John A (51 page)

The well-known story about “dominion” is that its author was Tilley, who informed the conference delegates that he had come upon in the Bible, in Psalm 72, verse 8, the evocative phrase, “And he shall have dominion also from sea to sea.” This account is certainly correct.
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The full story may have been a bit more complicated. The use of the term “dominion” for such a purpose was
not in fact new. It was applied to the brief confederation of American colonies, known as the Dominion of New England, which lasted from 1686 to 1689. As well, Virginia, until it became a state, was known as “The Old Dominion.”

All these details were marginalia. The central fact was that Confederation had been agreed to by all the constituent provinces. The later “compact” theory, that Confederation constituted a treaty negotiated by the provinces, was pure myth; none of them, as colonies, had the power to sign treaties. Lord Carnarvon, on behalf of the enabling power, Britain, explained in his parliamentary speech that the new dominion “derives its political existence from an external authority”—namely, the Imperial government.

The constitution itself, as Macdonald had wanted from the start, amounted to a prescription for a highly centralized confederation, very likely the most centralized confederation ever conceived (not least because it granted to the central government the power to disallow provincial legislation). Indeed, as the historian Peter Waite has written, “One might almost say that Canada has become a federal state in spite of its constitution.”
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It was indeed plausible, as Macdonald kept saying in private letters, that the provinces might wither away to municipalities.

The fact was, though, the provinces
did
exist. They were accountable to their voters through political mechanisms—of organized parties, elections and parliamentary debates—identical to those of the “senior” government. They were also, as
was inherent in so vast a country, incomparably closer to their people. As Macdonald had schemed for all along, the federal government was accorded not just extensive powers but all the unassigned powers, and as well a national override power. Yet although the newcomers, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, lost some of their existing powers on joining Confederation, they still wielded considerable ones. The two reborn “internal” members, Quebec and Ontario, gained powers greater than their institutional ancestors had ever possessed (if only because, back then, all power resided with the governors general).

Macdonald, moreover, failed to anticipate the consequence to his centralized scheme of the absence from federal jurisdiction of one vital power. Post-Confederation, just as before, Canada was still only a colony; responsibility for foreign affairs remained in London. Ottawa, unlike Washington, could not summon up national support on the grounds that it was responsible for Canadians' doings and reputation in the wider world. In the absence of any shared sense of national identity across the country (really, until the 1960s), the vacuum was bound to be filled by provincial identities. This flaw in Macdonald's concept of the new nation was recognized by Goldwin Smith in an almost eerily perceptive article for
Macmillan's Magazine
in March 1865. There he wrote that while “the sentiment of provincial independence among the several provinces of British North America is at this moment merged in the desire of combining against the common danger [the United States]…[w]hen the danger is overpast, divergent interests may reappear and the sentiment of independence may revive…especially in the French and Catholic province.” It was because national identity was pallid for so long that provincial identities commanded so much support.

In no sense was the British North America Act a constitution made for the people. There was nowhere in it any ringing “We,
the people” proclamation. It was, instead, a constitution made for governments. Over the decades, the balance between centralization and decentralization of governmental powers has settled down into pretty much what most Canadians want. Pragmatism has triumphed over principle, and muddling through over theory. Macdonald would disagree with the resulting decentralization, but as a pragmatist and as a believer that politics is about people, he would be delighted by the process.

Today, just one part of the British North America Act—now the Constitution Act, 1867—is familiar to any number of Canadians. It is widely known that the Fathers of Confederation defined their new nation by the talismanic mantra of “Peace, Order and good Government.” It is also widely known that this self-description contrasts radically with the idealistic but aggressive aspiration laid upon Americans by their constitutional call to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In fact, this phrase occurs not in the constitution of the American people but in their Declaration of Independence. But it's the contrast between these two rallying cries, and the illumination it provides about national differences, that matter.

Except that most of this is untrue. More exactly, it is true symbolically, but untrue substantively.

The phrase actually contained in the documents laid before the delegates at the Quebec Conference of 1864 (from which came the greatest part of the BNA Act), and at the start of the Confederation Debates in the Canadian Parliament in 1865 and at the London Conference, was “Peace, Welfare and good Government.” The second, unfamiliar, term, “Welfare,” was used here in the sense of well-being. It was only at the last
moment before the constitution was introduced into the Parliament at Westminster that “Welfare” was replaced by “Order.”
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The actual change was most probably made by the British legal draftsman Francis Reilly; and no evidence exists that Reilly ever discussed his choice of words with Macdonald or with any Canadian.

To get to the heart of the matter, no evidence exists that at any time throughout any of the three Confederation conferences, or during the long debate in the Canadian legislature, anyone paid the least attention to the phrase itself. The more than one thousand double-columned pages of the published Confederation Debates contain only a handful of references to “Peace, Welfare and good Government” (as it then was); moreover, it was raised almost always in discussions about the narrow issue of marriages and divorces.
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The reason why no one paid any attention to the phrase was straightforward: it actually meant very little. It amounted to a kind of legal boilerplate that was inserted routinely into all kinds of British colonial constitutions—from Newfoundland to New Zealand to New South Wales, from Ceylon to the Cape Colony (of South Africa), from Sierra Leone to St. Helena. The use of this
phrase can be dated all the way back to 1689.
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It appeared in every Canadian constitution before Confederation, from the Royal Proclamation of 1763
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to the 1841 Act of Union, which conjoined Upper and Lower Canada. The phrase that Canadians now embrace as distinctively their own was thus employed in the service of just about any entity in the Empire for which a constitution was needed.

Perhaps the most insightful comment ever made about the ways by which national communities acquire their particular character was from British-born international scholar Benedict Anderson. According to him, almost all of them amount to “imagined communities.” Few citizens in any of these societies know many other citizens personally, “yet in the minds of each,” wrote Anderson, “lives this image of communion.” People, that is to say, become what they are by the way that they think they are.

Not long after the Second World War, Canadians took cognizance of the fact that the British Empire was vanishing from the map and that its role as global hegemon had been taken over by the United States. Canada was threatened by being absorbed into this new imperium, of being reduced to a kind of virtual colony. Cross-border differences therefore became central to national existence itself, because if no differences existed, survival became pointless. In 1961 the historian W.L. Morton published
The Canadian Identity,
a book composed of four major lectures that he had given. In this work, Morton expressed the notion of a rad
ical difference between Canada and the United States from their very beginnings. “Not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” wrote Morton, “but peace, order and good government, are what the national government of Canada guarantees.” So far as this author has been able to determine, Morton was the first person to present the concept that the “Peace, Order and good Government” of Macdonald's constitution
is
Canada, in the same way that Jefferson's “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”
is
the United States.

Not long afterwards, “Peace, Order and good Government”—known to Ottawa insiders as POGG—was elevated into a defining national invocation. It has gone on to become the one item of our original constitution that almost every Canadian can recite—and holds to fiercely.
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It's as though, when Canadians learned of the phrase “Peace, Order and good Government” for the first time in the sixties, they, in the mysterious way by which the collective will can exert itself, said more or less simultaneously, “That's us.” The constitution's real patriation can thus be dated from the early sixties rather than from its formal enactment in 1982. It was during those years that the people of Canada made the constitution—at the very least one vital part of it—
their
constitution. Maybe it's coincidence, maybe it's karma, but Macdonald, as a conservative, could not have defined the purpose of a constitution better than as “Peace, Order and good Government.”
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At the time, Macdonald won just about everything he wanted. All the last-minute changes made in London strengthened the power of the central government. The federation would indeed be as close to a “legislative union” as was politically practical. These, though, were tactical accomplishments. In themselves, Confederation and the constitution that necessarily accompanied it amounted to not much more than a political fix of a political problem—“deadlock”—that the politicians, Macdonald included, had created themselves. That purpose could have been achieved as easily, almost certainly more so, by a “mini-federation” encompassing just the United Province of Canada. Such a nation, though, would have been a rump of a nation. What was being created instead was, at least potentially, a continental nation—one that would be, or could be, a real nation, marked at its birth by the extravagant ambition both of its geographical reach and of its commitment to British law and British political institutions. As such, it made a commitment to be and to remain that most improbable of all political communities—an un-American nation within North America. First, Macdonald had imagined a Canadian community of this kind; then, in London, he realized it.

All that remained now were details. Howe took his arguments for delay to as many people as he could secure introductions to in Britain. Lord Carnarvon heard him out politely, but without response; almost all the others showed the same indifference. All that remained between Macdonald and his final triumph was a thin red line of British MPs—few of them interested in the colonies at the best of times, and all of them now totally absorbed by the crisis over the Reform Bill and the prospect of an imminent election.