1867 (23 page)

Other
rouges
made similar declarations. It was the terms of confederation, not federal union itself, that inspired their wrath. “The confederation I advocated,” said Antoine-Aimé Dorion, “was a
real
confederation, giving the largest powers to the local governments and merely a delegated authority to the general government – in that respect differing in toto from the one now proposed.” He declared that the Quebec conference had proposed a legislative union in
disguise, with “local governments whose powers will be almost nothing, which will only burden the people with useless expenses.”
¹⁷

This was the crucial point. The
rouges
and their allies pointed to the unequal division of powers, to the federal authority to disallow, to federal appointment of the lieutenant-governors and judges. They highlighted every clause that emphasized central power and every statement delegates had made extolling strong national authority. They seized on all the elements designed to create a strong central government – and found them too strong. The English-Canadian majority had gained rep-by-pop, they charged, while French Canada would receive a provincial government whose powers were only illusory.

Why had French Canada’s representatives at Quebec allowed this to happen? It was treason, said several of the
rouges
, and Cartier was the traitor. He had undertaken a cynical betrayal of French Canada. Maurice Laframboise,
rouge
member for Bagot, accused Cartier of assisting the disappearance of the French-Canadian race for the promise of a baronetcy. Henri Joly compared him to a banker who had been entrusted with the fortune of the French Canadians – their nationality – and sacrificed it without a scruple, for private gain.

If political opinion in Quebec endorsed the
rouge
charge that the
bleus
had failed to safeguard its interests in so fundamental a matter, Cartier and his party would be finished. On November 8, 1864, a
bleu
journalist wrote ominously to one of Cartier’s cabinet colleagues, “I won’t hide from you that there is a certain malaise among our warmest, most devoted friends. It will need much prudence and zeal – both at the same time – to keep them all beneath our banner. Don’t trust too much in Cartier. He is surrounded by flatterers who don’t express the feelings of most people.”
¹⁸

The recipient of that letter was Hector Langevin,
bleu
politician, solicitor-general of Canada East, and a delegate at Charlottetown and Quebec. Like Cartier, with whom he had articled, Langevin was the lawyer son of a mercantile family, though his home and power
base was Quebec City, not Montreal. At thirty-eight, he stood second to Cartier among Quebec’s confederation-makers. One of Langevin’s brothers was an aide to a bishop, another about to become a bishop himself.

Langevin had decided early he was too ambitious to be a priest; he seems to have aspired all his life to be a
“grand fonctionnaire.”
Even at thirty-eight, he was a stout, formal figure with a fussy little goatee. In later years, he grew fatter as he grew more powerful, and he joked contentedly that “a minister should be a man of gravity, if he wants to weigh in the balance.” Langevin’s personal life was much more conventional than Cartier’s. He was always lonely when politics separated him from his wife and children. Never very sociable, he stood a little apart from the dinners and balls of the confederation process. Personal style, ambition, and the traditional Quebec–Montreal rivalry all kept him slightly removed from his leader. By the London conference of 1867, he would come to think Cartier spent too much time fighting for confederation in the salons of the great and powerful, leaving Langevin alone at the conference table to struggle with all the vital details of the legislation. (The other
bleu
delegate at the Quebec conference, a remarkably self-effacing politician named Jean-Charles Chapais, from Kamouraska, said barely a word in the conference or the legislative debate. He was dropped from the London delegation.)
¹⁹

Still, Langevin understood that “my political future depends entirely on the success of the measure.” He had to stand with Cartier. On February 21, 1865, well after the senior ministers had made their speeches, Langevin rose in the Parliament of the united Canadas to defend both his leader and confederation. In a long and powerful speech, Langevin appealed to ambition, saluting confederation because “we have become sufficiently great” for it. He quoted reams of financial statistics. He argued tangled issues of national defence and arcane matters of church-state relations. He even defended the appointive Senate.
²⁰

But the issues Hector Langevin kept coming back to were the national interests of Quebec. French Canadians were “a separate people,” he declared. They could never accept a position of inferiority, and he denied they would have to. “The central or federal parliament will have the control of all measures of a general character … but all matters of local interest, all that relates to the affairs and rights of the different sections of the confederacy will be reserved for the control of the local parliaments.” This talk of a new nationality that had alarmed the
rouges
meant the creation of a great country and a powerful nation, he said, but not at all the dismantling of “our different customs, manners, and laws.”
²¹

Unlike Cartier, Langevin was willing to confront the most explosive issue of confederation in Quebec: the threat to local autonomy pointed to by its critics. Lieutenant-governors would be appointed by the federal government, he agreed, but that would give them no more authority for “arbitrary acts” against the local government than the existing constitution gave to the governors appointed from Britain. The power to disallow local legislation had indeed been shifted from “a second or third class clerk” in the Colonial Office to a responsible government in Ottawa. But under responsible government, Imperial London had rarely used that power, and Langevin denied that a cabinet in Ottawa would have broader grounds for using disallowance against the provinces. In any case, should Ottawa try, members from every province would oppose it, “lest they should one day experience the same treatment.”

Oliver Mowat, gone to the chancery bench, was not in the Canadian legislature to argue the case he would make as premier of Ontario, that responsible government made provincial sovereignty inevitable. (Christopher Dunkin, who became so incisive a critic of the Quebec resolutions, had told Mowat when he left for the bench that his participation had been the best guarantee something good would come of the conference.) Langevin, however, was rooting his case in the same set of ideas Mowat would defend as premier of
Ontario. In the late twentieth century, praise for responsible government would sound like the merest cliché of platform oratory. But to the politicians of the 1860s, conscious heirs of the achievement of that principle, it mattered vitally. Responsible government was the sovereignty of the 1860s.

Antoine-Aimé Dorion had charged that the Quebec delegates had plotted to produce “the most illiberal constitution ever heard of in any country,” because confederation would obliterate responsible government. “There will be no such thing as responsible government attached to the local legislatures.” The appointive Senate, the powers confided to Ottawa, federal disallowance, lieutenant-governors dominating the provinces – all these proved confederation was a tory plot against the people, Dorion said. Confederation was not only an misallocation of powers between local and central governments. It was an attempt to restore arbitrary power against the influence of the people.
²²

Langevin confronted the
rouge
leader directly. “Now we enjoy responsible government,” he cried. “This great constitutional guarantee we take with us into the confederation.” Étienne Taché, titular head of the Canadian coalition and a living link to the campaign for responsible government, had declared earlier in the debate that the war of races in Canada had been extinguished “on the day the British government granted Canada responsible government.” Langevin argued on the same grounds that a self-governing people could not be oppressed. Within confederation, Quebec was and would remain distinct. Since responsible government had been preserved in the confederation settlement, he insisted, “our position then is excellent, and all those who frankly give expression to their opinions must admit that the representatives of Lower Canada at the Quebec conference have carefully guarded her interests.”
²³

Langevin gave his long speech to a noisy House. He was frequently interrupted and frequently flung out charges of his own. But his most impassioned moment came in response to Henri Joly’s
image of Cartier as a corrupt banker who had squandered the treasures entrusted to him. Langevin gave a long survey of Cartier’s achievements and turned Joly’s image inside out. “The country,” he said of Cartier – and by “country,” he meant French Canada – “confided to him all its interests, all its rights, all its institutions, its nationality, its religion … and he restored them guaranteed, protected, and surrounded by every safeguard in the confederation of the British North American provinces.” Langevin concluded with one final insistence that confederation “will afford the best possible guarantee for our institutions, our language, and all that we hold dearest,” and sat down amidst cheers.
²⁴

Despite speeches of great length, detail, and sometimes even power, the Canadian Parliament’s debate on the Quebec resolutions was weakened by a hint of inconsequence. The members had been told at the start that they could not change the resolutions, no matter how long they debated. “These resolutions were in the nature of a treaty,” John A. Macdonald said several times as he launched the debate. They were the result of long negotiation and many compromises among several provinces. If each legislature began to revise the terms of the treaty, “we could not expect to get it passed this century.”
²⁵

Macdonald’s cheerful refusal to countenance any change to the agreement made at Quebec troubled even some of his supporters. It infuriated his opponents. They denounced it as more evidence of the anti-parliamentary arrogance of the confederation planners. But Macdonald could refuse to be troubled with the inconvenience of amendments only because he and his partners were sensing that the House was behind them. No nineteenth-century ministry could count on passive, complaisant support from its backbenchers the way twentieth-century party leaders could. Had enough of the Canadian backbenchers seen trouble for themselves in the confederation resolutions, Macdonald would not have been so highhanded. Both Charles Tupper and Leonard Tilley had returned from
the Quebec conference to discover they could not get the Quebec resolutions through their legislatures, despite the large majorities their parties enjoyed. They each backed down. In Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, the legislatures made sure the Quebec terms were not even brought up for debate, while Tupper and Tilley eventually sought approval for resolutions that held out hope of “better terms.” Macdonald and Cartier would have done the same if their seats in government depended on it. They persevered only because they calculated they had the votes to do so.

Indeed, the Canadian caucuses did not waver. Among the Upper Canadians, Sandfield Macdonald of Cornwall, ex-premier of the union and its staunchest defender, voted against the Quebec resolutions. So did Malcolm Crooks Cameron, a prominent Toronto lawyer and a deep-died tory, Joseph Rymal, a homespun Clear Grit farmer from Hamilton, and a few others. From early in the debate, however, it was clear they and a handful of others would not shake the Upper Canadian consensus in favour of confederation. George Brown had forged it through years of effort, and Macdonald’s adhesion made it unbreakable.

In Lower Canada, caucus solidarity was equally firm. Had the
rouges’
charges – that confederation put the survival of French Canada at risk – stuck, Cartier and Langevin could not have prevented wholesale defections of
bleu
backbenchers to Dorion’s side. Instead, confederation gained supporters as the debate went on. Louis Archambault of L’Assomption came to the session intending to oppose confederation, he said. During the debate, he changed his mind. He would support confederation on the Quebec terms. Edouard Rémillard of Bellechasse, formerly a supporter of Dorion’s, told the House that, when it came to protecting the rights and institutions of French Canada, he had more confidence in Cartier than in his former leaders.

When an opposition member challenged him to put confederation to the people, George Brown predicted that, if the House failed
to support confederation, the government would sweep every seat in Upper Canada in a snap election. In Lower Canada, Cartier and Langevin faced more doubters and more opposition. But, as the debate continued, they too seem to have grown more confident. Dr. Beaubien of Montmagny expressed a belief that was growing rather than wavering among the
bleu
backbenchers when he declared that he had found opinion leaders “in every parish” were coming to support confederation.

Beaubien was exaggerating. Particularly in
rouge
strongholds around Montreal and on the south shore, protest meetings and petitions denounced confederation. But initial suspicion of the Quebec plan had failed to develop into general hostility. The church hierarchy got over its shock at what one influential cleric called “the union of this fanatic [George Brown] with our statesmen.”
²⁶
Vigorously lobbied by Cartier and Langevin, and by Langevin’s clerical brothers, the bishops dismissed the
rouges’
cry of alarm and came to support confederation very strongly. Even Henri Joly had to concede that Cartier had lulled the all-pervasive feeling of uneasiness the confederation plan had first provoked in Quebec into “a sleep of profound security.” The success of the
bleus’
public-relations offensive reassured their supporters, and few of their elected members defected.