1867 by Christopher Moore Read Free Book Online Page A

federation – a federal union of Canada East and West – or confederation, which would include the Maritime colonies and potentially the North-West as well. Macdonald and Cartier swiftly agreed to make the pursuit of these alternatives into government policy. Amid cheers and handshakes, politicians who had been at each other’s throats for a decade told each other they had broken the political deadlock.
    From the perspective of the 1990s, what was most striking about Brown’s offer is how much it was a
parliamentary
negotiation and a parliamentary accommodation. No single party could impose a solution to the problems of governing the united Canadas. No party commanded enough support to command the legislature, and no one-party policy would have been accepted in good faith by the others. Brown, however, had been proven right in his trust that, in a flourishing parliamentary system, where the voters’ elected representatives had real power to make both governments and policy, even a “governmental impossibility” could have a decisive impact.
    The united Province of Canada has had an historical reputation, above all else, for political deadlock and for squalid deal-making. Professor Russell spoke for the late-twentieth-century mainstream when he dismissed parliamentary government at the time of confederation as a top-down form of democracy, obeying traditionalélitist theories that are no longer tolerable today. But the union’s parliamentary government had defenders. In a heterodox study of Ontario’s political traditions, Professor S. J. R. Noel wrote that “in the United Canadas, the combination of responsible government and brokerage politics produced a system in which practically all the important areas of public policy … were dealt with through the processes of bargaining, deal-making and compromise: in other words, almost everything was legitimate grist to the political mill.… At its best it was innovative, practical, and wonderfully civilized.” Professor Noel declared that the political system of the Canadas in the 1860s “was in some respects in advance of any other in the world at that time.” 10
    Professor Russell – and presumably Preston Manning – would dismiss all this civilized parliamentary bargaining because it was done by “élites.” Certainly most politicians of the confederation era were wealthier, more prominent, and more successful than the mass of their supporters – much as politicians were in the late twentieth century. But they hardly enjoyed the kind of quasi-feudal authority suggested by “top-down democracy.” Politicians like George Brown and John A. Macdonald (essentially self-made successes, neither of whom received leadership as a birthright) were close to their electors. Macdonald is said to have known by name everyone who voted for him in Kingston, and (since voting was mostly done in public) everyone who opposed him, too. He and his rivals were elected on electoral franchises as broad as any then existing in the world, and they frequently staked their seats upon the support of an active, confident, well-informed, and changeable electorate. When they brokered the deal that broke the deadlock in June 1864, Macdonald, Brown, and Cartier had every right to believe that they represented the broad mass of the electorate which had recently put them into the legislature.
    George Brown’s moment in government was brief. In the two vital conferences where confederation was negotiated, and in theparliamentary debates that followed, he was a powerful force. But he was not in the end a government man, and not all the elements of the new Canadian constitution pleased him. Once confederation was settled, Brown no longer had any wish to sit in cabinet with his old rivals. He left the coalition in the summer of 1866, eager to see traditional party lines restored.
    He never did become quite the white-haired patriarch that Careless says we have made him. In 1880, not entirely weaned