British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government, 1839-1854

by J. L. Morison

In a young and not yet civilized community it was natural that the early days of self-government should witness some corruption among the voters, the more so because, at election times "there were no less than four days, the nomination, two days' polling, and declaration day, on all of which, by a sort of unwritten law, the candidates in many constituencies were compelled to keep open house for their supporters," while direct money bribes were often resorted to, especially on the second day's polling in a close contest.[[21]]

Apart from jobbery and frank corruption, Canadian politicians condescended at times to ignoble trickery, and to evasions of the truth which came perilously near breaches of honour. The most notorious breach of the constitutional decencies was the celebrated episode nicknamed the "Double Shuffle." Whatever apologists may say, John A. Macdonald sinned in the very first essentials of political fair-play. He had already led George Brown into a trap by forcing government into his hands. When Brown, too late to save his reputation, discovered the sheer futility of his attempt to make and keep together a government, and when it once more fell to the Conservatives to take office, Macdonald saved himself and his colleagues the trouble of standing for re-election by a most shameful constitutional quibble. According to a recent act, if a member of Legislative Council or Assembly "shall resign his office, and within one month after his resignation, accept any other of the said offices (enumerated above), he shall not vacate his seat in the said Assembly or Council."[[22]] It was a simple, and a disgraceful thing, for the ministers, once more in power, to accept offices other than those which they had held before resignation, and then, at once, to pass on to the reacceptance of the old appropriate positions. They saved their seats at the expense of their honour. In spite of Macdonald's availability, there was too much of the village Machiavelli about his political tactics to please the educated and honest judgment.

It was very natural too that, in these early struggles towards independence and national self-consciousness, the crudities inseparable from early colonial existence should be painfully apparent. In Canada at least, vice could not boast that it had lost half its evil by losing all its grossness. According to Sir Richard Cartwright, the prolonged absence from domestic associations, led to a considerable amount of dissipation among members of parliament. The minister who dominated Canadian politics for so many years before and after Confederation set an unfortunate example to his flock; and many of the debates read as though they drew their heat, if not their light, from material rather than intellectual sources. Apart from offences against sobriety and the decalogue, there can be no doubt that something of the early ferocity of politics still continued, and the disgrace of the Montreal riots which followed Elgin's sanction of the Rebellion Losses bill was rendered tenfold more disgraceful by the participation in them of gentlemen and politicians of position. Half the success of democratic institutions lies in the capacity of the legislators for some public dignity, and a certain chivalrous good nature towards each other. But that is perhaps too high a standard to set for the first colonial Assembly which had exercised full powers of self-government since 1776. After all, there were great stretches of honesty and high purpose to counterbalance the squalid jobs and tricks. If Macdonald sinned in one direction, Alexander Mackenzie had already begun his course of almost too austere rectitude in another. Opposition kept a keen eye on governmental misdoings, and George Brown, impulsive, imprudent, often lacking in sane statesmanship, and, once or twice, in nice honour, still raised himself, the readers of his newspaper, and the Assembly which he often led in morals, if not in politics, to a plane not far below that of the imperial Parliament. But the highest level of feeling and statesmanship reached by Canadian politicians before 1867 was attained in those days of difficulty in 1864, when the whole future of Canada was at stake, and when none but Canadians could guide their country into safety. There were many obstacles in the way of united action between the leaders on both sides; the attempt to create a federal constitution was no light task even for statesmen of genius; and the adaptation of means to end, of public utilities to local jealousies, demanded temper, honesty, breadth of view. George Brown, who with all his impracticability and lack of restraint, behaved with notable public spirit at this time, spoke for the community when he said, "The whole feeling in my mind is one of joy and thankfulness that there were found men of position and influence in Canada, who, at a moment of serious crisis, had nerve and patriotism enough to cast aside political partizanship, to banish personal considerations, and unite for the accomplishment of a measure so fraught with advantage to their common country."[[23]] In the debate from which these words are taken, Canadian statesmen excelled themselves, and it is not too much to say that whether in attack or defence, the speakers exhibited a capacity and a public spirit not unworthy of the imperial Parliament at its best.[[24]]

It would, however, be a mistake to exhibit the Canadian Assembly of early Victorian days as characterized for long by so sublime and Miltonic a spirit as is suggested by the Confederation debates. After all, they were mainly provincial lawyers and shrewd uncultured business men who guided the destinies of Canada, guilty of many lapses from dignity in their public behaviour, and exhibiting not infrequently a democratic vulgarity learned from the neighbouring republic. That was a less elevated, but altogether living and real picture of the Canadian politician, which Sir John Macdonald's biographer gave of his hero, and the great opposition leader, as they returned, while on an imperial mission, from a day at the Derby: "Coming home, we had lots of fun: even George Brown, a covenanting old chap, caught its spirit. I bought him a pea-shooter and a bag of peas, and the old fellow actually took aim at people on the tops of busses, and shot lots of peas on the way home."[[25]]

It now becomes necessary to answer the question which, for twenty years, English politicians had been putting to those who argued in favour of Canadian self-government. Given a system of local government, really autonomous, what will become of the connection with Great Britain? So far as the issue is one purely constitutional and legal, it may be answered very shortly. Responsible government in Canada seriously diminished the formal bonds which united that province to the mother country. For long the pessimists in Britain had been proclaiming that the diminution of the governor-general's authority and responsibility would end the connection. After the retirement of Lord Elgin, that diminution had taken place. It is a revelation of constitutional change to pass from the full, interesting, and many-sided despatches and letters of Sydenham, Bagot, and Elgin, to the perfunctory reports of Head and Monck. Elgin had contended that a governor might hope to establish a moral influence, which would compensate for the loss of power, consequent on the surrender of patronage to an executive responsible to the local parliament;[[26]] but it was not certain that either Head or Monck possessed this indirect control. In 1858 Sir Edmund Head acted with great apparent independence, when he refused to allow George Brown and his new administration the privilege of a dissolution; and the columns of The Globe resounded with denunciations which recalled the days of Metcalfe and tyranny. But, even if Head were independent, it was not with an authority useful to the dignity of his position; and the whole affair has a suspicious resemblance to one of John A. Macdonald's tricks. The voice is Macdonald's voice, if the hands are the hands of Head. Under Monck, the most conspicuous assertion of independence was the governor's selection of J. S. Macdonald to lead the ministry of 1862, instead of Foley, the more natural alternative for premier. Nevertheless Monck's despatches, concerned as they are with diplomatic and military details, present a striking contrast to those of Sydenham and Elgin, who proved how active was the part they played in the life of the community by the vividness of their sketches of Canadian politics and society. So sparing, indeed, was Monck in his information, that Newcastle had to reprove him, in 1863, for sending so little news that the Colonial Office could have furnished no information on Canada to the Houses of Parliament had they called for papers.[[27]] During the confederation negotiations, the governor made an admirable referee, or impartial centre, round whom the diverse interests might group themselves: but no one could say that events were shaped or changed by his action. The warmest language used concerning Her Majesty's representative in Canada may be found in the speech of Macdonald in the confederation debate: "We place no restriction on Her Majesty's prerogative in the selection of her representative. The Sovereign has unrestricted freedom of choice. Whether in making her selection she may send us one of her own family, a Royal Prince, as a Viceroy to rule us, or one of the great statesmen of England to represent her, we know not.... But we may be permitted to hope that when the union takes place, and we become the great country which British North America is certain to be, it will be an object worthy the ambition of the statesmen of England to be charged with presiding over our destinies."[[28]]

Apart from the viceregal operations of the governor, the direct action of the Crown was called for by the province in one notable but unfortunate incident, the choice of a new capital. Torn asunder by the strife of French and English, Canada was unable, or at least unwilling, to commit herself to the choice of a definitive capital, after Montreal had been rendered impossible by the turbulence of its mobs. So the Queen's personal initiative was invited. But the awkwardness of the step was revealed in 1858, when a division in the House practically flung her decision contemptuously aside—happily only for the moment, and informally. George Brown was absolutely right when he said: "I yield to no man for a single moment in loyalty to the Crown of England, and in humble respect and admiration of Her Majesty. But what has this purely Canadian question to do with loyalty? It is a most dangerous and ungracious thing to couple the name of Her Majesty with an affair so entirely local, and one as to which the sectional feelings of the people are so excited."[[29]] It had become apparent, long before 1867, that while the loyalty of the province to the Sovereign, and the personal influence of her representative were bonds of union, real, if hard to describe in set terms, the headship over the Canadian people was assumed to be official, ornamental, and symbolical, rather than utilitarian.

In other directions, the formal and legal elements of the connection were loosening—-more especially in the departments of commerce and defence.[[30]] The careers of men like Buchanan and Galt, through whom the Canadian tariff received a complete revision, illustrate how little the former links to Britain were allowed to remain in trade relations. There was a day when, as Chatham himself would have contended, the regulation of trade was an indefeasible right of the Crown. That contention received a rude check not only in the elaboration of a Canadian tariff in 1859, but in the claims made by the minister of finance: "It is therefore the duty of the present government, distinctly to affirm the right of the Canadian Legislature to adjust the taxation of the people in the way they judge best, even if it should meet the disapproval of the Imperial ministry. Her Majesty cannot be advised to disallow such acts, unless her advisers are prepared to assume the administration of the affairs of the colony, irrespective of the views of the inhabitants."[[31]] Similarly, the adverse vote on the militia proposals of 1862, which so exercised opinion in Britain, was but another result of the spirit of self-government operating naturally in the province. It was not that Canadians desired consciously to check the military plans of the empire. It was only that the grant of autonomy had permitted provincial rather than imperial counsels to prevail, and that a new laxity, or even slipshodness, had begun to appear in Canadian military affairs, weakening the formal military connection between Britain and Canada. Canadian defence, from being part of imperial policy, had become a detail in the strife of domestic politics. "There can be no doubt," Monck reported, "that the proposed militia arrangements were of a magnitude far beyond anything which had, up to that time, been proposed, and this circumstance caused many members, especially from Lower Canada, to vote against it; but I think there was also, on the part of a portion of the general supporters of government, an intention to intimate by their vote the withdrawal of their confidence from the administration."[[32]]

Even before 1867, then, it had become apparent that the imperial system administered on Home Rule principles was something entirely different from a federation like that of the United States, with carefully defined State and Federal rights. All the presumption, in the new British state, was in favour of the so-called dependency, and the British Tories were correct, when they prophesied a steady retrogression in the legal rights possessed by the mother country. But the element which they had ignored was that of opinion. Public feeling rather than constitutional law was to be the new foundation of empire. How did the development of Canadian political independence affect public sentiment towards Britain?

The new regime began under gloomy auspices. In 1849 Lord Elgin gave the most decisive proof of his allegiance to Canadian autonomy; and in 1849 a violent agitation for annexation to the United States began.[[33]] Many forces assisted in the creation of the movement, and many groups, of the most diverse elements, combined to constitute the party of annexation. There was real commercial distress, in part the result of the commercial revolution in Britain, and Montreal more especially felt the strain acutely. "Property," wrote Elgin to Grey in 1849,[[34]] "in most of the Canadian towns, and more especially in the Capital, has fallen 50 per cent. in value within the last three years. Three-fourths of the commercial men are bankrupt. Owing to free trade a large proportion of the exportable produce of Canada is obliged to seek a market in the States. It pays a duty of 20 per cent. on the frontier. If free navigation, and reciprocal trade with the Union be not secured for us, the worst, I fear, will come, and at no distant day." Now, for that distress there seemed to be one natural remedy. Across the border were prosperity and markets. A change in allegiance would open the doors, and bring trade and wealth flowing into the bankrupt province. Consequently many of the notable names among the Montreal business men may be found attached to annexation proclamations.

Again, in spite of the great change in French opinion wrought by Elgin's acceptance of French ministers, there was a little band of French extremists, the Rouges, entirely disaffected towards England. At their head, at first, was Papineau. Papineau's predilections, according to one who knew him well, were avowedly democratic and republican,[[35]] and his years in Europe, at the time when revolution was in the air, had not served to moderate his opinions. The election address with which he once more entered public life, at the end of 1847, betrays everywhere hatred of the British government, a decided inclination for things American, and a strong dash of European revolutionary sentiment, revealed in declamations over patriotes and oppresseurs.[[36]] Round him gathered a little band of anti-clericals and ultra-radicals, as strongly drawn to the United States as they were repelled by Britain. Even after Papineau had reduced himself to public insignificance, the group remained, and in 1865 Cartier, the true representative of French-Canadian feeling, spoke of the Institut Canadien of Montreal as an advocate, not of confederation, but of annexation.[[37]]