1867 (5 page)

At this point, Brown and Dorion wanted a general election, in which they could run as a government seeking a mandate rather than as a collection of opposition members. They asked Governor Head to dissolve the legislature. But Sir Edmund refused. In the 1850s, as in the 1990s, granting or refusing dissolution of the legislature was one of the few enduring powers of a governor general. Head used his authority to snub Brown and Dorion’s advice about a new election. Already he had an alternative government at hand.

The ever-inventive Macdonald and Cartier had put their problems behind them, rebuilt their coalition, and recruited some new supporters. They were ready to try again, and Governor Head was ready to let them. He invited Macdonald and Cartier back into power. In just three days, Macdonald and Cartier had resigned, been replaced, defeated their successors in the House, built a new coalition, and regained office. Once again they were in and Brown was out.

Even after going back through the revolving door on the cabinet room, Macdonald and Cartier had to pull one more rabbit from their top hat of parliamentary skills, for they had to evade the problem that had beaten Brown and Dorion: the need to resign their seats and
seek personal re-election upon accepting office. Macdonald and Cartier proved equal to the challenge by inventing the double shuffle.

Ministers who merely changed cabinet posts did not need to be re-elected. So, as if they had never left office, Macdonald and Cartier and their ministers solemnly shuffled the cabinet offices amongst themselves, and then after a day reshuffled them. Each minister recovered his old position, and Macdonald blithely told the House the law had been satisfied. While the Brown–Dorion team was still out seeking re-election to validate its members’ right to offices that had already been taken away from them, the Cartier–Macdonald team reoccupied its old cabinet posts and held on to its legislative seats. After two days in opposition, Cartier and Macdonald would stay in office for two more years – an eternity in the union’s lively politics.

Those two days were the only days George Brown would ever run a government. (Dorion had another brief stint in power in 1863–4.) His “short administration” was a humiliating failure. Opponents rejoiced that the disaster of a Brown government had been avoided, and happily denounced his greedy, short-sighted lust for power. They mocked him for abandoning his principles for office and then losing the office as well, proving he was not merely unworthy of political office, but also too inept to get it. More than ever, they said, George Brown had proved himself a governmental impossibility.

Locked once again in opposition, his causes and ambitions further than ever from becoming realized, Brown went from fury to a kind of despair. Brown’s newspaper poured abuse on the governor general who had hobbled Brown and assisted Macdonald, and the reformers launched a court challenge to the double shuffle. When they lost, Brown observed bitterly that the presiding judge was William Draper, Macdonald’s mentor and himself a tory premier from the bad old days before responsible government. But Brown’s condemnations began to go beyond personalities. He began to condemn not just Macdonald, Cartier, the judges, and Sir Edmund Head, but the constitutional system that had made possible his humiliation.

Over the next months, the
Globe
began to sound steadily more like the Clear Grits. “Responsible government,” said the paper in February 1859, “has not realized the expectations of its promoters. Men begin to pronounce it a failure.” Brown spoke the same epitaph in a political speech. Given the enduring existence of two incompatible popular wills – French Canada’s and English Canada’s – he said sadly, “responsible government could only end in failure.” And with the union and parliamentary government simultaneously discredited, the
Globe
began to proclaim that dissolution of the union and a presidential constitution for Canada West were the likely choices to replace them. Sir Edmund Head’s tampering with the usages of the constitution, said the
Globe
, had done more to Americanize Canadian institutions than all other influences combined. Brown began to consider the case for a written constitution on the American model, for separating the executive branch of government from the legislative, and for abandoning the attempt to govern Protestant, English Canada West and Catholic, French Canada East within one state.
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We need not grieve much for George Brown and his expulsion from office in 1858, any more than Careless, his mostly admiring biographer, did. The abrupt fall and sudden realignment of coalition ministries was a normal part of public life in a state like the Province of Canada, and Brown’s rivals should hardly be condemned for employing all the stratagems the laws provided. Even if Sir Edmund Head seemed partisan in his preference for Macdonald over Brown, the outcome seemed to confirm the governor’s
real-politik
judgement that Brown’s rivals offered a better prospect of political stability. The double shuffle is hardly an edifying part of Canadian political history, but the mere question of who deserved to get in and who deserved to go out in the summer of 1858 need hardly disturb us now.

If, however, the disasters and embarrassments of the double shuffle had permanently soured George Brown on parliamentary government, the consequences might have been momentous.
Brown’s aspirations and grievances were attuned to those of Canada West voters. As both its leading politician and its dominant newspaperman, he was superbly placed to guide and channel its political choices. Had he repudiated the union with Canada East and the British parliamentary tradition, he would have given an enormous boost to Clear Grit radicalism. A Clear Grit Brown, harnessing the West’s powerful sense of destiny, its impatience with compromise, and its anger at the French, would have pointed the way toward an Ontario without Quebec, and to a presidential system of government that aspired toward direct, rather than representative, democracy.

Such was not to be. John A. Macdonald would have been delighted to raise the loyalty cry and to campaign against George Brown as an annexationist and a traitor, and all the benefits of union, notably the skyrocketing growth and prosperity of Canada West, would have been marshalled on Macdonald’s side. Brown himself, whatever his frustration and his anger, was in the end too astute a campaigner and too much a patriotic British constitutionalist to plump wholeheartedly for such radical change. All his life he had been devoted to reform, but he had always insisted that true reform was the cause of representative, parliamentary democracy. In the wake of the double shuffle, he may have been tempted by the Clear Grit vision of an Upper Canadian paradise and vengeance on his tormentors. But only briefly. Before long, George Brown returned to the parliamentary system.

He remained the governmental impossibility. He was less likely than ever to form a government. In many ways, he was too zealous for the compromises that union politics required. Yet he returned to the parliamentary process. He seems to have returned to a root belief: that even a parliamentarian permanently in opposition had a role to play and a contribution to make. His return insured that, no matter how vigorously the Canadians debated union, disunion, and federalism in the 1860s, they would do so within the forms of the parliamentary system.

The analogy between George Brown and Preston Manning with which this chapter began is real enough. Manning acknowledged it when he named his modern party “Reform” and listed George Brown among its patron saints. But nineteenth- and twentieth-century Reformers part company at the point where Brown rededicated himself to parliamentary struggle. Preston Manning’s late-twentieth-century Reform Party promised to change the process of Canadian politics, not merely to exchange the Outs for the Ins. “To give effect to the common sense of the common people,” the platform of the modern Reform Party endorsed “direct consultation, constitutional conventions, constituent assemblies, national referenda, and citizens’ initiatives” to involve citizens directly in government. Its leader mused about impeaching unpopular prime ministers, and endorsed the recall of members of Parliament who followed their own judgement over their constituents’ wishes.
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The views of the modern Reformers were ones the Clear Grits would have understood. Like the Clear Grits, they expressed a scepticism about representative democracy far deeper than anything George Brown permitted his party to embrace. In its impatience with representation, however, the Reform Party was not nearly so radical in the twentieth century as the Clear Grits were in the mid-nineteenth. All twentieth-century parties from right to left had grown impatient with representative democracy. Radical, threatening, even “impossible” in other ways, the modern Reform Party was close to the centre of Canadian political culture in its belief that direct democracy and democracy itself were synonyms. All parties had ceased to see themselves as caucuses of representatives. They all sought to present a single message, marketed to a mass audience by a single leader. Inevitably, their efforts to forge a direct bond between leaders and the people downgraded legislatures and those who sat in them – except as election-night tally sticks to determine which leader achieved power. As one result, the role of legislatures in twentieth-century constitutional discussions was minuscule, by apparently unanimous consent.

George Brown, on the other hand, returned to the representative democracy that was the central faith of nineteenth-century politics in British North America. In his biography, Maurice Careless located Brown’s return to the parliamentary faith in a single event, the great reform convention at St. Lawrence Hall in Toronto in November 1859. Because of Brown’s choices, St. Lawrence Hall, still standing on Toronto’s King Street East, deserves to rank among the sites where confederation was made. Careless recreated the drama of the convention and its climax, “when even the gods and goddesses disporting on the ceiling of St. Lawrence Hall seemed to hang still and breathless in the yellow gaslight, far over the tall figure that now strode to the front of the platform.” George Brown was about to call for a federal union between Canada West and Canada East.
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Brown’s task in the convention he had organized was not to deny Canada West’s anger and ambitions, but to channel them into a renewed parliamentary campaign. His solution was federalism. To end Canada East’s interference in Canada West’s affairs, they would split the union into “two or more local governments” for Canada East and West. In 1859, western alienation still pointed toward separation, and when Clear Grit calls for a pure-and-simple dissolution roused cheers, Brown went far to accommodate them. The convention’s final resolution declared there would only be “some joint authority” to regulate matters of mutual interest between what would be two largely autonomous provinces.

In 1859, George Brown professed himself satisfied with only a restricted and inexpensive central government. But he talked no more of “organic change,” of abandoning British political traditions to pursue a presidential constitution. With a platform of federalism to propose, Brown no longer wanted to demand new political processes. The convention would leave it to the legislature to decide on the details of federal union. After the St. Lawrence Hall convention, Brown’s was still a minority party excluded from power. He was still derided or made a bogey by both conservatives and rival reformers. Yet Brown had accepted that, even as a minority politician,
perhaps condemned to perpetual opposition, he could do something useful, could perhaps see his causes brought to attention and to fruition.

In 1864, Brown was proven right. In the interim, he had struggled against both radical reformers impatient for “organic change” and moderate reformers still reluctant to change the union at all. Sandfield Macdonald, the most moderate of reformers and the union’s warmest champion, had put aside the rep-by-pop principle and formed a government, in alliance for a time with Antoine-Aimé Dorion. Brown, meanwhile, had taken a break from politics and made his first return visit in Britain. The visit mostly confirmed his commitment to Canada, but while in Edinburgh, Brown, then forty-three, fell suddenly in love. Within five weeks he was married. Anne Nelson at once became his steadiest and most secure commitment. Friends declared that her influence made Brown less impetuous, more thoughtful and tranquil. Better educated and more widely cultured than he was, she could hold her own in discussion with him. Maurice Careless pointed to her, through her influence on Brown, as a plausible “mother of confederation.”

By the spring of 1864, Sandfield Macdonald was out of power, and Macdonald and Cartier had returned once more to the cabinet room. The constant effort to construct a government without the impossible man, who commanded the largest bloc of Canada West’s representatives but would only enter government if he could change the union to a federation, was coming to an end. Brown’s instinct that Parliament could provide a solution finally bore fruit in May 1864. Even though Macdonald and Cartier were in power, the legislature approved Brown’s resolution to create an all-party legislative committee on constitutional matters. Even John A. Macdonald voted in favour, and Brown himself was appointed chairman. Power eluded Brown as much as ever, but Parliament would listen to his ideas.

In the House committee, parliamentarians of all shades of opinion discussed the constitutional deadlock: Canada West’s insistence on
voting power to match its population; Canada East’s refusal to surrender to an English and Protestant majority; the widespread reluctance to abandon the union; the persistent ambitions to unite all the British provinces of North America. When the committee reported to the legislature (just as the Macdonald–Cartier government collapsed), Brown got the chance to make his historic offer. On June 17, Brown stood up in the hot, crowded legislative chamber in Quebec City and broke the mould of union politics.

He offered to go into coalition with his hated rivals. He accepted the impossibility of forming a government of his own choosing, and offered to sustain Macdonald and Cartier in office. They had only to accept the constitutional solutions that his parliamentary committee had recently endorsed: either 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.