Sir John A. Macdonald and the Confederation

A country is rarely founded by those who came to found one. More often it is assembled by a man who has learned, in twenty years of provincial deadlock, that nothing pure ever passes, and that a compromise no one wanted is the only kind of constitution a free people can be persuaded to sign.

THE LAWYER FROM KINGSTON

He was born in Glasgow on the eleventh of January 1815, brought to Upper Canada at the age of five, articled to a Kingston lawyer at fifteen, called to the bar at twenty-one, and elected to the legislature of the Province of Canada at twenty-nine. By forty-nine he had been in that legislature for twenty years and had watched the Union of 1841 grind itself into immobility. Two Canadas had been yoked under one Parliament; each had equal seats; each blocked the other. By the early 1860s no government could hold a majority for a full session. Four ministries fell in two years. The deadlock had become the constitution.

In June 1864 George Brown, the Reform editor of the Globe and Macdonald's antagonist of fifteen years' standing, crossed the floor and joined the ministry on the express condition that the deadlock be ended by federation. The Great Coalition was Brown's price and Macdonald's instrument. In September the colonial delegates met at Charlottetown to test whether Maritime Union could be widened into something larger. In October they reconvened at Quebec to write the terms.

THE HOTEL SAINT-LOUIS

It is the late evening of the twenty-seventh of October 1864. The river fog has rolled up the cliff and is pressing against the windows of the upper room. The candles in the chandeliers are running low. Thirty-three delegates from five colonies stand in three knots around the long table at the head of the room, on which lie the Seventy-Two Resolutions in folio. Macdonald is in shirt-sleeves, with a glass of whisky-and-water at his elbow, which is his evening posture and is not for show. He has been drafting clauses since breakfast.

At the first knot, George-Étienne Cartier, leader of the Bleus, who delivers the Catholic and French-speaking vote of Lower Canada into any deal he signs and withdraws it from any deal he refuses. At the second knot, Charles Tupper of Nova Scotia and Samuel Tilley of New Brunswick, who have come up because the Maritime Union scheme they were sent to negotiate has turned, in three weeks, into something far larger. At the third knot, at the window, Brown himself, with Thomas D'Arcy McGee at his elbow.

A SECOND OF TIME AT THE LONG TABLE

Macdonald counts the room. Cartier needs the criminal law unified under the Dominion and the civil law and the schools left to Quebec; the language clause has been on his desk since noon and he has written it as Cartier will want to read it, which is twice and slowly. Tupper needs an iron rail to Halifax written into the Act, not promised in a despatch; the railway clause is drafted. Tilley needs the same rail to reach Saint John. Brown needs the Senate compromise to be defensible to the Reform caucus in Toronto: appointed not elected, equal by section not by province, so that Upper Canada is not swallowed by the small chambers of the small provinces. The Senate compromise is drafted; it is ugly; it will hold. Newfoundland will not sign tonight and will not sign in his lifetime. Prince Edward Island will not sign tonight and will sign in six years. He lets them go and keeps the four he has.

The point of the room, he sees, is that no one in it came for what is now on the table. Brown came to break the deadlock; he is leaving with a federation. Cartier came to protect Lower Canada from absorption; he is leaving with a province. Tupper came to widen a railway grant; he is leaving with a Dominion. The compromise is therefore the only document any of them can sign, because it is the only document none of them came to sign. He drinks the whisky-and-water. He picks up the pen.

THE RESOLUTIONS

Cartier comes to him at the table at twenty past ten and asks, in French, whether the Quebec delegation has the language clause it needs. Macdonald reads the resolution he has written that afternoon. Cartier reads it twice. Cartier nods. The Bleus will hold. Brown comes over from the window at half past ten and accepts the Senate compromise in two sentences and returns to the window. Tupper comes over at midnight, Tilley behind him, and accepts the railway. By two in the morning the Resolutions have been read through twice in plenary. The pipes are brought out. The Conference closes at three with the resolutions agreed in principle by every delegation in the room. It is not yet a country. It is a basis on which six colonial legislatures can be asked to vote.

THE EDITOR AT THE WINDOW

George Brown, who has fought this man in print and in the legislature for fifteen years, who has called him in the Globe every name a Presbyterian editor can put on a page, stands at the window with his back to the room and listens to Cartier laughing in French behind him. He has paid for this evening with his Reform purity; the caucus in Toronto will not forgive him for sitting in a cabinet with John A. Macdonald, and he knows it. He will be out of the ministry within two months. He will be out of politics within three years. He will be shot in his Globe office in Toronto in 1880 by a discharged employee, and the country he helped to make will go on without him. He turns from the window and signs.

THE SENATE CHAMBER AT OTTAWA

Two years and eight months pass between the Quebec Conference and the Act. The resolutions go to London in the winter of 1866. The bill is drafted by Lord Carnarvon at the Colonial Office and read in the Lords in February 1867. Royal Assent is given on the twenty-ninth of March. The Act comes into force on the first of July. That morning, in the Senate Chamber at Ottawa, Lord Monck the Governor-General reads the proclamation, confers the Knight Commandership of the Bath on Macdonald, and swears him in as the first Prime Minister of the Dominion of Canada. He is fifty-two. Cartier, beside him, is in the cabinet. Tupper is in the cabinet. Tilley is in the cabinet. Brown is not. Two and a half years earlier, in a letter to M.C. Cameron of December 1864, Macdonald had already written what he believed the deal to be: the Confederation of the Provinces is only yet in the gristle, and it will require five or six years before it is hardened into bone. The bone, he meant, was the railway.

IN THE GRISTLE

He held the office six years, lost it on the Pacific Scandal in 1873, came back in 1878 on a platform of high tariffs and a transcontinental line, saw the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway driven at Craigellachie in November 1885, won four further elections, and died in office on the sixth of June 1891, sixteen days short of seventy-seven, with the phrase a British subject I was born, a British subject I will die still warm from the campaign of that spring. He is buried in Cataraqui Cemetery at Kingston. His record on the Indigenous peoples of the North-West, on the famine policy in the Saskatchewan country in 1883, on the residential schools begun under his ministries, and on the execution of Louis Riel in 1885, has, since the 1990s, entered the moral inventory of the country in a way it had not in the nineteenth century, and rightly. The Glasgow-born Kingston lawyer was Prime Minister for nineteen of the country's first twenty-four years. The parish church in Glasgow where he was baptised has had, since 1967, a bronze plaque on its wall recording the fact. His face is on the ten-dollar note. The federal holiday on the first of July, named Dominion Day by his cabinet in 1879 and Canada Day since 1982, is the anniversary of the morning Lord Monck swore him in. The Dominion is a hundred and fifty-nine years old in the year you are reading this. It is, by his own image, still in the gristle, still hardening, still half-built around the long table at the Hotel Saint-Louis where, in the river fog of an October night, four colonies sat down and signed a constitution none of them had come to sign.