For some ten months the Macdonald-Dorion government stumbled along under accumulating difficulties. Without a substantial majority it could venture on no bold legislation, and its efforts were mainly concerned with staving off defeat. McGee attacked it with as much fire as any member of the Opposition. He was merciless in his treatment of Sandfield Macdonald. The premier on one occasion taunted him with his rebel past, and McGee replied with a polished sarcasm that held the house spellbound. "Although there may have been imprudence and many errors in the early career of one who was an editor at seventeen, and a public speaker before I was of age, and although there have been many things that my own judgment at this day does not approve, at all events, throughout the whole long road, and it remains for the most part in irrevocable type, the honourable member will find no art of duplicity, he will find no instance in which I betrayed a friend or intrigued against an associate. I have not been fair to men's faces and false behind their back. I have not condoled with sinister sympathy with the friends of a public man whom I desired to injure, while at the same time I placed in the hands of his enemies weapons of attack, forged by malice, and poisoned by slanderous personalities." The words do little to recapture the intense atmosphere of the chamber, the young man with pale face and flashing eyes, and the piercing soprano voice which carried the barbed phrases to every listening ear. An observer, E. R. Cameron, wrote that "the members upon the floor, and the spectators in the galleries, were .... almost breathless during the delivery, and the merciless flogging of the Premier excited the same feelings as would be aroused in a gladiatorial combat, in which one party, by the most exquisite thrusts, is done slowly to death." Notwithstanding the criticisms of McGee and others, the government staggered on until, like a spent runner, it resigned in March, 1864. Another impasse was reached.
After the usual political manœuvres Sir Etienne Taché, with the assistance of J. A. Macdonald, put together a new ministry in which the chief members were Taché, Macdonald, Cartier, Galt, Foley, and McGee. McGee became minister of agriculture, an office in which his chief interest rested, in virtue of its intimate contact with the work of nation-building through colonization. The ministry had the same jagged path to follow as its predecessors. With a slender majority, it worked under the shadow of defeat. It could obviously venture on no bold policies, and it was forced to shrink from clear-cut issues. Eventually, on June 14, it fell, the fourth ministry within four years. The situation had become baffling beyond description. It mattered not in what manner the political groups paired and allied, deadlock continued, like an evil spirit, to stalk the career of each administration. Political ingenuity exhausted itself without avail. Appeals to the electorate brought no wholesome results. The continuance of party conflict merely accentuated the difficulties. Where was the solution? The solution indeed had long been advocated by McGee and others. But it was now pressed forward by a stronger force than advocacy, by the intense gravity of the political situation. George Brown, with an honesty of purpose that should make his name for ever remembered among Canadians, came forward to declare that the time had come for establishing a new system by a union of all parties. His demand constitutes the real beginning of the federal movement consummated three years later.
Early in October, 1863, Brown and McGee had consulted over the difficulties of the existing constitution, and Brown was disposed to approve of a federal union of the Canadas. McGee promised his support to any motion which Brown might introduce on the subject. Hence on October 12, Brown introduced a famous resolution asking for the appointment of a committee to report on the constitutional difficulties with the purpose of finding a way out. The motion was temporarily withdrawn, but was reintroduced on March 14. Weeks again elapsed without anything being done, and throughout this period Brown's motion encountered the stern opposition of Cartier and Macdonald, while McGee was its warm champion, seeing in it the possibility of getting a federal system on the anvil. The committee was finally appointed, McGee and Brown being its two most prominent members. On June 13, the day previous to the fall of the Taché government, it reported in favour of a federation. The fall of the administration precipitated events. Brown's suggestion was now gladly accepted, and the formation of a coalition for the carrying of constitutional changes was agreed upon.
Difficulties strewed the path of forming a coalition. Men who had assailed one another with the bitterness of fishmongers could combine only with diffidence. Moreover, feeling in the country was lethargic. Yet, by the close of June, the administration was formed. The Reformers, Messrs. George Brown, Oliver Mowat, and William McDougall were sworn in as ministers, and eagerly looked forward to their task. Their procedure was shaped for them by events which matured quickly in the Maritime provinces. The need for union among the colonies by the sea had become so imperative that their leaders determined on holding a convention at Charlottetown on September I, for the purpose of fashioning a federal scheme. Fate in her kindest mood could not have given a better opportunity to Canadian statesmen. Why should not the prospective union between Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island include the Canadas? The dream of a united British North America, which had long dazzled the imagination of McGee and others, pushed itself to the fore. The plastic moment had come. Now was the time to shape the destiny of the British possessions. Fortunately men were in the Canadas ready to snatch opportunity by the forelock. Eight members of the ministry, including McGee, departed to Charlottetown to discuss federal union with the leaders of the lower provinces. They were successful in their mission. The statesmen of the Maritime colonies were convinced that the wider union was preferable, and to construct it they agreed to meet at Quebec in the early days of October.
In the months previous to the historic Charlottetown conference, McGee had championed his cherished cause, not merely in the legislature, but in the press and on the platform. The case for confederation had, in all the provinces, no greater publicity agent. In the British American Magazine for August and October, 1863, he eloquently pleaded that the British North American provinces should insure their future by immediate union. With the faith of Mrs. Browning that nations are what they will, he believed that all obstacles would dissolve before the determination of the colonists. "We are between the Gulf Stream and the Rocky Mountains—British subjects—professing monarchists almost to a man—four millions. Are these too few to form a decision on their political future? Our joint revenues within that range exceed those of the respectable kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, Bavaria, Portugal, and Saxony. Our joint civil lists far exceed the cost of the royal governments of those ancient and considerable nations, cramped as they are, where we are boundless in point of territory. It is clear, then, that it is listlessness of will—not lack of means or numbers—which heretofore has prevented us taking up in a practical shape the alternative of the fate before us—the establishment of our future, complete, and permanent constitution."
The reasons for immediate action were those he had adduced in previous years. There was the elemental need of defence. The colonies disunited could not defend themselves, nor could they be expected to fight for one another when they had nothing in common. They cherished British institutions, but these they could not long maintain without union. The force of American example was too great. Moreover, their economic development must inevitably lag behind that of the states to the south, unless they united to confer upon one another the benefits of reciprocal trade and mutual assistance. Of no less importance was the fact that only through confederation could the colonies shoulder the responsibilities which necessarily clung to them as communities with self-government as an ideal. It was not merely in their own interests that they should do so, but in the interests of the mother state. "We have passed out of the stage of pupilage, and we have not emerged into the stage of partnership." The intermediary stage, in McGee's estimation, failed to develop an adequate sense of responsibility among the colonists, while it imposed on the imperial state the unfair burden of defence.
But mere reasons for union were not sufficient. The march of development depended upon another factor. A vital union of any kind presupposed a common sympathy and understanding, and these could be created only by intercourse. The colonists by the sea and those of the Canadas lived under similar institutions, and were of the same racial stock. But they had little intercourse; they were as divided as if they lived on different continents. The inhabitants of Nova Scotia looked upon Canadians with almost as much distrust as they would view the natives of the South Seas. Business relations might have done much to dissipate this feeling, but the drift of trade from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick was southward. Halifax had more commerce with Boston than with Quebec, which lay away to the west, and was too distant for intimacy. McGee, who had travelled in all the colonies and felt as much at home at the friendly firesides of Halifax as in Montreal, pleaded continually for closer relationship. It was essential for that future nationality which he ever saw in the horizon. He expended energy and time to effect the closer contact. Each year since 1859, he had visited the Maritime provinces, pleading on every occasion for closer association. In the hot days of August, 1863, he was in Halifax and St. John, painting vivid pictures of the possibilities in colonial union, and championing the completion of the intercolonial railway as a means to union. "Your destiny and ours," he told the people of St. John, "is as inseparable as are the waters which pour into the Bay of Chaleur, rising though they do, on the one hand on the Canadian, and on the other on the New Brunswick Highlands. Geographically we are bound up beyond the power of extinction."
In the mid-summer of 1864, he attempted something more than a personal tour. With Sandford Fleming, then chief engineer of the intercolonial survey, he planned an elaborate excursion of one hundred leading men from the Canadas. Members of parliament, the professions, and business men were represented. The boards of trade in St. John and Halifax welcomed the deputation, banquets were held, speeches delivered, and the Canadian representatives found through the fellowship of knife and fork how much they had in common with their fellow colonists of the lower provinces. McGee made use of the occasion to plead passionately for federation. The reporter of the Canadien, who accompanied the excursion, stated that at Fredericton McGee surpassed himself in his plea for united action. At Halifax, he declared that if the colonies "remained long as fragments, we shall be lost; but let us be united, and we shall be as a rock which, unmoved itself, flings back the waves that may be dashed upon it by the storm." His eloquent campaigning, combined with the social intercourse provided by the excursion, undoubtedly did much to make successful the discussions at Charlottetown in the following September.
Throughout this period, he endeavoured to advance not merely those material readjustments, such as territorial union, necessary for the creation of a new nationality. With no less enthusiasm, he sought to cultivate sympathy and fellowship between all groups, sects, and parties—the essential basis for a nation. Dissension between the Roman Catholics and Protestants had long rent the Canadas, and McGee from the outset of his residence in Montreal had striven to heal it, frequently at the cost of friction with prominent men of his own church and race who feared that he was compromising their interests. In the period, Toronto was the chief hotbed of sectarian strife. The parades there on St. Patrick's Day had generally ended in rioting and sometimes in bloodshed. McGee poured oil on the troubled waters. He persuaded the Catholic body to forego their parades, out of consideration for public harmony, and also induced them to cease printing a rather vituperative organ, known as the Citizen. In its place he substituted the Freeman, a journal, ably conducted, which championed McGee's policy of conciliation, and did much to bring about harmonious relationships between the Catholic and Protestant sects. With equal fervour he sought to break down the fatal inertia which lay like a mountain upon colonial leaders. In Halifax in 1863, he declared that "if we were ever to have a spirit of patriotism amongst us such as Englishmen manifest with respect to England, and Frenchmen to France, if we are to feel that we have a country, and that it is our country, we must obliterate all sectional lines, and overcome all party and local prejudices, and if in so doing difficulties present themselves, we must conquer them and assert our mastery over all obstacles." It was an admirable creed for those who looked to Confederation as the supreme goal for the colonies.