1867 (35 page)

Walter Bagehot, who sometimes enjoyed playing the plain journalist taking the mickey out of rarefied theorists, might have enjoyed seizing on lines like these. In parliamentary government, Bagehot had
insisted, monarchy was always part of the “dignified,” that is, ceremonial side of the constitution. Beneath the trappings of monarchy and aristocracy, which could mislead even the wisest scholars, political power in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, and even more in British North America, was securely in the hands of the representatives of the people. The confederation-makers knew that worshipful addresses to Victoria lent dignity to their business, but they also knew power lay elsewhere. Britain and British North America were disguised republics – in disguise certainly, but certainly republics, if republic meant a government derived from the people.

Bagehot understood as soon as he looked at the Quebec resolutions that the Senate and the governor general were going to be largely powerless in the new Canadian confederation. Dignified for ceremonial purposes they might be, but real power would rest securely in a Canadian House of Commons, elected to represent the Canadian people on a franchise as wide as any then existing in the world. The role of the monarchy was even more illusory. Bagehot did not take seriously the confederation-makers’ florid assertions of loyalty and devotion.

In
The English Constitution
, Bagehot had argued that, although the monarchy was integral to British society and tradition, it was not essential to parliamentary government itself. In his confederation editorials, which welcomed the rise of an independent nationality in Canada, he doubted whether Canada needed a monarchy at all. He even suggested that the confederation-makers were not entirely sincere in proposing one. “We are not quite certain this extra and, so to speak, ostentatious display of loyalty was not intended to remove objections which might have been entertained at home,” he said of the monarchical clauses of the Quebec resolutions.
⁷

Bagehot was wrong to suspect the confederation-makers were insincere about the monarchy. But he would certainly have been right to mock the idea that confederation had been made by Imperial dictate. As late as 1841, Britain had imposed a made-in-London constitution on the mostly unwilling colonists of Upper and Lower
Canada. But in 1862, with responsible government firmly established, the colonial minister informed the colonies that, if they worked out a plan of union, Parliament would pass it. When the colonies took up the offer in 1864, the constitution that emerged was indeed what McGee called it: “a scheme not suggested by others, or imposed upon us, but one the work of ourselves, the creation of our intellect and of our own free, unbiased, and untrammelled will.” By “us,” he meant the legislatures representing the people of British North America.
⁸

The confederation deal hammered out by the British North Americans in conference had appalled most of the British colonial officials involved with it. Lacking parliamentary experience, lieutenant-governors like Gordon of New Brunswick and MacDonell of Nova Scotia never fully grasped the compromises that had produced the Quebec resolutions. When the Colonial Office requested clause-by-clause comments on the resolutions, they responded with contemptuous disapproval, demanding an assertion of central power on virtually every point. Officials in London were frequently just as obtuse about the political realities that made federal union a necessity. Expecting deference, not direction, from colonials, they largely ignored the elaborate division of powers worked out in the Quebec resolutions when they began to draft a text for the British North America bill.
⁹

Fortunately, British politicians were more realistic. Colonial Office functionaries could still imagine they were administering an empire in North America, but British politicians understood that trying to intervene in Canadian domestic politics meant responsibility without power. Even on a constitutional measure that required action by the British Parliament, they avoided any policy commitment that was not endorsed by the colonial legislatures themselves. The British government formally accepted the Quebec plan for confederation, not merely as advice, but as “the deliberate judgment of those best qualified to decide upon the subject.” Bagehot approved. “It is not, that we know of, the duty of Parliament to see that its
colonial allies choose constitutions such as Englishmen approve,” he said of the Quebec resolutions (though in this case, he did approve and thought Parliament also would).
¹⁰

When Britain’s Liberal government collapsed in mid-1866, the outgoing colonial minister, Edward Cardwell, left two questions for his successor. First, could they draft a confederation bill that would get through Parliament quietly, without partisan division? More important, if the staff could draft such a bill, would the provinces accept the text? “This is of cardinal importance,” emphasized Cardwell about the second point. His Conservative successor, the thirty-five-year-old aristocrat Lord Carnarvon, agreed. Like his officials, he thought power in the new state ought to be centralized at Ottawa as much as possible. But he understood changes in that direction were possible “only with the acquiescence of the delegates … this must depend upon them.” Both ministers overruled their advisers to endorse the colonials’ choices. When Governor MacDonell of Nova Scotia proved intransigent, he was transferred to Hong Kong, glad to be off to a colony where he could actually wield power. Gordon of New Brunswick held his job only by shelving his doubts about confederation.
¹¹

George Brown, who went to Britain after the Quebec conference to sound out British reaction, wrote back to John A. Macdonald that the British government might criticize a few details of the seventy-two resolutions, but only for the sake of appearances. “I do not doubt that if we insist on it, they will put through the scheme just as we ask it.” Canadian politicians of the 1860s may have been more polite than Pierre Trudeau, who suggested that, since his patriation package had been ratified in Canada, the British Parliament should hold its nose and pass it. But British and Canadian politicians agreed in the 1860s that the political relationship was much the same.
¹²

The bill drafted early in 1867 sailed through the Lords and Commons. Britain had been looking forward to British North American union for years, and there was no party division over its terms. This proved fortunate, since the British government was close
to collapse in bitter debates about expanding the franchise, and no contentious measure could have passed. Lord Carnarvon, indeed, resigned from cabinet early in March 1867 to protest a bill that would give British men voting rights approaching those long enjoyed by men in British North America, but a new minister shepherded his confederation bill through to the final vote on March 12. Queen Victoria granted the royal assent to the British North America Act on March 29, 1867.

The confederation bill passed so speedily that some of its makers were discomfited. They noticed that even a measure concerning dog licences, introduced in the Commons after second reading of the British North America Act, provoked livelier debate. Macdonald later complained that confederation was treated like “a private bill uniting two or three English parishes,” but he would not have tolerated changes to his bill, and British
MP
s were unlikely to waste time simply dignifying the passage of a bill when their only function was to approve it.
¹³

Parliament’s refusal to heed the Nova Scotian anti-confederates permanently disillusioned Joseph Howe about British Imperial guardianship of small colonies like his, and his associate William Garvie fumed about the measure being rushed through with lazy contempt. But even sympathetic British politicians agreed that the British Parliament had, as Carnarvon said, no business considering private petitions asking it to overrule the Nova Scotia legislature. In any case, most Britons thought they were creating a union in which Howe’s dissidents were an insignificant minority. Bagehot dismissed Nova Scotian opposition with the cool disdain of someone at the centre of a centralized state. Nova Scotia’s dissidents, he said, “must perforce give way. For purposes like these, the four provinces … must be taken to be one, and in that view the federation has been voted in … by 3,800,000 to 200,000. No plebiscitum has ever been more free or more decisive.” The discontented Nova Scotians, he said, “must now content themselves like the discontented Scotch, by using the new resources the loss of their isolation will assure them.”
Successful Canadian politicians, already learning about regional sensitivities in a federal state, would have been unlikely to express such a view so bluntly.
^*

British leaders accepted that they would be obliged to protect British North America if it were threatened, but they were ready to consider granting Canada outright independence if the colonists insisted on it. The confederation-makers, however, were so absolutely sincere in desiring both a monarchy and continued ties to Britain that British observers were struck by the “excessive timidity” with which British North America advanced toward its inevitable independence. Political independence and the “new nationality” somehow lived in harmony with monarchical deference.

They did so because the politicians who negotiated the Quebec resolutions were determined to preserve the pomp and dignity of a constitution modelled on Britain’s – and equally determined that having one would not fetter their actions. Bagehot’s distinction between the dignified and efficient aspects of parliamentary government had not entered the vocabulary of politics in 1864, but the concept was no mystery to the seasoned parliamentarians who gathered at Quebec. Once they established that the efficient (that is, the power-wielding) parts of confederation were securely in parliamentary hands, they could see nothing but benefits in the dignified aspects Britain could provide in abundance. They were eager to remain loyal subjects of Queen Victoria’s Empire, even when there was no pressure on them to remain, even when some in Britain thought they should be striking out on their own.

The confederation-makers of the 1860s had many reasons to avoid challenging the new nation’s place in the old Empire, and also one hard, realistic, positive reason to embrace the Empire. In the
1860s, Canada needed Britain, needed it much more than Britain needed Canada. Canadian development depended on British capital, often supported by British government guarantees. Canadian exports depended on access to British markets, assisted by Britain’s maternal attitude. Above all, Canada was a small nation sharing a large continent with a huge neighbour, and that meant it needed to shelter under both the military force and the diplomatic influence that only Britain could provide.

D’Arcy McGee caught this sense in his confederation speech. There had always been a desire among the Americans for expansion, he said, “and the inexorable law of democratic existence” in the United States seemed to require appeasing that desire. “They coveted Florida, and seized it; they coveted Louisiana, and purchased it; they coveted Texas, and stole it, and then they picked a quarrel with Mexico, which ended by their getting California. They sometimes pretend to despise these colonies as prizes beneath their ambition; but had we not had the strong arm of England over us, we should not now have had a separate existence.” If you seek reasons for confederation under the Crown, he had said earlier, look to the embattled valleys of Virginia, “and you will find reasons as thick as blackberries.”
¹⁴

Confederation should have given McGee scope to develop his entwined themes of nation and Empire. Though he was elected to the first House of Commons, he preferred the power of the pen over an uncertain future in politics, and Macdonald promised him a civil-service sinecure from which he could write on Canadian history and literature. But McGee’s insistence, even in Ireland itself, that the Irish must abandon republican violence in favour of a constitutional solution modelled on Canada’s, had made enemies. Ten months after confederation, Irish terrorists stalked him as he left a late-night session of Parliament and shot him dead at the door of his rooming house on Sparks Street. McGee’s death, coming just months after that of Ned Whelan, the other gifted writer among the
makers of confederation, ended the likelihood that any of them would write a substantial account of it from the inside.

The Fenian raids into British North America during 1866 had strengthened McGee’s argument that the Canadian nation needed the British Empire to resist the American threat. Confederation’s propagandists had exploited the raids to the hilt. But the American threat went far beyond the comic-opera Fenian attacks or even the more disquieting, but still unlikely, danger of an American invasion. In the Quebec resolutions, the confederation-makers had proclaimed their ambition to annex the North-West, incorporate British Columbia, and build a transcontinental nation. To become practical possibilities, all those ambitions required American acquiescence and British support.

Just two years after confederation, it was British military muscle that would enable Canada to put armed force behind its negotiations with Louis Riel and the provisional government of Red River over Manitoba’s entry into confederation. W. L. Morton, the most geopolitically sensitive of confederation’s historians, long ago identified the bargain being made when Britain withdrew its Canadian garrisons in 1871. Britain was using confederation to disclaim a military presence in North America, confirming that it – and Canada – would not challenge American pre-eminence on the continent. On those terms, the Americans accepted the existence of a transcontinental Canada. It was a subtle enough bargain, with British disengagement as a bargaining chip to offer in exchange for American agreement not to seek the whole continent. Canada’s unilateral abandonment of the British alliance would not have strengthened its position in negotiation with its neighbour.

If Canada had somehow been cut loose from Britain’s Empire in 1867, it might indeed have survived. With good fortune and American restraint, it might even have achieved its westward expansion. Bagehot breezily concluded in 1867 that, if Canada became wholly independent, merely twenty years of growth would render it
able to stand on its own feet, impervious to any American military threat. With or without British support, capital would have come, export markets would have been found. Canada would have developed foreign policies, armed forces, and other attributes of sovereignty merely at a more accelerated pace than it actually did.