CANADA’S ‘FATHERS OF CONFEDERATION’:
TIME TO RETIRE AN OUTDATED CONCEPT?
Ged Martin, December 2015
An Outsider Intrudes
The categorisation of 36 nineteenth-century politicians as Canada’s ‘Fathers of
Confederation’ no longer serves any worthwhile purpose, and should be abandoned, certainly
by historians. In making this claim, I have to add one huge disclaimer: I am neither a citizen
nor a resident of Canada. Strictly speaking, how Canadians decide to celebrate the 150th
anniversary of Confederation, which falls in 2017, is none of my business. I can claim only to
be an observer – I hope a friendly one – of Canadian events over several decades, and a
student of Canada’s history. In that latter capacity, I can and do suggest that the notion of the
‘Fathers of Confederation’ may have served a purpose a century ago, but that it has come to
raise more issues than it solves in modern times.
Defining the Fathers of Confederation
Officially, the Fathers are defined as the thirty six politicians who attended one of the three
conferences which designed the British North America Act of 1867 – at Charlottetown and
Quebec City in 1864, and in London, England during the winter of 1866-67. It is generally
stated that they were so recognised during the Diamond Jubilee of 1927, but the process or
the authority by which they were designated does not seem clear, a point that is further
discussed below.
It would be easy to assume that the concept of Fathers of Confederation evolved in parallel,
and as an implicit response, to adulation of the Founding Fathers in the United States.
Americans adopted a much looser attitude, avoiding any official categorisation of their
national heroes. Generally, the term applied to signatories of the Declaration of Independence
in 1776, and to those who took part in the 1787 Philadelphia Convention. There seems no
evidence that Canadians were aware of Jefferson’s overheated description of the latter as ‘an
assembly of demigods’, and no evidence of any concerted emulation north of the border.
Rather, the Canadian equivalent emerged slowly, and to some extent by accident.
Emergence of the term
The earliest use of the phrase in the Parliament of Canada seems to have been by Halifax
Liberal MP Alfred Gilpin Jones, on 30 March 1871.1 Jones seems an unlikely progenitor of
the phrase, since he had fervently opposed Nova Scotia’s adherence to Confederation and
was hardly likely to admire those who had designed its structure: perhaps his usage was
sarcastic. Equally mysterious is the reported statement from March 1875 by Stewart
Campbell, who ‘appealed to the Fathers of Confederation to protect the coal interests of Nova
Scotia.’ Since most of the architects of the Dominion were in opposition at the time, misreporting must be suspected. Far from being a central Canadian (or arrogant Ontario) cry, the
phrase seems to have made its rare appearances from opposite ends of the country: Arthur
Bunster, a British Columbia MP, called Langevin ‘one of the Fathers of Confederation’ in
1880. To put the matter mildly, Bunster was not highly regarded in the House of Commons.
His challenge to a Quebec member to engage in a fist fight in 1878 had been bad enough, but
his decision to arm himself with a knife for the encounter had been somewhat worse. 2 If
Bunster adopted a tag, there was no high probability that it would catch on.
It is also possible that the phrase made its way, slowly, in to English-Canadian discourse
from the more ebullient language of Quebec, where ‘père de la confédération’ would
probably have had a more acceptable ring. J-A. Mousseau applied the term to Macdonald in
1879, and it was used by Philippe Landry in 1880, by F-X-A. Trudel in 1882 and by
Guillaume Amyot in 1884, and again in 1895. The official debate record does not always
make clear whether Quebec MPs were speaking in French: most were fluent in English but
obviously influenced by the cadences and phraseology of their mother tongue.3 However,
one of the rare instances of an Anglophone MP using the phrase in those early years came
from James Cockburn in 1879: although a former Speaker, Cockburn notoriously spoke no
French.
One other piece of contemporary evidence indicates that Canadian public discourse had some
way to go in the 1870s before a collective identity might embrace all the framers of the
Dominion constitution. In September 1876, the satirical magazine Grip published a cartoon
showing Confederation as a wandering toddler, surrounded by four politicians, each of them
claiming paternity: George Brown insisted he was the child’s ‘genewine poppy’, John A.
Macdonald proclaimed himself its ‘real daddy’ and William McDougall astonished that ‘The
Much-Fathered Youngster’ did not recognise him. Macdonald, discredited by the Pacific
Scandal and hammered at the polls in 1874, had been asserting his guardianship of the
Confederation settlement in default of any more positive claim upon the support of the
Canadian people. The most unlikely of the four is Francis Hincks, who has a bubble saying
‘I’m the Father of Confederation’. This was a piece of sarcasm by Grip’s proprietor, J.W.
Bengough. Hincks had been out of Canada from 1856 until 1869, serving as a British colonial
governor in the West Indies, but he had recently talked of the need for a Caribbean
federation, and spoken of his own role in encouraging it.4 It was a clever caricature, not least
because in an era of large families and sometimes remote fatherhood, no doubt many a small
child was uncertain about its own paternity among a group of adults. But the cartoon suggests
that there was no sense of shared achievement, at least among the chief protagonists,
regarding the creation of Confederation, nor was there any general public attribution of
shared endeavour.
Throughout five years of office between 1873 and 1878, and despite frequent ministerial
changes, Alexander Mackenzie’s Liberal cabinet did not contain a single participant in any of
the three Confederation conferences. Although George Brown was influential behind the
scenes, a government of opponents of John A. Macdonald was likely mainly to comprise men
who had initially opposed Confederation, even if they were reluctantly acquiescent by 1873.
Macdonald’s return to office in 1878 might have seemed a step forward in the canonisation of
the Dominion’s founders, four of whom – Campbell, Langevin, Tilley and Tupper – served in
prominent posts. However, there was a complication. Appointed to the Great Coalition as one
of Brown’s associates, Oliver Mowat had apparently displayed little enthusiasm for the
political revolution that it espoused, and had accepted appointment as a judge before the end
of 1864. But Mowat had attended the Quebec Conference and so had an incontrovertible
claim to constitutional parenthood. In 1872, he had stepped down from the bench to become
premier of Ontario. Macdonald’s return to office six years later heralded a decade of legal
warfare between Ottawa and its largest province, argued out before the Judicial Committee of
the Privy Council in London, England. The substantive outcome of that campaign was that
Mowat rolled back Macdonald’s centralised Dominion, establishing Ontario (and, by
implication, the other provinces) as supreme within their legislative spheres. It would not
become widely known until Joseph Pope published his documentary collection on
Confederation in 1895, but Mowat had proposed two important resolutions as the Quebec
blueprint was assembled, one defining the sphere of authority of the provinces, and the other
authorising a number of central powers, including that of disallowing provincial legislation.
Mowat’s role in the conference was thus larger than his prompt withdrawal to a judgeship
might have suggested. In turn, this would have made Macdonald and his allies less likely to
welcome to the cult of veneration implied in the term ‘Fathers of Confederation’, with its
assumption of collective and constructive wisdom. If the premier who was fighting for
Ontario’s autonomy was the same politician who had proposed the original raft of provincial
powers, and if that person had also been almost immediately recognised as one of Upper
Canada’s leading lawyers, then the campaign to roll back Ottawa’s authority would obviously
seem to possess historical legitimacy. In 1887, Mowat countered the objection that he had
also endorsed the disallowance of local legislation by the new general government by
arguing, plausibly enough, that the delegates at Quebec had assumed that they were
transferring an imperial power to the Dominion, on the same basis that had been exercised for
many years from London – that is to say, very rarely.5 If Confederation had been the work of
founding fathers, then one of the most semi-divine of that assembly of demigods must have
been the premier of Ontario.
The Robert Harris group portrait
In 1883, the Fathers of Confederation took a step closer to becoming a national icon, but the
process was accidental and the accolade slow to crystallise. The founding, in 1880, of the
Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts had no doubt represented a landmark in recognition and
encouragement of the visual arts in the Dominion. Unfortunately, it was not easy to advance
its cultural agenda, especially the central aim of creating a National Gallery. A cramped room
in Ottawa’s Bank Street was designated as the Gallery’s first home in May 1882, and it may
be that the idea of acquiring a large picture of national import was attractive as a means of
forcing the issue of a permanent location. In April 1883, the Academy’s President, Lucius R.
O’Brien, submitted a wordy memorandum to the government calling for artistic
commemoration of ‘the meeting of the Conference at which the foundation was laid for the
Confederation of the Provinces constituting the Dominion of Canada’. O’Brien did not
specify which conference he had in mind, and the project began as a tribute to the meeting in
Charlottetown. However, wherever it happened, O’Brien argued that it was ‘an event of such
importance in the annals of the country’ that a monumental canvas was required to keep alive
the memory of the participants. O’Brien added two further points. One was a hurry-up
reminder that the delegates were already dying off. The other was that Robert Harris, ‘a
Canadian artist of ability’, had recently returned from Europe and was ‘fully competent to
paint such a picture.’6
Macdonald’s cabinet was apparently uncertain about how to respond to O’Brien’s plea. To
refuse to support a Canadian artist in the commemoration of a Canadian national landmark
would seem narrow and philistine. But to endorse a proposal that would necessarily feature
current members of the government would equally appear self-serving. They were rescued
from their dilemma by Liberal front-bencher Wilfrid Laurier, who raised the matter in the
Commons on 14 May 1883. Laurier no doubt believed in what he was doing, but it is likely
that embracing the issue was also convenient to him. First, it gave him the opportunity for a
frank avowal that he had opposed Confederation at the time, while making a
characteristically eloquent avowal of his subsequent conversion. Second, it enabled him to
adopt the mantle of a supporter of Canadian culture, his words of praise for Harris being
deftly mingled with a tribute to the work of Quebec sculptor Louis Hébert. His comments
suggest that he envisaged a work of art that would contribute to the portraiture in the hopedfor National Gallery. Perhaps above all, the implicit message of Laurier’s intervention was
that his sunny ways could get things done: the project, he estimated, would cost only $3,000
to $4,000.
Laurier was seconded by a prominent Conservative, the Ottawa Valley entrepreneur Alonzo
Wright, who saw himself as a gentlemanly figure in politics. In grandiose terms, Wright
specifically had the 1864 Quebec Conference in mind, praising its participants as ‘animated
by a lofty patriotism and a far-seeing statesmanship’ in their design of the new nation. His
wide-ranging tributes were slightly undermined by his accidental omission of Liberal hero
George Brown, and both oratorical efforts were hampered by the notoriously poor acoustics
of the House of Commons. New Brunswick’s Peter Mitchell, who would appear in the
memorial canvas, complained that he could not hear whatever was under discussion, and that
members generally should ‘speak a little louder’; Laurier apologised that he was ‘suffering
just now from an affection of the throat’. Sir John A. Macdonald wound up the discussion, in
full statesman mode, calling the exchanges ‘really one of those occasions in which the
asperities of politics are forgotten’: he even praised the contribution to the achievement of his
long-time enemy George Brown, who was conveniently dead, and ‘the present premier of
Ontario’, who was inconveniently alive and not necessary to name. The prime minister
deflected the potential objection that he would himself necessarily feature in the proposed
picture: a jocular allusion to the cartoons of Bengough enabled him to insist that ‘I can have
no objection to have another artist try his hand upon myself.’ Harris had won his commission.
The debate, although relatively brief, had rung the changes of praise for (to quote O’Brien)
‘the distinguished statesmen who took part in the deliberations.’ ‘There were giants in those
days,’ said Wright, while Laurier referred to ‘the event which gave birth to Confederation’.
But nobody mentioned the Fathers of Confederation. The phrase did not arise in connection
with the Harris picture until April 1884, when former Liberal finance minister Richard
Cartwright spotted the item in the estimates, and was apparently troubled by the thought that
the politicians involved could be depicted for as little as $100 a head. Cartwright, who had
been out of the House the previous year, asked: ‘Who is to commemorate the Fathers of
Confederation, and are they being done cheap?’ Sir Leonard Tilley assured him that Harris
had the work in hand, and that no money had yet paid out.7
It is only fair to acknowledge that Harris’s picture was a remarkable achievement. He had to
construct an essentially imaginary scene, dominated by carefully contoured heads. Images of
some of the faces were difficult to track down. When Bernini was commissioned to produce a
bust of Charles I, with the subject unseen, Van Dyck supplied three portraits of the king, full
face, in profile and at an angle. Photographers like William Notman, who assisted Harris,
snapped their sitters head-on, and the artist evidently had to work with the available material.
Thus Adams G. Archibald, surely the only Canadian to have served as lieutenant-governor of
two provinces, appears to cold-shoulder his immediate neighbour, John A. Macdonald, as he
stares directly at the viewer: no doubt, a solemn full-face photograph was the only source
available. Harris set his scene in a lofty chamber in the old Quebec parliament buildings –
which burned in 1883. This enabled him to use three high windows as the background light
source: Harris enlarged the centre window, presumably to emphasise the background
panorama of the St Lawrence. ‘The sight was one to stir the dullest imagination and warm the
coldest heart,’ wrote W.M. Whitelaw. The Canadians, Whitelaw suggested, would have felt
the essential unity of their two provinces, while the Maritimers ‘must have been stirred ...
watching the tide come in from the gulf.’8 In reality, Canada’s coalition cabinet needed no
such reminder, while the Prince Edward Islanders and Newfoundlanders, whose provinces
most closely felt the Gulf currents, would become the least enthusiastic participants in the
project. These comments by Whitelaw, generally an objective as well as a careful scholar,
illustrate how the Harris portrait became back-projected into the story of the Quebec
Conference, until it would become difficult to disentangle the actual hard bargaining from the
subsequent sentimentality. The more practical aspect of the Harris design was that the huge
windows provided light sources which made it possible to silhouette those secondary figures
who were still active two decades after the event. Although the picture was 3.58 metres long
by 1.55 metres high, the delegates occupied only the lower half of the canvas, giving the
throng the appearance of a crowded corridor rather than a constitutional convention.
Ostensibly, the participants were grouped around a long table, but there was not enough room
to seat them all. To ensure that the visibility of the major players on the far side of the table,
only seven of the 34 figures, all of them in profile, occupy the side nearest the viewer.
Necessarily, the lesser participants had to stand around the fringes of the scene.
Harris himself called the commission ‘the government picture’, and there can be no doubt
that his was a representation of 1864 seen through the political priorities of 1883. Although
Harris did attempt to replicate the general seating plan of the meeting, so far as it was
reported the time, his canvas was in every sense a central Canadian picture. Around the
middle section of the table, where the real decisions are being made, not one single delegate
from the Atlantic region can be seen.9 The standing figure of Macdonald dominates the scene,
as he expounds from a charter-like scroll. Leaning towards him is his French-Canadian ally,
George Étienne Cartier, in the body language of nation-building partnership. Slightly further
away is Étienne-Pascal Taché, premier of the Great Coalition and hence president of the
Conference, who had died in 1865: the imperatives of 1864 meant that he had to be depicted,
the needs of 1883 ensured that he need not be emphatically central. In the foreground, the
only figure permitted to mask Macdonald, is Hector-Louis Langevin, who had taken over
Cartier’s role as Quebec lieutenant, and was one of the possible candidates to succeed
Macdonald if the Old Man ever decided to step down. George Brown and Oliver Mowat are
close by, in the vanguard if perhaps not entirely on the team. Alexander Galt merits his nearcentral location, both as the wizard behind the 1867 financial settlement and for his
continuing prominence in public life. But the location of Alexander Campbell close to the
heart of events reflected the fact that he had led the Conservative party in the Senate since
1867. He played only a minor role at Quebec, largely because his skills as a Tory lawyer
replicated Macdonald’s own qualifications.
In flanking positions are Leonard Tilley of New Brunswick, comfortable and confident in his
chair, and the characteristically imposing standing figure of Charles Tupper. Indeed, it is not
wholly clear whether it is Tupper or Macdonald who addresses the meeting. To the left of
Tilley, there is a rent-a-mob of miscellaneous Maritimers, with others straggling away to the
right of Tupper. The two Newfoundland delegates, F.B.T. Carter and Ambrose Shea, stand
awkwardly at the back, like two embarrassed tourists who have stumbled into an ethnic
wedding. Two Maritimers still active in public life, Thomas Heath Haviland and Peter
Mitchell – the New Brunswicker who had found it difficult to hear Laurier’s original proposal
– are etched against windows, thus singling them out from the crowd. One of the oddest
portrayals, at the extreme right of the canvas, is that of New Brunswick’s John Mercer
Johnson, who leans forward attentively, in a manner that almost suggests he is gate-crashing
the picture. His positioning understated his role in the eighteen-sixties. Attorney-General of
his province, Johnson had attended all three conferences, forming part of a small subcommittee in London that had worked with the British to draft the British North America Act.
But he had died in 1868 – Johnson’s lifestyle was not conducive to longevity – and did not
merit a prominent place fifteen years later: perhaps, too, Harris had encountered difficulty in
locating a likeness, and hence had been forced to relegate him to the sidelines.
There are other levels of symbolism in the canvas, for instance in those participants shown
handling documentation. It is difficult to explain why Edward Palmer of Prince Edward
Island is shown, apparently reading a newspaper. Perhaps his body language suggests
detachment, for Palmer did declare against the Quebec scheme. As he was still alive in 1883
and living in Charlottetown – where Harris began work on the painting – it can hardly be the
case that the artist was constrained by only having access to a pensive profile. But another
Islander, journalist Edward Whelan, and John Hamilton Gray of New Brunswick, are both
apparently taking notes: each would later publish a book about the movement for
Confederation. D’Arcy McGee holds a pamphlet, perhaps one of his inspirational speeches
(although it seems a very small pamphlet for a McGee oration). Otherwise, Macdonald and
Tupper grasp resolutions, while Tilley has inserted his fingers in a reference book, marking
points for citation.
If, overall, the Harris painting must be regarded as an achievement, it is hard to acclaim it –
artistically – as a success. It lacks the spontaneity, warmth and wit of his other well-known
group picture, The Meeting of the School Trustees, which followed in 1885.10 His Quebec
Conference painting did not necessarily copper-bottom the concept of the Fathers of
Confederation, but rather formed part of its gradual percolation of public discourse. For
instance, a Nova Scotian MP, J.A. Kirk referred in April 1884 to ‘those gentlemen, who are
called today the fathers of Confederation.’ But when the canvas had its public exhibition,
soon after in Montreal, it was simply called ‘Meeting of the Delegates of British North
America’, with a subtext that spelled out the location and purpose. In 1891, J. Pennington
Macpherson referred to the ‘noble picture ... of the “Fathers of Confederation” ... which now
adorns the vestibule of the Houses of Parliament at Ottawa’11 – for the politicians had been
too smart to fall for any manoeuvre that might entrap them to erecting a purpose-built
National Gallery. Unfortunately, the painting was destroyed in the 1916 Parliament fire.
Harris sold the preliminary cartoon to the government, thus partly compensating him for an
official decision to refuse him royalties on reproductions. Complaining about Mackenzie
King’s unilateral redefinition of Canada’s relationship with Britain at the Imperial
Conference of 1926, acting Conservative leader Hugh Guthrie pointed out that at Quebec, ‘all
the great parties of Canada were represented. Look at that famous picture the Fathers of
Confederation if you want reassurance on this point.’ Harris had become not simply an
imaginative tribute but a documentary source.
Towards the Diamond Jubilee of 1927
Even so, the phrase ‘Fathers of Confederation’ made relatively slow headway in Canadian
cultural and political discourse. Macpherson used it once in his workmanlike biography of
Macdonald, Emerson B. Biggar twice in his popular Anecdotal Life of the first prime
minister. But Sir John A’s official chronicler, Joseph Pope, avoided the phrase in his twovolume study of 1894. Nor had it been used a decade earlier, either by Alexander Mackenzie
in his hagiography of George Brown, or by J.C. Dent in his monumental political history of
the previous four decades. Biographers tended to be partisans for their subjects, and were
perhaps reluctant to share the glory of nation-building. Yet the participants themselves may
have been equally embarrassed by the tag. Oliver Mowat died in 1903: his headstone
described him as ‘One of the Founders of the Confederation of the Provinces of the
Dominion of Canada’, and a member of the government ‘Formed for the purpose of effecting
the Political Union of British North America.’12 The avoidance of a snappier phrase is
revealing. However, Canada’s constitutional architects were dying off, and a sentimental
designation that perhaps they themselves rejected came to seem acceptable by the generation
that followed. By 1908, only Charles Tupper was left, and the old bruiser was becoming
transformed into a national treasure, ‘Canada’s Grand Old Man’ as a biographical sketch put
it. In that year, the governor-general, Earl Grey, hailed him as ‘one of the Fathers of
Confederation’,13 although his biographer, E.M. Saunders, avoided the term in his twovolume Life in 1916. That year saw the publication of A.U.H. Colquhoun’s volume in the
Chronicles of Canada series, an overview history of nation building, entitled The Fathers of
Confederation. This may have been a publisher’s marketing choice, for Colquhoun was
remarkably sparing in his use of the term, using it just six times (twice in the shortened form
of ‘Fathers’), in one of which he regretted their design of the Senate.
Given that the concept of the Fathers of Confederation as such emerged but slowly, it is not
surprising that specific opinions and attitudes were rarely attributed to them. Quebec MP
Guillaume Amyot was prepared in 1895 to accept a moral duty to observe the Sabbath, but ‘I
do not think the fathers of confederation ever intended that this Parliament should enforce
that obligation.’ G.E. Casey, Liberal MP for Elgin West in Ontario, seems to have been the
first politician to speak of the ‘wisdom of the fathers of confederation’ in Parliament. The
example is instructive. In 1864-7, the politicians who stitched together the new Canadian
constitution decided not to tackle the issue of common franchise qualifications across the
Dominion. It was left to Macdonald to impose a system in 1885 which opponents alleged was
politically slanted in favour of the Conservatives. In 1898, the Liberals reverted to using
provincial qualifications in national elections. Supporting the move, Casey appealed to the
‘wisdom’ of the founders, sagacity that happened to coincide with his own preferred solution.
In a later example, Mackenzie King’s minister Brooke Claxton used the same phrase in 1949
to rebut demands that the nine existing provinces should be consulted (or, in plainer English,
bribed) before Newfoundland was admitted as the tenth. It seemed that ‘wisdom of the
fathers of confederation’ was perceived the more easily when their decisions happened to
coincide with your preferences.
Had they really done such a marvellous job? ‘It is to the glory of the Fathers of Confederation
that the constitution ... has lasted without substantial change for nearly half a century,’
proclaimed Colquhoun, in one of his few engagements with the title of his own book.14 With
due respect to the author, who was a distinguished Ontario civil servant, 49 years was not
long for the survival of any system of government. In most polities, a natural inertia leads
power-brokers to operate existing institutions, rather than seek to rip them up from the roots
and start again. In the absence of national disasters such as defeat in war or major internal
upheaval, it was hardly a matter for wonder, much less of celebration, that the 1867 rules still
formed the basis of government in 1916. Second, the constitution had been amended, not
only by Ottawa but also – because its architects omitted to endow their constitution with an
amending formula – through legislation from Westminster, requested of course by Canadians
but enacted to plug gaps in the original settlement. Thus the British North America Act of
1871 (34-35 Victoria, c. 28) resolved ‘doubts’ regarding the authority of the Dominion to
carve out new provinces in the West. The 1875 Parliament of Canada Act (38-39 Victoria, c.
38) was also intended ‘to remove certain doubts with respect to the powers of the Parliament
of Canada’ which had arisen out of controversy over the right of a parliamentary enquiry to
take evidence under oath during the Pacific Scandal. A brief declaratory act was even
required in 1895 to validate the appointment of a Deputy Speaker for the Senate. 15 In macroengineering terms, the drafting process of 1864-67 had indeed achieved a remarkable
structure, but there had been glitches and oversights which could not be ignored. Third, and
perhaps the most important reservation of all, while Canada was still governed by the same
basic charter after half a century, that document was interpreted in a very different spirit
thanks to the provincial counter-offensive of the 1880s. It was to the credit of the Fathers that
their document was flexible enough to accommodate an alternative philosophy of federalism,
but it was less clear that they had all foreseen or would have welcomed such a development
themselves.
Socialist leader J.S. Woodsworth reacted impatiently to hero-worship of the country’s
founders. ‘We are often told of the great achievements that were wrought by the Fathers of
Confederation,’ he commented in January 1926, asking: ‘What about the grandchildren of
confederation? Is confederation worthwhile?’ Woodsworth feared that the benefits of
political unity were purchased at the expense of regional economic disparity. Henri Bourassa
echoed his concern in March 1927: it had been ‘a great mistake on the part of the fathers of
confederation’ to purchase the North West, treat the region as a colony of central Canada and
so transmit second-class status to the prairie provinces. In the same debate, Woodsworth was
prepared to make politely patriotic noises, but fundamentally he doubted whether the values
of 1867 had much to say to the political agenda of six decades later. ‘The fathers of
confederation could not have had any idea sixty years ago of the vast changes that were
coming; they could not possibly have had the prescience that would enable them to visualize
them.’
It was against the background of such attitudes that the Dominion celebrated its sixtieth
birthday, on July first 1927. Overshadowing the event was the lost opportunity of ten years
earlier: the more obvious calendar landmark, fifty years of Confederation, had been obscured
by War and internal division. The tone of the period was caught by the grim warning of
Quebec Conservative MP P-E. Lamarche, who noted that the fiftieth anniversary followed the
1916 destruction of the Ottawa parliament: he could only hope that the bicultural spirit of
Confederation was not equally threatened. A commemorative stamp was issued in 1917, a
truncated, Tilley to Tupper, extract from the now-destroyed Harris canvas. There were few
other formal commemorations.
Ten years on, Canada needed to do better. Prime Minister Mackenzie King told parliament in
April 1927 that the celebrations would honour ‘the achievements of the fathers of
confederation’. However, the unanimously adopted Commons resolution looked to the future,
stating that the commemoration was intended to encourage ‘a robust Canadian spirit, and in
all things Canadian a profounder national unity.’ The term ‘Diamond Jubilee’ invoked
memories of the celebration of Queen Victoria’s reign back in 1897, the high water mark of
imperial unity and comfortable world power, implying that celebrating sixty years was better
than fifty, not a delayed second-class substitute. Yet there were modernistic features of the
celebration, too, that would not have been present a decade earlier – a coast-to-coast hook-up
through the new medium of radio, plus the enhanced international status of membership of
the League of Nations and an honoured role within the Commonwealth of Nations that
Mackenzie King stressed in his July first address on Ottawa’s Parliament Hill. ‘Thus has been
realized, far beyond their dreams, the vision of the Fathers of Confederation.’16 The oratory
was uplifting, but it was also logically confused, a characteristic example of the mismatch
between the values of the present and the aims of the past inherent in the celebration of any
founding myth. The vision of the Fathers had been realised, but the Canada that had
developed had not been imagined in their dreams. There is some contradiction here.
Canada’s founders were not only honoured: they were also re-defined. Three additional
names were added to the list, apparently in deference to pressure from their families.17 It is
likely that the decision was ultimately made by Mackenzie King, who micromanaged the
celebrations: ‘no detail escaped his attention.’18 There is a Big-Tent inclusivity about the
1927 pantheon which is certainly redolent of King’s tendency to straddle opposites. Nine of
the acclaimed Fathers came from provinces that did not join the original Dominion – one
quarter of the total – including the two from Newfoundland, a jurisdiction that was still
outside in 1927. Furthermore, even by the standards of Canada’s famed tolerance and
inclusivity, it seems remarkable that three of the officially hailed founders of the nation had
in fact opposed its creation.19
Rex Woods: repainting the past
The constructed nature of the ‘Fathers’ category was underlined in 1964 when an insurance
company, Confederation Life, commissioned the artist Rex Woods to produce a tribute to
Harris, which would replace the picture lost in 1916. Woods added the three 1927 Fathers of
Confederation at the right hand side of the canvas, even though they had not been present at
Quebec. Their addition subverted the balance of the original group, a disruption that Woods
sought to disguise by placing a cameo from a Harris self-portrait on the wall behind them.
(Aged fifteen at the time of the Quebec Conference, Harris was in fact living in Prince
Edward Island while the Dominion was in gestation.) Despite its resemblance to a gigantic
cigarette card, the Woods revival of the Harris icon no doubt succeeded as a nation-building
symbol. The downside was some of the individual figures were now third-hand – copies of
interpretations of photographs – and several of the individual figures, notably Étienne Taché
and John Hamilton Gray of Prince Edward Island, appear as spiritless caricatures. Woods
captured a moment of breathless destiny at the price of rendering a collection of mainly
lifeless figures. One unfortunate inheritance from Harris was that the participants all have
their backs to the giant windows, as if ignoring the inspirational panorama of seemingly
endless river that symbolised the real Canada. Equally, the casual observer would have no
idea that most of these black-coated figures were in fact men in their forties, not so much
handing down a constitution to posterity as designing a stage on which they proposed to act
themselves.20
The Fathers of Confederation: Regional and Ethnic Restrictions
Of course, there were notable limitations to the comprehensiveness of the 1927 list. It was the
year that the Government of Canada formally asked the Supreme Court to adjudicate whether
women were ‘persons’ within the meaning of the British North America Act, and hence
eligible for appointment to the Senate: ‘Fathers’ meant precisely what it said – an all-male
cohort. Had the discrimination been complained about, the defence would obviously be that
1927 was faithful to 1864-66, both in its restriction by gender and in the fact that none of the
conference participants had ever set foot west of the Great Lakes. In 1927, as in 2015, the
concept of the Fathers of Confederation excluded the half of Canada that resides west of
Ontario, and the half of Canada that happens to be female. A further complication was that
the Fathers were mainly Anglophones and Protestant. Of the four French-Canadians, Taché
did not live to see the passage of the British North America Act, while Cartier and Langevin
are deeply embedded in the parliamentary world of Victorian Canada, in a manner that today
resonates only to a handful of students of political history. (Indeed and alas, Langevin was in
so deeply engaged that he was eventually forced to resign for complicity in corruption.) The
fourth Quebecer, J-C. Chapais, enjoyed brief retrospective prominence in 1927 because his
son happened to be serving in the Senate.21 (Thomas Chapais doubled as a History professor
at Laval, and later served in the Quebec cabinet under Duplessis. He accepted a knighthood
when Bennett briefly revived imperial honours in 1935. If the son seems remote from modern
Quebec, the father can only belong to an even more distant world.) Even in the late
nineteenth century, French Canadians were looking to alternative parental figures, such as
Champlain and Papineau.22 Of the 32 anglophone Fathers, just three were Catholics – D’Arcy
McGee from Canada, Newfoundland’s Ambrose Shea and Edward Whelan of Prince Edward
Island. Only William Henry Steeves of New Brunswick could claim any ethnicity outside the
prevailing Anglo-Celtic background of the English-speaking majority, on the basis of a greatgrandfather, Heinrich Stieff, from Germany.
While qualification for the parenthood of Confederation remains participation at one of the
three founding conferences, it is not easy to see how these problems can be overcome. The
case of Robert Duncan Wilmot illustrates this. Wilmot had long believed in British North
American union, but he objected to the Quebec scheme because, in his opinion, it did not go
far enough towards centralisation. He joined the 1865 New Brunswick cabinet – it was
initially known as the Smith-Wilmot ministry -- which temporarily derailed the process of
Confederation. Wilmot quickly found himself at odds with his colleagues, and became first a
fifth-column and soon a declared opponent of the Antis. He travelled to the London
conference in 1866, but left no amending mark upon the draft constitution. By contrast, Nova
Scotia’s Joseph Howe – perhaps the most enduringly popular and certainly best remembered
public figure his province has ever produced – made peace with the new dispensation in
1868-9 – extracting ‘better terms’ that represented at least a dent in the Confederation
settlement. Unlike Wilmot, Howe changed sides too late to qualify for national parenthood.
Then came the creation of Manitoba in 1870, the fulcrum of a profound argument by W.L.
Morton that the constitution was fundamentally changed by the creation of an intended
second French-majority province.23
However, no mechanism exists to designate post-1867 Fathers of Confederation. Given that
the overall category probably no longer serves much purpose, that may not seem to be a
problem. But there are two downsides to the closure of the elite. One is that it continues to
confine a nation symbol by region, gender and ethnicity. The other is that unofficial bids are
made on behalf of attractive individuals who are taken from their context and elevated into
popular icons. One individual located in an ambiguous category is Louis Riel, who was
recognised by the House of Commons in 1992, for his ‘unique and historic role’ both in the
founding of Manitoba and ‘his contribution in the development of confederation’, despite
being hanged for treason in 1885.24 Some undoubtedly regard him as a Father of
Confederation, even though he has never been so recognised.25
When it comes to geographical distribution, it seems unreasonable that Canada’s third largest
province by population, British Columbia, has no representative among the country’s
acclaimed creators. A modern-day Government of Canada website quotes a tenth-grade
student in Greater Vancouver who argues that Amor De Cosmos should be regarded as
British Columbia’s Father of Confederation.26 The problem with both these popular
ascriptions is that they focus upon one colourful personality to the exclusion of many other
potential candidates. If formal participation in negotiations for provincial status is the
touchstone for Confederation fatherhood, then neither Riel nor De Cosmos would qualify.
The three British Columbians who journeyed to Ottawa in 1870 were R.W.W. Carrall, J.S.
Helmcken and J.W. Trutch. They are not names that trip from the tongue of memory. And the
problem of over-emphasis upon larger-than-life figures is accentuated where the lewgendary
personality was himself the origin of the claim to inclusion, as in the case of Newfoundland’s
J.R. Smallwood, who projected himself as the only living Father of Confederation. And such
self-promotion undoubtedly has its effect. Most politically aware Canadians would probably
have a vague notion that Smallwood was the vital force behind Newfoundland’s accession as
the tenth province. Few would recall that F. Gordon Bradley was at least the formal leader of
the campaign. Some would argue that his role was more than merely nominal, and that,
without the ‘cover’ of the more prominent and respectable Bradley, Smallwood might well
have failed.27
Of course, there are no Aboriginal Fathers of Confederation. It would be insulting to imply
that signatories to the Numbered Treaties between 1871 and 1921 were free agents helping to
shape Canada, let alone that they embraced any vision behind the agreements. Arguably, it
was not until the creation of Nunavut in 1999 and the Nisga’a Treaty the following year that
Aboriginal people negotiated participatory status with any element of equality. In any case,
First Nations emphasise decision-making through group consensus rather than by individual
leadership, so the singling out of individuals, even as symbolic of their communities, would
run counter to their cultures.
Mothers of Confederation?
The major shortcoming of the Fathers of Confederation remains their uniform masculinity.
Here there is an obvious mismatch between the realities of the past, when political activity
was restricted to men, and the culture of the present, which finds itself uneasy with any
tradition that so obviously excludes women. In recent times, Moira Dann, a writer based in
Victoria BC, has brought alive the women, wives, daughters and sweethearts, who enlivened
the social side of the first two Confederation conferences. (London in 1866-67 was less
festive, although some of the Maritime delegates were accompanied by spouses, George
Cartier brought his partner and John A. Macdonald found time to get engaged.)28 Dann’s
Mothers of Confederation certainly offer a lively corrective to the masculine story, but it is
still hard to see them as equivalents in terms of policy-making. In 2015, Ontario premier
Kathleen Wynne endorsed a similar approach.29 R. Douglas Francis, Richard Jones and
Donald B. Smith are perhaps the first academic historians to recognise the collective
designation, although this prolific team of textbook authors has come late to its acceptance.30
The Canadian Encyclopedia includes six women in a section on ‘Mothers of Confederation’,
the component articles dating in their present form to 2015. Unfortunately, only two of six
were on the fringes of any of the Confederation conferences, one of whom, Mercy Anne
Coles, daughter of a Prince Edward Island politician, unfortunately caught diphtheria at
Quebec. Two of the Canadian Encyclopedia six were not even in Canada in 1864: one, Lady
Dufferin, arrived in 1872; the other, Queen Victoria herself (discussed below), never made
the journey. (When John Ross, a Canadian delegate to London in 1858, invited her to visit,
she ‘laughed very heartily, saying she was afraid of the sea’.) 31 Collectively, these are
refreshing attempts to redress the gender bias in the parenthood of Canadian Confederation,
but they do stretch the factual underpinnings to present a matching female team.
Anne Nelson Brown: Get Me Out Of Here
The first one political wife from that era to be the subject of a scholarly attempt to label her
as the ‘Mother of Confederation’ was Anne Brown. The year was 1960, and the proposer was
Maurice Careless, charming and scholarly biographer of Anne’s husband, George Brown, the
dark and driven proprietor of the Toronto Globe and masterful voice of the Upper Canada
Reform movement. Careless was influenced by the ethos of the University of Toronto’s
History school. Its members tended to perceive great underlying forces which sought to
determine the course of events and the creation of nations. However, those forces required to
be first recognised and then harnessed by gifted and blessed individuals in order to be
brought to fruition. Character and circumstance, Donald Creighton called the approach, and
its greatest monument would be his two-volume biography of John A. Macdonald, who
soared above some very human weaknesses to embrace the potential of the St Lawrence
system and so create a transcontinental Canada. However, perhaps the most noteworthy
example of the intersection between personality and destiny in Macdonald’s career resulted
not so much in his own landmark resolve, but in the decision of his rival, George Brown, to
join him in a coalition ministry in June 1864 which aimed to restructure British North
America and did indeed create modern Canada three years later. The feud between Brown
and Macdonald was legendary, with the upright and inflexible Reform leader insisting upon
an unconditional apology for an earlier attack on his integrity. Why did he modify his
position – for he still insisted on personal redress, even though he was prepared to defer the
retraction, thus enabling the devious Macdonald to postpone and evade the commitment? It
was tempting to attribute Brown’s new-found moderation to a seismic change in his private
life. Concentrating on his business and political careers, Brown had remained single until the
age of 43. On a visit to his Scottish homeland in 1862 he had met and successfully wooed
Anne Nelson, returning to unaccustomed domesticity and (at an appropriate interval)
parenthood in Toronto. He also re-entered politics, which dragged him down to parliament in
Quebec City, but he now adopted an aloof and independent attitude, concentrating on the
constitutional issue of relations between English- and French-speaking Canadians. This, in
turn, led to his reluctant agreement in June 1864 to work for structural change within a
coalition cabinet. Was his new-found moderation a by-product of his belated marriage? In a
bright throwaway remark in 1927, Frank Underhill, gadfly of the Toronto History
Department, had suggested: ‘Perhaps the real Father of Confederation was Mrs Brown.’32
In nominating Anne Brown as the ‘Mother of Confederation’ at a conference of the Canadian
Historical Association, Careless impishly pleaded that he was ‘merely altering the
characterization to restore Mrs. Brown to her rightful sex.’ Indeed, he half admitted that his
title was ‘devised to trap an audience’. He disavowed any intention ‘to prove that Brown’s
activities in the conceptual year of Confederation [i.e. 1864] were directed by a feminine
hand.’ Rather, he sought to demonstrate that George Brown’s public activities were
conducted within a context of concern for his family life, so that ‘the former cannot be
properly described without reference to the latter.’ As Brown himself put it in one of his
letters home, ‘we must think of wallpaper and carpets, whatever comes of the constitution.’
As Careless happily accepted, this was almost certainly true of most politicians. The
advantage in this case was the survival of an exceptionally rich seam of private
correspondence from husband to wife. Unfortunately, Anne Brown’s replies mostly do not
survive but, unless he was a thunderingly insensitive bore, the contents of George’s letters
imply that Anne took an informed interest in public affairs. (The same may be said of Amy
Galt, whose husband Alexander Tilloch Galt similarly kept her closely informed of the inner
world of politics.33)
Given the one-sided nature of the surviving correspondence, it is difficult to infer the nature
and extent of Anne Brown’s influence. So far as her opinions can be reconstructed, it seems
that she did indeed encourage her husband to take a prominent role in politics. George
himself was understandably reluctant. His bid to form a government in 1858 had come apart
after just two days, while the attempt to combine politics and business had caused a
breakdown in his health in 1861. In February 1864, he mused over the idea of ‘going in’,
taking cabinet office if the opportunity arose. His preferred strategy was to secure his
financial position, concentrate on rearing their small daughter -- ‘and then perhaps think of
such work. But now – it would be arrant folly. ... But you are so ambitious!’ The comment is
interesting, since it inverts what might seem to be more conventional gender roles, in which
women are cautious and men competitive. It also contradicts Brown’s report to his mother-inlaw a few months earlier that Anne had told him ‘not to run again’ (adding, facetiously, ‘I
always do as she tells me’). A likely interpretation would suggest that Anne reinforced her
husband’s shifting moods, in effect saying – as spouses and partners so often say – do what
you think is right, and I shall support you. ‘How I do wish you were here to advise me,’
Brown wrote from Quebec City as he took the unpalatable step of entering coalition. ‘You
cannot tell how much I wish you had been.’ There is a considerable difference between
sharing a difficult decision and submitting to wifely dictation.
Anne Brown may be useful in filling the perceived character-and-circumstance need for the
vital human influence that tipped the fulcrum of destiny, but there is not the slightest
evidence that she contributed to the shaping of Confederation. In entering government,
Brown had refused to accept any departmental responsibility, taking the non-portfolio post of
President of the Council. Although he was pleasantly surprised at how easy it proved to work
with former opponents, there was one cabinet spat in late August, when John A. Macdonald
tried to railroad through a suspect payment, which Brown blocked by threatening resignation.
‘Do you know you were very near being stripped yesterday of your honours of Presidentess
of the Council?’, he wrote to Anne. ‘Would that not have been a sad affair?’ His ironic and
affectionate tone reflected that the fact that Anne was most certainly not Presidentess of
anything, nor did she wish to be. At home in Toronto with the baby, she was not even acting
as her husband’s official hostess in Quebec City: indeed, few wives accompanied politicians
to parliamentary sessions.
The most that can be said about Anne Brown’s significance in the formation of the Great
Coalition is that marriage had sufficiently mellowed her husband to make him accept an
alliance that he would earlier have rejected out of hand – as, indeed, he had done in spurning
feelers on behalf of John A. Macdonald two years earlier. (Of course, it might also have been
the case that his new-found, mid-life domesticity would have weighed against spending any
more time at the seat of government than was absolutely necessary.) But in focusing upon the
personal and sentimental, character-and-circumstance missed other, underlying elements in
the pact of 1864. First, the Great Coalition was primarily an alliance between Brown’s Upper
Canada Reformers and Cartier’s francophone Bleus. Given Brown’s track record of minimal
tolerance towards either Catholics or French Canadians, his decision to strike a deal with a
party that had both strikes against it might indeed seem to call for the location of some
extraneous personality modifier. However, there was an even deeper imperative driving a
deal, in that Brown could only secure reconstruction of the province of Canada by working
with the predominant political grouping in Lower Canada. Since Cartier would not abandon
his marginalised Upper Canada Conservative allies, making terms with Macdonald was a
collateral and essentially secondary consideration. Moreover, within the factional politics of
the upper province, Brown and John A. Macdonald had a shared interest in blocking the rival
Reform leader, Sandfield Macdonald, whose ‘double majority’ shibboleth threatened to
preserve the existing province in its stumbling stalemate. For a brief moment in 1864, both
the reality of political power in Lower Canada and the triangular fluidity of Upper Canada
pointed to a Brown-John A. Macdonald deal. But, as I have pointed out in other contexts,
they grasped one another not by the hand but by the throat. The alliance of convenience broke
down, with Brown’s resignation from the ministry in 1865 – an episode not mentioned by
Careless in his Anne Brown paper, which stopped at Christmas 1864. Far from having
undergone a permanent personality transformation thanks to his marriage, George celebrated
his departure from the Great Coalition with an exultant message to his wife: ‘I am a free man
once more!’34
This review of a conference address delivered half a century ago may seem an unduly
detailed response to a jeu d’esprit that no doubt enlivened a solemn gathering. However, the
Maurice Careless paper has become the cornerstone of more recent attempts to fashion an
entire category of Mothers of Confederation, all of which include Anne Brown, usually citing
her unveiling in 1960 as its ultimate validation. Two further points seem appropriate to wrap
up the case. The first is that there is surely a mismatch between the social attitudes of 1960
and the culture of gender equality that prevails today, making it incongruous for the latter to
base an analysis upon a piece of work shaped by the former. This is no criticism of Careless:
both as a historian and as a (male) citizen, he was remarkably progressive in the context of
1960 to suggest that a woman had played any kind of public role. Women’s history and
women’s studies were concepts that lay in the future: Wikipedia tells me that Cornell led the
way in 1969. Ellen Fairclough had become the first woman appointed to the Canadian cabinet
three years earlier. When Fairclough had first entered parliament, winning a by-election in
1950, she found herself the only female MP at Ottawa. It was not until 1979 that the number
of women in the House of Commons broke the double figures barrier (just – there were ten of
them). Nineteen years earlier, the suggestion that a woman influenced the shaping of a major
political endeavour was refreshing, even provocative. But what was path-breaking half a
century ago is surely embarrassing now. Anne Brown’s contribution to the purported
moderation of her husband lay in the excellence with which she performed very traditional
roles – wife, mother, and matrimonial counsellor, ‘perfectly loveable and loving’, as her
absent and pining husband put it. No doubt Canada should honour the past and present role
in the life of the nation played by its womenfolk as homemakers. But nowadays it is
patriarchal and patronising to claim that Anne Brown contributed to a constitutional
revolution because she so effectively stood by her man. Finally, there was one awkward
complication that can fatally undermines Anne Nelson Brown’s claim to be considered a
founder of the Canadian nation. She did not like the country. In a rare surviving letter, written
in February 1865, you told her husband flatly, ‘you must never speak of settling down here
for life.’ Homesick for Scotland, she clung to the hope of eventually ‘going home and settling
among friends there. ... The idea of being buried here is dreadful to me.’35 It seems bizarre to
hail Anne Brown as one of the founders of a country which she detested.
Queen Victoria Makes a Late Run
In the early twenty-first century, as the monarchy receded from Canadian present and faced
an uncertain role in the country’s future, a second and even more unlikely female figure
began to be acclaimed in the Confederation pantheon. If Anne Brown was a reluctant exile,
Queen Victoria managed never to set foot in her chief colony at all. Yet, in 2013, Canadian
monarchist Arthur Bousfield stated that the empire’s sovereign ‘has rightly been called the
“Mother of Confederation”.’36 This usage appears to be entirely modern, with no example of
the phrase traceable either at the time of Confederation, or during the mid twentieth-century
decades when the mythology of the ‘Fathers’ was at its height. Nonetheless, it is by no means
implausible to claim that Victoria played some role in the emergence of modern Canada. She
was a much shrewder political observer than she is often given credit for. Moreover, her
father (whom she never knew) had commanded the garrison in Halifax, and had been an early
advocate of a centralised authority in British North America.37 In February 1865, the Queen
recorded her opinion that the danger of war with the United States over Canada was so great
that ‘far the best would be to let it go as an independent kingdom under an English prince’.38
That same year, she received at a general audience the delegates sent over to negotiate with
the British to save the Confederation project (temporarily derailed by R.D. Wilmot and his
‘Anti’ colleagues in New Brunswick). To the surprise of courtiers, instructions were given to
suspend protocol and present the Canadians ahead of the titled aristocracy, who normally had
precedence. The Queen obviously acquiesced in this gesture, which was formally authorised
by royal command, but it was also certainly a dual political signal inspired by ministers: it
emphasised British support for the union of the provinces, while implicitly warning the
Canadians that they were being treated as ‘a quasi-independent state’ which should ultimately
look to its own defence. The Queen’s only personal intervention seems to have been her
insistence in February 1867 on receiving an assurance that the Maritimers had indeed
accepted ‘Canada’ as the name for the new Dominion — perhaps suggestive of some residual
and filial identification with Nova Scotia.39 At another audience, following the passage of the
British North America Act in February 1867, Charles Tupper ventured to thank the monarch
for her ‘deep interest’ in the union of the provinces. ‘I take the deepest interest in it because I
believe it will make them great and prosperous,’ the Queen reportedly replied.40 In May of
that year, on his return to Canada, John A. Macdonald assured his Kingston constituents that
their sovereign had personally endorsed Confederation, a sentiment that of course went down
well in a Loyalist riding.41 It seems fair to argue that Queen Victoria played an appropriate
supporting role in the process of Confederation. So did her namesake, the government
steamship, Queen Victoria, that carried the Canadian delegates to Charlottetown in 1864. It
seems difficult to argue that either contribution equated to a maternal role in the birth of the
Dominion.
It is an understandable and entirely positive development that modern Canada should seek to
assemble a team of female nation-builders alongside its male progenitors. The impossibility
of identifying a matching team of constitutional Mothers only underlines the point that the
time has passed when a distinct category of national heroes should be hailed as Canada’s
Fathers of Confederation.
Architects and Guardians?
What, then, should be done about this redundant concept? The question deserves to be
answered both from the point of view of historians, and from that of Canada’s citizens:
professionally, I can contribute to the first; as a non-Canadian I can only float an outsider’s
suggestions for the second.
To argue that historians should cease to speak of the Fathers of Confederation is hardly a
major proposition. Few academics have employed the term as a serious analytical tool:
almost every Canadian history textbook alludes to the influence and composition of Upper
Canada’s legendary ‘Family Compact’, but few trouble even to include an index reference to
the Fathers. Grouping disparate conference delegates into a single category is unhelpful. As
Christopher Moore has vividly put it, ‘the men whom we call the fathers of confederation
blur together, a single stultifying mass of white-haired patriarchy.’42 In fact, only two of the
participants at Quebec seem to have gone grey: Robert D. Dickey of Nova Scotia was
heading for 54 during the conference, while Taché, at 69 an elder statesman who had fought
in the War of 1812, was entitled to a distinguished appearance. Most, as already noted, were
in early middle age – few of them had even marched far down the road of baldness. It is not
so much white hair as black broadcloth and stovepipe hats that create the false impression of
unimaginative sameness. By remarkable coincidence, two of the Fathers were even
identically named, although apparently unrelated: both New Brunswick and Prince Edward
Island produced a John Hamilton Gray.43 I contribute an example of my own lack of
discernment here. Through forty years as a consumer and sometimes a practitioner of
Canadian history, I thought of Alexander Campbell, if I thought about him at all, as a stuffedshirt and an offsider of John A. Macdonald. Eventually, digging a little deeper and following
what should have been obvious clues, I discovered that this Father of Confederation had
struggled against the disability of severe lameness and, in later decades at least, also suffered
from epilepsy. It is no wonder that he appears in the group photograph of the Charlottetown
delegates, taken in front of Government House, sitting on the steps, his walking stick to hand.
There are indications, too, that his marriage began to go wrong in the middle years of the
1860s, as he became more deeply involved in both nation-building and ministerial office:
perhaps Frederica Sandwith Campbell should be hailed as the Casualty of Confederation. 44
Notwithstanding their theoretical veneration, it is far from being the case that historians know
everything about the politicians who shaped Canada. Samuel Leonard Tilley, who would
undoubtedly qualify for membership of the inner core of the Fathers, is the subject of an
illuminating essay by C.M. Wallace,45 but the lack of a major modern scholarly biography
represents a gap in the literature, leaving obscure Tilley’s reasons for embracing
Confederation before the event, and how he operated as New Brunswick’s voice at Ottawa in
the decades that followed. Perhaps worse still, lumping the country’s founders into Moore’s
‘stultifying mass’ risks not only attributing identical opinions, but also – as Bruce W.
Hodgins pointed out in 1967 – ‘viewpoints which they in fact never possessed.’ Hodgins
noted that the Centennial year celebrations tended to laud the Fathers for their belief in
democracy, a form of government that they had regarded with attitudes varying from
profound reserve to outright hostility. The Upper Canadian conference participants of 186467, Hodgins concluded, were ‘worthy Fathers of Confederation’ but ‘not Fathers of Canadian
democracy.’46 Half a century later, it can be argued that in identifying an ideological
inconsistency, Hodgins was equally pointing to a fundamental mismatch: it seems
contradictory to laud a group of men as founders of a nation when they collectively rejected
the political philosophy that has come to underlie its existence.
It will not be difficult for historians to stop talking about the Fathers of Confederations, since
few have ever made extensive use of the collective category: even A.H.U. Colquhoun and
Christopher Moore, who have alluded to it in book titles, have been remarkably sparing of its
use in their texts. In the wider public domain, retiring the terminology may prove a greater
challenge. In 2015, the Canadian government decided to erect heritage plaques across
Ottawa, marking the residences of fifteen of the Fathers of Confederation, those who made
some subsequent contribution to Dominion politics. That seems an unexceptional project, and
there is much to be said for the comment of Ryerson University professor Patrice Dutil that
commemorations of this kind remind people that there is ‘a Canadian past and we don’t do
enough of it.’47 In recent decades, Canada’s academic historians have concentrated on themes
related to class, ethnicity, gender and region, and much important work has been produced.
But because Canada is essentially a constitutional construct, the themes that illuminate and
shape the human experience are ultimately expressed and mediated and shaped through
electoral, parliamentary and bureaucratic processes. Emphasising research into social rather
than political history too often means that path-breaking findings are related to sometimes
simplistic views of policy formation, characterised by such superficialities as the widespread
belief that John A. Macdonald was permanently drunk and that Mackenzie King ran the
country from a Ouija board. How, then, would it be possible to steer between idolatry and
ignorance?
Two suggestions are offered, with the humility of an external observer. The first is that it
would be helpful to think of Canada’s creators not as Fathers but as architects. This would
have several advantages. It would broaden the category away from the restrictive definition
that limits recognition to those who took part in the drafting conferences. As the 1999
publication of Canada’s Founding Debates amply illustrated, there were thoughtful
discussions about the future shape of government right across the continent, at a level of
engagement and a breadth of reference that bore favourable comparison with the
controversies twelve decades later as a far larger and better educated population argued over
Meech Lake.48 Equally important would be the scope for recognition that Canada is a
continuing project, one that should recognise contributions made by the Riels and the
Smallwoods of subsequent decades. Above all, the abandonment of gender-specific
honorifics would make possible the recognition of women – Nellie McClung, Agnes
MacPhail, Thérèse Casgrain, Flora MacDonald, Kim Campbell ...the list is easily extendable.
More generally, perhaps there is a need to move away from parenthood and towards
guardianship, for Canadians to define the qualities they perceive to be inherent in their
country’s existence – starting with those familiar buzzwords of democracy, human rights and
multiculturalism, but broadening to include courage, endeavour, family life and international
responsibility. Any list propounded by a friendly observer can only be indicative, not
prescriptive: identifying their nation’s positive qualities would be a means for Canadians to
redefine themselves, and an appropriate exercise in stocktaking to be carried out around the
150th anniversary of Confederation. If it is the case, as I strongly suspect, that Canadians
respect Terry Fox more than John A. Macdonald, that more have heard of Wilfred Grenfell
than Wilfrid Laurier, then arguably the country needs an institutional honour system to
express and project its collective sense of value. At a practical level, recognition of an
individual as a national guardian would take much the same form as the honouring of the
Fathers of Confederation today, through heritage plaques, the naming of buildings and
institutions. Of course, such an initiative would have its detractors, those who would liken it
to the Hockey Hall of Fame, or the Latter Day Saints’ practice of baptising ancestors – for the
designation of national icons would be made less controversial if the process included a
twenty-year moratorium on any form of recognition after death. There would inevitably be
conflict between the values of the present and the past: Emily Murphy, Canada’s first female
magistrate, spearheaded the fight to have women to serve in the Senate. She also energised
the country to the menace of drugs, but unfortunately also luridly warned against what she
saw as the menace of alien races whom she blamed for trafficking.49 An observer can only
point out that, in the Order of Canada, the country operates a widely respected system of
honouring achievement among the living, and can surely manage a parallel system for
nominating role models among the dead. The principle of conferring retrospective accolades
is not new, as shown by the 1992 Commons resolution acclaiming Louis Riel, or the 2009
Senate decision to extend posthumous honorary membership of the Red Chamber to the
Famous Five who carried the Persons’ case.
The Fathers of Confederation have made their contributions to Canada, to its structure of
government in the 1860s, to its national art from the 1880s, to its sense of emerging
nationhood in the 1920s. As individuals, their careers still merit examination, all the more so
because the cloudy aura that surrounds them means that we know deplorably little about far
too many of them. It is my firm belief that the deeper we dig into the politics of nineteenthcentury Canada, the more we shall appreciate the commitment and the ambition of its
practitioners, and the less we shall be tempted to caricature them, stove-pipe hats or not. But
times change, values evolve. A Canadian who lives somewhere between Toronto and St
John’s, who is male and of British, French or Irish stock – such a person can find Fathers of
Confederation with whom he can identify, if he so chooses. For the remainder, probably
three-quarters of the country’s population, the Fathers hardly resonate. If the Fathers of
Confederation provided a prism through which we could illuminate Canada’s past, they
might still merit recognition and collective acclaim. As it is, their sepia-tinted masculinity
devalues the very challenges that they combined to resolve, and obscures the remarkable
achievement that they collectively brought about.
1
The debates of the Parliament of Canada are available on line via http://parl.canadiana.ca/, which is easily
searched. Specific reference is given only for the 1883 discussion below. Unless otherwise referenced,
biographical information is taken from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, searchable via
www.biographi.ca. Websites were consulted at various dates in November and December 2015.
2
P.B. Waite, ‘Sir Oliver Mowat’s Canada: Reflections on an Un-Victorian Society’, in D. Swainson, ed., Oliver
Mowat’s Ontario (Toronto, 1972), 12-32.
3
French premier Georges Clemenceau was hailed in 1918 as ‘Père la Victoire’ (or ‘père de la victoire’).
Detractors alleged (it would seem, unfairly) that he failed to safeguard France in the 1919 Versailles peace
settlement, and changed the title to ‘Perd la Victoire’.
4
Bengough’s cartoon, ‘Confederation: the much fathered youngster’ is at:
http://collection.mccord.mcgill.ca/en/collection/artifacts/M994X.5.273.150?Lang=1&accessnumber=M994X.5.
273.150.
5
J. Pope, ed., Confederation ... (Toronto, 1895), 27-32. Mowat’s role at Quebec in 1864 is discussed by P.
Romney, Getting It Wrong ... (Toronto, 1999).
6
O’Brien’s memorandum was quoted by Wilfrid Laurier when he raised the matter in the House of Commons in
May 1883: House of Commons Debates, 14 May 1883, 1171-4:
http://parl.canadiana.ca/view/oop.debates_HOC0501_02/433?r=0&s=1. The following section draws upon this
debate.
7
: House of Commons Debates, 3 April 1884, 1309-10, via:
http://parl.canadiana.ca/view/oop.debates_HOC0502_02/515?r=0&s=1
8
W.M. Whitelaw, ‘Reconstructing the Quebec Conference’, Canadian Historical Review, xix (1938).
9
I have used the key to the portrait in Quick Canadian Facts (Toronto, 1967), 13. This small book has followed
me around the world, and I always knew it would come in useful some day. As of November 2015, there seems
to be no key to the portrait on the Internet, but sitters can be identified by ‘hovering’ in:
http://www.parl.gc.ca/About/House/collections/fine_arts/historical/609-e.htm .
10
https://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artwork.php?mkey=13043
11
J.P. Macpherson, Life of the Right Hon. Sir John A. Macdonald (2 vols, Saint John, 1891), ii, 288.
12
C.R.W. Biggar, Sir Oliver Mowat ... (2 vols, Toronto, 1905), ii, 695.
13
Charles Tupper, Recollections of Sixty Years in Canada (London, 1914), 8, 12.
14
This quotation comes from the 1920 edition of Colquhoun’s Fathers of Confederation, 66.
15
British North America Acts 1867-1907 (Ottawa, 1913), 85-6, 95-6, 117.
16
http://www.canadahistory.com/sections/documents/leaders/King/Canadas%20Diamond%20Jubilee.html
17
They were R.B. Dickey of Nova Scotia, William Howland of Upper Canada, and R.D. Wilmot of New
Brunswick, each of whom attended the London conference of 1866-67. Boy Scouts placed flowers on
Howland’s grave on Dominion Day: Globe (Toronto), 29 June, 2 July 1927, so the designation had agreed in
advance. Wilmot is discussed below.
18
H.B. Neatby, William Lyon Mackenzie King: the Lonely Heights 1924-1932 (Toronto, 1963), 228. King’s
diaries, available on-line through Library and Archives Canada, show his awareness of the Fathers of
Confederation, but do not record any specific decision about membership.
19
They were the Prince Edward Islanders John Hamilton Gray, A.A. Macdonald and Edward Palmer.
20
http://www.parl.gc.ca/about/house/Collections/collection_profiles/CP_Other_Fathers_of_Confederatione.htm.
21
The only other son of a Father of Confederation active in politics was L.P.D. Tilley, a minister in New
Brunswick.
22
R. Rudin, Founding Fathers: The Celebration of Champlain and Laval ... 1878-1908 (Toronto, 2003).
23
W.L. Morton, ‘Confederation, 1870-1896...’, in B. Hodgins and R. Page, eds., Canadian History Since
Confederation ... (2nd ed., Georgetown, Ont., 1979, first published in Journal of Canadian Studies, 1966).
24
T. Flanagan, Riel and the Rebellion: 1885 Reconsidered (2nd ed., Toronto, 2000), 175.
25
E.g. https://prezi.com/hverk_oo5t_v/louis-riel-father-of-confederation/
26
http://canadashistory.ca/History-Awards/Student-Award/Winning-Essays/Adrian-Molenkamp-BritishColumbia.
27
J.K. Hiller, ‘The Career of F. Gordon Bradley,’ Newfoundland Studies, iv (1988), 163-80.
28
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/where-were-the-mothers-of-confederation/article4284401.
29
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/who-were-the-mothers-of-confederation/.
30
R.D. Francis, R. Jones and D.B. Smith, Journeys: A History of Canada (2nd ed., Toronto, 2009), 240.
31
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/exhibit/mothers-of-confederation/; O.D. Skelton (ed. G.
MacLean), Life and Times of Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt (Toronto, 1966 ed.), 101.
32
Underhill’s witticism was quoted by Careless in ‘George Brown and the Mother of Confederation, 1864’,
delivered to the Canadian Historical Association in 1960, and cited here from Careless at Work (Toronto, 1990),
77-97. Quotations in the following paragraphs from this source.
33
See, e.g., letters in Skelton, ed. MacLean, Life and Times of ... Galt, 189-207.
34
J.M.S. Careless, Brown of the Globe: ii, The Statesman of Confederation 1860-1880 (Toronto, 1963), 218.
35
Careless, Brown of the Globe: ii, 188.
36
http://crht.ca/queen-victoria-mother-of-confederation/.
37
Ged Martin, ‘Queen Victoria and Canada’, American Review of Canadian Studies, xii (1983), 215-34.
38
G.E. Buckle, ed., Queen Victoria’s Letters: second series (London, 1926), i, 275.
39
Ged Martin, Britain and the Origins of Canadian Confederation 1837-67 (Vancouver, 1995), 264-5, 282.
40
E.M. Saunders, ed., The Life and Letters of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles Tupper ... (2 vols, London, 1916), i, 143
41
Ged Martin, Favourite Son? John A. Macdonald and the Voters of Kingston 1841-1891 (Kingston, 2010), 87.
42
C. Moore, 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal (Toronto, 1997), 3.
43
An engaging statue on Charlottetown’s Great George Street, by sculptor Nathan Scott, shows the two
namesakes in earnest discussion of Confederation. Images of this splendid piece of street furniture are easily
traced on the Internet.
44
Ged Martin, ‘Alexander Campbell (1822-1892): The Travails of a Father of Confederation’, Ontario History,
cv (2013), 1-18. I acknowledge with appreciation the work of Dr Michael Poplyansky of the University of
Regina in increasing my understanding of Campbell.
45
http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/tilley_samuel_leonard_12E.html..
46
B.W. Hodgins, ‘Democracy and the Ontario Fathers’, in E.G. Firth, ed., Profiles of a Province (Toronto,
1967), 83-91.
47
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/11/16/heritage-plaques-across-ottawa-to-honour-all-fathers-ofconfederation.html.
48
J. Ajzenstat, P. Romney, I. Gentles and W.D. Gairdner, eds, Canada’s Founding Debates (Toronto, 1999).
49
http://www.macleans.ca/authors/michael-petrou/why-does-canada-insist-on-honouring-a-xenophobic-fascist/.