Document Information

Date: 1864-08-27
By: The Economist
Citation: “The Difficulties in the Way of the Federation of Canada,” The Economist (27 August 1864).
Other formats: Not yet available.

THE DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY OF THE FEDERATION OF CANADA.

MR BROWN, the Minister who leads the Upper Canadians in the new project of Federation, explains his policy very clearly. In a long and excellent speech, addressed to the county for which he sits, he has, we think, demonstrated past all question that the existing arrangement—the Parliamentary equality of the provinces—has become intolerable; that it places the richer, more populous, and higher taxed province permanently under the feet of the poorer, less populous, and less taxed division; that it subjects Protestants to Catholics, men of the English stock to men of the French race; that there is no possibility of change under the existing arrangement, and that a new one must be adopted without further delay. He has also, we think, shown that if British America is to become a great independent State, allied very strictly to Great Britain, but not entitled to call on her for troops, the colonies owning that vast territory must be bound together by some plan of a Federation. The Canadians will benefit by it in the elevation of thought and purpose which national feeling begets; Great Britain will benefit by it in the new prospect of creating a balance of power upon the American continent. We have already expressed our appreciation of the plan in principle, but it is necessary to point out a few of the dangers in the path. Constitutions work well or ill according to their details, not their principles, and Mr Brown is, upon details, very far from explicit. He seems, indeed, scarcely to have made up his own mind, to regard the points on which depends the working of his scheme as of minor importance, and to be a little too ready to make concessions rather than protract a difficult situation. In one or two of the hints he lets drop, we perceive the germs of evils which will task his very considerable powers fully to remove. Two points in particular strike us as involving very serious danger,—the danger, in fact, of destroying national government just as the nation begins to constitute itself.

We do not quite perceive in the first place how, with the ideas Mr Brown seems to accept, British North America is to have an Executive Government at all. He says that the Lower Canadians insist on what is practically internal independence, on the absolute right of control over worship, including the power of maintaining a State Church, over internal legislation, over the descent of land, over everything which affects in any way their distinctive social condition. Of course, each of the colonies admitted into the Federation will demand equal privileges, and there will therefore exist no absolute central Parliament at all, only a Congress with defined and very limited national powers, a taxing machine rather than a ruling assembly. That arrangement has immense inconveniences to which we shall presently allude; but just now we want to ask whence, without an absolute Parliament, a strong Executive is to be derived. The framers of the American Union made one by investing their President with enormous authority, with very much more than the average power of a King. He is, in fact, in action King and Premier both, dictates policy as well as maintains political order. The colonists will, it is to be feared, create no such officer. They do not wish to separate from Great Britain yet, and before separation they certainly will not invest the British Governor with powers like those of the President, with the power for example of acting despite a momentary hostility in his own Congress, of appointing and removing every officer unquestioned, of exercising a vast patronage without even verbal remonstrance from his Parliament. It might be wise to grant such powers, but Colonial jealousy, to say nothing of statesmanship, is quite certain to prevent the concession. Then who is to wield them? The Cabinet clearly, but the Cabinet is a collection of Parliamentary officers, and cannot be stronger than the Parliament which elects them. If its powers are limited theirs will be limited too, and the new Commonwealth will find itself in the position of a nation whose government in times of emergency actually cannot act. Suppose, for instance, it is indispensable, in order to maintain civil order, to do something wholly contrary to the institutions of the Lower Province. There is no independent Executive to do it in the name of the nation, and Parliament has not the power to authorise the Parliamentary Executive to step over the law, has no authority even to pass a bill of indemnities outside the constitution. Suppose for example, a section of the Lower Province to be in revolt against the Catholic State Church, quite a conceivable case if an English speaking population ever settles there, and the local legislature to resolve not to give way, is the Supreme Government to allow of perpetual disorder? We do not see how it is to help it, for the Premier cannot carry out any compromise with the discontented outside the power of Parliament, and Parliament will have no power even to consider the matter. The Commonwealth will be exactly in the position in which the United Kingdom would have been had Catholic Emancipation been forbidden by a law which Parliament could not alter,—in which, in fact, it was as long as George the Fourth held his coronation oath to be one from which his people could not release him. Such emergencies occur seldom, but when they occur, they, unless provided for, destroy States, and it is a nation, a succession of generations, not a generation, for which the Canadian statesmen are trying to provide. Mr Brown may be able to provide against this danger, but his present inclination seems to be to buy the adhesion of the less powerful colonies by granting to them a share of independent power which may, and we fear will, hereafter prove extremely embarrassing.

Again, whatever may be done as to the Executive power, it is quite evident that there is to be no unlimited Legislative authority. The jealousy of the Colonies is to be conciliated by limitations on the central Legislature which will incapacitate it from touching their peculiar institutions. This provision will, we believe, prove to be a fatal mistake. It is a repetition of the very blunder which has proved so disastrous throughout the course of recent American history, the destruction of every instrument for conveying the final decision of the majority of the nation. If Congress, for example, had been absolute, the slavery difficulty might have been removed without danger of civil war. The very first principle of Government is that absolute power, an authority which can use the whole of the strength of the nation to meet an emergency, unfettered by any law or custom or fear of physical opposition, must reside somewhere, and in a free State the locale should be the nation acting through its representatives. This is the case in Great Britain, and the most important crises, the demand for emancipation, the Irish famine, the necessity of drafting for a militia, the change of succession, the abolition of slavery, have been met in this way by the use of power outside ordinary constitutional rules. The Canadian Congress, as proposed, could not pass an Encumbered Estates Bill, however necessary it might appear to all but the encumbered proprietors. There will be a hundred occasions in its history in which the nation will require such acts; and, whenever they occur, the machine must either break or be kept going by a revolution—the most dangerous of all experiments, because the one which melts away the habits which are the protection of society. The difficulty will tax Mr Brown’s ability to the utmost; but we may offer him one suggestion. He will not, we imagine, be able to make his Parliament absolute; the dread entertained by the Lower Canadians of being overpowered by an English and Protestant majority will be too great; but he may overcome the difficulty in another way, by clauses inserted in the new Constitution enabling Parliament, in time of great danger, to clothe the Viceroy for three months or six months, or for a specified purpose, with absolute authority. He must exercise it still subject to recall from home, and, being as much Viceroy of one province as of another, would be almost certain to use it with moderation and without any apparent sectional bias. Some such law must be enacted in the event of invasion, and it might most usefully be made an element in the permanent Constitution. If some such provision is not introduced, every great emergency, every foreign war, every shifting of the centres of population, every demand for a revision of the constitutional Charter, will involve the danger either of revolution or of the extinction of the nationality which Mr Brown is so very wisely anxious to create.