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СКАЧАТЬ disunity among Macdonald’s supporters. In January 1858, news arrived that Queen Victoria had chosen Ottawa as Canada’s permanent capital. There was widespread protest against the selection of this primitive backwoods town: the Globe predicted that any public buildings erected in Ottawa would soon “be abandoned to the moles and the bats.” Indeed, Premier Macdonald was in no hurry to start construction. “Do not say anything about any action of the Government on the matter,” he warned the editor to whom he leaked the scoop. His Lower Canada supporters especially disliked the Queen’s choice and, on July 28, a Bleu revolt carried a motion denouncing Ottawa by sixty-four votes to fifty. It was a parliamentary hiccup, but the next day, Macdonald tendered his Cabinet’s resignation, in protest against the Assembly’s “uncourteous insult” to the Queen. Since ministers had not snubbed their monarch, they had no reason to resign. Indeed, they had comfortably defeated a formal censure motion and so had no right to quit. The ensuing week of farcical intrigue damaged the reputation of public life, and branded John A. Macdonald as an inept trickster.

      Still caretaker premier, Macdonald sat back to enjoy watching George Brown self-destruct in an impossible pursuit of power — in Macdonald’s contemptuous image, like a greedy fish gobbling at the angler’s bait. Unfortunately, Brown grabbed the bait and eluded the hook. Since Cabinets were small, there were only six Lower Canadian posts to fill, and the task proved unexpectedly easy. Antoine-Aimé Dorion was keen to show that his Rouges could tame the Toronto Protestant ogre, while Montreal’s business community wanted its voice heard too. The Brown-Dorion ministry was sworn into office on August 2, and John A. Macdonald automatically became Canada’s ex-premier. Worse still, the incoming team even offered some plausible policies. Disagreements over Catholic schools were mysteriously sidelined, but there was an important breakthrough on representation by population. Montreal Reformer Luther H. Holton encouraged Brown to consider restructuring the province as a two-headed (Ontario-Quebec) federation. Each section would run its own affairs, with Upper Canada having its rep. by pop. majority in the joint legislature. It looked a cumbersome constitution for just two million people: intriguingly, Brown wondered whether a union of all the provinces would make more sense. But the idea offered Lower Canadian politicians a device to protect their local interests while giving ground to Upper Canada’s growing weight of numbers. The new ministry could also plead for time to work out the details. John A. Macdonald urgently needed to strangle the Brown-Dorion ministry in its cradle.

      Macdonald was helped by the constitutional rule requiring ministerial by-elections. By accepting office, Brown’s Cabinet colleagues ceased to be members of the Assembly until their ridings had re-endorsed them, further weakening their parliamentary numbers when attacked by Macdonald and Cartier. Ambush turned into massacre, with a censure motion passing by seventy-one votes to thirty-one. On his second day in office, Premier Brown asked the governor general to call an election. In a rare invocation of the Crown’s prerogative, Sir Edmund Head refused. The governor general had already indicated that he might refuse to allow a fresh election but, as Head wrote privately, Brown believed “he could bully me into dissolving.” Franchise qualifications had been relaxed in recent years, but no provision had been made for reliable voters’ lists. During the recent elections, returning officers had been intimidated into accepting blatantly bogus claims: in Quebec City, thousands of dubious voters allegedly included British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston and French Emperor Napoleon III. Premier Macdonald had carried legislation to create voters’ rolls, but these were not yet ready, and other abuses remained. Head argued that “a new election, under precisely the same laws, held within six to eight months of the last” would be equally unsatisfactory. However, Head was known to like Macdonald, and critics suspected a secret alliance between them. John A. himself angrily branded the charge of collusion “false as hell” but, in England, a senior civil servant suspected that Head was “too much under the influence of Macdonald.” Frustrated and furious, Premier Brown resigned on August 4.

      “Government no. 3 pretty much identical with no. 1,” was Head’s laconic summary of the outcome of a turbulent week. However, there was one notable change: the former ministers mostly returned, but Cartier was now premier. John A. Macdonald had been unlucky in his eight months at the provincial helm, politically in the lop-sided election result, personally through the hammer blow of Isabella’s death. But politics is an unforgiving trade and, for all his efficiency, charm, and political cunning, John A. Macdonald had proved a disappointment in Canada’s highest office. Worse still, he had formally admitted his alcohol problem. His resignation on a trumped-up pretext had proved a ludicrous miscalculation, although it would become a slow-burn grievance in Kingston that his premiership had made the rival city of Ottawa Canada’s capital. Macdonald and Cartier remained allies but, down to 1867, the Montrealer was the senior partner. He was not pleased when Macdonald supplanted him as first prime minister of the Dominion.

      The week of petty politicking played out in a bizarre finale. Somebody recalled that the law had been changed in 1857 to exempt ministers from fighting by-elections if they moved between portfolios within thirty days — a device to permit leisurely Cabinet reshuffles. Since Brown’s “Short Administration” had survived only forty-eight hours, the returning ministers were well within the timeframe, so long as they accepted fresh portfolios. On August 6, John A. Macdonald was sworn in to Cartier’s Cabinet as postmaster general. The next day, he resumed his old office as attorney general West. This was politics as a card game, and the episode was nicknamed the “double shuffle.” Some said the ministers had accepted their joke jobs just before midnight, waited till the clock struck and then picked up their Bibles to swear themselves into their previous portfolios. Victorians were shocked at the sacrilege. Macdonald later implied that the dodge was not his idea but, for the remainder of his career, enemies remembered the squalid pantomime of the double shuffle.

      Building Parliament in Canada’s compromise capital Ottawa. His Kingston voters blamed Macdonald for backing the rival city.

      Paradoxically, this shabby episode spawned an inspirational policy. Almost casually, the new ministry announced that it would ask the Maritime provinces to discuss how Confederation might “perhaps hereafter be practicable.” The initiative was both tentative and tactical. It was the price paid for recruiting Alexander Galt, a reputed financial genius (although he had problems with the concept of a balanced budget) and an early enthusiast for British North American union. Cartier also needed a big idea to trump Grit talk of a two-headed Canadian federation, and Macdonald likely recalled Nova Scotian enthusiasm for the wider union in London the previous year. Above all, raising the Confederation issue might permit delay over Ottawa. Quebec City’s campaign to become the permanent seat of government had argued that its central position between Canada and the Maritimes would make it the obvious capital of a united British North America. Discussing Confederation tacitly signalled to the Bleus that Ottawa might yet be dumped. However, the ploy was checkmated by the governor general’s threat to resign unless Cartier backed the Queen’s selection.

      For Cartier’s new ministry, the union of the provinces was more an aspiration, perhaps even just a slogan, than a practical policy. There was potential for disagreement over the design of any such union: would it imitate the American federation, in which Washington shared its authority with state legislatures, or copy Britain, where a single Parliament at Westminster ruled the entire United Kingdom? Cartier wanted French Canadians to control their own autonomous unit, but Macdonald admired the British constitution, a preference confirmed by the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861. In 1858, this difference was papered over with the phrase “a bond of a federal character” — “bond” meant strong, “federal” meant weak. The initiative petered out in a round of dispatches and delegations, but the Confederation genie was out of the bottle, and the issue returned to the political agenda in 1864.

      Macdonald’s disappointing premiership left his career curiously becalmed at the very top of politics. He claimed he was “unwilling” to return to office in August 1858, “but Cartier would not do anything without me.” His health was poor and, by November, it was “no secret” that he was СКАЧАТЬ