John A (36 page)

Wilfrid Laurier. As the editor of a small rural newspaper, Laurier dismissed the argument that Confederation would secure Canada from invasion by comparing its effect to trying to stop a bullet with an eggshell.

The duke in private and the country editor in an unknown newspaper were saying what Macdonald had told the Quebec
City delegates. There was only so much that Britain could or would do for Canada. It would do even that almost entirely for the sake of its honour, and do it on its own terms. Canada really was on its own.

Credible or not, useful or not, some sort of attempt to improve Canada's military security had to be made, if only as a gesture. In 1863 Britain sent out a Lieutenant-Colonel William Francis Drummond Jervois to recommend improvements for defence. Jervois's report, made public early in 1864, touched off a political storm because he had quite clearly concluded that Upper Canada was indefensible. Hope remained only for those places the Royal Navy could reach, such as Halifax, Quebec City and perhaps Montreal. The effect of his report, said Macdonald, had been to create “a panic” in Upper Canada. Jervois later turned in a second, more optimistic report calling for heavy spending on fortifications and, to reassure Upper Canadians, for a fleet on Lake Ontario. The Canadian legislature approved the spending of one million dollars, though little work was actually done. Macdonald refused to take the plans seriously. After two years, he forecast, “a hole may be made in the mud opposite Quebec, and the foundation of single redoubt built.” Implicitly, Macdonald agreed with Laurier.

Something else was needed. What it might be, Macdonald as yet had no idea. But he did understand the nature of the problem that had to be solved—Canada had to find a gap, no matter how narrow and twisting it might be, between the opposed risks of “forcible annexation and abandonment by Britain,” as he phrased
it in a letter to a Maritime supporter. What Macdonald could not know was that Queen Victoria had been discussing the very same conundrum with her ministers at the same time. This was, as she recorded, “the impossibility of our being able to hold Canada, but we must struggle for it; and by far the best solution would be to let it go as an independent kingdom under an English prince.”
^*108
The problem was defined. The next step, long overdue, was to define a solution and then implement it.

 

SEVENTEEN

Irreplaceable Man

Everybody admits that the union must take place some time. I say now is the time. If we allow so favourable an opportunity to pass, it may never come again. John A. Macdonald

T
he political minuet that followed the defeat of Macdonald's government on June 14, 1864, was well practised. After he had lost the non-confidence vote, Macdonald called on Governor General Monck at Spencer Wood, his residence in Quebec City, where the government was now located, to ask for a dissolution of the legislature so an election could be held. This Monck agreed to. Here, though, the familiar ritual was halted; it was interrupted first by George Brown, and soon afterwards by Monck himself.

A month earlier, the resolution Brown had moved at the start of the session—for a legislative committee to look at all the alternative proposals for some form of federation—had at last come to a vote; to general surprise it passed, 59 to 48. Those opposed were mostly Canadien
bleus,
but they also included John A. Macdonald, Alexander Tilloch Galt and George-Étienne Cartier, all of them suspicious of what Brown was up to. On May 20 the committee assembled—Macdonald as a member—to begin its
work. To make certain that all present stayed and really worked, Brown strode over to the door, locked it, and told the group, “Now gentlemen, you must talk to me about this matter, as you cannot leave this room without coming to me.” Another seven meetings followed, with Cartier playing an active part—an unusual role for him when constitutional changes were being discussed.

By a fluke of fate, the committee's report was finished on the same day, June 14, that Macdonald's government fell. Brown read out its conclusion to the House: “A strong feeling was found to exist among members of the committee in favour of changes in the direction of a federative system, applied either to Canada alone or to the whole British North American Provinces.” Its sole recommendation—opposed by just three of the twenty members, among them Macdonald—was that yet another committee look again at the matter. This was tepid stuff.

Late that night, though, Brown spoke to two Liberal-

Conservative members. Could the crisis not be used to address directly the great constitutional questions? he suggested. The pair asked if they could pass this comment back to Macdonald and Cartier. Brown agreed. The members hurried off.

The next morning, there was a slight alteration in the customary steps of the minuet. Macdonald asked the House for an adjournment to give him time to consult the governor general. When Macdonald and his delegation arrived, Monck assured them that his approval for a dissolution and an election still stood. He asked, though, why they did not talk to the opposition leaders to see whether an all-party government might be formed to address the constitutional options. One day later, members of the legislature were astonished to see Brown and Macdonald having a brief, urgent yet seemingly amicable conversation in the chamber's centre aisle. They were discussing when and where
Macdonald and Galt should meet Brown to talk about a possible coalition government.

The challenge before the old enemies was to agree on what such a government should stand for and, scarcely less consequential, who should be in its cabinet. They met, at one in the afternoon on the 17th, in Brown's room in the St. Louis Hotel, overlooking Quebec City's harbour. For Macdonald and Galt, harking back to their own agreement of 1858, the new government's first priority had to be a pan-Canadian federation. For Brown, it had to be Representation by Population. The differences between them had to be fudged, and getting there took time and immense care by both sides as they struggled not to look back at old battles and wounds. The fudge proved to be that Brown, no less than Macdonald and Galt, was committed to the “federative principle”—a term that conveniently could mean almost anything and could also be applied as easily to the United Province of Canada alone, as Brown wanted, or to all of British North America, as was Macdonald and Galt's choice. They were still arguing about details when they had to hurry back to the chamber for Parliament's three o'clock opening.

Macdonald spoke first. His government had initiated negotiations with a leading opposition member, he disclosed, and as a result of progress in these talks the dissolution of Parliament was being delayed. After a pause to heighten the suspense, Macdonald revealed that the opposition member he was negotiating with was “the member for South Oxford”—Brown. There were gasps of disbelief. Then Brown spoke. He had never imagined himself negotiating with such a government, but “the repeated endeavours year after year to get a strong government formed have resulted in constant failure.” Out of this crisis, he continued, a chance had been created “to consider the interests of both sections of the Province, and to find a settlement of our differences.” With great
grace, Brown singled out Cartier as having done “a most bold and manly thing” by agreeing to the project. The chamber rang out with cheers, shouts, exclamations, slaps on the back. At one in the morning, alone at last in his hotel room, Brown wrote home to tell Anne all about it: “You never saw such a scene…but as the whole thing may fail, we will not count our chickens yet.” The
Canadien
newspaper expressed its opinion that the Macdonald-Brown accord “comptera parmi les plus memorable de notre histoire parlementaire.” In the town now known as Kitchener, the
Berliner Journal
expressed, in the primary language of the people of that area, its delight that the project could lead to the incongruity: that “George Brown mit John A. Macdonald, Cartier und Galt Hand in Hand zu gehen—daran nätte, gewiss Niemand in Traume gedacht.”
^*109

It was the most dramatic instance of political reconciliation in Canada's parliamentary history since 1848, when Governor General Lord Elgin had followed his reading of the Throne Speech in English with, for first time, a re-reading in French. As on that earlier occasion, some Canadien members rushed up to Brown to kiss him on both cheeks—a challenging feat given his height of more than six feet. Brown and Macdonald had fought over everything from Rep by Pop to the double majority to the choice for Canada's capital. Besides their multiple combats, they shared a mutual animosity, thickening towards contempt, matched only a century later by that between Prime Ministers John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson. Yet here they were, doing what they had promised never to do—joining hands with each other.

The explanation each gave at the time was “deadlock.” That was true enough: the journalist Goldwin Smith would later describe deadlock as having been the “true Father of Confederation.” The Canadian political system had become stale and sterile. The Conservatives and the Reformers were like punch-drunk fighters, still upright only because they each propped the other up, too depleted now to take more than the occasional swipe at each other over stale quarrels.

Brown in particular was displaying an out-of-character generosity for which Anne Brown surely deserves a share of the credit. The newspaper owner had a first-rate mind, but as a politician he was of the third rank; yet he was now putting himself into Macdonald's supple and deviously articulated hands.

Macdonald's own explanation for embracing Brown and Confederation, given in a letter to a Conservative supporter two years later, was straightforward: “As leader of the Conservatives in Upper Canada, I then had the option of forming a coalition government or of handing over the administration of affairs to the Grit party for the next ten years.” That admission of opportunism is persuasive—Macdonald's political circumstances were indeed parlous. His count of Conservative supporters was down to twenty. He had misjudged until the very last moment the readiness of politicians in all corners of the House to find a way out of the legislative inertia made unavoidable by the double-majority rule.

An entirely new political threat also confronted him. Now that Brown had stopped denouncing “French domination,” an alliance between Brown and Cartier's
bleus
became a real possibility. Brown could bring to such a grouping many more elected members than remained with Macdonald. The “mini-confederation” that Brown favoured, of separating Upper and Lower Canada into autonomous provinces with some minimal
“joint authority” over them, would give Cartier what he most wanted—protection against Rep by Pop. And Macdonald knew it would be far easier merely to reshape the existing government in this way than to recreate the entire country as he now wanted to do.

It fact, though, Brown had for too long said too much that was hateful for Canadien members ever to fully accept him. His “mini-federation” would be far more difficult to bring off than it might seem at first glance. It would leave the English in Lower Canada (now one-quarter of Montreal's population) isolated in a quasi-separate province dominated by the French. Cartwright wrote in his
Reminiscences
that he thought the English in Lower Canada would have responded by seeking union with the United States (as they had advocated in 1849). To prevent such an unhinging of all its British North American colonies, the Imperial government would almost certainly have intervened to disallow the “mini-federation.”

Yet something was going on between Brown and Cartier, and if it ever came to anything, the victim would be Macdonald. Cartwright wrote later that there existed at this time a perfectly good understanding between Mr. Cartier and Mr. Brown about forming “a new ministry”—and he claimed that Governor General Monck had told him this. In the end, all this backstage plotting came to nothing, except that thereafter Macdonald and Brown circled each other even more warily.

Nevertheless, a transformational change had taken place. Macdonald and Brown had reversed their roles. Brown, the impatient moralist, was now the cautious conservative. The scheme he was advocating amounted only to a rejigging of the existing system. Macdonald, the scheming opportunist, had turned visionary. He had not only committed himself to Galt's 1858 plan for a new Confederation extending to the Maritimes but had added to
it an entirely new goal of stretching this new nation west to the Pacific. His leitmotif of maintaining Canada as an un-American nation was at work. As Macdonald expressed it in a letter to British railway promoter Edward Watkin, “If Canada is to remain a Country separate from the United States, it is of great importance that they should not get behind us by right or force and intercept the route to the Pacific.” Not only was Macdonald now calling for a much more ambitious federation than that proposed by Brown but he was calling also for a much more ambitious national government than Brown's minimalist “some joint authority.” Of the pair, one wanted only to spring clean the existing house, while the other wanted to build an entirely new mansion.

It was this formula for national survival that, six months later, Macdonald would lay before the delegates at the Quebec Conference when he challenged them to “convince the world of our strength by being united.”

In the immediate future, the boldest of the three was Cartier. He was risking the bird he already had in his hand—the effective veto on national affairs exercised by his
bleu
members—on a good-faith assumption that Quebec's distinctiveness would continue to be respected even when it was surrounded by an entire transcontinental flock of English-speaking fowl. Between Macdonald and Brown, though, there was no question who now was the bolder. Indeed, Brown at times seemed curiously self-doubting. Asked how he saw the way ahead, he replied, “I am not so well informed as to all the bearings on the question of a union of all the British North American Provinces that I could at once pronounce a final option on that question.” Brown's
Globe
echoed his timidity: “Efforts are to be made to induce the Lower Provinces [the Maritimes] to join confederation, but the success of the scheme, so far as Canada is concerned, is not to be contingent on their assent.”