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Brown’s resolution marked the triumph of his ten-year crusade for rep-by-pop, but its approval by the delegations should have been automatic. The Canadian coalition and the Charlottetown consensus had both been rooted in agreement upon rep-by-pop; there could be no confederation on any other principle. Indeed, most of the discussion that evening turned on technical details. But when the vote was taken, Prince Edward Island stood opposed. After the vote, and again on Thursday morning when Brown demanded an explanation, Heath Haviland, Edward Palmer, and Andrew Macdonald all denounced rep-by-pop. They wanted more seats in Parliament than the mere five to which the Island’s population would entitle it.
Edward Whelan, staunch confederate though he was, had voted with them to swing the Island delegation against the motion.

The Island’s delegation was split. Premier Gray and Provincial Secretary Pope, both warm supporters of confederation, were embarrassed by the repudiation of the Charlottetown consensus by their cabinet colleague, Attorney-General Palmer. But Palmer had always been cool to confederation, and he was willing to rally the Island against it if it meant no power in the Senate and only five seats in the Commons. Andrew Macdonald, who perhaps still smarted from the dismissive rejection of his Senate proposal, voted with Palmer. Haviland and Whelan, who had not been in the Charlottetown sessions, were enthusiasts for confederation, but seem to have felt obliged to make a stand on rep-by-pop after the Island’s inability to gain anything on the Senate question.

“Prince Edward Island would rather be out of the confederation than consent to this motion,” said Heath Haviland bluntly, but the Islanders were abused more than cajoled. Canada East’s Alexander Galt lamented that “it would be a matter of reproach to us that the smallest colony should leave us,” but to avoid that unfortunate situation, he urged the Islanders, not the other delegates, to reconsider. And when Galt presented the financial terms of confederation in the last days of the conference, it became clear that the Canadians had reneged on the commitment that the Islanders thought they had won at Charlottetown, namely, that the new nation would provide a fund for buying out the Island’s landlords and establishing freehold tenure. For Island delegates who had seen political salvation in confederation’s promise to end landlordism, this was a disaster. It clinched George Coles’s opposition to confederation and ruined Edward Whelan’s hope of persuading Islanders to support it.
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With the Islanders virtually written out of confederation, the conference proceeded to the workings of the federal and provincial legislatures. On Thursday and Friday, October 20 and 21, John A. Macdonald moved a series of resolutions. Several were routine, but the status of the provincial lieutenant-governors provoked a revealing
exchange. Would they be appointed by the Imperial government, as was the governor general? Or would the federal government appoint them? Macdonald got what he wanted, a statement that the provinces would be subordinate in this to the national government.

That great issue, the independence or subordination of the provinces, came up again on Monday, October 24, in resolutions that set out the division of powers between the provinces and the federal government. These resolutions brought in a new player, who had not been at Charlottetown and thus far had said little at Quebec. This was Oliver Mowat, an Ontario reformer who had come into the coalition government with George Brown.

Like John A. Macdonald, Mowat was a Kingston Scot of unpretentious background and large ambitions, and, like Macdonald, he had chosen law as his path upward. He had been a law student in Macdonald’s own Kingston office and might have been his partner. Instead, as Macdonald launched his political career, Mowat moved to Toronto and prospered in the arcane field of chancery litigation. “I do not see where it all came from,” he said disingenuously as he tallied up the income a decade of practice had brought him.
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Despite his family’s conservative connections and his own utter lack of radical passion, Mowat went into politics as a reformer. John A. Macdonald resented this betrayal by his former protégé, but Mowat seemed no great threat. Knowledgeable and useful in administrative work, he seemed too “desky” for real political success. He peered at the world through small, round glasses set on a small, round face. He was pious, a non-drinker, a dull speaker, and he lived a life of bourgeois propriety, proud to call himself a “Christian statesman.” In the rough and tumble of Canadian politics, he hardly seemed a match for the likes of John A.

Mowat, however, would one day be a political giant, the first great provincial premier of confederation. As premier of Ontario from 1872 to 1896, Mowat would virtually set the mould for provincial premiers, and he would do it by declaring loudly that the provinces mattered. Far from being minor branches with no more than municipal duties, said Mowat, the provinces were sovereign powers within confederation. “The provinces are not in any accurate sense subordinate to the Parliament of Canada,” was the way he put it. “Each body is independent and supreme within the limits of its own jurisdiction.”
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Defending the rights of provincial governments proved to be brilliant politics in Oliver Mowat’s Ontario. Premier Mowat would become (to the extent it was possible) even duller and deskier as he aged in office, but the voters of Ontario supported him every time he got into a jurisdictional fight with Ottawa. Mowat had rooted himself in the great Upper Canadian political heritage. By resisting autocratic Ottawa, he made himself the heir to the Baldwin reformers who had resisted autocratic British governors and the Brown reformers who had resisted “French domination” of Ontario under the union. Mowat never lost an Ontario election. He was premier until he went to Ottawa in 1896, age seventy-six, to be Wilfrid Laurier’s minister of justice.

Mowat’s success on the platform of provincial rights infuriated John A. Macdonald, who was Ottawa for most of the time that Mowat was Ontario. Macdonald as prime minister insisted on the supremacy of Ottawa over the provinces. He insisted that the Quebec conference had authorized the central government to dominate the provinces – and that Ottawa’s pre-eminence was crucial to the survival of the new Canadian nation. Mowat, said Macdonald furiously, “with his little soul rattling like a dried pea in a too large pod – what does he care if he wrecks confederation?”
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Donald Creighton shared Macdonald’s opinion of Oliver Mowat as a dangerous wrecker. Creighton, who was born in 1903, came to maturity in a surge of postwar nationalism in the English Canada of
the 1920s. His views solidified in the 1930s, when English-Canadian constitutional scholars agreed that only a strong national government could wield the powers needed to fight the Great Depression. Impatient with provincial sensibilities or provincial rights, Creighton agreed absolutely with Macdonald that strong central government was vital to Canada – and that centralized authority had been the aim and consensus of the Quebec conference. In Creighton’s story of confederation, anti-confederates were merely misguided. Oliver Mowat was a villain.

Mowat, said Creighton, was “a remarkable combination of determination, effrontery, and legal cunning,” who knew well that his provincial-rights views “differed from – and, in fact, completely contradicted – the original conception of confederation.” Mowat may have called himself a Christian statesman, said Creighton icily, but “attacking principles which he had previously endorsed and attacking a constitution which was partly his own handiwork apparently did not cause him a moment’s concern.” Creighton even accused Mowat of attempting to falsify the memory of what happened at the Quebec conference.
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To clinch their case that the delegates at Quebec had guaranteed Ottawa’s supremacy, Donald Creighton and John A. Macdonald could cite a string of resolutions on federal and provincial powers which were debated and passed between October 20 and 25. Had not the delegates established a clear hierarchy when they agreed that lieutenant-governors would be appointed by Ottawa, while Ottawa’s governors general would be appointed by the Queen? Had they not given Ottawa the power to make laws “for the peace, welfare, and good government of the federated provinces,” as well as authority to legislate “respecting all matters of a general character” in the new nation? Had they not given to Ottawa all the great powers: trade and commerce, finance, foreign affairs, and indeed all powers not specifically listed as belonging to the provinces? Had they not, in the financial resolutions debated on Saturday, October 22, and again on October 26, given Ottawa most of the nation’s revenues and made
the provinces dependent upon federal allowances (unless they were ready to move into the then-explosive matter of direct levies on property)? Above all, had they not specifically given the government in Ottawa the power to disallow any law passed in any province, for any reason or for no reason at all?
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They had. These were apparently overwhelming powers. For Donald Creighton and English-Canadian constitutional scholars of the 1960s who defined the history of the confederation process, they confirmed that the founders had decreed a national government with all the powers needed to harness and direct “the expanding energies and requirements of a potentially great nation,” as Creighton put it. He quoted John A. Macdonald’s conference speech of Monday, October 24, when Macdonald denounced proposals for stronger provinces as American in inspiration. Macdonald declared, “We should concentrate the power in the federal government and not adopt the decentralization of the United States,” and the motion he was supporting passed without opposition.
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The records of the Quebec conference contain many statements echoing Macdonald’s. The confederation-makers did want a strong central government to fulfil their nation-building ambitions. They put much stock in the British example of undivided sovereignty in a single Parliament. If they doubted, the civil war in the United States provided strong lessons about the dangers of schism in a loose federation, while the republic’s very size (and the size of its armies) suggested that only a strong, united Canada could hope to stand up against its threats and pressures.

The delegates’ commitment to strong central government was demonstrated in their reaction to the states-rights argument of New Brunswick’s Edward Chandler on October 24. Chandler, Frances Monck’s expert on the happiness of slaves, objected to giving the federal government all powers not specified as provincial. It should be the other way around, he declared, with federal powers strictly listed and the provinces acquiring all the many powers that had gone unspecified. “I am rather inclined to agree with Mr. Chandler,”
said Robert Dickey of Nova Scotia. A few other delegates expressed equally qualified sympathy.
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But the attack against his proposal was overwhelming. Henry from Nova Scotia, Haviland from the Island, Chandler’s fellow New Brunswickers Johnson and Gray, and Brown from Ontario all tried to show Chandler his error. The most powerful assault came from Charles Tupper, who called federal primacy “a fundamental principle … and the basis of our deliberations,” and from John A. Macdonald. Macdonald connected Chandler’s proposal to its origins in the United States, where, he said, the principle that “every man sticks to his individual state” had led to civil war. “It would be introducing a source of radical weakness,” cried Macdonald, winding up a long speech. “It would ruin us in the eyes of the civilized world.” Chandler was routed, left vainly protesting that his plan was “not precisely the same” as in the United States.
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Oliver Mowat said not a word in support of Chandler’s lonely fight for provincial rights. In fact, the resolution Chandler was attacking was Mowat’s own. It was Oliver Mowat himself who had introduced the essential resolutions on federal and provincial powers, and he had certainly helped draft them. At least since Creighton wrote his confederation histories, the case that Oliver Mowat accepted a dominant federal government at Quebec, only to renege on this fundamental principle of confederation when he became premier of Ontario, has seemed damning.

Yet Mowat, in his own defence, might wish to emphasize elements of his Quebec resolutions that the historians of the 1960s minimized. First among these was the list of powers granted to the provinces. By its terms, provincial governments won exclusive authority over education, hospitals, and charities. They would control the public lands and the income from them, and govern all matters of property and civil rights. They could levy direct taxation, which in the context of the 1860s essentially meant putting taxes on property. They would have full authority to create and supervise municipal institutions. They would run the prisons, the police forces, and the
administration of justice. They would have authority over the whole sphere of what Mowat initially called “private and local” matters and which in the final draft became “generally all matters of a private or local nature.”

These were broad and substantial powers. From Canada West to the Maritimes, in fact, there was a significant caucus committed to preserving substantial provincial authority – even as it acknowledged the need for strong central authority. Leonard Tilley would later argue that eleven of every twelve laws he had seen passed in New Brunswick before confederation were in fields that would remain within its powers after confederation. What Ottawa had acquired, he implied, were Imperial powers transferred from London, rather than local powers removed from the provinces. George-Étienne Cartier hardly needed to say that French Quebec could never join a nation dominated by Protestant anglophones unless its local government had the powers to protect the vital institutions of francophone society. And Brown’s reformers had long wanted to get Upper Canada free of the union to run more of its own affairs through a legislature “beyond the control of the central power, set apart from it, untouchable by it” (as Brown’s
Globe
had put it just as the Charlottetown conference opened). Even John A. Macdonald concurred. When it was suggested the federal government might “sweep away” the provinces, he told the conference, “This is just what we do not want. Lower Canada and the lower provinces would not have such a thing.”
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