The Quebec Conference of 1864 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2018-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

During the Canadian parliamentary debate on the Quebec Resolutions, the Montreal conservative Christopher Dunkin remarked that people like himself, who preferred legislative union, were told “that the Federal union offered us in name will be a legislative union in reality.” Yet, he continued, “whoever dislikes the notion of a legislative union is assured that it will be nothing of the sort.”51 The Resolutions represented a compromise, and the architects of this compromise were anxious to reassure their followers that it sacrificed nothing essential. In Brown’s case this problem is magnified by his status as proprietor of the most widely circulated newspaper in Canada. The contemporary record of his views is ample, but it needs to be read with an eye to context. His views, amplified by the Globe, were heard by both sides (or all sides) at once, and he shaped his words accordingly.52

Maurice Careless correctly stated that the Quebec agreement embodied a more centralized union than the Upper Canadian Reformers had endorsed in 1859, but his intellectual conditioning rendered him deaf to the nuances of Brown’s political evolution. The difference lay in investing the general government with a larger legislative capacity and a formal supremacy that made it first among equals, not in erecting a dominant central authority to which the local governments would be effectively subordinate. Certainly the Reformers did not consent, as Donald Creighton imagined, to impose on the local governments that subordination to central authority that had been the colonies’ lot under the Old Colonial system; as we have seen, the Globe spurned this obsolete model in favour of its successor. This editorial, together with Hewitt Bernard’s note of Brown’s intervention in the debate on the local legislative power, foreshadows the basis upon which Mowat was later to defend provincial rights: the imperial model of internally autonomous colonies, the compromise on the distribution of legislative powers, and judicial resolution of jurisdictional issues.

John A. Macdonald, of course, had other ideas. Shortly after the conference, he predicted to a fellow Conservative that, within their lifetimes, the local governments would be “absorbed in the general power.”53 At the London Conference, he collaborated with British officials to transmute the Quebec Resolutions into statutory language that might promote that outcome.54 As prime minister of Canada, his efforts to expedite it would precipitate the struggle over provincial rights. That struggle would turn on the discrepancy between the Resolutions, which could be seen as a treaty or compact incorporating unwritten constitutional conventions, and the text of the statute. Accordingly, Mowat pursued a strategy of insinuating the understandings of the Quebec Resolutions into the case law developing around the statute.55 The triumph of provincial rights was above all Mowat’s triumph in infusing Canadian constitutional law with the spirit and lore of the Upper Canadian Reform tradition.56 With the fading of that lore, however, the case law thus generated would begin to seem contemptibly perverse.57

We have reviewed the reported remarks of George Brown and Oliver Mowat on the Quebec agreement and Confederation from two points

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