John A (46 page)

Before the Confederation Debates ended, other news—this time deeply discouraging—reached Macdonald. It came from New Brunswick's small capital of Fredericton. The result of a provincial election there, even though not yet completed, was almost certainly going to be the defeat of Premier Leonard Tilley's pro-Confederation government. Shortly afterwards, Nova Scotia's premier, Charles Tupper, sent word to Macdonald that support for Confederation was slipping fast there.

Patching these pieces back together now became Macdonald's principal mission. It would remain so for far longer than he, or anyone, imagined.

 

TWENTY

The Administration of Strangers

[Take a Nova Scotian to Ottawa], where he cannot view the Atlantic, smell salt water or see the sail of a ship, and the man will pine and die. Joseph Howe, Nova Scotia anti-Confederate leader

T
he news from New Brunswick, once it had been handed over to Macdonald from the telegraph office, was far worse than the initial reports. Premier Leonard Tilley had not merely lost the government; he had lost his own seat. His party had not just been defeated but trounced, winning fourteen seats against the twenty-seven captured by the incoming anti-Confederation premier, Albert James Smith. Even if Nova Scotia could be kept on side—Charles Tupper by now was thoroughly gloomy—there would be no continuous chain of provinces extending out to the Atlantic. With such a gap in its middle, Confederation would be all but unattainable; without it, Britain and the United States would have no reason to believe that Canadians possessed the will to be a nation.

In the House, Macdonald accepted without argument the choice that New Brunswickers had made; the result, he admitted, represented a “declaration against the policy of Confederation.”
In contrast to D'Arcy McGee, who claimed that American money had determined the outcome, Macdonald made only a glancing reference to that possibility. He remained defiant, though, rejecting “any signs of weakness, any signs of receding on this question,” and telling Tupper, “there was nothing left for us but the bold game.” To one alarmed supporter he counselled, “stick with the ship until she rights.” He was particularly concerned that George Brown might use the setback to argue once again for his “mini-federation,” applying only to the United Province of Canada. Macdonald was able to forestall that. In private, though, he let his frustration show, telling a Prince Edward Island supporter that Tilley had been “unstatesmanlike” to allow an election to happen without first putting the Confederation scheme to his legislature to ensure that “the subject had been fairly discussed and its merits understood.”

Nova Scotia premier Charles Tupper. He was the only Father of Confederation with a university education (Edinburgh, in medicine). He was bold and blustery, an even stronger advocate of a centralized Confederation than Macdonald.

By the end of March, he was already planning a counterattack. “We will endeavour to convince the Catholic Bishop of the benefits to be derived from Confederation,” he told Tupper, while he himself would arrange “to get the communication you speak of from the Orange Grand Lodge to the same body in New Brunswick.” These tactics were premature, though. The news soon got bleaker. On April 10, 1865, Tupper informed his legislature in Halifax that “under existing circumstances, an immediate Union of the British North American Colonies has become impractical.” He stopped
trying to bring the issue to a vote. Inevitably, anti-Confederates in Canada itself joined in.
Rouge
leader Antoine-Aimé Dorion declared triumphantly, “This scheme is killed. I repeat that it is killed.” And a new player now came onto the stage. He was Joseph Howe, a former Nova Scotia premier and easily its most exceptional politician of the century. He was also the strongest anti-Confederate that Macdonald would ever face.

Howe was the third of the three Maritime politicians who were by now becoming familiar names to newspaper readers across the country. The others were Tupper and Tilley. Since both men would have long terms in post-Confederation Ottawa, a snapshot of each will suffice for now. Tupper was a medical doctor—ebullient, bombastic, bold. He practically challenged observers to employ purple ink while describing him, as in “broad-shouldered, self-contained, as vigorous-looking as Wellington's charger” and “oratorical and obstetrical”—these latter words by Lord Rosebery, later the British prime minister. Tupper was not just pro-Confederate but an ultra Confederate: he outdid even Macdonald in his advocacy of a full legislative union with minimalist provinces, rather than merely the kind of centralized confederation Macdonald aspired to. Tilley was a druggist, and a most successful one. Never popular because of a self-righteous streak, particularly as a
prohibitionist, he was widely respected for his intelligence and integrity. It's because of Tilley that for a long time, as we shall see, our title was that of a dominion.

New Brunswick premier Leonard Tilley. He led the fight for Confederation in his province, and for a time lost it.

Joseph Howe, the anti-Confederate leader in Nova Scotia. He was the one “anti” to propose a serious alternative. The odds were against him and he lost, but Macdonald later praised him as “the most seminal mind” he had met.

Between them, Tupper and Tilley began the tradition of the Maritimes exporting its political talent to Ottawa.

New Brunswick premier Leonard Tilley. He led the fight for Confederation in his province, and for a time lost it.

Of all the men who fought against Confederation, and so against Macdonald, Howe was the one Macdonald respected the most.

Years later, he told his secretary Joseph Pope that Howe possessed the most seminal mind” he had ever met. Yet Howe was the tragic figure of Confederation. He opposed it, and lost. The true source of his pain, though, was that he lost his faith in Britain. His father, John Howe, who had been living in the United States at the time of the rebellion by the American colonies, had been the only member of his family to come north as a Loyalist. He passed on this almost mystical attitude towards Britain to his son.

Self-educated, Howe edited a journal, the
Novascotian,
which was way ahead of its time in calling for such grand notions as “more of rational freedom” and, as early as 1838, for a union of the British American colonies. Howe sent letters to the colonial secretary suggesting how best to reform the Empire, into a sort of super-confederation of Britain and its colonies strikingly similar to the concept developed decades later as Imperial Federation. Elected to the legislature, Howe took up the cause of Responsible
Government and played a major role in its attainment in 1848, a few months ahead of the United Province of Canada. He became premier, a post he lost to Tupper, regained and then lost again to Tupper in 1860. Short of money, he accepted a minor patronage post as a fisheries commissioner. In 1864 he gave a fiery speech to the touring group of Canadian businessmen and journalists organized by McGee, calling for a sea-to-sea union; the alternative, he said, was to “live and die in insignificance.”

Then, in January 1865, Howe burst out as a fully fledged anti-Confederate. He wrote eleven long articles, the “Botheration Letters,” which played a substantial part in stoking Nova Scotian fears of what Confederation might bring. Disappointment at his own career was a factor: when his poorly paid patronage job came to an end, Howe would face virtual penury at the age of sixty. Jealousy of Tupper, who had forced him out of politics, was also a factor; invited to be a Nova Scotia delegate to the Charlottetown Conference, Howe refused, saying he wouldn't “play second-fiddle to that damn'd Tupper.” He assumed that the conclave would fail, then watched from the sidelines as Confederation took off—and Tupper with it. Howe's core reason for opposing Confederation was his love of country—far less for Nova Scotia than for Britain. As he wrote, “I am a dear lover of old England, and to save her would blow up Nova Scotia into the air or scuttle her like an old ship.”

He opposed Confederation so fiercely because he feared it would tug Canada, and so Nova Scotia, away from the mother country. He talked more often about Britain than about his own province, as in his speech in Yarmouth in May 1866: “You go down to the sea in ships, and a flag of old renown floats above them, and the Consuls and Ministers of the Empire are prompt to protect your property, and your sons in every part of the world.” And, in another speech, “London [was] large enough—
London, the financial centre of the world, the nursing mother of universal enterprise, the home of the arts, the seat of Empire, the fountainhead of civilization.” Who could think of giving all that up for a capital in Canada's backwoods “with an Indian name and any quantity of wilderness and ice in the rear of it”?