John A (45 page)

As thought Macdonald, so did almost everyone else. If, in Macdonald's judgment, Americans were subject to “the tyranny of mere numbers,” to the Toronto
Leader
U.S. presidents were “the slave of the rabble,” to the
Globe
democracy was “one of those dreadful American heresies,” and to Brown American elections were a sham, because “the balance of power is held by the ignorant unreasoning mass.” McGee, during his speech in the Confederation Debates, said, “The proposed Confederation will enable us to bear up shoulder to shoulder, to resist the spread of this universal democracy doctrine.” In Lower Canada politicians thought the same way; so, still more vociferously, did the Catholic hierarchy. In Canada there were conspicuously no great debates about democracy as there had been in Britain during each of its Reform Laws.
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There nevertheless was a debate in Canada's Legislative Assembly about whether a constitution should be sanctioned by the people or only by those few who happened to be members of the legislature. A Reform backbencher, James O'Halloran, addressed the issue directly. “When we assume the power to deal with this question, to change the whole system of government, to effect a revolution peaceful though it may be, without reference to the will of the people of this country,” he said, “we arrogate to ourselves a right never conferred upon us, and our act is a usurpation.” He went on, describing the people as “the only rightful source of political power.” Another backbencher, Benjamin Seymour, supported O'Halloran,
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as did a few newspapers, such as the Hamilton
Times,
which declared forthrightly, “If their [the people's] direct decision on the confederation question is unnecessary…we can imagine none in the future of sufficient importance to justify an appeal to them. The polling booths thereafter may as well be turned into pig-pens, and the voters lists cut into pipe-lighters.”

A second debate on the issue of democracy occurred after the Confederation Debates had ended, when a Conservative member, John Hillyard Cameron, moved a motion calling for an election to be held before the constitution was enacted. The motion was defeated easily. The brief debate that followed, though, inspired Macdonald
to muster his most extended and considered arguments to justify parliamentary supremacy over the will of the people.

The only way to determine the people's will on a single issue would be to hold a referendum, declared Macdonald. In a letter to a supporter, Saumel Amsden, he argued that a referendum would be “unconstitutional and anti-British” anyway, “submission of the complicated details to the Country is an obvious absurdity.” In the Parliament, he based his argument on the nature of Parliament itself. “We in this house” he told the members, “are representatives of the people, not mere delegates, and to pass such a law would be robbing ourselves of the character of representatives.” The idea itself was dangerous, because “a despot, an absolute monarch” could use referendums to win public approval “for the laws necessary to support a continuation of his usurpation.” The strength of Macdonald's feelings came through in his unaccustomed eloquence: “If the members of this house do not represent the country—all its interest, classes and communities—it never has been represented. If we represent the people of Canada…then we are here to pass laws for the peace, welfare and good government of the country…. If we do not represent the people of Canada, we have no right to be here.”
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Macdonald genuinely believed what he was saying; as a desirable bonus, his argument ensured that the Quebec Resolutions would be approved as quickly as possible.
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One other factor may have influenced Macdonald's arguments against democracy: he knew that referendums produce losers as well as winners, and that turning some people into losers always comes at a cost. Macdonald had anticipated this point in the speech he delivered at the beginning of the conference in Quebec City. The effect of the constitution, he told the delegates, would be to create “a strong and lasting government under which we can work out our constitutional liberty as opposed to democracy, and be able to protect the minority by having a powerful central government…. The people of every section must feel they are protected.” One of the constitution's purposes would be specifically to protect minorities—religious, ethnic and linguistic. Here Macdonald was feeling his way towards the thoroughly modern and pre-eminently Canadian concept that democracy must balance its own defining rule—the will of the majority—with the needs, and the rights, of minorities.

Contemporary sensibilities are still bruised by Macdonald's exclusion of Canadians from any say in making their own constitution. If he had included them, though, it might not have made that decisive a difference. Then, no more than 15 per cent of adults in Canada had the vote. And the turnout might well have been low. A systematic search of Macdonald's correspondence during the key years of 1864 and 1865 reveals how few letters he sent out expressing his views about and arguments for the constitution. The explanation is disconcerting: he wrote few letters about the constitution because he received very few asking for his thoughts. The truth is that at the same time they were excluded from constitution making, Canadians willingly excluded themselves. Moreover, there was always the risk that a referendum might indeed have made a decisive difference: Confederation might well have lost.

Macdonald's main speech, two hours in length, given on February 6, wasn't one of his best. He was tired, suffering an illness of some kind that was caused or exacerbated by heavy drinking. Anyway, he had said everything many times before. He declared that he had always favoured a legislative union—“the best, the cheapest, the most vigorous, and the strongest system of government we could adopt”—but accepted that a federation of some kind was needed to protect “the individuality of Lower Canada.” In addition, both of the Maritime provinces now committed to Confederation were not prepared to “lose their individuality as separate political organizations.”

He did broach one fresh topic of potentially great importance. Some Canadians, Macdonald noted, opposed Confederation out of fear that “it is an advance towards independence.” He himself had no such concern; he did, though, expect the transatlantic relationship to change. “The colonies are now in a transition state. Gradually a different colonial system is being developed—and it will become[,] year by year, less a case of dependence on our part, and of overruling protection on the part of the Mother Country, and more a case of healthy and cordial alliance. Instead of looking on us as a merely dependent colony, England will have in us a friendly nation to stand by her in North America in peace or in war.”

Among all the speakers in the six-week debate, no one identified the dilemma inherent in Canada's ongoing relationship with Britain with more devastating accuracy than Christopher Dunkin.
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Small and whip-smart—perhaps too smart for his own
good, because he generated more bright ideas than his hearers could absorb—Dunkin asked rhetorically, “What are we doing? Creating a new nationality, according to the advocates of this scheme. I hardly know whether we are to take the phrase as ironical or not. It is a reminder that, in fact, we have no sort of nationality at all about us…. Unlike the people of the United States, we are to have no foreign relations at all to look after…therefore, our new nationality, if we could create it, could be nothing but a name.” Cruelly, but unanswerably, Dunkin commented, “Half a dozen colonies federated are but a federated colony after all.”

In response to the contradiction identified by Dunkin—of creating a nation that would have no nationality—Cartier did his best, very possibly, since he was no intellectual, by repeating ideas suggested to him by Macdonald. “When we were united together, if union were attained, we would form a political nationality, with which neither the national origin nor the religion of any individual would interfere,” said Cartier. Some complained that Canada was too diverse, but, he continued, “the idea of unity of races was utopian—it was impossible. Distinctions of this kind would always exist. Dissimilarity in fact appeared to be the order of the physical world, of the moral world, as well as in the political world.” Britain itself was composed of several nations. Likewise in Canada, the English, French, Irish and Scots would each, by their “efforts and success[,] increase the prosperity and glory of the new confederacy.” In his rough way, Cartier was talking about a nation whose unity would be its diversity.

Cartier's principal purpose was to mollify Quebecers' anxieties about a “new nationality.” Nevertheless, his comments were one of perhaps only two genuinely original insights to emerge during the prolonged debate. The other insight has almost vanished from the history books, but it merits being revived. Its author,
Alexander Mackenzie, that worthy but dull rawboned Scot, later a Liberal prime minister, commented in the midst of an otherwise routine speech, “I do not think the federal system is necessarily a weak one, but it is a system which requires a large degree of intelligence and political knowledge on the part of the people.”

As the days passed, it became clear that those opposed to the scheme, principally the
rouges,
had nothing to suggest in its place. A mood of inevitability took hold. At times, there were only twenty members in the chamber. In the description of the
Stratford Beacon,
the House had deteriorated to “an unmistakably seedy condition, having as it was positively declared, eaten the saloon keeper clean out, drunk him entirely out, and got all the fitful naps of sleep that the benches along the passages could be made to yield.”

The vote on the main motion was called at last, at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday, March 11, 1865. The result was 99 to 33. The Nays included nineteen French Canadians—a half-dozen fewer than those who had voted six weeks earlier for Dorion's motion opposing a “new nationality.”

Except for the legislatures in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Confederation was now a done deal.

Four weeks later, the long agony south of the border ended when General Robert E. Lee called on Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, bringing with him the signed surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. Thereafter, the North began demobilizing its vast armies with
remarkable speed. Fear of an invasion northwards receded rapidly, in Canada as well as in Britain. In Macdonald's judgment, either the huge Northern armies, “full of fight,” would invade almost immediately or, if not, “we may look for peace for a series of years.”

One substantive concern did remain. Among those soon to be released from the Northern armies were tens of thousands of Irishmen, all now trained in the arts of war. A new word entered the Canadian political vocabulary—
Fenian
(from the Fenian Brotherhood, originally created in 1858 for the purpose of liberating Ireland). Macdonald charged his intelligence chief, Gilbert McMicken, to keep a close eye for any possible cross-border raids. He took seriously the declarations by Fenian leaders that one effective way to deliver a blow at Britain would be to attack the lightly guarded Canada. “The movement must not be despised,” he wrote to Monck. “I shall spare no expense in watching them.”