1867 (22 page)

So when Cartier led the
bleus
into a coalition with Brown based on confederation and rep-by-pop, he was making an enormous political conversion, and taking an enormous risk. He was abandoning the positions on which he had built his career. After twenty years of
insisting that the union was essential to the survival of his people, he was suddenly agreeing to consign it to the dustheap – in partnership with the man he had always denounced as an enemy to French Canada. The survival of his people, not merely of Cartier’s political career, was the measure by which confederation would be judged in Quebec. For Quebec’s political master, confederation was a gamble with nightmarishly high stakes.

Nevertheless, Cartier had compelling reasons to come over to confederation. He liked some key elements of the idea. He was, after all, a growth-oriented bourgeois railway lawyer, a proud partner in the expanding British Empire. Partnership with English Canada had brought him both personal wealth and political success, and he believed it had been good for his people as well as for his business clients. Cartier was no more immune to state-building, continent-spanning ambition than Tupper or Brown. “Shall we be content to maintain a mere provincial existence, when, by combining together, we could become a great nation,” he told the Parliament of the united Canada in 1865, and no one doubted he was sincere.
⁶

Cartier could also calculate that the union of the Canadas, attractive as it had been for almost a quarter-century, might not long endure. Canada West, with 300,000 more people than Canada East, was expanding the population gap more every day. Its unwillingness to tolerate the sectional equality that gave Cartier’s
bleus
such influence could only grow stronger. The
bleus
had to calculate that rep-by-pop campaigners might come to control Upper Canada so totally that only a handful of allies in Lower Canada would enable them to turn the tables and make Cartier’s
bleus
a perpetual minority. Failing that, the Upper Canadians might convince the ultimate arbiter, the British government, simply to repeal the increasingly unbalanced union. Cartier feared that, once out of the union, Quebec would be ripe for annexation to the United States and rapid assimilation. Cartier’s phobia about American republicanism and the tyranny of the majority was one of the wellsprings of his fervent devotion to the British monarchy. In the United States, he argued, Quebec would be
consigned to the fate of Louisiana, where the French language and the Catholic faith were already considered as good as lost. When they considered the dark possibilities of seeing the union abolished, the
bleus’
resistance to changing it began to waver.

Accepting Upper Canada’s demand for rep-by-pop, Quebec would lose the precious half-share in the national Parliament that had become its bulwark against hostile or assimilationist policies. But in a
federal
union, Quebec might see the union preserved, and still shelter its vital interests. Back in 1859, when the Upper Canadian reformers had proposed a federal union, they had suggested all significant powers would go to the provinces. That concept had changed by 1864, but the confederation bargaining of 1864 still presumed that “local matters” would be consigned to the provinces. That was Brown’s peace offering to Cartier, and Cartier recognized it.

Brown’s cry of joy when the Quebec resolutions were complete – “French Canadianism entirely extinguished” – has often been taken as an assimilationist chant, but Brown always used “French Canadianism” as an ugly shorthand for French-Canadian interference in Canada West’s affairs, and securing an end to that necessarily meant hands off French Canada’s affairs. Even Edward Whelan, visiting from far-off Charlottetown, grasped in a couple of weeks at Quebec that “the French desire most ardently to be left to the undisturbed enjoyment of their ancient privileges – their French language, civil law, literature, and language. It is utterly impossible to anglicize them.”
⁷

In the spring of 1864, when Brown was floating the idea of federation in the union Parliament, Cartier’s government partner, John A. Macdonald, had condemned federalism as a foolish, dangerous notion. “We should have a legislative union, in fact, in principle, and in practice.” Brown leapt in. Was that the policy of the Macdonald–Cartier government? “That is not my policy,” said Cartier grimly. The House laughed to see a wedge put so neatly between the unshakeable partners, but Cartier’s answer was the decisive one. Quebec could not accept rep-by-pop
and
legislative union, since in a single
legislature its representatives would always be in a minority. If rep-by-pop had to come, federation must come too.
⁸

Cartier quickly calculated that the trade was worth making. In a federal state, the province would protect the powers then thought necessary to the survival and prospering of rural, Catholic, and agricultural French Canada – its legal code, the administration of property, and education, charities, and health. With those secure, language and culture would take care of themselves. At the same time, Quebec could preserve the economic benefits of a larger union. Cartier seems never to have doubted that French Canada’s needs would be protected in a federal state, both by the powers of its new provincial government and by the continuing clout of Quebec’s members in the national government. Taché, his nominal leader, declared that confederation was “tantamount to a separation of the provinces, and Lower Canada would thereby preserve its autonomy together with all the institutions it held so dear.” Had he been a maker of slogans, Cartier might have called the plan sovereignty-association.
⁹

Cartier was not a maker of slogans or a parliamentary speech-maker. He set his terms for confederation in the back rooms of the
bleu
caucus and in the coalition cabinet before leaving for Charlottetown. He spoke little in the conferences, though he did weigh in heavily when any of his fundamental requirements seemed threatened. Even in the public speeches he made, after the conferences and in the parliamentary debate on the Quebec resolutions, he chose blandness over detail. Instead of minutely analysing confederation’s benefits, he preferred mostly to celebrate the agreement and to sneer at its critics. It was his job to know what was good for Quebec, he seemed to be saying, and he had decided on confederation. Do you think you can do everything? challenged an opposition member. Cartier replied disdainfully that he was sure he was capable of forming a government for the new nation. “Well,” said the critic, “it will take more than a bold assertion and capacity for a hearty laugh.” Cartier did not bother to reply.
¹⁰

Confederation had critics in Quebec. The
bleus
were the largest but not the only political party in Quebec. Ranged against them were the
rouges
, proud heirs of Papineau’s Patriot cause. (In the parliamentary debate on confederation, Cartier’s dismissive reference to Papineau would provoke them to a furious defence of the man “every true French Canadian holds in veneration.”
¹¹
) In the 1860s, the
rouges
offered French Canada a political vision almost the reverse of Cartier’s. They were liberals and sometimes radicals, heirs of the French and American revolutions. Where
bleus
defended traditional society and an alliance with English Canada,
rouges
proposed both a secular society and a French one, a Quebec independent of both clerical and British influence.

Federalism in itself was not necessarily anathema to the
rouges
. In other circumstances, they might have been natural federalists. In 1858, when Antoine-Aimé Dorion had been George Brown’s unfortunate fellow victim of the double shuffle, they had been struggling to shape a common policy that would give each section of the Canadas greater autonomy to run its own affairs. Dorion still led the
rouges
. Far from being an embittered old rebel, he was liberal more than radical. Four years younger than Cartier, he too was a middle-class Montreal lawyer with commercial interests, and he was perfectly fluent in English. Unlike previous
rouge
leaders, he was a practising Catholic. Under his influence, the
rouges
were mellowing, in a society where clerical influence was on the rise. If Cartier could talk with Brown, why should not Dorion?

But
rouges
and reformers had drifted apart. Cartier, whose credentials as a defender of tradition were secure, could consider the leap to accepting rep-by-pop. The
rouges
no longer could. In the conservative Quebec of the 1860s, it was radical enough for
rouges
to question clerical authority by defending freethinking intellectuals and secular education. For them also to waver from the defence of sectional equality seemed suicidal. When Brown and Cartier began talking about federalism in the spring of 1864, Brown hoped to bring
rouge
leaders into the coalition. Instead, the
rouges
took up
the traditional
bleu
repudiation of rep-by-pop, proposing that the sectional equality of Canada East and Canada West should be entrenched forever. The
rouges
stayed out of the coalition of 1864 and declared themselves opposed to its federal policy.

Cartier, the only provincial leader willing to bear the risk of making confederation alone rather than have to share credit for it, seems to have been glad to find the
rouges
so hostile to the coalition. It was said that, when Brown and Cartier met to form their new partnership, Cartier only embraced Brown after making sure no
rouge
leaders were following the western reformer into the room. Instead, the
rouges
would attack the
bleus
for making a unprincipled surrender to George Brown. They accused Cartier of endangering French Canada simply to preserve his hold on power.
Bleus
retorted that the
rouges
had turned away from federalism “not by patriotism or national spirit, but simply by party spirit.”
¹²

The isolation of the
rouges
left them out of the constitutional process. Quebec became the only province where the main opposition party did not have delegates at the confederation conferences. Had Dorion and one or two of his
rouge
colleagues joined the negotiations at Quebec, they could have strengthened the reform-minded, provincial-rights caucus there. Their readiness to challenge Cartier would have forced clarification of issues he was willing to blur, and their participation should have improved both the resolutions and the debates about them which followed. If dissatisfied, the
rouges
could still have repudiated the outcome of the conference, as several members of the Maritime delegations soon did. Instead, Quebec was the only province where one party presumed to negotiate for a divided population. The
rouges
, having had no part in making the new constitution, were certain to oppose it.

In February 1865, the legislators of the united Canadas gathered again in the building where the confederation terms had been negotiated in October. The vital order of business was a resolution
requesting the Imperial government to enact a new constitution for British North America based on the Quebec resolutions. The
rouges
launched their attack on it with their usual parliamentary skill. Governor General Monck, in his Throne Speech, had looked forward to the rise of “a new nationality” under confederation. Dorion swiftly moved that, as French Canadians and loyal subjects of the Queen, they wanted no new nationality. Confederation’s supporters found themselves obliged to vote down this apparently unimpeachable statement of loyalty, as if confederation’s aim was to assimilate the French and break up the Empire.

In the debate on the resolutions themselves, Dorion, his followers, and anglophone allies Luther Holton and Lucius Huntington launched withering attacks on the agreement. How could confederation protect British North America against the United States when it simply created a longer border to defend? Why promote a customs union between colonies which had no trade ties? What good were bold promises that union would bring intercolonial railways if confederation was, as Dorion put it, only “another haul at the public purse for the Grand Trunk,” which would bankrupt all the colonies together?
¹³

What about this crazy idea of letting the government appoint members of an unelected upper house?
Rouges
condemned it as reactionary and autocratic, a tory plot to reimpose the rule of unelected councils sure to be hostile to French Canada. The federal union was at once too centralized and too dependent on the will of the Maritime provinces, they said. Dorion urged the union to solve its own problems rather than “going on its knees and begging the little island of Prince Edward to come into this union.” Henri Joly,
rouge
member for Lotbinière, concluded a string of criticisms by proposing the rainbow as confederation’s symbol. “By its slender and elongated form, the rainbow would afford a perfect representation of the geographical configuration of the confederation. By its lack of consistence – an image without substance – the rainbow would represent aptly the solidity of our confederation.”
¹⁴

Mostly, however, the secular, freethinking
rouges
took up the natural grounds of the conservative
bleus:
confederation as a threat to the institutions, religion, language, and way of life of French Canada. The
rouges
stressed the danger of ethnic conflict, tried to show the Catholic Church was opposed to the union, and denounced confederation’s originators as the implacable English enemy, the heirs of Lord Durham. “The union having failed to produce assimilation,” said a
rouge
newspaper, “they have turned to a more powerful, more terrible instrument: federation.”
¹⁵

In his fiery contribution to the legislative debate, Joseph Perrault,
rouge
member for Richelieu, made much of this theme. Perrault was no nostalgic Patriot. Just twenty-seven, he was an agronomist, trained at English universities, who urged modernization for Quebec’s farms. But facing the confederation plan, he made embattled tradition the theme of a long speech, packed with historical references. He argued that it had been the ambition of the English since long before the conquest “to destroy the influence and the liberties of the French race” in Canada. Confederation was the work of George Brown, the “imported fanatic,” “the man most hostile to Lower Canadian interests.” It would be “a fatal blow to our influence as French Canadians” and “decreed our national downfall.” French Canadians would find it would be “disastrous to their institutions, their language, and their laws” and “threaten their existence as a race.” Perrault acknowledged he was in favour of “the creation of a great political organization spread over an immense territory” – but not “at the price of our absorption.”
¹⁶