John A (40 page)

In hindsight it is remarkable how much the delegates accomplished—and also how little they did. Issues that have dominated Canadian politics ever since, such as the division of powers between the two levels of government, were barely discussed at all; Macdonald suggested a list of federal powers, and Oliver Mowat a list of provincial ones, and both were passed quickly with little argument or debate. Matters fundamental to the functioning of any federal system, such as how to amend the constitution, were not debated. A satisfactory explanation has never been constructed for the absence of so vital a piece of constitutional machinery. Speculatively, Macdonald may have worried that an amending system, which merely by existing implied that the constitution might need improving later on, might open the way for critics calling for changes before the constitution was carved into legislative stone, but whose real purpose was delay for its own sake. What is remarkable is that no one in Quebec City commented on the absence of an amending formula, even though one existed in the United States and was known to be working well. The Nova Scotia anti-Confederate Joseph Howe (who was not present at Quebec City) was one of the few in the entire country to raise the issue.

Premier Étienne-Paschal Taché. He served as the titular leader whom both Macdonald and Brown could accept.

What interested the delegates most was the Senate. One full week
was spent on a debate (which came close to breaking up the conference) about how many senators
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each section (Upper Canada, Lower Canada, the Maritimes) should have. “Everyone here has had a fit of the blues,” reported the Toronto
Globe.
At Charlottetown, it had been agreed that every section would have twenty-four senators. The possible addition of Newfoundland meant that the Maritime colonies as a whole would end up with fewer senators than either of the Canadas. Eventually Macdonald concocted a compromise—Newfoundland would get four senators all of its own, if and when it joined. That said, the work resumed.

It was now October 19, and progress had been slow. From this point on, as Prince Edward Island delegate Edward Palmer reported in a newspaper article, “the current seemed to set with the Canadians.” Contentious matters remained: Prince Edward Island asked for a special grant of £200,000 to buy up the extensive holdings of absentee landlords (mostly British) but was refused, and its delegates thereafter effectively dropped out of the discussions. Mistakes were made: on New Brunswick's behalf, Leonard Tilley managed to get an extra $63,000, but Charles Tupper forgot to ask for a matching amount for Nova Scotia.

The turn of the tide towards the Canadians meant a turn at the same time towards the strong central government that Macdonald had always called for. Words like “unity” and “nation” gained a magical quality. During a debate about criminal law, Mowat declared, “I quite concur in the advantages of one uniform system. It would weld us into a nation.” A quote from a popular pamphlet,
The Northern Kingdom,
written by S.E. Dawson—“Never was there such an opportunity as now for the birth of a nation”—was reprinted in a Quebec City newspaper
and commented on by many delegates. When a New Brunswicker, E.B. Chandler, protested that the provinces would be reduced to “merely large municipal corporations,” he was almost shouted down. Macdonald was now so confident of success that he was able to dismiss as invalid another delegate's claim that the provisions of New Zealand's 1842 constitution, which had ended with the provinces there being abolished, could be used in Canada. A Newfoundland delegate, Ambrose Shea, caught the mood of many when he said the scheme would enable British North Americans to escape from the “wretched broils of our colonial life.” Out of Quebec City came the first sense of Canada as a national community.

On Wednesday, October 26, the conference held its final full sessions—which extended until midnight. They met again on Friday to tidy up the details. That evening there was a huge ball, attended by one thousand guests. For the first time in history, a band of colonists had drafted a constitution for themselves. The deed was done.

The first reward of this constitutional success was financial. “The immediate effect of the scheme was such on the public mind that our five per cents [government bonds] rose from 75 to 92,” Brown reported to Anne.

The new draft constitution was in fact an unrelievedly prosaic document, more like a car repair manual than a prescription for building a nation. The London
Times
commented, unkindly but accurately, on its “practical and unpretending a style.” Only one resolution contained even a hint of poetry. It called for Canadians to move ahead by means of “the perpetuation of our connection with the mother country and the promotion of the best interests of the people of these provinces [who] desire to follow the model of the
British constitution,” with, since this was a Canadian document, the closing qualifier “so far as our circumstances will prevail.”

Macdonald understood the significance of what had been achieved. During the brief debate on the division of powers, he intervened to say that if the mix was too decentralized, a “radical weakness” would be introduced into the constitution that would “ruin us in the eyes of the civilized world.” To gain respect and acceptance, the new nation had to let the world know, and its own people know, that it was united and capable of being daring. To do that took a strong central government. By contrast, Brown's understanding was much more parochial: “Constitution adopted—a most credible document—a complete reform of all the abuses and injustices we have complained of,” he wrote to Anne right after the conference's close. He then added, “Is it not wonderful? French-Canadianism is entirely extinguished.” (He meant by this that French Quebecers would no longer be able to intervene in the politics of English Ontarians.)

To be fair to the Quebec City delegates, they had to cobble together a federal constitution at the very time when the world's best-known federation had dissolved into a horrendous civil war. The temptation was strong to assume that federations were inherently flawed and that only a “legislative union,” or a unitary state like Britain, could work. They were also hemmed in by circumstances. The United States' solution to the challenge of representing the regions at the centre—two senators from each state, no matter their size—was indeed well known in Canada. But Canada was too oddly sized for such a system to work here. The three Maritime provinces together contained only a fifth of the total population; a U.S.-style equal allocation of Senate seats would give
them a majority in that chamber, growing to a two-to-one majority once Newfoundland joined. This said, any solution would have served better the need for a national balance than the one the delegates settled on—a Senate supposed to represent the regions, but with all its members appointed by the federal government.

There was, nevertheless, a fair amount of shrewd sense in the delegates' preference for the pedestrian. Thus, the Canadiens were conspicuous by their silence about the rights of French Canadians outside Quebec, in particular entirely ignoring the interests of New Brunswick's Acadians. Any vocal defence of the pan-Canadian interests of French Canadians, though, would have triggered demands for extra protections by English Canadians in Quebec. The silence was unbrotherly, and even cowardly, but it preserved for Quebec's Canadiens what they wanted.

To contemporary eyes, the aspect of the Quebec City resolutions most difficult to comprehend is that the delegates took almost no interest in the respective powers of the federal and provincial governments. Ever since, there have been long periods when the only matter of consequence in Canadian politics seems to be which level of government is responsible for what, and who should pay for it. While unsatisfying, the explanation for this constitutional amnesia is easy: governments then did so little because people wanted them to do little. Pre-Confederation, the share of government revenues expended on what are now the principal activities of government—education, public charities and social services—was just 9 per cent of the total.
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Neither governments themselves nor ordinary Canadians expected them to do much more. Then, some 80 per cent of Canadians were farmers and fishermen, and they looked after themselves and their families.

Also, there was a general assumption that setting down lists of federal and provincial responsibilities would pre-empt all the jurisdictional problems. This attitude was odd, given that delegates were familiar with the contortions that had bedevilled the quasi-federation of the United Province of Canada. But the naïveté about federalism was widespread. Macdonald would later proclaim, “We have avoided all conflict of jurisdiction and authority.” The
Globe,
in that tone of plaintive exasperation at the follies of others so distinctive to editorial writers, would ask with unconcealed impatience, “We desire local self-government in order that the separate nationalities of which the population is composed may not quarrel. We desire at the same time a strong central authority. Is there anything incompatible in these two things? Cannot we have both? What is the difficulty?”

The delegates were practical men, not visionaries or scholars. Just one of the thirty-three Fathers of Confederation at Quebec City—Nova Scotia's Charles Tupper—had a university education, in his case in medicine from the University of Edinburgh.
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By contrast, of the fifty-five at Philadelphia in 1787, more than half were university trained or had studied at the Inns of Court in London. The composition of the Senate interested the delegates for the sake of regional balance, but scarcely less so for their personal career prospects.
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Few had bothered to study federal
systems. The proceedings of those American colonists were available at the conference, and Macdonald had brought along his well-annotated copy of James Madison's
Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787,
which included Alexander Hamilton's
Draft of a Constitution for the United States.
But really only Macdonald, Galt, Mowat and, less so, Brown understood the complexities and subtle tradeoffs inherent in any federal system.

Practical men—even pedestrian ones as most of them were—the Quebec City delegates did one thing that was more imaginative than anything attempted at any federal-provincial conference since: most of the delegations were composed of representatives of both the government and the opposition in the home colony, as Christopher Moore pointed out in his excellent book
1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal.
(The one exception was the opposition
rouges,
who refused to take part.) Also, half hidden beneath all the workaday clauses of the resolutions, there was one radical new notion that was little appreciated by most of the drafters: in the new nation, linguistic and cultural differences would be protected.
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This promise had never been made before, not even in the constitution of the original Swiss federation, which, if only by historic circumstance, was based on cantons that were all linguistically and ethnically German.