John A (12 page)

Montreal. Place d'Armes, with a view of Notre Dame church, c. 1843. It was Canada's only real city, the first to install such technology as gas lights and the horse-drawn omnibus.

Durham's formula worked—but backwards. Quebec's commitment to
la survivance
dates less from Wolfe's victory over Montcalm (after which the Canadiens' religion and system of law were protected by British decree) than from 1839, when Durham told French Canadians they were finished. The consequence of this collective death sentence was an incredible flowering of a national will to remain alive.
^*36

In the years immediately following 1839, a sociological miracle occurred in Lower Canada: a lost people found themselves.
Historian François-Xavier Garneau, the poet Octave Crémazie, and Antoine Gérin-Lajoie, author of the patriotic lament
Un Canadien Errant,
created the beginnings of a national literature. Étienne Parent, a brilliant journalist, wrote a long series of articles calling for sweeping social, educational and religious reforms. The
Instituts canadiens
were founded as a means of generating intellectual inquiry and speculation and as a form of adult education. Montreal's Bishop Ignace Bourget, an ultramontane,
^*37
or right-wing Catholic, attracted major orders of priests—the Jesuits and the Oblates—and four orders of nuns to staff the new
collèges classiques,
from which a new and educated middle class would soon graduate. In 1840 there was just one priest for every two thousand parishioners; by 1880 there was one for every five hundred. As historian Susan Mann Trofimenkoff wrote in
The Dream of Nation,
“the clergy was as much a means of national unity as the railroad.” The culmination of this new surge in national self-assertiveness, the Société St-Jean-Baptiste, was established in 1843.

Few in Upper Canada noticed. Their attention was focused on the other part of Durham's report, one calling for a totally different kind of Parliament. It was to be a responsible Parliament, with a cabinet composed of members of the majority party rather than chosen at the pleasure of the governor general. In a phrase of almost breathtaking boldness, Durham wrote, “The British people of the North American Colonies are a people on whom we may safely rely, and to whom we must not grudge power.”

Durham almost went right to the constitutional finish line. He recognized the advantages of Confederation: “Such a union
would…enable all the Provinces to cooperate for all common purposes,” he said. “If we wish to prevent the extension of this [American] influence, it can only be done by raising up for the North American colonist some nationality of his own.” At the last instant, Durham drew back from specifically recommending Confederation because he doubted that Canada possessed politicians of the calibre needed for so ambitious an undertaking.

At the time, Durham's report attracted little applause either in Canada or in Britain. A century passed before it came to be recognized by some as “the greatest state document in British imperial history.” His recommendation for Responsible Government began a fundamental reordering of the Empire, and it set the political maturation of the British North American colonies in motion. Had that precedent—and its logical successor of Confederation—been applied to Ireland, as William Gladstone attempted in his Home Rule Bill in 1886, thousands of lives could have been saved.

Embedded in the proposal for Responsible Government was a fundamental illogicality. The colonial secretary, Lord John Russell, spotted it immediately: it would be “impossible,” he wrote his cabinet colleagues, “for a Governor to be responsible to his Sovereign and a local legislature both at the same time.” To stop Responsible Government, the British government sent out another of its best and brightest, Lord Sydenham, then in the cabinet as president of the Board of Trade. Still in his thirties, multi-lingual, highly professional and confident to the point of cockiness, Sydenham was one of the ablest of governors general—and one of the most dashing. Described as “worship[ping] equally at the Shrine of Venus and at the Shrine of Bacchus,” he died
following a fall from his horse after a visit to his mistress. He was also one of the more corrupt. The election of 1841, which he ran single-handedly, has few equals in Canadian history for chicanery, gerrymandering, vote-rigging, bribery and the systematic use of violence. Sydenham's candidates won handily.

To implement the part of Durham's program that the British government found wholly acceptable—the assimilation of the French—Sydenham moved the seat of government to Kingston, its attraction being that it was entirely English-speaking. All the legislative documents were unilingual; and the Throne Speech, read by Sydenham himself, was in English only.
^*38
Following his death later that year, his successor, Sir Charles Bagot, quickly recognized that Britain had positioned itself on the wrong side of history. “Whether the doctrine of responsible government is openly acknowledged or only tacitly acquiesced in, virtually it exists,” Bagot wrote home in 1842.

In fact, Britain ceded Responsible Government with remarkable readiness. The quite separate colony of Nova Scotia actually gained it two months ahead of Canada, in 1848. But it had been allowed effectively in 1846, when Britain adopted free trade and abolished its protectionist Corn Laws and Navigation Laws. Thereafter, Canada and several other colonies were free to make their own trading arrangements, thereby exercising de facto self-government.

The fight for Responsible Government mattered, though. It entered Canadian political mythology as a sort of non-violent version of the Boston Tea Party. And the struggle brought together one of the most important and appealing of all Canadian
political partnerships, one that would provide Macdonald with a template of the way to fashion and sustain a political alliance between the country's two principal European races.

One of these partners was Robert Baldwin. The son of a successful lawyer, William Baldwin, who had originated the idea of Responsible Government, Robert came from the same social circles as the Family Compact. He was highly intelligent and of irreproachable integrity. Robert took over the cause from his father and, in January 1836, sent a letter to the Colonial Office. In it, he made a case for Responsible Government on the politically shrewd grounds that it was essential for “continuing the connection” with Britain. Durham's advocacy of the idea can be dated to this letter.

The other partner in the emerging alliance was Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine. He was the prototype of the commanding
le chef
figure whom Quebecers have so often followed. Grave in manner and exuding gravitas, LaFontaine was blessed with a resemblance to Napoleon that he assiduously fostered. As a one-time Patriote, he had nationalist credentials that were unimpeachable.

Robert Baldwin. He won Responsible Government, or self-government, for the colony of Canada. High-minded and single-minded, he was known as the “Man of the One Idea.”

Soon after the formal creation of the United Province of Canada, LaFontaine spotted an opening for himself and for his Canadiens. Skilfully used, the new configuration could lead not merely to
la
survivance
in defiance of Durham's assimilation program but to substantive economic benefits for his people. He saw that an alliance between his bloc of French members and the Reform group led by Baldwin would form a majority in the legislature. Baldwin would get the Responsible Government he so desired (even if it was of small interest to LaFontaine, who, by inclination, was a conservative). In exchange, LaFontaine would get the keys to the patronage treasure chests that Responsible Government would transfer from the governor general to the Canadian politicians in power. Though a partnership of convenience, the alliance was also one of principle and of personal trust. In the election of 1841, with LaFontaine badly in need of a winnable seat, Baldwin found one for him among the burghers of the riding of Fourth York in Upper Canada. A year later, LaFontaine returned the compliment by handing to Baldwin the equally unilingual riding of Rimouski. (And at the personal level, Baldwin sent all four of his children to French schools in Quebec City.)

Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine. With Baldwin, he forged a French-English political alliance that turned Durham's policy upside-down.

To move the Imperial government over to the “right” side of history took a new governor general, Lord Elgin. Exceptionally able, he was Durham's son-in-law and, later, viceroy of India—the top position on the Imperial ladder.
^*39
The key year was 1848, when an election re turned a majority for Baldwin and
LaFontaine. Acting on the principle of the sovereignty of the people, Elgin accepted the result and invited the pair to form the first biracial ministry. (Technically, LaFontaine, the leader of the largest bloc of members, was the premier. In practice, Baldwin functioned as co-premier, a system followed throughout the life of the United Province of Canada.) At the opening of that year's session of the Legislative Assembly, Elgin read the Throne Speech in English, as all his predecessors had done, and then, after a fractional pause, read it again in French. Canadien members burst into wild applause and song; one so forgot himself that he rushed up and kissed the governor general on both cheeks.