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

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СКАЧАТЬ finally met in June 1866, the governor general was “uneasy.” Britain’s Parliament generally took a holiday between August and February, but in 1866 an autumn session seemed likely to tackle a political crisis over parliamentary reform. Lord Monck wanted to complete Canada’s preparations, travel to London, and pass the Confederation act before the close of 1866. On June 21, he threatened to resign if Confederation faltered. Macdonald read the governor general a polite lecture on constitutional responsibility, urging Monck to trust “my Canadian Parliamentary experience.” As for Confederation, “success is certain, and it is now not even a question of strategy. It is merely one of tactics.” But uncertainty returned when Britain’s Liberal government resigned and an inexperienced minority Conservative ministry took office. There would be no autumn session, and if the parliamentary reform issue could not be resolved when Westminster reassembled early in 1867, a British general election would follow. Nova Scotians were due to vote too, around June 1867. Although the colony’s politicians had fallen into line with New Brunswick, proud Bluenoses might well reject Confederation.

      Drafting legislation would require “weeks of anxious and constant labour” in England, but preparations seemed lethargic in Ottawa. Proposed local constitutions for Upper and Lower Canada were introduced on July 13, 1866, but there was no sense of urgency about ratifying them. On August 6, the Globe denounced the delay as “shameful,” ominously blaming “Ministerial incapacity.” It was “the common talk of Ottawa” that Macdonald was responding to pressure in his usual deplorably liquid way: Monck’s resignation threat had likely been a coded warning. In mid-August, the Globe abandoned all restraint to report that Macdonald had made a “wild and incoherent” speech in Parliament, proof that he was “in a state of gross intoxication.” George Brown’s newspaper broadened its attack over a three-week period. Never before, it claimed, had a Cabinet minister been “seen to hold on to his desk to prevent himself from falling … with utterance so thick as to be almost incomprehensible … so utterly gone at mid-day as to be unconscious of what he was doing.” Macdonald’s drunken bouts threatened the “postponement of Confederation.”

      Macdonald’s alcohol problem was no secret, but public attitudes to drink were ambivalent. One supporter even urged him “not to rely on Cold Water, & tea, & coffee alone, to sustain your not very robust &, sometimes over-wrought frame.” Macdonald had twice publicly admitted his need to reform, but the temperance groups he joined were widely viewed as cranks and killjoys. Macdonald often joked about his weakness, claiming that Canadians preferred John A. drunk to George Brown sober. Legend claimed that Macdonald once shocked an audience by vomiting during a public debate, but charmed them by explaining that his opponent’s policies turned his stomach. Pressures of the Confederation timetable plus his lonely Ottawa existence probably explain why Macdonald was drinking heavily. Friendship with fellow minister D’Arcy McGee, another notorious boozer, worsened the problem. The Globe declared that “never before were two Ministers of the Crown seen at one time rolling helplessly on the Ministerial bench.” Legend claimed that Macdonald told his colleague that the Cabinet could not afford two drunks — so McGee must give up alcohol. Macdonald threatened to sue, but the case never came to court, and even his apologists did not deny the stories. Instead, his defenders organized a banquet in his honour, held at Kingston on September 5, where the impressively sober guest of honour obliquely deplored the “wanton and unprovoked attack” upon him. Guest speakers lavished generous praise as damage limitation, but one speech was so exaggerated it almost destroyed Macdonald’s career.

      Leading an anti-Confederation delegation in London, the veteran Nova Scotian politician Joseph Howe pounced upon McGee’s overblown statement that Macdonald had crafted fifty of the seventy-two Quebec resolutions. On October 3, Howe released a statement “charitably” attributing the “incoherent” nature of the Confederation project to alcoholic excess, and asking why Maritimers should be ruled by Canadian politicians who “cannot govern themselves.” Alarm bells rang at the highest levels of the Empire. The Globe had specifically charged that Macdonald had been drunk during the Fenian raid, and Lord Monck had privately confirmed that the minister of militia had been “incapable of all official business for days on end.” London bureaucrats were aghast at Macdonald’s behaviour. One argued that they should “endeavour to get the Offender ousted.” Senior civil servant Frederic Rogers hoped “the Canadians will have the good sense to keep Mr. John A. Macdonald on the other side of the Atlantic.” There were urgent consultations among British Cabinet ministers. The colonial secretary, Lord Carnarvon, concluded that “in spite of his notorious vice,” Macdonald was “the ablest politician in Upper Canada.” Losing Macdonald “would absolutely destroy Confederation”; without Confederation, Canada would eventually join the United States. In a carefully worded letter to Monck, sent on October 19, Carnarvon avoided naming the offender but stressed that “undoubted ability” was no excuse for drunkenness. By the time he sailed for England in mid-November, Macdonald would have known how close his career had come to disaster. Had he been excluded from the final Confederation talks in London in 1866–67, he would hardly have become the Dominion’s first prime minister.

      Preparation of the new British American constitution fell into two parts, a debate on the blueprint among the colonial delegates themselves before Christmas, and negotiations with the British in the New Year to shape an act of Parliament. Thirteen delegates representing Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia began talks at London’s Westminster Palace Hotel on December 4, 1866, concluding their deliberations on Christmas Eve. The politician who had so nearly been banned from taking part became, in the tribute of fellow delegate Hector Langevin, the key figure, “l’homme de la conférence.” Indeed, his primacy was recognized at the outset, when the Maritimers proposed him as chairman. Maritime delegates also quietly accepted the Quebec scheme as the basis for discussion — there was no alternative blueprint. Delegates began with an outline survey of the seventy-two resolutions, deleting those that applied only to Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island, which had dropped out of the movement, and highlighting others for reconsideration. Then they started over again, working through the scheme in detail. In all, they sat for around sixty hours, allowing about fifty minutes to examine each resolution. The Maritimers were “excessively fond of talking” but few changes were made. Much of the credit went to the chairman, “un fin renard,” Langevin called him, the elegant fox — well-informed, persuasive, capable, and popular. Macdonald’s contribution was remarkable since, for much of the conference, he was in pain, having badly burned himself in a hotel-room fire.

      After Christmas there was a lull, while the Colonial Office considered the delegates’ work. Even Macdonald managed to take a short break in Paris. Then, as the February 1867 meeting of the Westminster Parliament approached, the pace quickened and the pressure intensified, with some disagreements between the delegates and British policy-makers. There were problems in turning the fuzzy edges of the “London Resolutions” into the sharp language of an act of Parliament, while British concerns, for instance about the role of the Senate, opened regional divisions and strained the harmony of December.

      By January 13, 1867, Macdonald feared “a good deal of difficulty” with his francophone colleagues, Cartier and Langevin, over “the proposed change as to Property and Civil rights.” It seems that the British were probing an overlap in the delegates’ London Resolutions, which allocated responsibility for “Marriage and Divorce” to the central Parliament, but gave the provinces control over “Property and civil rights (including the solemnization of marriages).” As devout Catholics, French Canadians rejected divorce but they recognized that British North America’s Protestant majority permitted the dissolution of failed marriages. Hence, in a very Canadian compromise, the central Parliament could grant divorces, but Lower Canada’s legislature would have power to prevent Catholic divorcees from remarrying within the province.

      If there was a row over marriage laws, it was soon settled, but it triggered a nasty conspiracy theory. When Cartier died in 1873, a Quebec journalist, Elzéar Gérin, claimed that the anglophone delegates in London tried to bully their two French colleagues into accepting a centralized union. But, said Gérin, Cartier outwitted them, by mobilizing the figurehead premier, Narcisse Belleau, who had been left behind in Canada. Belleau СКАЧАТЬ