1867 (20 page)

The privy councillors had decreed that, whatever the British North America Act said about disallowance, interference with the workings of a responsible government in its own sphere was fundamentally unjust. The words remained unchanged, but Ottawa lost the power of disallowance, much as the Colonial Office had lost it
with the coming of responsible government. The equitable principles of interpretation upon which Mowat had built his legal career had triumphed over the black-letter rules in which Macdonald had put his trust.

At the end of the Quebec conference, with his baggage gone and the train waiting, George Brown scribbled a note to his wife. “You will say our constitution is dreadfully tory – and it is – but we have the power in our hands (if it passes) to change it as we like. Hurrah!” This has always seemed a poignantly sad prediction. Brown’s party would be out of power in Ottawa for most of the rest of the century, and the constitution drafted at Quebec largely resisted formal amendment for more than a hundred years. But perhaps at some point during the conference, Brown had had Mowat at his elbow, Mowat with his enigmatic smile and his equity-lawyer mind, hinting that Canada West would find the federal government’s big guns as easy to discredit as the autocratic rule of the bad old days before responsible government.
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The Mowat resolutions on the division of powers and Alexander Galt’s financial resolution were the last large issues of the Quebec conference. Galt’s financial proposals were another demonstration of the Canadians’ control of the Quebec agenda. Mowat’s resolutions had confirmed that the provinces would receive the revenues of their Crown lands and would be entitled to levy direct taxes. But direct taxes were almost unknown and much feared in the 1860s. (George Brown, who took his free-trade principles seriously, was rare in his eagerness to see direct taxation of property replace customs tariffs as a main source of public revenue). On the whole, the financial terms gave blunt evidence of Canadian primacy. Although the Maritime provinces had substantial net assets and the Canadas substantial liabilities, Galt’s resolution transferred to the federal government most of the assets and liabilities of the old provinces. The federal government would also acquire control of customs duties and tariffs, though the sea-trading Maritimes needed low tariffs much more than the revenue-hungry Canadas did.

Had these fiscal proposals been introduced at the start of the conference, they might have launched intense, even fatal, disagreement. Even in the last days, with confederation almost a
fait accompli
, the financial terms provoked hard bargaining. Soon after Galt introduced them on Saturday, October 22, they were handed over to a committee for further work. When the committee members – Galt and Brown for Canada, Tilley, Tupper, Pope, and Shea for the four Atlantic delegations – returned on Wednesday, they proposed new details but no fundamental change. Tilley, who had an eye for a balance sheet, had secured for New Brunswick a special grant of $63,000 a year for ten years. Tupper, less preoccupied with monetary details, got nothing similar for Nova Scotia. As part of the bargaining, the delegates had also agreed on a railway from Quebec to Halifax – considered a boon to the Maritimes and particularly to Halifax, but long viewed sceptically by Upper Canadians. Prince Edward Island, perhaps to teach it a lesson about the perils of resisting the Canadians on so many issues, got nothing for its land problem.

The conference wound up at Quebec on Thursday, October 27. A ceremonial tour of the Canadas followed. Some delegates left for Montreal on the afternoon train, but the key ones spent most of the day in a desperate scramble to get the resolutions into coherent form and caught the night train at 9:00 p.m.

What they had produced in their sixteen days of arguing and voting was a strikingly utilitarian document. There is no poetry in the Quebec resolutions. The colonists had addressed the philosophical questions of government in the responsible-government struggles two decades earlier. They treated their constitution as a machine for running governments, and their resolutions were almost entirely about governmental mechanics. Explosive issues of language, religion, ethnicity, and national identity were not ignored, but they were left almost entirely unstated in the text.

“Since they had entered the province of Canada,” reflected Nova Scotia delegate Robert Dickey about the experiences of the Quebec
delegates, “the managers of railways had contributed in a very great degree to their pleasure, comfort, and accommodation.” The railwaymen, who understood exactly what the new nation could mean for railway development, had been keeping in touch at the St. Louis Hotel throughout the conference.
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When it ended, they were happy to lay on special trains to take the delegates wherever they chose to go. After Charlottetown, the delegates had gone on to Halifax, Saint John, and Fredericton, giving speeches and promoting their new proposal everywhere. Now the railways would speed the Quebec delegations through the Canadas. In their last official session, held at the St. Lawrence Hotel in Montreal on Saturday, October 29, the delegates formally adjourned the Quebec conference, and the Charlottetown conference too, at least until Maritime union returned to the political agenda. Then it was more speeches, more dinners, more champagne.

The weather at Montreal was as bad as at Quebec, and a military review and fireworks display in honour of the delegates was cancelled, but there was another lavish ball. At a six-hour luncheon the next day, the delegates described their agreement to a large and enthusiastic crowd. Then they and their families went by Ottawa River steamer to Ottawa. They dined in the spectacular new parliament buildings, still under construction. Then, in a few whirlwind days on the railways, they visited Prescott, Kingston, Belleville, Cobourg, Toronto, Hamilton, and even Niagara Falls. Conference secretary Hewitt Bernard refused to give in to the agonies of gout, but John A. Macdonald succumbed to drink at Ottawa. Mercy Coles, having the time of her life, was much more forgiving of him than she had been of D’Arcy McGee two weeks earlier. At each town, there were tours and civic receptions, and even George Coles and Edward Palmer were persuaded to say kind things about confederation – which they were later to regret.

The very brief stop at Cobourg was made mainly to gratify the local delegate, James Cockburn, a loyal supporter of Macdonald, who, so far as the record shows, had said not a single word throughout the conference. But the tour was acutely political, too, for the
decisions of Quebec still had to be ratified. The men of the confederation conferences were merely delegates, with no power to bind their respective provinces. The Quebec resolutions were merely their proposals, and would lack all official standing until given legislative approval. “I should see no objection to any consultation on the subject amongst the leading members of the governments concerned,” the colonial secretary had instructed the colonies in 1862, “but whatever the result of such consultation might be, the most satisfactory mode of testing the opinion of the people of British North America would probably be by means of resolution or address proposed in the legislature of each province by its own government.” Only the legislatures could grant legitimacy to the Quebec resolutions.
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The delegations at Quebec represented the cabinets of all five provinces, as well as three of the four political parties of the united Canadas and both leading parties in each of the Atlantic provinces. From the perspective of the late twentieth century, when the functions of Canadian legislatures had become largely ceremonial, it was difficult to imagine that legislative approval of the Quebec resolutions would have been more than a formality. In the 1860s, however, no legislature could be taken for granted. To get their plan through, the delegates had to begin to seek public approval as part of the campaign to win legislative approval.

So the grand tour of the Quebec delegations coincided with a flood of press coverage in newspapers controlled by the delegates – and in the hostile press as well. The resolutions, and commentary on them, were soon published throughout British North America. So were the speeches the delegates made to public meetings at all the stops on their tour. Their opponents were soon organizing counter-demonstrations, but for a time the confederation delegates had a clear advantage. The largest of their post-Quebec public meetings was in Toronto, late at night on Thursday, November 3. With Mercy Coles watching from her window at the Queen’s Hotel on Front Street, Tupper, Tilley, and Toronto’s own hero of the hour,
George Brown, stood on a gallery just beneath her and spoke to five thousand cheering citizens.

That was almost the end. The festive excursion to Niagara Falls was the last gathering of the personnel of the great confederation conference. When her family parted from the others after a visit to the falls (“I can’t, it is quite impossible to describe them. They far exceeded anything I ever expected to see”), Mercy Coles was grief-stricken.
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It was time for the delegates to face the reactions back home.

S
HORTLY BEFORE
confederation, twenty-year-old Alfred Bessette left Quebec’s rural d’Iberville County and the relatives who had raised him and went seeking work in the United States. In the 1860s, emigration was carrying a flood of young people like him from the crowded farms of rural Quebec to the factory towns of New England. Unlike most of them, young Bessette did not stay in the States. Small and sickly, he proved as ill-suited to the American factories as to the farms where he had grown up. Shortly after confederation, the young man returned home, to bleak prospects.

Soon, however, Alfred Bessette found a vocation. He had always been given to prayer, penance, and meditation, and his local curé encouraged him to approach the Congrégation de Sainte-Croix, a clerical order that had recently opened a college nearby. For an illiterate son of the rural peasantry, the priesthood was beyond reach, but the Congrégation included lay brothers who devoted themselves to manual labour in imitation of St. Joseph the carpenter, and Bessette joined these. At the order’s college in Montreal, Alfred Bessette gave up his name and became Brother André. In time, he
was assigned to be the college doorman – in effect, to be a household servant to the teaching order and its students. It seemed an appropriately humble vocation for one of the weakest and most vulnerable children of rural French Canada. Yet, during his decades of service as doorman and servant, Brother André would become one of the pre-eminent men of early-twentieth-century Quebec.
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Brother André began to visit the poor and sick of the neighbourhood around the college. He also began to work cures. During his charitable visits, Brother André would offer to rub sores or disabled limbs with oil that he collected from the lamps at the statue of St. Joseph in the college chapel. Many professed themselves cured, often instantly. Admiration for the humble brother’s healing skills and his holiness began to spread. Devout Montrealers seeking relief from illness or injury made their way to the doorman’s cell. Brother André attributed all his feats to his patron saint and insisted he was only St. Joseph’s “little dog.”

To have a miracle-working cult arising in Montreal initially dismayed sophisticated Catholics and some of the Catholic hierarchy. But Brother André’s simple piety disarmed his critics, and his popularity among working-class Montrealers became immense. He won tolerance and support, and then he won permission to build a shrine to his saint on the slopes of Mont-Royal near his college. St. Joseph’s shrine became a place of pilgrimage, a minor North American Lourdes, with Brother André as its guardian and guiding spirit. Pilgrims left alms, and in 1915 the small shrine was removed to make way for a vast church, the Oratoire Saint-Joseph.

For the rest of his life, Brother André devoted himself to caring for the pilgrims and completing his shrine. As devotees flocked to the Oratoire, and stories of cures multiplied, Brother André humbly but ceaselessly solicited the millions of dollars his shrine required. He would talk to anyone, pray with anyone, take an offering from anyone. By the 1920s, frail and elderly, he travelled widely every year to raise funds, but he was particularly cherished by the poor Montrealers to whom he preached quiet Christian acceptance of
life’s hardships, even as he sought to heal their pain. Montreal shops displayed collection boxes for Brother André, in much the way they might now support cancer research or environmental protection. Brother André became a talismanic figure for French Canada, but particularly for francophone Montreal. The simple, devout, barely literate son of the rural peasantry had become to Montreal what the parish curé was supposed to be for rural farm families of Quebec: a familiar friend and counsellor, the benefactor of a village society secure in the embrace of traditional ways.