John A (41 page)

Here resides one of the great mysteries of the achievement of Confederation. It was built on the understanding of a pact between Canada's two founding races. Yet this fundamental
building block of the national architecture was, for all practical purposes, never discussed.

The extent of this pact is not at all easy to decipher. The actual provisions for bilingualism agreed on at Quebec City were exceedingly limited. There was no ringing proclamation of the equality of the two languages: the Quebec Resolutions merely declared, permissively, that “both the English and French languages may be employed by the general parliament…and also in the federal courts.” There was no mention of bilingualism in the federal government, or anywhere in Canada outside Quebec.

Just once did Macdonald appear to accept that French should be a national language rather than one limited, outside Quebec, to Parliament and the federal courts. During the Confederation Debates that immediately followed the Quebec Conference, Macdonald said that “the use of the French language should form one of the principles upon which the Confederation should be established.” Here, he linked French to Confederation itself rather than only to the new central government. This statement, though, was made only during a debate; he made no similar statement (so far as is known) during any of the conferences at which the new constitution was drafted. And his phrase “the use of” was imprecise. Yet the
bleu
members were satisfied. More striking, because Confederation could never have been implemented without his approval, Cartier was satisfied.

Cartier's confidence wasn't misplaced. Much would be gained by Confederation: the Canadiens would have their own legislature and government. In them, the dominant language would of course be French, in a return to the situation that existed before the Conquest. To reinforce the sense of assurance so gained, there was also the force of rising expectations. The eventual British North America Act would be the sixth constitutional construct by which French Canadians had been ruled—the earlier
five being the Military Government of 1760, the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Quebec Act of 1774, the Constitutional Act of 1791 and the Act of Union of 1841. Whatever the particular constitutional system, French Canadians had found ways to use it not merely to survive but progressively to enlarge their self-rule, gaining recognition of their religion, their language and their right to a full share of the patronage of the national government. If this much had been won already, why not more, later, by other constitutional changes and rearrangements?

These ambitions were expressed quite openly.
La Minerve
(Montreal), a strong supporter of Cartier, used the evocative phrase “maîtres chez nous” to describe what Confederation would accomplish for the francophones of Quebec.
Le Journal de Québec
said that French Canadians “can and must one day aspire to being a nation,” adding that premature independence would lead to annexation by the United States. Other than “nation,” probably the most common word in the commentaries on the Confederation project in Quebec newspapers was that of “separation.” The most explicit declaration was in
La Minerve,
which in its issue for Confederation Day, July 1, 1867, advised readers, “As a distinct and separate nationality, we form a state within a state. We enjoy the full exercise of our rights, and the formal recognition of our national independence.” The magazine
Contre-poison
wrote that Quebec was to be “completely separated from Upper Canada” and praised the leaders who had “turned us over into our own hands, who have restored our complete autonomy.” And
La Minerve
observed, “In giving ourselves a complete government we affirm our existence as a separate nationality.”

Quebecers—as they soon would be called—were saying to each other, or at least were being told by their newspapers and political leaders, that Confederation's purpose was not to create
some new Canadian nation but to create a political system in which they could not only continue to be what they always had been but grow into something larger—perhaps, to quote
La Minerve
again, into a “state within a state,” or, eventually, into “national independence.” And their understanding of Confederation itself was quite different from that of English Canadians. At the same time, English Canadians were being told by leaders such as Macdonald and Brown that Confederation's purpose was to create a “new nation.”
Le Canadien,
by contrast, informed its readers that Confederation's purpose was to create “un certain nombre d'États souverains, déléguant une partie définie de leurs droits et leurs pouvoirs à un gouvernement central.”

Few if any English Canadians, in Upper Canada or the Maritimes, read any of these commentaries. In the mid-nineteenth century, the two solitudes were wholly disconnected from each other and wholly self-absorbed. But for this mutual ignorance, the bliss of Confederation, such as it is, simply could not have been achieved.

To some extent, the use of terms such as “separation” and “nationality” in
bleu
newspapers was just a tactic to reassure Quebec francophone voters. Some of it was wish-fulfillment. A large part of it, though, was real. It was an expectation about the future that arose directly out of the past and the present.

The concept of Canada as a political pact between the two races derived from the alliance years between Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine. Macdonald and Cartier had picked it up a decade later, and so it had remained in the public discourse. The Confederation pact itself was now Macdonald and Cartier's pact. Once it was achieved, both of them would still be there to implement it. Many Canadiens must have taken for granted that the pair of them could, and would, make it work. It wasn't a legal compact but rather a pact of trust.

Nothing was ever said about this pact during any of the Confederation conferences, and no evidence exists that Cartier and Macdonald ever discussed the nature of the pact between them. Whether they even sketched out a deal is unknowable. Most of Cartier's personal papers were destroyed after his early death in 1873, almost certainly deliberately to protect him (and Macdonald) from any further disclosures about Canadian Pacific Railway funds being used in Conservative election campaigns. Macdonald and Cartier were so close, though, that they would hardly have needed to commit to paper any agreement between them about Confederation's future.

Macdonald, nevertheless, is on the public record as committing himself to a pact with both Cartier and
les Canadiens.
In reference not to Confederation but to its predecessor, the United Province of Canada, he said in a speech he gave in Toronto, which was quoted in the Toronto
Leader
on April 30, 1861, that union had been “a distinct bargain, a solemn contract.” During the Confederation Debates of 1865, Macdonald again used the term “Treaty of Union” to refer to the practices followed in the legislature of the United Province, and he intriguingly admitted that, although a single unit according to its constitution, it had been, “as a matter of fact…a Federal Union”—or little different in its reality from what the proposed Confederation would be.

Legally, no such treaty or contract between the French and English ever existed. But in Macdonald's mind, and equally in Cartier's, a “distinct bargain, a solemn contract” existed between them, and so between the English and the French. Confederation didn't create this bargain between the two founding peoples, as has often been claimed. Instead, it arose out of a pact of trust that predated Confederation and had, by the time of Confederation, been made into part of Canada's DNA by Macdonald and Cartier.

Between Cartier and Macdonald there was one dramatic Confederation-era public exchange that revealed how they understood their respective roles. In March 1864, on the eve of the formation of the Great Coalition government, Macdonald, then not yet committed to Confederation, spoke briefly on Brown's motion to set up a legislature committee to consider all federal options. “The sad experience on the other side [the United States],” Macdonald said, “proved that it must not be merely a federal one; that instead of having a federal one, we should have a Legislative Union, in fact, in principle, and in practice.” Sitting beside him, Cartier interjected grimly, “That is not my policy,” meaning he would never accept a unitary state in which his Canadiens would have no government of their own to protect them. Just a few days later, Macdonald showed that he understood Cartier's objection, and that he accepted it, by coming out in support of a pan-Canadian federal union. The mutual trust between these two men was the unwritten pact that made Confederation possible.

At Quebec City, there was one revealing public discussion of this existential issue between French and English, though it involved neither Macdonald nor Cartier. It occurred right at the start of the conference, and it's very likely that only Macdonald among the English-speaking delegates understood the significance of what was being said. Sir Étienne-Paschal Taché made a brief opening statement in his role as nominal premier of Canada. After pleasantries, he informed the delegates that Confederation would be “tantamount to a separation of the provinces, and Lower Canada would thereby preserve its autonomy together with all the institutions it held so dear.” Not one member of the “other” solitude rose to challenge or inquire about what the words “separation” and “autonomy” meant; by their silence, English Canadians sealed the pact.

Here is the place for a footnote too important to be tucked away at the bottom of the page. Taché, avuncular in his appearance and genial in his manner, was highly regarded by his English counterparts as one of the gatekeepers between themselves and the near-invisible Canadiens. But Taché was also a passionate patriot. He showed this side of himself in a remarkable 1858 letter to a fellow Canadien politician. “The important thing to remember is that the unity we have just consolidated in Lower Canada ensures that
we are the de facto rulers of the entire province
[of Canada],” he wrote. “It may come that, in their impotent rage, we will soon be hearing weeping and gnashing of teeth from the Upper Canadians…. All the blustering of our enemies will vanish into thin air, while we go forward,
govern,
progress…. And we will do more: we will safeguard our institutions and preserve them from impure contact.” Fortunately for Macdonald, and for Canada, neither Brown nor the
Globe
ever learned about this other side of their gatekeeper.
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Equally fortunately for Canada, no Canadien leader learned of Brown's triumphant declaration to Anne that Confederation's great accomplishment was that French Canadianism had been extinguished.

Macdonald achieved all he really wanted just in getting the Confederation deal itself at Quebec City. Prince Edward Island pulled out from the pact later, as did Newfoundland, neither of these island colonies having any interest in the Intercolonial Railway or any fear of Americans attempting to invade by running the gauntlet of the Royal Navy. The approval of the Nova
Scotia and New Brunswick delegates, though, meant that Macdonald had in his hand one-half of a continental-sized nation that would stretch to the Atlantic; the addition of the second half, stretching all the way to the Pacific, was specifically provided for in the Quebec Resolutions.