excluding all their rivals. They meant well and they worked hard, only to find themselves assaulted and finally defeated by partisan attack and local resentment. Eager to float above the political landscape as fathers of the new confederation, they made themselves irresistibly juicy targets for every opposition leader who lined up to declare that
he
would have gotten more and given up less.
Charles Tupper, a political brawler and not a man to shed tears for losers, would surely have sneered at the defeated makers of the Meech Lake accord, the would-be confederation-makers who failed to get their deal through. Bringing his rivals to Charlottetown had been no act of kindness. Tupper did it as much to protect his hide as to ensure success. But it did both. Bipartisanship gave the results a legitimacy no modern constitutional initiative has achieved. The premiers of Meech Lake failed where he succeeded, because theyfollowed their presidential egos when he followed his parliamentary guile. In its strategic calculation and in its understanding of parliamentary necessities, it demonstrated in Tupper and his confrères a parliamentary sagacity never matched in the constitutional efforts of the late twentieth century.
* Ged Martin used this phrase to me in an interview in 1991, when I was beginning to look into confederation. It crystallized the process for me instantly and has stayed with me ever since. I am glad to have a chance to acknowledge Ged Martin’s perception and enthusiasm for his subject.
* It is one of the oddities of confederation history that two of the thirty-six fathers of confederation were fiftyish gentlemen of conservative views named John Gray, and both of them had the middle name Hamilton. Colonel Gray, a retired soldier, was premier of Prince Edward Island; Mr. Gray, a lawyer, was ex-premier of New Brunswick.
* I take up the political status of women in Chapter Six .
CHAPTER THREE
Ned Whelan and Edmund Burke on the Ramparts of Quebec
T HE CANADIAN steamship
Queen Victoria
, which had carried the Canadian delegation down to Charlottetown in August 1864, sailed again in October. This time, she collected Maritime delegates at Pictou, Charlottetown, and Shediac, and carried them up the St. Lawrence, bucking headwinds and snow squalls all the way. Among the passengers eager to get to Quebec and the second confederation conference was Edward Whelan, who had recently been added to Prince Edward Island’s delegation.
Whelan makes an odd figure among the makers of confederation, at least among the anti-democratic, élitist fathers we take for granted. He was of working-class origins, raised by his mother and largely self-educated. He never had money or any security beyond what an Island printing office provided, and he had built his political career as a troublemaker and an agent of change. He once declared that all of history was an endless battle of aristocratic power against “the humbler classes of society, the men of small means and limited education.” In the cause of the humbler classes, he was capable of calling loyalty to the Empire “old rubbish” and the Britishconstitution “a mockery, a sham, and a delusion.” Smashing the existing state of property relations on Prince Edward Island was the foundation of his twenty-year political career there. 1
In the tributes given him after his early death, everyone said Ned Whelan was “convivial.” There are just hints that he ate and drank too much and neglected his family. His power base lay with the Island’s Irish Catholic minority, but he was a backsliding Catholic and occasionally a thorn in the bishop’s side. Yet neither his confrontational politics nor his private life made him an outcast. He was generally acknowledged as Prince Edward Island’s liveliest orator on any subject from Shakespeare to educational reform. He ran the Island’s best newspaper, the
Examiner
, and filled it with his perceptive and wide-ranging writing. Though he
he
would have gotten more and given up less.
Charles Tupper, a political brawler and not a man to shed tears for losers, would surely have sneered at the defeated makers of the Meech Lake accord, the would-be confederation-makers who failed to get their deal through. Bringing his rivals to Charlottetown had been no act of kindness. Tupper did it as much to protect his hide as to ensure success. But it did both. Bipartisanship gave the results a legitimacy no modern constitutional initiative has achieved. The premiers of Meech Lake failed where he succeeded, because theyfollowed their presidential egos when he followed his parliamentary guile. In its strategic calculation and in its understanding of parliamentary necessities, it demonstrated in Tupper and his confrères a parliamentary sagacity never matched in the constitutional efforts of the late twentieth century.
* Ged Martin used this phrase to me in an interview in 1991, when I was beginning to look into confederation. It crystallized the process for me instantly and has stayed with me ever since. I am glad to have a chance to acknowledge Ged Martin’s perception and enthusiasm for his subject.
* It is one of the oddities of confederation history that two of the thirty-six fathers of confederation were fiftyish gentlemen of conservative views named John Gray, and both of them had the middle name Hamilton. Colonel Gray, a retired soldier, was premier of Prince Edward Island; Mr. Gray, a lawyer, was ex-premier of New Brunswick.
* I take up the political status of women in Chapter Six .
CHAPTER THREE
Ned Whelan and Edmund Burke on the Ramparts of Quebec
T HE CANADIAN steamship
Queen Victoria
, which had carried the Canadian delegation down to Charlottetown in August 1864, sailed again in October. This time, she collected Maritime delegates at Pictou, Charlottetown, and Shediac, and carried them up the St. Lawrence, bucking headwinds and snow squalls all the way. Among the passengers eager to get to Quebec and the second confederation conference was Edward Whelan, who had recently been added to Prince Edward Island’s delegation.
Whelan makes an odd figure among the makers of confederation, at least among the anti-democratic, élitist fathers we take for granted. He was of working-class origins, raised by his mother and largely self-educated. He never had money or any security beyond what an Island printing office provided, and he had built his political career as a troublemaker and an agent of change. He once declared that all of history was an endless battle of aristocratic power against “the humbler classes of society, the men of small means and limited education.” In the cause of the humbler classes, he was capable of calling loyalty to the Empire “old rubbish” and the Britishconstitution “a mockery, a sham, and a delusion.” Smashing the existing state of property relations on Prince Edward Island was the foundation of his twenty-year political career there. 1
In the tributes given him after his early death, everyone said Ned Whelan was “convivial.” There are just hints that he ate and drank too much and neglected his family. His power base lay with the Island’s Irish Catholic minority, but he was a backsliding Catholic and occasionally a thorn in the bishop’s side. Yet neither his confrontational politics nor his private life made him an outcast. He was generally acknowledged as Prince Edward Island’s liveliest orator on any subject from Shakespeare to educational reform. He ran the Island’s best newspaper, the
Examiner
, and filled it with his perceptive and wide-ranging writing. Though he
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