John A (27 page)

Alexander Galt. The fourth of the four “Super-Fathers” of Confederation and its financial brain, he shared Macdonald's fear that Britain wanted to rid itself of Canada.

Galt preserved his virtue for another year and then joined the cabinet—but at a high price to Macdonald. By this time Galt had become convinced that the only solution to Canada's governmental inertia was to form a federation of all the British American colonies. He sketched out his idea in impressive detail, including a supreme court to settle jurisdictional disputes. In fact, neither Macdonald nor Cartier was in the least persuaded by Galt's ideas, but they both accepted fully the political credibility he could bring to the government. They offered him the finance portfolio, and he joined the cabinet in July 1858. Galt then exacted his price. In a long speech to the House, he set out on behalf of the government his idea for a federation of British North America. The response made right afterwards by Macdonald and Cartier was striking: after Galt had finished speaking, neither of them said a word.

As a further part of his price, Galt had secured from Macdonald approval for him to go with Cartier to London that October to try to sell his federation idea to the Colonial Office.
The response of the colonial secretary, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton,
^*78
was dismissive, principally because of London's skepticism that Canadian politicians were up to so ambitious a task, but also because the reaction to the idea in the Maritimes was negative.

Galt and Macdonald were never close. Macdonald once described him as “unstable as water, and can never be depended upon to be of the same mind for forty-eight hours together.” This assessment wasn't off the mark; before advocating Confederation, Galt had advocated annexation with the United States. Nevertheless, he succeeded for the first time in actually discussing a possible federation with the Colonial Office and, however nominally, secured a commitment for that notion to be added to the grab bag of policies that belonged to the Liberal-Conservative Party. As important for the way the future would unfold, Galt, with his well-known competence for accounting on a grand scale, was now working alongside Macdonald.

A third voice could be heard musing out loud about the need for a wider Canada. It was that of the Toronto
Globe
owner and publisher, George Brown. A grand federation held few charms for him. Instead, the catalyst for Brown's interest was his realization that, with the new immigrants having settled on the last “wild” land in Upper Canada, this province—Brown's province—needed new worlds to conquer. The
Globe
expressed this expan
sionist concept best in an epistle to its Toronto readers on December 26, 1856: “If their city is ever to be made great—if it is ever to rise above the rank of a fifth-rate American town—it must be by the development of the great British territory lying to the north and west.”

The
Globe
's reference was to the North-West Territories, stretching out all the way from Lake Superior to the Rockies. It was bald, empty prairie, except for the Indians and a small cluster of Métis and a few Canadian settlers at the bend in the Red River. The rest of the territory served as a gigantic trapping ground for the fur traders of the Hudson's Bay Company and as a killing ground of the buffalo. Commonly called the North-West, it was also known as Rupert's Land—after Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the dashing cavalry general and cousin of Charles II, who in 1670 had secured a monopoly charter over the territory for himself and a group of British financiers and businessmen.

By the late 1850s the members of the governing board of the Hudson's Bay Company had come to realize that their exercise of absolute rule over a land that was now desired by nearby British North Americans was anomalous and ultimately unsustainable. They continued to protest that the land of the North-West was arid and useless. At Red River, though, as the settlers there knew well, the soil was black and deep. One of Macdonald's ministers, Joseph-Édouard Cauchon, the commissioner of Crown lands, wrote a memorandum to cabinet arguing that the “Red River and Saskatchewan Country” could attract to Canada many of the immigrants now passing straight through to the United States.

Another possibility—a distinctly alarming one—was that the Americans might come into the North-West first. In fact, they were almost there already. By now a railway line had reached St. Paul, Minnesota. From there, by oxcart and by boat along the winding Red River, it was incomparably easier to send goods to
and from the settlement of Red River than it was for Canadians to make the long, brutal slog westwards across the Pre-Cambrian Shield above Lake Superior. To heighten the threat, a scientist at the Smithsonian Institution, Lorin Blodgett, issued a report in 1857 describing the land beyond the forty-ninth parallel as “perfectly adapted to the fullest occupation by a civilized nation.” In response, two surveying expeditions to the West were dispatched from Canada the following year, one headed by Captain John Palliser, a Britisher, and the other by Henry Youle Hind, a graduate of Cambridge who had settled in Toronto as the professor of chemistry and geology at Trinity College. To heighten the sense of cross-border rivalry and threat, Minnesota was elevated from a territory to a state in 1858.

Macdonald's response to all this expansionism was cautious to a degree. About a possible federation he said nothing at all. About territorial expansion he said as little as possible, influenced by the warning of his friend John Rose, a Montreal lawyer, that it would be expensive to protect “such an extent of territory, even if it is given up to us for nothing.”

Britain, in the person of the colonial secretary, Henry Labouchere, nevertheless felt that something had to be done to regularize the situation in the North-West. At Westminster, a select committee of the Commons was set up to recommend on the future of the Hudson's Bay Company charter, including whether the territory should be offered to Canada and at what price. The company adroitly countered with an offer that it would accept a takeover in return for a payment of one million pounds. To present Canada's case to the Commons committee, Macdonald established a commission headed by his former leader William Draper, now a judge.

Very little came of any of this. Draper told the select committee that Canada “must assert her rights” in the North-West, but
in the absence of clear instructions from Macdonald his presentation to the British MPs was vague and legalistic. The committee made only one innovative recommendation—for a second Crown colony to be established on the Pacific Coast, to be named British Columbia. By oversight (or perhaps by design), the Hudson's Bay Company charter was allowed to lapse of its own accord in 1859. A group of British businessmen bought up the company, calculating shrewdly they would make an easy profit once they were forced to resell it to Canada. The Hudson's Bay Company continued to rule over its land, but less and less to govern it. Among those who came increasingly to control their own lives were the Métis of Red River, a change in their sense of themselves that no one outside the settlement took any notice of.

For the first time, though, ordinary Canadians had become aware of the open territory to their west. Indeed, because of a gold rush at the Fraser River, they appreciated now that this immense territory stretched all the way to the Pacific. An eventual takeover seemed more or less inevitable, if in no way imminent. Canada's own version of Manifest Destiny beckoned.

That expansionary thought precipitated others. If Canada were to be extended to the Pacific, then logically it should be extended as well to the east, to the Atlantic. Yet if Canada proper were to be augmented by both the North-West and the Lower Provinces (as the Maritimes then were called), the population balance would tilt decisively against the Canadiens—everyone taking it for granted that the West would be colonized by settlers from Upper Canada and by new immigrants from the British Isles. The Canadiens, though, would oppose any such radical change in Canada's demographic character as a violation of the agreement
between the two groups when the United Province had been formed; more to the point, they could forestall it by exercising the de facto veto they possessed through the double-majority convention. When Cartier and Galt went to Britain for their meetings in 1858, Cartier warned Colonial Secretary Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton that, if forced to, he would exercise this veto. Nothing was resolved, but for the first time politicians were giving thought to the kind of problems that would emerge as soon as any serious attempt was made to add to Canada some or all of the other pieces of British North America.

Here, Macdonald allowed himself for the first time to express some views about a possible wider Canada. In the debate that followed the announcement that Draper would represent Canada's views on the North-West to the British Parliament, Macdonald made an intriguing comment quite different from his earlier cautious utterances on the topic of Canada's future. “The destiny of this continent,” he told the House, could depend on the results of the parliamentary inquiry in London. “Upon that action may depend whether this country remains confined to its present boundaries or swells to the dimension of a nation; whether we are to be annexed to the neighbouring Republic or extend the boundaries of this country itself.”

Macdonald was allowing the wheels of his mind to turn in public. Earlier he had dismissed the western territory as useless, and on one occasion expressed concern that Canada could be weakened by spreading out its settlers too thinly. Now he was declaring that adding the West to Canada could transform what was still only a province into something resembling a nation. While the word “federation” had not yet crossed his lips, Macdonald was here using the word that had always held talismanic importance to him—“annexation”—in the sense of stressing the need to make certain it never happened.

Proposals for a federation of the British North American colonies, or for a confederation of them—the terms were used interchangeably at this time—were not in themselves in any way new. The number of different proposals made for some form of federation or confederation before McGee and Galt took up the cause has been estimated at eighteen in all. The first person to advocate it—three-quarters of a century earlier—was Major Robert Morse, a British army engineer who, after surveying the Bay of Fundy in 1784 for possible settlements following the loss of the American colonies, suggested that all the colonies still remaining under the Crown should be banded together for their own protection. The same thought was expressed a few years later by two leading Loyalists, William Smith, later chief justice of Quebec, and Jonathan Sewell, who, in 1807, published a pamphlet about his idea:
Plan for a General Legislative Union of the British Provinces in North America.
^*79
In the late 1830s in Britain, a Canadian-educated British MP, James Roebuck, proposed it at Westminster; Lord Durham came very close to recommending it in his famous report; and the Colonial Office later drafted a report on how it might be constructed.