John A (42 page)

Macdonald didn't get what he had said on several occasions he personally would prefer to a confederation or federation—a “legislative union.” Such an arrangement was highly attractive to Britain, itself a “legislative union,” or unitary state, and one that had forged a “Union” with Scotland and had rejected repeatedly, and violently, any attempts at Home Rule, or self-government, in Ireland. Midway through the conference, Macdonald wrote to the businessman-politician Isaac Buchanan, “My great aim is to strengthen the general Legislature and Govt. as much as possible, and approach as nearly to a Legislative Union as is practicable.” Shortly after the conference ended, he wrote to a supporter, Malcolm Cameron, “If the Confederation goes on, you, if spared the ordinary age of man, will see both local Parliaments and Governments absorbed in the General Power.” Macdonald added, as hardly needed to be said, “But of course, it doesn't do to adopt that point of view in discussing the subject in Lower Canada.”

While Macdonald kept on saying this kind of thing, he may not have meant it. He may have been playing another set of his “long game.” He once even showed his hand in public. In the Confederation Debates in the Canadian legislature that followed the Quebec Conference, Macdonald engaged in an intriguing exchange with the High Tory M.C. Cameron, who challenged Macdonald that he would have “better shown [his] patriotism by waiting a little longer to accomplish it.” Macdonald interjected,
“Accomplish what?” Cameron answered, “A legislative union of all the provinces.” Macdonald then gave his colleague a lesson in
realpolitik.
“I thought my hon. friend knew that every man in Lower Canada was against it, every man in New Brunswick, every man in Nova Scotia,
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every man in Newfoundland and every man in Prince Edward Island. How, then, is it to be accomplished?” The “long game” that Macdonald thus was playing was to position himself at a constitutional extreme from which he could gracefully retreat, while using his concessions to gain in exchange yet more bits and pieces of a highly centralized federal system.

That in fact is exactly what happened. Before the Confederation project was completed, Macdonald won a succession of important additions to the central power. Immigration and agriculture became joint jurisdictions rather than exclusively provincial concerns, and Ottawa gained the right to appoint the provincial lieutenant-governors, officials considered so powerful at the time that Macdonald described them as “chief executive officers.” Moreover, during the negotiations at the Quebec Conference, even though many delegates favoured a legislative union rather than a confederation—Brown
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and Galt among the Canadians, and, among the Maritimers, Tupper and some senior men—Macdonald made no attempt to win approval for a legislative union. By not attempting seriously the impossibility of a legislative union, he got the possible—namely, as he expressed it
and believed he had achieved, that “the Central Government assumes towards the local governments precisely the same position as the Imperial Government holds with respect to each of the provinces.”

The constitution that emerged from Quebec City, and that went on to become the BNA Act, was almost certainly the most centralized constitution for a federation or confederation that's ever been assembled. Macdonald secured all the four centralizing measures Alexander Hamilton had attempted to insert into the U.S. Constitution at Philadelphia in 1787—appointment of senators for life; federal appointment of state governors; the federal right to disallow state laws; and the granting of residual powers to the federal government. He also secured one centralizing authority, over “banking, incorporation of banks, and the issue of paper money,” that Hamilton never even thought of.

Macdonald's “long game” had another objective, one far more critical to his purpose than creating a strong central government for the sake of governmental efficiency. Confederation's prime purpose was to impress Britain and the United States by a statement of national will; gathering together the British North America colonies was merely a means to that end. A central government that possessed, as he put it, “all the powers which are incident to sovereignty” would impress as the government of a nation rather than of some upgraded province or colony. To impress further, it would avoid what Macdonald saw as the “fatal error” that had almost sundered the United States—that of “making each state a distinct sovereignty, and giving to each a distinct sovereign power.” In the nation-state he was creating, therefore, sovereignty would reside, as in all real nation-states, at its centre.

As it turned out, Macdonald would lose this part of his “long game”—in later sets. Quirky decisions by the Judicial Committee
of the Privy Council in London during the latter part of Macdonald's post-Confederation term were an early cause. The underlying reason was that Canadians themselves wanted a decentralized confederation rather than Macdonald's centralized one. Another reason was the most obvious one of all: immense distances kept the people of British North America apart from each other and turned them to their own local governments and away from the remote national one. Above all, Canadiens, soon to become Québécois, located their true national government not in Ottawa but in Quebec City. As to the future of federal-provincial relations, rather than Macdonald's benign confidence about federal dominance, the shrewdest guess was the one made by that unnervingly perceptive critic Christopher Dunkin: the “cry” of the provinces, he predicted in 1865, “will be found to be pretty often and pretty successfully—‘Give, give, give.'”

A closing note about the Quebec Conference. The most famous painting in Canadian historiography is Robert Harris's
The Fathers of Confederation.
Macdonald dominates the picture—because he's in the centre, he's standing rather than sitting, he's tall (at five foot eleven he was above the average height for the time), he's wearing a dashing white waistcoat inside his black frock coat, and, in contrast to the ponderous gravitas of most of the others, his posture is alert, watchful, purposeful. Harris painted it in 1884. By that time the building in which the event had taken place had burned down, and Harris improved the vista by painting in delicate arched windows in place of the square wooden casements of the original.

This painting was lost in the 1916 fire that destroyed the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. Harris, by then seventy, refused
a second commission but did touch up his original cartoon, or charcoal sketch. In 1964 the insurance company Confederation Life commissioned Toronto artist Rex Woods to recreate Harris's 1884 version and presented it to Parliament as a Centennial gift. It now hangs in the Railway Committee Room of the Parliament Buildings.
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Macdonald's mood after the comprehensive success at Quebec City was confident to the point of being cocky. Within a fortnight of the conference's end, he was treating Confederation as if it were already an accomplished fact and was looking beyond to the administrative details of a post-Confederation government. On November 14, 1864, he wrote to Premier Tilley of New Brunswick, “Have you thought over the formation of the Govt—the Federal Govt I mean?—i.e. as to the number and composition of the Executive, the number and nature of the Departments & the general system of administration?” He made the same request to Nova Scotia's Tupper the same day, adding, “I intend to commence next week to draft the Bill to be submitted for the consideration of the Imperial Govt.”

His personal correspondence communicated the same assurance. A day after his letters to Tilley and Tupper, in a letter to Judge James Robert Gowan, Macdonald claimed the entire constitution as “mine.” In another letter at this time, he declared, “We
do not pretend that it is at all perfect, or even symmetrical, but it was the result of a series of compromises which were necessary to secure the support of all classes.”

To heighten his high spirits, events kept breaking his way. Midway through the Quebec Conference, the delegates heard worri some news that two dozen Southern Confederates hiding in Canada had staged a cross-border raid on the northern Vermont town of St. Albans, taking two hundred thousand dollars from three banks, killing one person and wounding another before fleeing back to Canada. The general commanding the American forces in the region gave his troops an order that if other Confederates made a similar sortie, they were to give hot pursuit right into Canada. President Lincoln refused to confirm the order, which would have breached Canada's neutrality, and waited to see how Canada would respond.

By bad luck, that response could not have been more thoroughly bungled. Most of the Confederates were arrested as soon as they arrived back in Canada from St. Albans. On December 13, their preliminary trial came up before Montreal magistrate Charles-Joseph Coursol. The defence lawyer made a convoluted argument for the prisoners' temporary release; a confused Coursol assented, and the Confederate raiders instantly vanished. American newspapers, and many American politicians, were certain it was an anti-North plot. Four days later Washington gave notice that all Canadians would have to have passports to enter the United States. Privately, Macdonald expressed his fury at “the unhappy and mistaken decision of Coursol.” To an inquiring businessman, Macdonald's response was nuanced adroitly. On the one hand, Macdonald wrote, there was no reason why “individuals or incorporated companies like Railways should not join in their exertions with Americans from the Western Frontier to procure its [the passport order's] with
drawal.” On the other, “it would be extremely impolitic, and, indeed, defeat our object, if the Canadian Government went on its knees to the United States government.” Macdonald then gave the businessman a lesson in governance: an intervention by the Canadian government itself, he wrote, “would give Mr. Seward [the secretary of state] an exaggerated idea of the inconvenience and loss suffered by Canada and it [the order] would be kept up as a means of punishment or for purposes of coercion.”

In fact, the released raiders were quickly rearrested and retried by a different judge, who subsequently ruled (very likely after being prompted by Macdonald) that they should be extradited to the United States.
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To forestall future raids, Macdonald called up two thousand volunteers to stand guard along the border. As a further precaution, he organized a detective force, headed by Gilbert McMicken, “a shrewd, cool and determined man who won't easily lose his head,” to provide intelligence on what was happening across the border. The flap died down, although, as always, not without calls by American newspapers, especially the New York
Herald,
for Canada's annexation, if necessary by force. Of lasting consequence, though, was the decision by Congress not to renew the Reciprocity Treaty when it reached its due date in 1866, in reaction to what was seen to be Canadian favouritism towards the South. The combination of this cross-border free-trade pact, together with the immense demand generated by American military mobilization, had led to the growth of Canada's economy at a faster rate than ever before in the nineteenth century.
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The immediate consequences of this mini-crisis, though, were all positive. Even the passport rule was soon withdrawn. As always, an external threat drew people together. Further, the St. Albans affair reminded Canadians of the threat about to be posed by the imminent victory of the North over the South. About the war itself, Macdonald now insisted on the strictest neutrality, urging it on a colleague with just a hint of regret: “We can't help the South[,] and a naked expression of sympathy would do it no good and greatly injure us.” Nevertheless, the fact remained that once the American Civil War ended, the vast Federal armies might be demobilized—or, perhaps, mobilized to march northwards.

To this threat, actual or perceived, two responses were possible: Confederation, which would signal Canada's will to survive; as well, a helping hand from Britain. Macdonald now set out to secure both.