that they would go it, and after there was a caucus they did go it every time.”
¹²

A colleague put it more admiringly. “Often when council was perplexed and you had made things smooth and plain, I have thought, ‘There are wheels in that man that have never been moved yet,’ ” said Archibald McLelan, the one-time anti-confederate from Nova Scotia who sat in Macdonald’s cabinets for years.
¹³
For his part, Macdonald once joked that his ideal cabinet would be “all highly respectable parties whom I could send to the penitentiary if I wished.”
^*
Lacking that power, he used his persuasive powers instead.
¹⁴

Macdonald was good on the floor of the House, too. He was not notably an orator. George Brown, who took pride in his own oratorical powers, dismissed Macdonald’s prepared address in the confederation debates as “a very poor speech for such an occasion.”
¹⁵
Macdonald did better later in the debate, and in a crisis he could speak strongly. With his government on the line in 1873, he rallied wavering members with a passionate five-hour argument, fuelled by gin delivered in water glasses from three different supporters, each unaware of what the others were doing. But his great strength was the casually wielded authority, which, Bagehot argued, parliaments preferred over oratory. During the confederation debates, an opposition member tried to score a point by tying Macdonald to some procedure in a long-ago debate over a temperance bill. “I don’t remember,” confessed Macdonald. “I don’t generally go for temperance bills,” and in the laughter that followed, the House acknowledged his authority to ignore the challenge.
¹⁶

It was not all laughter, however. “The great leaders of parliament … all have a certain firmness,” Bagehot thought, and Macdonald, with a majority at his back, used it without compunction, whether in the double shuffle of 1858 or in ruthlessly closing down the confederation debate when the New Brunswick election disaster seemed likely to give the Canadian anti-confederates an opening.
¹⁷

It was the same with smaller matters. Joseph Rymal had been a popular and respected member of Parliament for decades when Macdonald gerrymandered his seat out of existence in 1885. “Mr Speaker, I am not made of such material that I can beg for justice,” declared Rymal. “I can ask you in a plain and manly way to do what is right, but I cannot fawn and be a sycophant.” Macdonald was unmoved, and his majority voted Rymal’s seat into oblivion.
¹⁸

For the photography session that recorded the delegates at Charlottetown, Macdonald crouched casually at the centre of a long line of standing delegates, so the eye was drawn to him automatically. Robert Harris gave him the same central status in the Quebec painting. But despite his important role in both conferences, Macdonald was one delegate among many, and not always in the majority. He had never fought for federalism and did not conceal his conviction that “absolute power … must reside somewhere” (the phrase is Bagehot’s and appears in
The English Constitution
and
several times in the
Economist’s
articles on confederation, but the opinion was also Macdonald’s). That view was problematical, given the necessity of a federal union. Cartier, Langevin, and the Maritimers had frequently to rein in their colleague’s acknowledged preference for legislative union.

At Quebec, Macdonald argued adroitly and yielded grudgingly, but what made him indispensable was his organizing. Approval by Prince Edward Island had never been essential to confederation, and by the end of the conference George Coles was undisguisedly hostile, yet Mercy Coles’s diary shows Macdonald working relentlessly on the Coles family – and charming Mercy, if not her father. To all the delegates and hangers-on, he seemed endlessly present, more sociable than Brown, more comfortable than Cartier, more at home than any of the Maritimers, more authoritative than anyone.

It seems to have been the same behind the closed doors of the conference. Macdonald did not control even his own delegation, but his skills as an organizer had free rein. Though he made several of the major formal presentations, these were probably less important than his ability to work the room and identify potential coalitions, to draft compromise texts during the recesses, and come back to coax the resisters. For Macdonald, Quebec meant the exercise of these skills in endless days at the conference table, in late nights of resolution-drafting and early-morning briefings, and even in the midst of the lavish hospitality of the conference. His Sunday-night dinner with the Coles family, at which he entertained Mercy Coles “with any amount of small talk,” was almost certainly aimed at softening her father’s stand on the eve of Oliver Mowat’s crucial resolution on provincial powers, and Mercy noted that, at 9:00 p.m., their guest was off to another political soirée. Although Macdonald vanished into a gin bottle as soon as the confederation tour reached Ottawa, even straitlaced Mercy Coles understood.
¹⁹

In the thirty months between Quebec and the official proclamation of confederation by Queen Victoria, Macdonald’s letterbooks show him relentlessly keeping in touch even with minor players. He
maintained a correspondence with Colonel Gray of Prince Edward Island even when the confederation cause was clearly hopeless there. (One letter concluded, “Pray present my best regards to those of the Prince Edward Island delegation whom you may meet, always excepting Messrs Palmer and Coles,” who by then were implacably opposed to confederation. He and Gray even discussed the merits of asking Britain to legislate the Island into confederation against its will.) Macdonald did more than write letters. During the second New Brunswick election, when Leonard Tilley sent his plea for “forty or fifty thousand of the needful” to Macdonald, Macdonald arranged the cash transfer quickly and discreetly.
²⁰

When confederation had been ratified by the legislatures at Quebec, Fredericton, and Halifax, one more gathering of convention delegates remained to be held. The delegates moved on to London, this time to supervise the rewriting of Quebec’s seventy-two resolutions into the formal language of a bill for the British Houses of Parliament. The Colonial Office had already assigned legal draftsmen, and the colonial delegates were expected merely to consult on matters of detail and nuance.

Politics had intervened, however. As we have seen, delegates from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick headed for London under instruction to try for “better terms,” and by mid-1866, those from Canada also had a wish list. The Quebec resolutions had made education a provincial responsibility, but sectarian schools that had official status at the time of confederation would be able to seek federal protection against provincial moves to limit or abolish them. The Canadian legislature had failed to pass promised legislation to provide Protestant schools of Quebec the official status they sought. At the insistence of Alexander Galt, the Canadian delegation intended to insert the protection (for minority schools in both Quebec and Ontario) directly into the constitution, despite all the assurances that the Quebec terms were a treaty that could not be amended.

Lord Carnarvon, the young English politician who had just become colonial secretary, wanted nothing to do with colonial controversies. He “proposed” that the delegates should confer among themselves and “narrow their points of difference, if any, to the smallest compass, so as to leave as little as possible for my decision and arbitration.” The London conference proceeded, therefore, in two stages. In December 1866, the delegates negotiated among themselves, working steadily through all seventy-two of the Quebec resolutions. Then the bill itself was drafted early in the new year.
²¹

Reopening the Quebec resolutions was no easy matter. The delegates’ debates at London seem to have been as fractious and free-flowing as at Quebec. Even the degree to which the delegates were free to debate was contentious. Peter Mitchell argued that New Brunswick’s “better terms” resolution empowered them to reopen only the handful of matters that he considered particularly contentious. Charles Fisher, no less dedicated a confederate, retorted that he had heard forty different objections in New Brunswick. He intended to follow his own judgement.
²²

John W. Ritchie, the new Nova Scotia delegate who had replaced Robert Dickey, said plaintively that “in the legislature of Nova Scotia it was understood that all matters should be entirely open.” William Howland and William McDougall of Upper Canada, however, declared the Canadian legislature had approved the Quebec resolutions and nothing else; their hands were tied, they said. Somehow, the conference permitted this exchange to be summed up with the extraordinarily vague statement that “We are quite free to discuss points as if they were open, although we may be bound to adhere to the Quebec scheme.”
²³

Hector Langevin had been to both Charlottetown and Quebec and had gone on the tours afterwards. But his letters home suggest how little friendship confederation had created among the men most responsible for making it. McDougall was ambitious but lazy, Langevin wrote, Galt was impetuous and too easily swayed, and Tupper made enemies by his bluntness. Howland was second-rate,
and Fisher was mediocre. Among the Maritimers, only Leonard Tilley really impressed him, though he liked McCully and expressed some respect for one or two others. The delegates attended many banquets in London, but the one really sociable moment shared by most of them came in February, when John A. Macdonald married Agnes Bernard, the sister of his long-time aide and conference secretary, Hewitt Bernard.
²⁴

Langevin considered himself and Cartier as ranking number two and three among the delegates, but even Cartier now struck him as unreliable. He spent too much time in London’s great society, Langevin thought, leaving Langevin to cover all the details. Langevin spent the conference fearful that, while Cartier caroused, the English and the English Canadians were still plotting to turn confederation into a tightly centralized legislative union. “This has been settled,” he thundered when the form of the Senate came up for debate among the colonial delegates. He wrote to his family that he had to remain constantly alert and combative to protect the interest of French Canada. “I go my own way. When someone wants to block me, I show my teeth and I bite if I have to.” Langevin was determined that the bill would remain substantially unchanged from what had been negotiated at Quebec. “I have had to see it, review it, review it again, and then re-review it whenever anyone else has put their hand to it.”
²⁵

Even in the midst of his distrust and frustration, Langevin did not doubt who was number one among the delegates. “Macdonald is a sly fox,” he wrote. “He is well briefed, subtle, adroit, and popular. He is
the man
of the conference.” At the London conference, there were no more neutral chairmen. The delegates unanimously agreed Macdonald should have the job. Later, as Macdonald increasingly took precedence over him, Cartier would grouse that it was only the accident of being the cabinet member with the greatest seniority that gave Macdonald the right to chair the conference, but political longevity was only one of Macdonald’s qualifications. The delegates had accepted “the ablest man in the province,” in Governor General Monck’s phrase, as first among equals.
²⁶

A week into the conference, Macdonald managed to set his hotel room on fire after falling asleep while reading by candlelight, but he carried on despite his serious burns. He steered the discussions, summed up the consensus, and wrote up the resolutions with Hewitt Bernard. The colonists’ meetings wound up on December 24, 1866. Macdonald formally delivered them to the Colonial Office on Christmas Day. Several significant details had been added, but the bargain struck at Quebec two years earlier remained essentially unchanged.