Thomas D'Arcy McGee

by Alexander Brady

Bitter were the complaints of the Opposition against such juggling. McGee's voice joined the chorus of denunciation. He slashed the Cartier-Macdonald group for pushing difficulties in the path of the Brown government, and even accused the governor of an unseemly partiality for Macdonald. His heavy-fisted criticisms aroused intense resentment in the government ranks, and every effort was made to discredit him. The press was wheeled into the sordid task of endeavouring to damage his reputation and ruin his public life. The Toronto Leader and the Catholic Witness of Montreal were truceless in their attacks. Much was made out of the fact that he had been a fugitive rebel, and the hostile Catholic press endeavoured to prove that his orthodoxy was in question. Even an effort was made to get the board of Catholic bishops to condemn him publicly. Innuendoes were thrown out that he had some association with a revolutionary society which threatened the overthrow of Canadian institutions. John A. Macdonald was led to describe him as a rebel in his own country, who had come to Canada to propagate rebellion. Indeed, the party of Macdonald and Cartier procured a complete file of McGee's New York Nation, in order that they might be able to taunt him with the revolutionary and anti-British sentiments which he had expressed between the years 1848 and 1850.

If he had been a man of ordinary ability and troubled with super-sensitiveness, McGee would not have survived this ordeal of his first parliamentary year. But ten years of American journalism had hardened him sufficiently to go buoyantly and successfully through the disagreeable rough-and-tumble of Canadian politics. His rebel antecedents did not encumber him. He boldly defended his revolutionary career in Ireland on the ground that he had rebelled against conditions which did not exist in Canada, and against which any Canadian would have rebelled. As to his position in his new home, he was emphatic in his profession of faith: "I am as loyal to the institutions under which I live in Canada as any Tory of the old or new schools."

Throughout this period he was not always on the side of Brown and the Opposition stalwarts. On the important question of the tariff he voted with the government. In 1858 Cayley had introduced a budget with additions to existing duties. He was bending to the drift of opinion in favour of protection for the juvenile industries of Canada, and was also in search of increased revenue. Galt, who became finance minister in 1858, was influenced by similar considerations. He imposed duties of 20% and 25% on manufactured goods, with the aim of seeking more public revenue and incidentally providing protection to Canadian manufacturers. To George Brown and his followers who had absorbed the free trade doctrines of British liberalism Galt's protective principles were heresy. Brown's organ, the Toronto Globe, thundered against them as pernicious. But McGee, a frank protectionist, championed them as necessary for the development of industrial as well as agrarian activity. "Where there were no producing cities as well as consuming cities, there had been no prosperity—the urban and the rural population must bear some adequate proportion to each other before security and safety could be established." This creed was similar to that preached in the same period by Horace Greeley in the republic to the south. It has continued since to have an influence on Canadian and American statesmen.

In the four years that McGee sat on the opposition benches, the gravest question facing the United Canadas was the fate of the union. Largely on the recommendation of Lord Durham and Lord Sydenham, the two provinces had been united in 1841. But, contrary to Durham's intention, little attempt had been made to merge into one the two peoples, the French of the lower province and the British of the upper. Complete fusion was perhaps impossible. In any case it had been made difficult by the provision of the Union Act that equal representation should be conceded to each province. The two sections of the country thus being recognized as distinct units, the members of the legislature, as representatives of one or the other unit, contended for sectional advantages. At the outset the population of Lower Canada had been larger by 150,000, but in the passage of a few years the situation was reversed. The Upper Canadian members now became sensitive that their province was not receiving benefits commensurate with their numbers. In George Brown they had an eloquent and fearless advocate. In his opinion, the union was a complete failure because it did not succeed in creating a united people. In addition he considered that it upheld an injustice, for it allowed one community to govern another more numerous. His case was stated emphatically in the Globe "It must be obvious to every intelligent man that to accomplish the great ends contemplated by the union, and to draw closer the bonds of sympathy uniting the people of Canada—it is imperatively necessary that legislation wherever practicable, shall be for the whole province and not sectional, and that the local institutions of Upper and Lower Canada shall be gradually assimilated. With two languages—two law codes—two judicial systems—two systems of national instruction—two systems of municipal government—two systems of land tenure—two systems of title registration—two systems of mercantile partnership and right of kin—two systems of relief to solvents—two systems of raising money for local purposes—two systems in everything—how can we hope to create a united people?"

Brown's solution was the concession of representation by population. Through the recognition of this principle the various differences between the two portions of the province would be sponged out by the action of the majority in the legislature. In addition it would redress the injustice suffered by Upper Canada. That province in Brown's estimate had an excess population over Lower Canada of 225,000, and this excess, according to the Reformers, was virtually unrepresented. In plain terms majority rule in the Canadas was impossible and majority interests suffered. Brown raised the principle of representation by population into a slogan cry, and no Highland chief could have been more effective in stirring his impassioned followers. The French were as relentless in their resistance. They rightly feared that representation by population would bring a majority of English into the chamber, and their most cherished interests would be imperilled. Yet Brown, like a representative of Fate, in season and out of season drove home his arguments, and made an ominous deadlock in the legislature. In 1858, when McGee entered the chamber, the majority of French under Cartier, leagued with a minority of British from Upper Canada under Macdonald, were like a threatening army opposed to the followers of Brown, who constituted a majority of the Upper Canadians. The feverish intensity of Canadian politics at the time was the consequence of this strained battle to decide whether the union was to fall under the weight of Brown's attack. One side added as much bitterness to the struggle as the other. On one occasion Cartier stirred up great irritation by expressing the opinion that the excess population of Upper Canada had no more right of representation than the numerous codfish in Gaspé Bay.

What was McGee's position? He was in the ranks of the Opposition, but his views on the momentous question of the time did not entirely square with those of Brown and the Upper Canadian Reformers. He admitted the justice of the claim that numbers should be the basis of representation. "Property should have its weight, intelligence should have its weight, but any man who, on this continent and in this age of the world, did not believe that numbers should be the basis, was as little to be reasoned with as a man who believed in the philosopher's stone." Yet he did not think that a change in the basis of representation would constitute a permanent solution of the difficulties of Canadian government. In October, 1859, he, Dorion, and two other members of the Lower Canadian opposition, L. T. Drummond and L. A. Dessaulles, explored carefully the constitutional problem, and drew up an able report, which has considerable significance in the light of later events. They examined in turn the various suggestions made to relieve the constitutional conflict: repeal of the union, representation by population, the double majority. Repeal of the union was practically impossible. The provinces had so many things in common as to make it imperative that they remain under the same roof. Representation by population, they summarily rejected on the ground that it would still leave room for bitter conflict between the representatives of the respective provinces over the justice of particular legislation. They similarly rejected the double majority, whereby no measure should be considered as carried until it had not merely a majority of the legislature as a whole, but also a majority of members from the section of the country which it affected. They considered that the double majority would give rise to confusions, not least of which would be the difficulty of distinguishing between the cases where it should and should not apply. Moreover, the remedy would be worse than the disease, because it would leave in the chamber two majorities and two minorities.

The true statesmanlike solution in their estimation would be the substitution of a purely federal for the existing legislative union. The federal government should have powers defined to such subjects as were common to the two provinces, leaving supreme jurisdiction in all other matters to the provincial legislatures. The committee even went into some of the details of their suggested system, making it clear throughout that the pervading idea of the new constitution should be the delegation of powers from the province to the federal government. Everything relating to local affairs, such as education, administration of justice, and militia should be under provincial jurisdiction.

This document is symptomatic of McGee's thought. In the New Era, he had painted the vision of a united British North America, but he had not, while a journalist, come to close grips with a scheme of union. His year of parliamentary experiences had brought him nearer to constitutional needs, and his co-operation with Dorion in the projection of a definite plan was the result. Although he later departed from the details of this programme, to the principle of federation he remained faithful. Such was not the case with Dorion. It was the irony of his career that the confederation scheme of 1864, under which Canada grew into lusty young nationhood, found in him its severest critic. In the years following 1859 McGee continued as zealously as before to plead in parliament and on public platforms the cause of federal union. He looked even far beyond the mere federation of the two Canadas. With an extended foresight he advocated a union of all the colonies. In 1860, in the debates on Brown's resolutions, favouring a federal union of the two provinces—to which Brown had now turned—McGee argued that much more desirable would be a union of all the North American provinces. Common interests demanded it. The existing arrangement with its tariff barriers between the colonies hampered trade and economic development. Union would widen intercolonial markets and stimulate the entire material progress of the colonies, while without union they must lag far behind the United States in the working of their natural resources. But federation was imperative for another reason. It was a necessary means of attaining for the colonies a national existence. McGee fervidly looked forward to a day, not distant, "when we should be known not as Upper or Lower Canadians, Nova Scotians, or New Brunswickers, but as members of a nation designated as the Six United Provinces." The establishment of a federal state for the nurturing of a British North American nationality was the shining goal that he held before Canadians. The wider union would not merely solve the political difficulties of the Canadas, but would insure the great destiny of all the colonies.

Canadians of the present take casually the fact that their country straddles a continent. They assume that the eastern settlements expanded through the pressure of population into the prairie country and beyond; that the spread of Canada westward was as inevitable as the growth of a sapling into an oak, that nothing else could happen but what did happen. Their assumption leaves out of consideration the effulgent political idealism that entered into the creation of their country. It was through the daring spirit of individual men and their faith in Canada's future that the Dominion was fashioned. The winning of the West was not the product of mass action, like the swarming of bees taking possession of a new hive. The majority of eastern colonists in the sixties knew nothing of the West, and were content to remain uninformed on the subject. A Nova Scotian of the period would have shaken his head in disbelief had he been told by a passing stranger that, in little more than fifty years, a city on the far-away Red River would possess one of the world's largest wheat exchanges, and that winding freight trains would draw the grain eastward on its way to the markets of Europe. The economic potentialities of the land beyond Lake Superior were a closed book to the average man. The school children knew of it only as the land where the Indian still hung his scalps in his wigwam, and hunted the buffalo. Adults read slender references to it in the newspapers with the mild interest with which their descendants scan the descriptions of Arctic territories discovered by a Stefansson. Had the acquisition of the West depended on popular agitation and action, it would not have become Canadian, and very likely would have become part of the American republic. It was won by the vision and faith of a few men, prominent among whom was McGee.

He had abundant reasons for western expansion. Conspicuous among them was the desire to open up the unexploited prairie lands, where the indigent members of society in the East might, through their own effort, find a competence. For the same reason he had been an ardent champion of western settlement while residing in the United States. A more imaginative consideration was that the Canadian territory might constitute a pathway to the great East, and that thereby the hopes of early explorers in a north-west passage from Europe to Asia might be realized. "We cannot despair," he declared in a speech in 1860, "that the dream of Jacques Cartier may yet be fulfilled, and the shortest route from Europe to China be found through the valley of the St. Lawrence." Some twenty-five years later, the steel lines of the Canadian Pacific Railway made McGee's dream come true.