The constitution of 1867 was more Macdonald’s doing than anyone else’s. Charles Tupper and Leonard Tilley were local politicians, neither of them lawyers; Alexander Galt was a railway magnate and businessman; George-Etienne Cartier was a lawyer all right, but mainly connected with railways and civil law, which was of little use in the stern and thoughtful work of constitution-making; George Brown was a newspaperman. There was precious little real administrative and legal expertise among the thirty-three Fathers of Confederation. Nor was there much in the civil service. Macdonald told Judge Gowan of Barrie, Ontario, an old friend from the Rebellion days of 1837, that there was no one to help him, and he had to take it all on himself: “As it is I have no help. Not one man of the [Quebec] Gonference (except Galt in Finance) has the slightest idea of constitution making. Whatever is good or ill in the Constitution is
George Brown (1818-80), above, founded the Toronto Globe in 1844, and although he was an active politician for many years, he never gave up control of the paper. Author and statesman Joseph Howe (1804-73), right, when he was Secretary of State for the Provinces in Sir John A.
Macdonald’s government. Note mine.” In the end, the form of our constitution comes his trousers have no crease; that back to Macdonald s fertile, malleable mind, fashion came in after the turn One of the immediate, fundamental questions was
Of the century. what the balance of power should be between the fed
Eral and provincial governments. Macdonald must have realized at once, the moment the word “federal” was used, that it could cover a great deal of ground. There were many different kinds of “federal.” At one end of the scale was a constitution like that of New Zealand in 1852, where the provinces were barely above municipalities; at the other, a constitution like the first American confederation of 1777-89, where the states had virtually all the power. Macdonald had one distinct and unequivocal aim—to combat that which the American Civil War had writ so large: the inherent tendency of federal systems to fly apart. It was the result of too much weakness at the centre. He therefore set out to centralize as much control in Ottawa as he could, save only the irreducible minimum which of necessity went to all the provinces.
The result was a very strong central government, with dominance over the
Provincial governments, and was clearly so intended. The central government’s control over “peace, order and good government” was the biggest grant of power known to the Colonial Office drafters. It was a phrase that had been used for years—though more often in its other version, “peace, welfare and good government”—whenever the British Parliament wanted to bestow a plenary grant of power on any colonial government. Nor was that all. Ottawa appointed all the judges in the country, right down to and including the County Courts. It left the provinces with the power to appoint only the magistrates (the justices of the peace). And Ottawa appointed the official executive heads of all the provinces, the lieutenant-governors. Disallowance, the unfettered power given to the federal Cabinet to strike down any provincial law for whatever reason, be the law constitutional or not, was emphasized. In a famous memorandum in June 1868, just a year after Confederation, Macdonald told the provinces that in future they could expect to see disallowance, a weapon used infrequently by Great Britain against colonial legislation, employed much more often by Ottawa. Macdonald saw the Dominion government as the master, the provincial governments as subservient. He probably hoped that in the long run he might shake the provinces down into quasi-municipal governments, like those of New Zealand. Some of these perceptions also shaped his view of the role of the Dominion government in the new North-West whose future was being negotiated with the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Within fifteen months of Confederation, while Macdonald was courting Joseph Howe and Nova Scotia, the Cabinet sent George-Etienne Cartier and William McDougall to London to negotiate the cession of the hbc’s title to Rupert’s Land. The two ministers came from radical political backgrounds; both were vigorous and opinionated. Cartier was French Canadian in style, manner, and beliefs; he had been rebel-minded in the 1830s, but had accommodated himself nicely to the tough new world of railways and investment portfolios, and to the role of politician in the mid-1850s. McDougall was a Reformer from Ontario, rather to the left of George Brown—radical, anti-Catholic, anti-French—who would have never been mixed up with Cartier at all but for the coalition that Brown had been instrumental in putting together in June 1864. McDougall was now, after Confederation, Macdonald’s Minister of Public Works.
Cartier and McDougall agreed, each for different reasons, that Canada had now to take over the hbc title to Rupert’s Land. Rupert’s Land was big, very big; its boundaries, though quite precise, had never been run: Rupert’s Land was the land comprehended by all the rivers that flowed into Hudson Bay. That meant, in present-day terms, part
Old Parliament Buildings, Ottawa. This pleasing and harmonious portrait of the Parliament Buildings of the Province of Canada was done in 1866, the year construction was completed; the next year the buildings became the home of the new Parliament of the Dominion of Canada. The principal architects were Thomas Fuller (1823-98) and Charles Baillairge (1826-1906). Watercolour (1866) by Otto R. lacobi.
Of what is now western Quebec, most of north-west Ontario, all of Manitoba, most of Saskatchewan and Alberta, and part of the eastern Northwest Territories. The question for Canada was, at what price? The hbc wanted the best price it could get, and while it would prefer to sell to Canada, the price Canada seemed willing to offer was nowhere near what the company wanted, nor indeed remotely near its market value. The United States had paid a cool $7.2 million cash to the Russians for Alaska in 1867, hardly knowing what was up there—if anything. The hbc reasoned, not without justice, that if Alaska was worth $7 million, Rupert’s Land, with seven hundred miles of common border with the United States, must be worth a lot more. There was talk of $40 million, and whispers that the hbc would like to sell to the Americans. But however tempted the company might be, the British government would never let that happen.
After six months of negotiation—the hbc reluctant, the British government insistent—Canada got a bargain. Canada paid $1.5 million for the whole of Rupert’s Land, and gave back to the company one-twentieth of the fertile land; the hbc originally wanted one-tenth of the fertile land, hut Canada refused. Bought hy the Dominion government—paid for with the help of an imperial guarantee—this was Dominion land, and it was to remain so until alienated, sold, or given to subsidize railways. (What was left over in 1930 would be given to the three western provinces.) It was the biggest real-estate deal in our history, and Cartier and McDougall returned to Canada in the spring of 1869 with some reason to be pleased with themselves.
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