Canada's 'Fathers of Confederation'

CANADA’S ‘FATHERS OF CONFEDERATION’: TIME TO RETIRE AN OUTDATED CONCEPT? Ged Martin, December 2015 An Outsider Intrudes The categorisation of 36 nineteenth-century politicians as Canada’s ‘Fathers of Confederation’ no longer serves any worthwhile purpose, and should be abandoned, certainly by historians. In making this claim, I have to add one huge disclaimer: I am neither a citizen nor a resident of Canada. Strictly speaking, how Canadians decide to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Confederation, which falls in 2017, is none of my business. I can claim only to be an observer – I hope a friendly one – of Canadian events over several decades, and a student of Canada’s history. In that latter capacity, I can and do suggest that the notion of the ‘Fathers of Confederation’ may have served a purpose a century ago, but that it has come to raise more issues than it solves in modern times. Defining the Fathers of Confederation Officially, the Fathers are defined as the thirty six politicians who attended one of the three conferences which designed the British North America Act of 1867 – at Charlottetown and Quebec City in 1864, and in London, England during the winter of 1866-67. It is generally stated that they were so recognised during the Diamond Jubilee of 1927, but the process or the authority by which they were designated does not seem clear, a point that is further discussed below. It would be easy to assume that the concept of Fathers of Confederation evolved in parallel, and as an implicit response, to adulation of the Founding Fathers in the United States. Americans adopted a much looser attitude, avoiding any official categorisation of their national heroes. Generally, the term applied to signatories of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and to those who took part in the 1787 Philadelphia Convention. There seems no evidence that Canadians were aware of Jefferson’s overheated description of the latter as ‘an assembly of demigods’, and no evidence of any concerted emulation north of the border. Rather, the Canadian equivalent emerged slowly, and to some extent by accident. Emergence of the term The earliest use of the phrase in the Parliament of Canada seems to have been by Halifax Liberal MP Alfred Gilpin Jones, on 30 March 1871.1 Jones seems an unlikely progenitor of the phrase, since he had fervently opposed Nova Scotia’s adherence to Confederation and was hardly likely to admire those who had designed its structure: perhaps his usage was sarcastic. Equally mysterious is the reported statement from March 1875 by Stewart Campbell, who ‘appealed to the Fathers of Confederation to protect the coal interests of Nova Scotia.’ Since most of the architects of the Dominion were in opposition at the time, mis- reporting must be suspected. Far from being a central Canadian (or arrogant Ontario) cry, the phrase seems to have made its rare appearances from opposite ends of the country: Arthur Bunster, a British Columbia MP, called Langevin ‘one of the Fathers of Confederation’ in 1880. To put the matter mildly, Bunster was not highly regarded in the House of Commons. His challenge to a Quebec member to engage in a fist fight in 1878 had been bad enough, but his decision to arm himself with a knife for the encounter had been somewhat worse.2 If Bunster adopted a tag, there was no high probability that it would catch on. It is also possible that the phrase made its way, slowly, in to English-Canadian discourse from the more ebullient language of Quebec, where ‘père de la confédération’ would probably have had a more acceptable ring. J-A. Mousseau applied the term to Macdonald in 1879, and it was used by Philippe Landry in 1880, by F-X-A. Trudel in 1882 and by Guillaume Amyot in 1884, and again in 1895. The official debate record does not always make clear whether Quebec MPs were speaking in French: most were fluent in English but obviously influenced by the cadences and phraseology of their mother tongue.3 However, one of the rare instances of an Anglophone MP using the phrase in those early years came from James Cockburn in 1879: although a former Speaker, Cockburn notoriously spoke no French. One other piece of contemporary evidence indicates that Canadian public discourse had some way to go in the 1870s before a collective identity might embrace all the framers of the Dominion constitution. In September 1876, the satirical magazine Grip published a cartoon showing Confederation as a wandering toddler, surrounded by four politicians, each of them claiming paternity: George Brown insisted he was the child’s ‘genewine poppy’, John A. Macdonald proclaimed himself its ‘real daddy’ and William McDougall astonished that ‘The Much-Fathered Youngster’ did not recognise him. Macdonald, discredited by the Pacific Scandal and hammered at the polls in 1874, had been asserting his guardianship of the Confederation settlement in default of any more positive claim upon the support of the Canadian people. The most unlikely of the four is Francis Hincks, who has a bubble saying ‘I’m the Father of Confederation’. This was a piece of sarcasm by Grip’s proprietor, J.W. Bengough. Hincks had been out of Canada from 1856 until 1869, serving as a British colonial governor in the West Indies, but he had recently talked of the need for a Caribbean federation, and spoken of his own role in encouraging it.4 It was a clever caricature, not least because in an era of large families and sometimes remote fatherhood, no doubt many a small child was uncertain about its own paternity among a group of adults. But the cartoon suggests that there was no sense of shared achievement, at least among the chief protagonists, regarding the creation of Confederation, nor was there any general public attribution of shared endeavour. Throughout five years of office between 1873 and 1878, and despite frequent ministerial changes, Alexander Mackenzie’s Liberal cabinet did not contain a single participant in any of the three Confederation conferences. Although George Brown was influential behind the scenes, a government of opponents of John A. Macdonald was likely mainly to comprise men who had initially opposed Confederation, even if they were reluctantly acquiescent by 1873. Macdonald’s return to office in 1878 might have seemed a step forward in the canonisation of the Dominion’s founders, four of whom – Campbell, Langevin, Tilley and Tupper – served in prominent posts. However, there was a complication. Appointed to the Great Coalition as one of Brown’s associates, Oliver Mowat had apparently displayed little enthusiasm for the political revolution that it espoused, and had accepted appointment as a judge before the end of 1864. But Mowat had attended the Quebec Conference and so had an incontrovertible claim to constitutional parenthood. In 1872, he had stepped down from the bench to become premier of Ontario. Macdonald’s return to office six years later heralded a decade of legal warfare between Ottawa and its largest province, argued out before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, England. The substantive outcome of that campaign was that Mowat rolled back Macdonald’s centralised Dominion, establishing Ontario (and, by implication, the other provinces) as supreme within their legislative spheres. It would not become widely known until Joseph Pope published his documentary collection on Confederation in 1895, but Mowat had proposed two important resolutions as the Quebec blueprint was assembled, one defining the sphere of authority of the provinces, and the other authorising a number of central powers, including that of disallowing provincial legislation. Mowat’s role in the conference was thus larger than his prompt withdrawal to a judgeship might have suggested. In turn, this would have made Macdonald and his allies less likely to welcome to the cult of veneration implied in the term ‘Fathers of Confederation’, with its assumption of collective and constructive wisdom. If the premier who was fighting for Ontario’s autonomy was the same politician who had proposed the original raft of provincial powers, and if that person had also been almost immediately recognised as one of Upper Canada’s leading lawyers, then the campaign to roll back Ottawa’s authority would obviously seem to possess historical legitimacy. In 1887, Mowat countered the objection that he had also endorsed the disallowance of local legislation by the new general government by arguing, plausibly enough, that the delegates at Quebec had assumed that they were transferring an imperial power to the Dominion, on the same basis that had been exercised for many years from London – that is to say, very rarely.5 If Confederation had been the work of founding fathers, then one of the most semi-divine of that assembly of demigods must have been the premier of Ontario. The Robert Harris group portrait In 1883, the Fathers of Confederation took a step closer to becoming a national icon, but the process was accidental and the accolade slow to crystallise. The founding, in 1880, of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts had no doubt represented a landmark in recognition and encouragement of the visual arts in the Dominion. Unfortunately, it was not easy to advance its cultural agenda, especially the central aim of creating a National Gallery. A cramped room in Ottawa’s Bank Street was designated as the Gallery’s first home in May 1882, and it may be that the idea of acquiring a large picture of national import was attractive as a means of forcing the issue of a permanent location. In April 1883, the Academy’s President, Lucius R. O’Brien, submitted a wordy memorandum to the government calling for artistic commemoration of ‘the meeting of the Conference at which the foundation was laid for the Confederation of the Provinces constituting the Dominion of Canada’.

Load more