Delphi complete works of.., p.726
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 726
1867
Confederation
ORIGINAL PAINTING BY HAL ROSS PERRIGARD, A.R.C.A., MONTREAL, P.Q., 1941
Upper Canada College, Toronto, 1829-1877. “. . . the red-brick Government House flew its flag, and over the way the red-brick Upper Canada College set itself to make scholars and gentlemen . . .” — page 155
CHAPTER VI. THE NEW DOMINION STRUGGLING INTO LIFE. 1867-1878
THE MAKING OF Confederation — Canada at Confederation — Meeting of Parliament — Nova Scotia and Repeal — The Red River Rebellion — Admission of Manitoba — British Columbia enters Confederation — Prince Edward Island — The United States, Reciprocity and the Washington Treaty — The Pacific Scandal and the Fall of the Government — The Liberal Government, Hard Times and the Election of 1878.
The stages by which the Dominion of Canada was formed stand as follows. A Conference was held at Charlottetown Sept. 7, 1864 to discuss the union of the four Maritime Provinces. Delegates W. P. M. Kennedy, “Constitution of Canada,” 1922 arrived from Canada inviting the Conference to adjourn to Quebec to discuss the wider union of all British North America. The Quebec Conference met in October of 1864. These were the Fathers of Confederation, known in the familiar picture by Robert Harris. Their formal dress of bygone fashion, their wide Prince Albert coats and flowing side whiskers, lend them a certain air of distinction, not to say antiquity. Of the total thirty-three Fathers the most remembered names are those of John A. Macdonald, George Brown, Etienne Taché, Georges Sir G. Bourinot, “Constitutional History of Canada,” (List of Members, 1901) Etienne Cartier, all from Canada. From Canada also was D’Arcy McGee, the ‘lost leader’ of the Fenian movement, who was to pay for his conversion with his life. From Nova Scotia came Dr. Charles Tupper of Amherst, a veritable maker of Canada, who was to represent Cumberland County at Halifax and at Ottawa for thirty-two years. He was Joseph Howe’s great rival in a province that never had room for both of them. Howe, being out of office, had no share in either Conference. For New Brunswick was Leonard Tilley and for ‘The Island’ J. H. Gray, the Prime Minister. From Newfoundland came Ambrose Shea and Frederick Carter, two Fathers who deserted their offspring in its cradle and never came back.
The Convention drew up the seventy-two Resolutions which became the basis of our present constitution. These were submitted to the Legislature of Canada and called forth, in the famous Confederation Debates, a record of the public opinion of Feb. 3-March 14, 1865 the day. Such opposition as there was arose chiefly from French-Canadian fear of absorption, or reflected Christopher Dunkin’s “Confederation Debates” 1865 melancholy prophecy that Canada was too sectional for unity. The two Houses joined in an address asking the Crown for an Act of Parliament.
If Canada had been alone concerned, that would have been the end. But federation, as things stood, had no chance in the Maritimes. Newfoundland ran away from it. Prince Edward Island petitioned the Crown against it. New Brunswick held a 1865 election on the issue and snowed it under, Tilley’s government with it. In Nova Scotia, public opinion, roused by Joseph Howe, ran wild against the plan. Tupper did not even attempt a general election. It seemed in 1865 that federation had been strangled in its cradle. Nor is the reason far to seek. To the Maritimes, Canada was another place. People used the word in that sense for forty years after Confederation. Union with Canada meant to them French rule for British people. In taking away their power over customs duties it would take all their revenue. It meant, they felt sure, a protective tariff, high prices for Canadian manufactures and British goods shut out. Their market was going. Reciprocity was running out. The wooden ship was foundering, flag up. The shades of night were falling, and the night was called Confederation.
Then came destiny and altered everything. The Civil War in April 9, 1865 America ended virtually at Appomattox. As its echoes ceased, the new tumult of Fenianism was heard across the border; men drilling in thousands, unimpeded, the Washington government looking the other way. There was to be invasion, and with it a Republic of Canada to avenge the wrongs of Ireland. The invasion came, its raids across the border meeting an inglorious end. But with invasion the hearts of the Loyalists stirred again G. Denison, “Soldiering in Canada,” 1900 within their grandchildren. A second election (1866) carried Confederation through in New Brunswick. In Nova Scotia the government, right or wrong, grasped firmly the nettle of difficulty, and passed a legislative vote for union without asking sanction from the people.
A delegation from the Province of Canada had gone to London in 1865. A new delegation, Canadian and Maritime, was sent over in the autumn of 1866. The famous Westminster Palace Conference arranged better terms, larger subsidies for the Maritimes. Dec. 4, 1866 It was agreed all round — except by the people in the North-West — to throw in the North-West into the bargain. The plan of union left an open place for British Columbia, for Prince Edward Island and for Newfoundland. This gave it that continental aspect which overcame and still overcomes, to the view of common sense, all local and minor divergences. As beside this ideal an independent Red River and the shadow republic of to-day in Laurentia, are just nowhere.
In those days the only method of procedure to alter the constitution of the British American Provinces was by an imperial statute. Strangely enough it is the only method to-day. We cannot ourselves amend our constitution. The British North America Act of 1867, having no amending clause, locked the door of the past and threw away the key. The lock could only be picked by the imperial locksmith. Our new Westminster Statute of 1931 goes further. It throws away the other key. Amendment of Dominion and Provincial relations, if ever done, can only be done now by pretending that the British Parliament has a power which this statute expressly says it has not. That, however, offers no great difficulty for people with what is called the British genius for government. We have lived for centuries on just such fictions and obsolescences. Compare the Chiltern Hundreds and the Keeper of the Swans.
All that, however, was not yet. The British North America Act of 1867 still reserved very real power to the Imperial Government. The Governor-General could of his own initiative reserve A. B. Keith, “Responsible Government in the Dominions,” 1912 Canadian bills. The supreme military command rested with Great Britain. Imperial garrisons were in Canada till 1871 and naval establishments at Halifax and Esquimalt till 1903. Foreign relations and diplomacy were in imperial hands. One by one all these powers faded out, or were explicitly wiped out or forgotten. The Westminster Statute only stated a fact.
Such was the union of the Dominion of Canada which was to embrace when it was complete over three and a half million square miles, an area larger than Europe. But apart from its great size it was, in early Confederation days, little more than an outline. The far greater part of it and much of the best of it was trackless, almost unoccupied and unused. The Maritime Provinces with 767,000 people offered a fairly compact block of settlement, although the interior of New Brunswick was still mostly forest. From New Brunswick the wilderness reached to the French-Canadian settlements on the St. Lawrence at Rimouski. Westward the occupied country ran all along the St. Lawrence and for some distance up the Ottawa. From the St. Lawrence, settlement continued along the north side of Lake Ontario, reaching at most a hundred miles inland. Thence it spread all over the Western Peninsula to Lake Erie and Lake Huron. But except for the Eastern Townships of Quebec and the Western Peninsula of Ontario, there was no ‘depth’ to occupied Canada. “The country,” wrote Governor Sir Edmund Head, “is all frontier.” Everywhere the bush was close at hand and where the lumber-shanties ended, forest and outcropping rock, broken with innumerable lakes, a maze of islands and a rush of rivers, went on for ever to the north.
Of the ports and cities of Canada at Confederation, Nova Scotia could boast of Halifax, with 29,000 people, already a place of world renown, a naval and military station, with all that goes with a seat of government and a college town. On The Island, Charlottetown was an old-world seaport, like an old-fashioned child, with a Government House, visits of naval ships and the romance of the tall white schooners of the West Indian trade. For New Brunswick, larger and with great forests and valley farms and the open seaport of Saint John, prosperity seemed already around the corner — of the Bay of Fundy. Quebec, its population 59,000 in 1871, had lost its priority in shipping and commerce to Montreal. The improvement of the river channel, together with the opening of the St. Lawrence canals, was turning Montreal into a seaport metropolis. It was superior in situation to New York, but the grip of the ice condemned it to alternating death and resurrection.
In Upper Canada, henceforth Ontario, Toronto was a commodious 1871 capital city of 60,000 inhabitants. Its streets were embowered in leaves above which rose the many spires of the churches. Its wooden slum district was herded into the centre and, like poverty itself, forgotten. Where the leaves ended a sort of park land began and in it stood the University of Toronto, A. N. Bethune, “Memoir of John Strachan,” 1870 secular and scientific, but housed in Norman architecture of beauty unsurpassed. To the west, more rural but less beautiful with earthly beauty, was Trinity College, founded in protest against the existence of secular Toronto. But down below, along the water-front, was a business district, built like a bit of London, all of a sky-line and with cobblestones rattling with cabs. The H. Scadding, “Toronto of Old,” 1873 new railways sliced off, as everywhere in Ontario, the shore line, vilified with ash-heaps and refuse. All over Canada between the vanishing beauty of nature and the later beauty of civic adornment, there extended this belt of tin cans and litter.
Just above the railway lines rose the red-brick Parliament buildings, the red-brick Government House flew its flag, and 1829 over the way the red-brick Upper Canada College set itself to make scholars and gentlemen as good as real ones. Guarding the harbour entrance was the Old Fort, its frame barracks of the same old pattern and roof-slope that had already gone round the Empire, its ramparts crumbling but its ponderous old guns in embrasures still looking feebly dangerous. The tone of society was English at the top but the barber shops spoke American. There was profound peace and order and on Sunday all bells and Sunday-best. It seems, as most places do, a pleasant place in retrospect. At least it was cheap. The chair at Toronto that Professor Huxley tried in vain to get, carried a salary of £400 and meant an ample living.
From the business district the shops ran for half a mile up Yonge Street and, beyond that, Yonge Street ran thirty-five miles to Holland Landing where water communication began. It had a tavern to every mile and plenty of grain wagons to keep them busy. The main railway ran through from Montreal to Sarnia-Chicago. But from the half-dozen little railway stations O. Skelton, ‘The Railway Builders,’ “Chronicles of Canada,” 1916 of the Toronto of early Confederation days, there radiated, like the fingers of a hand, half a dozen little railways with various gauges, reaching out north to the lumber woods — Huntsville, Coboconk, Haliburton — and north and west to the lake ports of Lake Huron and the Georgian Bay. Along the stations of these railway lines the horse and buggy and the lumber-wagon took up the traffic. General stores, each a post-office, with a near-by blacksmith shop, arose at the cross-roads, and if there was also a river with a waterfall, there appeared a sawmill and a gristmill, and presently, as the farms multiplied, a village. Then the village became a little town, with not one but rival stores, a drug store, a local paper and a cricket club. In it were four churches and three taverns. One church was of the Church of England, one Presbyterian, while the Roman Catholics, Methodists and Baptists divided the other two. On the map of Ontario Protestantism was everywhere, but Roman Catholicism ran in zig-zags. The three taverns were one Grit, and one Tory and one neither. Many things in Ontario ran like that in threes, with the post-office and the mail stage alternating as the prize of victory in elections. The cricket club is now just a memory, gone long ago. Thus the little Ontario town grew till the maples planted in its streets overtopped it and it fell asleep and grew no more. It is strange this, and peculiar to our country, the aspect of a town grown from infancy to old age within a human lifetime.
But other towns had better luck. To them fell the new factories of the protective tariff that after 1858 began to turn out ploughs and implements, boots and shoes, cloth and cottons and furniture. They grew bigger than town-size, cut down the maples on the main street, put in a horse-car from the ‘depot’ to the ‘business section’ — and then stuck dead again as cities. Even in 1880 London, Ontario, had a population of only 19,000, St. Thomas of 8,000, and Hamilton of 35,000. The ten western lakeport towns extended all the way from Kincardine to Parry Sound, each waiting to become the main outlet of the North-West, living on the lumber trade and the excursion business meanwhile, till in many of them the cedar piles rotted and the wharves sagged with weariness of waiting. None ever became the outlet. Each is waiting again now, seventy years later, to be the ocean port of the inland sea-way.
Beyond the Muskoka district Canada went on indefinitely Rev. Geo. M. Grant, “Ocean to Ocean,” 1873 north and west. There were fishing harbours on the Georgian Bay and beside Manitoulin Island, and a settlement where Lake Superior has its outlet at the Sault Ste. Marie. Inland was nothing but trading posts here and there and the Red River settlement of Assiniboia. This district covered roughly a circle of a fifty-mile radius around the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Garry at the junction of the Red and the Assiniboine. Winnipeg — the word means dirty water — was the name for a random collection of saloons and shacks down the road from the fort. More respectable was the French-Canadian village of St. Boniface, across the river, its stone cathedral marking it as a bishopric, and containing some 750 souls as against the soulless 250 of Winnipeg. On the plains 1871 was Regina, still a ‘pile of bones,’ buffalo bones, and called so, and beyond it the various Company posts of the Saskatchewan and Mackenzie Valleys. Edmonton appears as the Edmonton House, established in 1795. There was no Calgary. Nor was there any town Vancouver. Beyond the Rockies British Columbia was to be reached only by sea, round the Horn or by way of the Panama Isthmus. After 1869 the Union Pacific Railway and a steamer from San Francisco supplied a more rapid transit. In British Columbia were, in 1871, some 25,000 Indians and 10,000 whites.
To group all these fragments, these solitudes, into one great Dominion, to join it with a continental railroad, to embrace it all in one jurisdiction by law and order, seemed to many people a task beyond endeavour. Thus, in the days of Jefferson’s Louisiana 1803 Purchase of 900,000 square miles, had seemed the western prairies to the people of the United States. The Roman poet J. B. McMaster, “History of the People of the United States,” Vol. II, 1885 Virgil said proudly — think what a task it has been establishing Rome as a nation! We may well say the same of Canada.
Yet the task was begun. The British North America Act became law in March, 1867, and went into force on July 1, A. P. Cockburn, “Political Annals of Canada,” 1905 1867. Lord Monck was appointed Governor-General. John A. Macdonald, now fittingly Sir John, was appointed to summon a ministry, purposely drawn from both sides of politics. Georges Etienne Cartier became his chief support among the French. Sir Georges, 1868 But Macdonald in the opening years of Confederation himself guided the policy of Canada. Opposition fell into the hands of Alexander Mackenzie, an unflinching Canadian Scot, self-made and not to be made over again, and of Edward Blake, a man of cultivated intellect and Roman dignity, about as genial as a Latin grammar. Beside the easy-going jocularity of Sir John A., they were, for Canadian politics, nowhere. A large part of the first session was devoted to legislation organizing the departments of government and initiating a system of finance. These were largely matters of routine. But the difficulties of the new government began in its very cradle. Its life opened with the conflict of Dominion and Provinces which has ever since vexed the Canadian union. Of the nineteen members from Nova Scotia all except Dr. Charles Tupper went to Ottawa only to protest against being there.
Well might the members sit in protest. These were indeed hard times for the Maritime Provinces and especially for Nova Scotia. The termination of Reciprocity had lost the American market. Wooden shipbuilding was obviously moving to its decline. Confederation had destroyed revenue and dislocated finance. There seemed no remedy but in repeal, in renewed relations with the J. W. Longley, ‘Joseph Howe,’ “Makers of Canada,” 1904 States and renewed access to British trade. This repeal movement fills the early years of Confederation and centres round the name of Joseph Howe. From his past views and his imperial ideals, Howe should logically have been the maker of Confederation. As has been said, he was out of office and had no part in either the Charlottetown or the Quebec Conference. The task fell to his opponent, Tupper, a man less genial but of greater strength. Howe bitterly opposed the plan, not of Confederation in general, but of what he called “the Quebec scheme,” which, he said, “utterly sacrificed the interests of the Maritime Provinces.” He was sent to London with two others, at the 1866 expense of his sympathizers (Howe had no money) to oppose the plan. After Confederation was adopted, Howe for a time led the agitation for repeal. Then silence fell upon him. Sir John Macdonald was consulting him, in correspondence and in conference, about better financial terms — for Nova Scotia and for himself. The better terms for Nova Scotia were granted in the increased subsidies of 1868. It was then learned that Howe was to join Macdonald’s cabinet at Ottawa. Following this ministerial appointment Howe stood, by constitutional custom, for election to Parliament. A fierce contest followed in the County of Hants. Howe was elected and repeal shattered. Till the government fell, Howe remained in the cabinet, his untrained hand learning to play second fiddle, with no applause. His four years in the Dominion cabinet were, in the words of a biographer, “the least glorious of his career.” For over a generation Nova Scotia people went on discussing whether Joseph Howe was a lost leader, bought and sold, or a great patriot, honest enough to admit error. In the long retrospect of to-day, those who should know most, think best of him.
