14.4 Crafting a Constitution
The Charlottetown Conference
Two dozen delegates attended the first meeting in Charlottetown to discuss the possibility of a federal union. The fact that the idea of federalism was put on the table at the outset is important. The United States was a federation and its example was obvious and important to consider. But Britain was a legislative union: there was parliament at the top and the next level of government down the chain was municipal. Macdonald, for one, favoured legislative union partly because he was a fan of British institutions generally (like many of his Victorian peers). But also, he distrusted federalism because of where it had led the United States. He had a point: in 1861 the Union had been dissolved in war and, as the conflict raged south of the border, more than 600,000 lives were lost. Every day the meat-grinder of the Civil War churned on, Macdonald could point to it as an argument in favour of a strong central administration rather than the weaker bonds of federalism.
Cartier, however, would not consider anything other than a federal structure which, from the perspective of the Maritimers, was a happy coincidence. The delegates from Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick knew that they were going to be giving up some authority to Canada in any kind of union; better that they should keep some for themselves than to be utterly subsumed beneath an ambitious Canada West and a culturally alien Canada East. Brown, Macdonald, Cartier, and Canadian finance minister (and, 20 years later, Albertan railway magnate) Alexander Galt led the Canadian charge and won agreement in principle to the proposal to “confederate.”
This meeting, known as the Charlottetown Conference, took just over a week, from September 1 to 9, 1864, during which enormous amounts of liquor, food, and cigars were consumed. The wives of the delegates have been credited with smoothing much of the ego-strewn road to agreement and goodwill.[1] It is worth noting that this pivotal meeting in the evolution of a new constitution competed (rather badly) with a travelling circus that was visiting Charlottetown the same week. There was no room for the Canadian delegation in the local hotels, and they were obliged to spend their nights on board their ship.
The Quebec Conference
A month later, in October, an expanded delegation met in Quebec City to resolve the finer points of the agreement. These took the form of the Seventy-Two Resolutions (a.k.a. the Quebec Resolutions), 50 of which were believed to have come directly from the pen of John A. Macdonald. Certainly his taste for a more powerful central government worked its way into the resolutions, but he knew better than to alienate Canada East and the Maritimes. The colonies, it was agreed, would become provinces. Canada would be once again severed at the Ottawa River, and Ontario and Quebec would emerge as provinces in their own right.
Also agreed was that the central administratio