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Date: 1866-09-02
By: Montreal Herald
Citation: “Confederation in England and the Reported Abandonment of the Quebec Constitution” Montreal Herald (2 September 1866).
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CONFEDERATION IN ENGLAND AND THE REPORTED ABANDONMENT OF THE QUEBEC CONSTITUTION.—We on Saturday copied from our American exchanges an extract from an article on this subject, taken from the London Times, which seemed to show that the progress of Confederation in England was not quite so smooth and rapid as some persons in Canada would gladly suppose. To-day we give the leading points of that article, and if we are to understand that its statements are true, the public will learn from this publication, for the first time, that that sacred convention, the Quebec constitution, which it was once declared to be death to touch, has been already wholly set aside. The Times in that termagant spirit with which it always treats some one when writing on trans-Atlantic matters, scolds the Nova Scotians for petitioning against the enforcing upon them of the Quebec constitution, because it asserts that that constitution has been abandoned, and that other provisions for the interests of all the Colonies have been adopted in its stead. Who are the parties who have taken upon themselves thus to lay hands on the ark of the Intercolonial Covenant, which was too perfect to admit of the pollution, even of a single amendment in the Canadian Legislature, is a subject on which we have no information; but no one can read the article without understanding that it has not been evolved by the Editor, as the blind man learned the shape of the elephant, from the depths of his own moral consciousness. It is undoubtedly a more or less official statement of the opinions of and the facts known to the pro-Confederate delegates now in England. We hope that it is true; for of one thing we are quite satisfied, that such a botch as the Quebec constitution has never hitherto been invented, even by those amateurs Sieyes and Bentham, who used to manufacture the article, and keep on hand a stock in all varieties of pattern. In the present changed state of Provincial politics, no such absurdity could possibly be again carried. Still it has been carried in the Canadian Legislature, and the circumstance that it has been since thrown overboard in spite of our legislatures assent to it—if that be the fact—is the best possible answer to the assurance of our London contemporary, that nothing is to be done without the assent of the Peoples of the several Provinces. Canada is the only one of these countries which has really given her assent in a constitutional way to any definite scheme of Union. Any scheme, therefore, which shall be carried in the Imperial Parliament now, will be carried, if not in opposition to the opinion of the Maritime Provinces, certainly without the assent of that opinion; while if the Quebec scheme be replaced by another, that other will have the assent of no one Province at all, and will become law in direct opposition to the resolves of, and the solemn pledges given to the Parliament of Canada. For the rest, passing by the half masterful, half vixenish manner of the Times, some of the principles it lays down, will commend itself to all men capable of reasoning on such a subject. The place for free men under constitutional government, to fight out their political debates, is in their own legislatures, and at their own hustings, and if the people of these Provinces were permitted to do that, there would be no room for the complaint of the Nova Scotians that their Parliamentary majority does not represent the people. It is because against the whole spirit of responsible government, an arrangement which concerns ourselves alone, is to be removed from the control of our own Parliaments, and is to be enacted in a manner utterly foreign to our mode of legislation, that the discontented in Nova Scotia have found it necessary to appeal to England. If, therefore, as the Times avers, no one in England wishes to force Confederation against the will of the inhabitants of the different Provinces, why do not the Imperial government and parliament leave the framing of our future constitution to our Colonial governments and legislatures, so that the new government and legislature which shall be created by their agreement shall have the ordinary self-inherent power of reforming and changing the system at need? No one can doubt that we have in these Colonies the necessary legislative machinery to perfect a plan of Confederation—why, therefore, should the Imperial Government and Parliament intervene in an affair of which they know just as little as they did of the proper place for a seat of government, when Ottawa was chosen for our legislative capital by authorities three thousand miles distant? Why has the Imperial Government and Parliament been asked to interfere and supersede our own? It is not usual for legislative bodies, or for self-governing peoples to ask to have their own powers thus placed in abeyance; and if it has been done now, it does not require the sagacity possessed by the Times to understand that there must be a peculiar reason for it. That reason is because the measure was initiated in Canada for the exigencies and interests of rival politicians, anxious to come together and thus make themselves strong enough to seize on the Government, not in any developed public opinion or for any appreciable public interest; and also because it was believed that the plan never could be accomplished in the ordinary methods of constitutional legislation, which would afford opportunity for popular discussion, and occasions for appealing from the legislators to the electors. A Legislative Council, elected for six years only, did not want any opportunity for its constituents to say whether or not its members should be able to vote themselves Councillors for life: it wisely preferred to take the power rather than ask for it. The whole measure was, indeed, contrived as a coup d’etat, to be worked by making the existing Legislatures, filled with interested members, obtain from the Imperial Parliament an enactment which should oust us of our existing constitutions that we can now alter at pleasure, and should impose upon us one made according to the will of these parties temporarily in office, that it should ever after be beyond our power to change it. Now the ground for the complaint by a minority of such courses—supposing that to be the character of the complaint from Nova Scotia—is very different from the ordinary and discreditable whine of a beaten party in a free State. There are in such States forms for the protection of the minority—forms which enable them in the Legislature to obtain modifications of obnoxious measures which they cannot wholly defeat—forms which enable them to evoke expressions of public opinion, and often to appeal directly from the Legislature to the People before great changes can be effected. Above all, in the last resort minorities have this faculty—that a bad measure carried in spite of their opinions to-day, may be changed to-morrow, after experience has shown its defects, and the minority has educated public sentiment to its own standard. Now all this has been set aside in the mode of carrying Confederation. Everything about it has been exceptional—everything unconstitutional, unless you impute such constitutional weight to the will of a majority at any given moment, as to make it the rule for all future generations—as to make it constitutional, for instance, for Mr. D’Isreali and Mr. Gladstone, suddenly to join together, and having thus secured a Parliamentary majority, to vote the Three Kingdoms an absolute Monarchy, and in order to prevent the work from being undone, ask some external power to guarantee that they shall never again lapse into the evils of constitutionalism. Let the spirit of the Times article be put into practice—let those by whose will alone it is admitted that Confederation should be effected, be left to effect it, by the ample machinery already conferred upon them, subject to changes to be made in ordinary course, if the work done be not afterwards approved, and we will vouch for it, that neither in Nova Scotia nor elsewhere will there be any whining complaints, because the minority cannot rule. On the other hand let the method now proposed be carried through, and every change which public opinion may hereafter call for in the new system, will have to be fought out in the Colonial office and the Imperial Legislature, just as they used to be before the epoch of responsible government. It will not be very long before Colonial petitions will pour into the British Parliament.

One more observation we have to make. The Times sarcastically represents those who object to Confederation as foolishly refusing a good, lest some other people should have more than their share of the benefit; but all this sarcasm loses its effect when it is remembered that the fact of Confederation being a good, is just the thing which has to be proved, and just the thing which the supposed minority do not believe.