The John A. Macdonald Retrospective 2-Book Bundle. Ged Martin

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СКАЧАТЬ they would legislate “in the next session of Parliament” to create a local federation for Canada alone.

      Given parliamentary timetables, Macdonald had gained maybe nine months to launch the dormant project of Confederation before conceding victory to Brown. His best hope was to play for time and extend the deadline. But everything depended upon winning over a group of small-pond Maritime politicians, most of them strangers to him. If they said “No” at Charlottetown, John A. Macdonald’s career would hit the buffers. Working hard to prepare an outline scheme, and with his business affairs in disarray, he was under great pressure that summer, even appearing at one Cabinet meeting aggressively drunk.

      Fortunately, despite much champagne diplomacy, he remained sober and performed impressively at Charlottetown. Although the meetings were held in secret, we know that the Canadians — Brown, Galt, and Cartier included — swept their hosts into endorsing Confederation in principle. The delegates then sailed on to Halifax where, on September 12, John A. Macdonald delivered a heartfelt speech. He had spent “twenty long years” dragging himself through “the dreary waste” of provincial politics. “I thought there was no end, nothing worthy of ambition” but Confederation was “well worthy of all I have suffered in the cause of my little country.” He accepted that that “local difficulties may arise ... local jealousies may intervene” but asserted that the union of the provinces was “a fixed fact.” “Union must take place some time. I say now is the time.” On the return journey, the delegates visited New Brunswick to speak at Saint John. It was a worrying sign that Macdonald was too exhausted to leave the ship.

      On October 10, 1864, provincial delegations began a three-week conference at Quebec to convert the outline agreement of Charlottetown into a constitutional blueprint. “Unless the details can be made satisfactory the whole thing must break down,” Macdonald warned. He called for “a powerful central government,” with the provinces assigned “only such powers as may be required for local purposes.” He reminded the Maritimers of the coalition’s timetable, warning that if Canada was compelled to tackle its own problems, “it will be too late for a general federation.” He also told them that the “Intercolonial” railway from Halifax to Quebec was conditional on Confederation, “a political consequence of a political union.”

      D’Arcy McGee later claimed that John A. Macdonald crafted fifty of the seventy-two resolutions that comprised the Quebec scheme. “Not one man of the Conference (except Galt on finance) had the slightest idea of Constitution making,” Macdonald privately boasted. “Whatever is good or ill in the constitution is mine.” Would there have been a Confederation movement without John A. Macdonald? Probably. Would it have been led with the same skill and efficiency? Perhaps not.

      Macdonald was open about his belief that “one government and one parliament ... would be the best, the cheapest, the most vigorous and the strongest system of government we could adopt.” Realistically, he also recognized that centralization was unacceptable to French Canadians, because they were “a minority, with a different language, nationality, and religion.” But a “smoking gun” in a letter to Tory politician, Matthew Crooks Cameron, might suggest he was playing a secret double game. Cameron admitted that the “federal principle does not inspire me with a feeling of confidence,” but John A. Macdonald reassured him that “we have hit upon the only practicable plan — I do not say the best plan … for carrying out the Confederation.” He went further, predicting that British North America would evolve into a unitary state: “you, if spared the ordinary age of men, will see both Local Parliaments & Governments absorbed in the General power. This is as plain to me as if I saw it accomplished but of course it does not do to adopt that point of view in discussing the subject in Lower Canada.” Was there was a deep-laid plot to smuggle some toxic provision into the constitution, a poison time-capsule that the forty-two-year-old Cameron would live to see destroy the provinces? Hardly. Macdonald was trying to hoodwink Cameron with “spin,” and even that failed. When Cameron argued for a legislative union in Parliament, Macdonald replied that French Canadians and Maritimers opposed a unitary scheme. “How, then, is it to be accomplished?” Macdonald knew that Cameron was a gentleman, and gentlemen did not divulge private correspondence.

      Indeed, Macdonald rejected the best instrument for destroying the provinces. The Fathers of Confederation used New Zealand’s federal constitution as a quarry: it was even the source of the celebrated phrase “peace, order and good government.” That document gave the colony’s General Assembly power to abolish New Zealand’s constituent provinces, which it exercised in 1876. But when the Nova Scotian centralizer Jonathan McCully argued for copying this provision, Macdonald retorted: “That is just what we do not want.” John A. Macdonald did not plot to undermine Canada’s provinces.

      The workload of the Quebec Conference took its toll. “John A. Macdonald is always drunk now,” commented one observer: he was found in his hotel room, a rug draped over his nightshirt, in front of a mirror declaiming Hamlet. The genial “John A.” was in overdrive, designing Canada’s new constitution at the expense of his own. After the conference, the delegates headed for a banquet in the nearly-complete Ottawa Parliament Buildings. Keynote speaker would be John A. Macdonald, “but illness ... compelled him to curtail his observations.” Two weeks later he was “still weak.” “I got a severe shock at Ottawa and was very near going off the books,” he admitted. Although his collapse was reportedly “induced by fatigue from assiduous attention to public affairs,” alcohol was a rumoured contributory cause. However, six years later, Macdonald was diagnosed as suffering from gallstones. His 1864 illness perhaps resulted from the banqueting that accompanied the Quebec Conference, too much rich food for his tender gallbladder.

      While he was designing a new constitution, Macdonald was also running the existing government machine — and a time of continental crisis as the American Civil War moved to a close. Southern sympathizers marooned in Canada were arrested after raiding a bank in the border town of St. Albans, Vermont. In mid-December, 1864, C.J. Coursol, a lowly Montreal magistrate, freed them on a technicality, and the raiders even recovered their loot. Macdonald hoped to escape Quebec to spend Christmas in Kingston, “but if there are other such fools as Coursol in the world, I’ll never get away.” He established Canada’s first secret service, to collect intelligence on Southern sympathizers, and also to watch a new menace, the Fenians, an American-based paramilitary organization that aimed to free Ireland by attacking Canada.

      In February 1865, the Canadian Parliament debated Confederation, with Macdonald leading off for the government. Unusually, he had rehearsed his speech. Indeed, his Quebec City landlord feared for Macdonald’s sanity when his distinguished tenant locked himself in his room and harangued the lodging-house cat. Even so, it was a low-key performance. Speaking for several hours, Macdonald outlined the unexciting details of the proposed structure, insisting that the Quebec scheme was a “treaty” agreed with the Maritimers, a package that Canada’s legislators must not amend. Calling Confederation “an opportunity that may never recur,” he concluded by hailing “the happy opportunity now offered of founding a great nation.” Calling it “the feeblest speech he had ever delivered,” Reformer Luther Holton claimed that the centralist Macdonald did not truly believe in the federal system he had helped devise. The charge rankled, and weeks into the marathon debate Macdonald delivered a sparkling extempore rebuttal: maybe his earlier speech had sounded feeble, “but as to my sentiments on Confederation, they were the sentiments of my life, my sentiments in Parliament years ago, my sentiments in the Conference, and my sentiments now.”

      Macdonald’s speech was downbeat partly because it was the curtain-raiser to a comprehensive ministerial battery: Galt talked about finance, Brown and Cartier the advantages of Confederation to Upper and Lower Canada, while D’Arcy McGee supplied the oratorical fireworks. Another factor was disturbing news from the Maritimes, where public opinion was startled by the novelty of the project. Indeed, in New Brunswick, Premier Tilley had already been forced to call an election, rather than face a mutinous local Assembly. Overheated speeches in the Canadian Assembly might sound suspiciously triumphal on the Atlantic seaboard. Indeed, Macdonald unwittingly created СКАЧАТЬ