British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government, 1839-1854

by J. L. Morison

Metcalfe, then, found in Canada a ministry not far from being unanimous, supported by a union of French and British reformers; and he ought to have realized how deeply the extended view of self-government had affected the minds of all, so that only by a serious struggle could Sydenham's position of 1839 be recovered. But Metcalfe was an Anglo-Indian, trained in the school of politics most directly opposed to the democratic ways of North America. He was entirely new to Canadian conditions; and one may watch him studying them conscientiously, but making just those mistakes, which a clever examination candidate would perpetrate, were he to be asked of a sudden to turn his studies to practical account. The very robustness of his sense of duty led him naturally to the two most contentious questions in the field—those which concerned the responsibility of the colonial executive government, and the place of party in dictating to the governor-general his policy and the use to be made of his patronage.

His study of Sydenham's despatches revealed to him the contradiction between that statesman's resolute proclamation of Russell's doctrine, and the course of practical surrender which his actions seemed to have followed in 1841. "In adopting the very form and practice of the Home Government, by which the principal ministers of the Crown form a Cabinet, acknowledged by the nation as the executive administration, and themselves acknowledging responsibility to Parliament, he rendered it inevitable that the council here should obtain and ascribe to themselves, in at least some degree, the character of a cabinet of ministers."[[5]] In a later despatch, Metcalfe attempted to demonstrate the inapplicability of such a form of government to a colony: "a system of government which, however suitable it may be in an independent state, or in a country where it is qualified by the presence of a Sovereign and a powerful aristocracy, and by many circumstances in correspondence with which it has grown up and been gradually formed, does not appear to be well adapted for a colony, or for a country in which those qualifying circumstances do not exist, and in which there has not been that gradual progress, which tends to smooth away the difficulties, otherwise sure to follow the confounding of the legislative and executive powers, and the inconsistency of the practice with the theory of the Constitution."[[6]]

To his mind, what Durham had advocated was infinitely sounder—"that all officers of the government except the governor and his secretary should be responsible to the united Legislature; and that the governor should carry on his government by heads of departments, in whom the United Legislature repose confidence.... The general responsibility of heads of departments, acting under the orders of the Governor, each distinctly in his own department, might exist without the destruction of the former authority of her Majesty's Government."[[7]] So set was he in his opposition to cabinet government on British lines in Canada, that he prophesied separation as the obvious consequence of concession. It was natural that one so distrustful of cabinet machinery in a colony should altogether fail to see the place of party. It must always be remembered that party, in Canada, had few of those sanctions of manners, tradition, and national service, which had given Burke his soundest arguments, when he wrote the apologetic of the eighteenth century Whigs. Personal and sometimes corrupt interests, petty ideas, ignoble quarrels, a flavour of pretentiousness which came from the misapplication of British terms, and a lack of political good-manners—in such guise did party present itself to the British politician on his arrival in British North America. Metcalfe, from his previous experience, had come to identify party divisions with factiousness, a political evil which the efficient governor must seek to extirpate. His triumph in Jamaica had secured the death of party through the benevolent despotism of the governor, and there can be no doubt that he hoped in Canada to perform a precisely similar task. "The course which I intend to pursue with regard to all parties," he wrote to Stanley in April, 1843, "is to treat all alike, and to make no distinctions, as far as depends on my personal conduct." But since parties did exist, and were unlikely to cease to exist, the governor-general's distaste for party in theory merely forced him to become in practice the unconscious leader of the Canadian conservatives, who, under men like MacNab and the leaders of the Orange Lodges, differed only from other parties in the loudness of their loyalist professions, and the paucity of their supporters among the people. Metcalfe complained that at times the whole colony must be regarded as a party opposed to her Majesty's Government.[[8]] He might have seen that what he deplored proceeded naturally from the identification of himself with the smallest and least representative group of party politicians in the colony.

The radical opposition between the governor and the coalition which his executive council represented led naturally to the crisis of November 26th, 1843. For months the feeling of mutual alienation had been growing. On several occasions, more notably in the appointment to the speakership of the legislative council, and in one to a vacant clerkship of the peace, the governor's use of patronage had caused offence to his ministers; and, towards the end of November, the entire Cabinet, with the exception of Daly, whose nickname "the perpetual secretary" betokened that he was either above party feeling or beneath it, handed in their resignations. The motives of their action became, as will be shown, the subject of violent controversy; but the statement of Sir Charles Metcalfe seems in itself the fairest and most probable account of what took place. "On Friday, Mr. La Fontaine and Mr. Baldwin came to the Government House, and after some irrelevant matters of business, and preliminary remarks as to the course of their proceedings, demanded of the Governor-general that he should agree to make no appointment, and no offer of an appointment, without previously taking the advice of the Council; that the lists of candidates should in every instance be laid before the Council; that they should recommend any others at discretion; and that the Governor-general in deciding, after taking their advice, shall not make any appointment prejudicial to their influence."[[9]]

At a slightly later date the ministers attributed their resignation to a serious difference between themselves and the governor-general on the theory of responsible government. To that statement Metcalfe took serious exception, but he admitted that "in the course of the conversations which both on Friday and Saturday followed the explicit demand made by the Council regarding the patronage of the Crown, that demand being based on the construction put by some of the gentlemen on the meaning of responsible government, different opinions were elicited on the abstract theory of that still undefined question as applicable to a colony."[[10]] There can be no doubt that the casus belli was an absolute assertion of the right of the council to control patronage, but it is, at the same time, perfectly clear that in the opinion of the ministers the disposal of patronage formed part of the system of responsible government, and that they were quite explicit to Metcalfe in their statements on that point. The incident, striking enough in itself, gave occasion for an extraordinary outburst of pamphleteering; and the reckless or incompetent statements of men on either side make it necessary to dispel one or two illusions created by the partizan excitement of the time. On the side of the council, Hincks, the inspector-general, then and afterwards contended that the incident was only an occasion and a pretext; that Stanley had sent Metcalfe out to wreck the system of responsible government, so far conceded by Sydenham and Bagot; and that the episode of 1843 was part of a deeper plot to check the growth of Canadian freedom.[[11]] Apart from the absurdities contained in Hincks' statement of the case, the only answer which need be made to the charge is that, if Stanley could have descended to such ignoble plotting, Metcalfe was the last man in the world to act as his dishonoured instrument. On the other side, Gibbon Wakefield believed that the council chose the occasion to escape from a defeat otherwise inevitable, in the hope that a renewed agitation for responsible government might reinstate them in public favour. As Metcalfe gave the suggestion some authority by accepting it provisionally in a despatch,[[12]] the details of Wakefield's charge may be given. The ministry, he held, had been steadily weakening. Two bills, advocated by them, had been abandoned owing to the opposition of their followers. The French solidarity had begun to break up, and La Fontaine had found in Viger a rival in the affections of his adherents. The ministers, intoxicated by the possession of a little brief authority, had offended the sense of the House by their arrogance; and the debates concerning the change of the seat of government from Kingston to Montreal had been a cause of stumbling to many. With their authority weakened in the House, doubtful in the country, and more than doubtful with the governor-general, the resignation of the ministers, in Wakefield's view of the case, "upon a ground which was sure to obtain for them much popular sympathy, was about the most politic of their ministerial acts."[[13]]

But the ministry possessed and continued to possess a great parliamentary majority; and a dissolution could not in any way have improved their position. Besides this, the alienation of the councillors from the governor-general had developed far more deeply than was generally supposed; indeed it is difficult to see how common action between the opposing interests could have continued with any real benefit to the public. On May 23rd, that is six months before the resignation, Captain Higginson, the Governor's civil secretary, had an interview with La Fontaine, to ascertain his views on the appointment of a provincial aide-de-camp, and on general topics. The accuracy of Higginson's précis of the conversation was challenged by La Fontaine, but its terms seem moderate and probable, and do not misrepresent the actual position of the Executive Council in 1843—a determined opposition to the governor-general's attempt to destroy government by party: "Mr. La Fontaine said, 'Your attempts to carry on the government on principles of conciliation must fail. Responsible government has been conceded, and when we lose our majority we are prepared to retire; to strengthen us we must have the entire confidence of the Governor-general exhibited most unequivocally—and also his patronage—to be bestowed exclusively on our political adherents. We feel that His Excellency has kept aloof from us. The opposition pronounce that his sentiments are with them. There must be some acts of his, some public declaration in favour of responsible government, and of confidence in the Cabinet, to convince them of their error. This has been studiously avoided.'"[[14]] The truth is that the ministry felt the want of confidence, which, on the governor's own confession, existed in his mind towards them. Believing, too, as all of them did more or less, in party, they must already have learned the views of Metcalfe on that subject, and they suspected him of taking counsel with the conservatives, whom Metcalfe declared to be the only true friends to Britain in Canada. Matters of patronage Metcalfe had determined, as far as possible, to free from party dictation; and so he and his ministers naturally fell out on the most obvious issue which their mutual differences could have raised. There was nothing disingenuous in the popular party claiming that the patronage question stood in this case for the broader issue. Indeed Metcalfe's own statement that "he objected to the exclusive distribution of patronage with party views and maintained the principle that office ought, in every instance, to be given to the man best qualified to render efficient service to the State" was actually a challenge to the predominance of the party-cabinet system, which no constitutionalist could have allowed to pass in silence. Egerton Ryerson, to whom in this instance the maxim about the cobbler sticking to his last is applicable, erected a ridiculous defence for Metcalfe, holding that "according to British practice, the councillors ought to have resigned on what Metcalfe had done, and not on what he would not promise to do. If the Crown intended to do just as they desired the governor-general to do, still the promise ought not to be given, nor ought it to have been asked. The moment a man promises to do a thing he ceases to be as free as he was before he made the promise."[[15]] The actual struggle lay between two schools directly opposed in their interpretation of responsible government; and since Sir Charles Metcalfe definitely and avowedly set himself against cabinet government, the party system, and the place of party in allocating patronage, the ministers were not free to allow him to appoint men at his own discretion. For the sake of a theory of government for which many of them had already sacrificed much, they were bound to defend what their opponents called the discreditable cause of party patronage.

The line of action which the members of council followed had already been sketched out by Robert Baldwin in his encounter with Sydenham. In the debate of June 18th, 1841, Baldwin had admitted that should the representative of the Crown be unwilling to accept the advice offered to him by his council, it would be impossible by any direct means to force that advice upon him. But he also held that this did not relieve the members of council for a moment from the fulfilment of an imperative duty. "If their advice," he said, "were accepted—well and good. If not, their course would be to tender their resignations."[[16]]