1867 (9 page)

On the other hand, the delegates were hardly so unrepresentative as has routinely been presumed. Coming from two parties in each of the Maritime provinces and three in the Canadas, the delegates spoke for almost the whole of their legislatures. Legislatures in the 1860s were elected by all adult males in some provinces and most of them in the rest, so the delegates had a legitimate claim to represent a large part of the political class of their society. Strongly middle-class and professional, they typified political representation then as today. A few were holdovers from the old days of
noblesse oblige
, but as many had made political careers as advocates for the common farmer against élite interests.

Increasingly, colonial politicians were brokers, well-placed intermediaries rather than authority figures in their own right. It was no longer necessary to have inherited wealth and position to succeed in politics, but it did help to have the skills that gentlemen and lawyers and successful businessmen tended to possess. Members of Parliament were paid (in Britain they would not be until 1911), but it helped to be well-to-do, or at least to be able to carry off the lifestyle of the independently wealthy. In all these ways, mid-nineteenth-century politicians were not much different from late-twentieth-century ones.

As the delegates gathered at Charlottetown in 1864, constitutional discussions of the sort they were about to launch were something new in British North American politics. All previous British North American constitutions, down to the most recent – the union imposed upon Upper and Lower Canada in 1841 – had been made in London to serve Imperial objectives. Responsible government, the sea-change of 1847, had changed that, too. In 1862, in response to union talk, Britain’s colonial secretary declared that the British government “do not think it their duty to initiate any movement towards such union, but they have no wish to impede any well-considered scheme which may have the concurrence of the people of the provinces through their legislatures, assuming of course that it does not interfere with Imperial interests.” The Colonial Office suggested “consultation on the subject among the leading members of the governments concerned” without much consideration of the details, beyond the need for ratification in the colonial legislatures. The bipartisan form of the mid-nineteenth-century constitutional talks was a Canadian innovation.
¹²

The Charlottetown conference gave a uniquely carnivalesque air to the sober world of Canadian political history. George Brown, sailing to Charlottetown with the Canadian delegation, rose at four for a saltwater shower and saw dawn revealing the rich green shores of Prince Edward Island, “as pretty a country as you could ever put
your eye upon.” Everyone going to Charlottetown seems to have been similarly inspired. The charms of the Island and the glorious high summer weather that prevailed throughout the conference soon enveloped all the potentially quarrelsome participants in a festive, party mood.
¹³

No one has evoked this mood better than Peter Waite. Waite’s 1962 book
The Life and Times of Confederation
was the first of the great 1960s histories of confederation to appear; its opening sentence notes that no book had been published on the subject since 1924. When he researched
The Life and Times
, Waite was determined that its themes would grow out of the “raucous voices” of the “vast and multifarious native sources” in the newspapers of the time. Later, he would describe himself as “driven to the newspapers, to the Parliamentary Library, to the St. John’s library, to the hot little sheds on Pinnacle Street, Belleville, Ont., not by the exigencies of a Ph.D. but by adrenalin.” He was caught, he said, “as the newspapermen of the time were, by the sheer magnitude of confederation, of colonials meeting and greeting for the first time, a bit star-struck some of them, the way the writer was, who’d caught it too.”
¹⁴

Waite’s quarryings from those newspapers yielded the details of the Charlottetown conference that historians have relied on ever since. Charlottetown in 1864 was a town of just seven thousand people, with red dirt streets running in parallel lines down to the spacious, sheltered harbour. Its landmark was Province House, the Georgian legislative building built with Island stone and Island craftsmanship in 1847, and still central in the modern city of Charlottetown.

In late August 1864, Waite tells us, the great excitement in the town was caused not by the hastily scheduled political conference, but by Slaymaker’s and Nichol’s Olympic Circus, the first circus seen on the Island in twenty years. Charlottetown’s twenty small hotels were crowded with excursion visitors drawn by this sensation. As one of the newspapers noted, even Island politicians could not be deprived of their chance to see the elephants, and in his book Waite has fun with the casual reception given to the arriving delegations.
When the spit-and-polish steamship
Queen Victoria
, carrying the Canadian delegation, the last to arrive, anchored in the harbour on September 1, the Island’s provincial secretary William Pope had to have himself rowed out to her in an oyster boat “with a barrel of flour in the bow and two jars of molasses in the stern.” Once Pope had welcomed the visitors, the
Queen Victoria
’s boats were lowered, “man-of-war” fashion. In Brown’s amused phrase, “we landed like Mr Christopher Columbus, who had the precedence of us in taking possession of portions of the American continent.”
¹⁵

That same day, the conference opened in Province House. For all its giddy improvisation and champagne-fuelled sociability, the delegates to the Charlottetown conference also spent quite a few hours grinding out constitutional details around a conference table – more hours, in fact, than late-twentieth-century first ministers usually devoted to constitutional accords. Today, half-legislature and halfmuseum, Province House still preserves that serious side. Visitors to “the Confederation Room,” which in 1864 was the chamber where the Island’s upper house met, still lean over the barrier to see the long table and leather chairs where the business of the conference was conducted.

The Charlottetown conference began with its original mandate of Maritime union, and no Canadians. The Maritimers, veterans of parliamentary business, set about electing Colonel Gray, their host, as chairman, and the visiting premiers, Tupper and Tilley, as joint secretaries, and hearing the enabling resolutions from their three legislatures. Despite some dissent, they soon decided they would have no observers and no transcripts. “Buncombe speeches will be out of place, and politicians will for once deal with naked facts,” wrote a surprisingly sympathetic journalist. While no transcript was made, the shape of the discussions was soon widely known and widely reported.
¹⁶

Having organized the formalities, the Maritimers decided almost at once to bring in the Canadians and hear their proposal.
Charlottetown thereupon became two conferences proceeding in tandem – the Maritimers’ sessions on Maritime union, interspersed with much longer meetings to discuss confederation with the Canadian guests. The Charlottetown conference would continue all week, and the delegates would hold further sessions in Halifax and Saint John before adjourning the Charlottetown conference indefinitely (in fact, permanently) in Montreal in October. The vital sessions, however, were those with the Canadians in the upstairs room at Charlottetown.

With the entry of the Canadians, Maritime union was effectively marginalized. Begun as a whim of Arthur Gordon, it was not a vital interest of any of the three governments. None of them had done the preparatory planning the governors might have ordered had they retained control. Gordon, who disapproved of both the confederation idea and the representative form the conference had taken, spent only a couple of days at Charlottetown before returning to Fredericton to draft a scathing report for his masters in London. The elected politicians of the Maritimes, however, were eager to learn more of the larger union before making any decision on the smaller one. So the Canadians, straight from the boat and many of them quite unknown to their Maritime colleagues, were ushered in for what Brown called “the shake elbow and the how-d’ye-do and the fine weather.” Charlottetown had been permanently redirected.

For the next three business days, Friday, Saturday, and Monday, September 2, 3, and 5, the Canadians led the conference through a long presentation on the ways and means of a federal union of British North America. They had done their homework. George Brown, Alexander Galt, and others in the Canadian delegation had been thinking hard about such a union for half a decade, and the parliamentary committee led by Brown had given the concept a rigorous examination in May and June 1864. After the Brown–Cartier–Macdonald coalition was formed in June, federal union had dominated the Canadian cabinet’s agenda, and the last-minute opportunity
to join the Maritimers at Charlottetown had provoked furious preparation of position papers and background documents. The Canadians’ scripts were ready, and they knew their lines.

John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier introduced the confederation proposal. Macdonald spoke more than Cartier, who to the end of his life was never entirely comfortable speaking formally in English. “Federalism” was a large part of Macdonald’s presentation. A federal union, one that divided power between central and provincial governments, was the basis on which the Canadian coalition had formed, and any proposal that did not guarantee the survival of local legislatures would be hard to sell in the Maritime provinces. But federalism provoked doubts, too. None of the colonials had ever lived under a federal regime. The United Kingdom, to which they all looked, was a unitary state, not a federal union, and the collapse of the United States into secession and civil war was no recommendation for the federal principle. Macdonald, both an instinctive centralizer and an adroit politician, must have spent much of the day threading his way between the centralized authority he would have preferred and the local autonomy he had to accept, eagerly seizing any hint of what leeway the delegates would tolerate.

The next day was devoted to Alexander Galt’s exposition on the finances of a federal union. Galt also inclined to a strong central government, and his presentation may have begun to bring home to the Maritimers just how much power the Canadians expected the national government to wield in confederation. Big, energetic, dogmatic George Brown took all of the third day to outline the Canadians’ proposals on constitutional mechanics: the divisions of powers, the relations of the provinces to the central government, the harmonization of laws, the judiciary. Back in 1859, at the great reform convention in Toronto’s St. Lawrence Hall, Brown had sold federal union to the restive, separatist-minded delegates by describing its central government merely as “some joint authority” between powerful provinces. Memories of that stand, and of Brown’s long
fight to free Canada West from the union, may have reassured local patriots that their provincial prerogatives would endure. But by 1864 Brown’s views on federalism were changing. He too foresaw a central government with broad powers, and he would soon be describing the provinces as “mere municipal institutions.”
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After three days of detailed proposals, the next day, not surprisingly, was for questions, answers, and discussion. Hector Langevin of the
bleus
, D’Arcy McGee, and the old Clear Grit reformer William McDougall gave speeches, perhaps to suggest all-party support for the leaders’ views within the Canadian delegation. But the Maritimers also probed and tested the broad concept. Setting out their concerns and interests, they gave the Canadians a sense of where to push hard, where to pull back.

Only on the sixth day, Wednesday, September 7, did the Maritimers hold a substantial session on Maritime union, the formal business their legislatures had authorized them to discuss. The return to formal session required a resolution to drive the business, and Tupper moved Charlottetown’s first substantial motion: “Whereas in the opinion of this conference a Union of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island under one government and legislature would elevate the status, enhance the credit, enlarge the influence, improve the social, commercial, and political condition, increase the development, and promote the interests generally of all these provinces,
RESOLVED
that the time has arrived when such Union should be effected.”
¹⁸

For all the confidence of the preamble, this was a resolution of principle only. Tupper, who would have been happy to see its passage as a first step in the rebuilding of greater Nova Scotia, spoke forcefully of the benefits of union. But he had no details comparable to those the Canadians had been providing about the federal union, no suggestions for where the capital of a united Maritime province would be, nothing to say how distinct (and politically explosive) schools systems would be integrated, nothing about how the delicate
ethnic, religious, and class coalitions of each province would be reordered in a united province.

Tupper’s notes confirm that debate on his motion quickly exposed deep divisions amongst the delegations. The tactless suggestion of New Brunswick attorney-general Johnson that it would be good for Prince Edward Island to become “a partner in the land of New Brunswick” invited retaliation. Colonel Gray soon replied that Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were already as good as united, but the disadvantages to the Island would be great. Edward Palmer reminded the room that the Islanders were there only to listen. Their legislature, he said coldly, had given them no authority to endorse a union – or even to express an opinion. Chandler, the loyalist aristocrat from New Brunswick, perhaps offended by Colonel Gray’s dismissal of his province’s individuality and aware that Halifax was the most likely capital of a united Maritimes, noted that New Brunswick was going to have difficulty with the seat-of-government problem.

The more these issues loomed, the more eagerly the Maritimers brought confederation back into the Maritime-union debate. The Canadians were eager to see the Maritimes become one province, suggested Tilley darkly, because Canada might have to offer better terms to the three provinces separately than to one united province. William Pope of Prince Edward Island took the same view. George Coles said eagerly that a federal government would have the authority – and the money – to settle the Island’s vexed problem of absentee estates, a tempting carrot for the Islanders. (Indeed, withdrawal of this carrot would make Coles a vigorous anti-confederate who would help keep Prince Edward Island out of confederation in 1867.)