1867 Read Online Free PDF Page A

He could work out deals of astounding complexity, which usually proved to be of substantial benefit to his friends. The most notorious of these was “The Ten Thousand Pounds Job” of 1852, when his government guaranteed some previously risky private bonds. The bonds naturally jumped in value, enriching Hincks himself, at the expense of much of his reputation, and obliging his withdrawal from Canadian politics for more than a decade.
    But deal-maker Hincks was also one of the architects of the politics of the union of the Canadas. He moved easily between Montreal and Toronto, and his legwork had fused the mutually suspicious blocs led by Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine into the reform majority that had secured responsible government. When reformers like Brown endangered that French-English alliance, Hincks stood by it. “The truth was,” said Hincks in 1853, as he demolished George Brown’s arguments for rep-by-pop, “that the people occupying Upper and Lower Canada were not homogeneous; but they differed in feelings, language, laws, religion and institutions, and therefore the union must be considered as between two distinct peoples, each returning an equal number of representatives.” 6
    Hincks understood – as all the really successful politicians of the union eventually did – that so long as Canada East and Canada West were joined together, Anglo–French alliances were the key to power. Alliances had to be built on trust, and trust was founded on an equality that would outlast any particular election or census. To give either side predominant influence over the politics of both could only destroy the other side’s trust in the union itself. Sectional equality had become the
raison d’être
of a state originally intended as a machine for assimilation. That was why reformer Hincks, the sectional-equality man, dismissed fellow reformer Brown, the apostle of rep-by-pop, as a governmental impossibility.
    Yet it was not hard, at least in Canada West, to find justice in Brown’s principle, too. The
Globe
and George Brown exulted in Canada West’s size and prosperity, and at the same time they seethed with indignation that their region lacked the political clout to which its size and wealth and confidence made it feel entitled. It was no abstract indignation, either. Sectional equality meant that the cohesive bloc of French-Canadian legislators needed only a few supporters from Canada West to impose policies most of Canada West’s voters and their representatives might oppose. During the 1850s, George Brown had conceived a passion for rep-by-pop, and it was shared by masses of Upper Canadian voters.
    Francis Hincks the reformer – apostate reformer, in Brown’s eyes – was not the only Upper Canadian ready to defend the union, even in the face of such consequences. Canada West’s conservatives, including John A. Macdonald, who was rising to leadership among them, were also willing to forsake Protestant solidarity for the sake of the French–English sectional alliance. Macdonald could justify that alliance as essential to racial harmony and to the preservation of the union, but it also put him and his tory colleagues into power for much of the 1850s and 1860s. As LaFontaine’s heir, Cartier led the big bloc of francophone legislators. As long as each section was equal in parliament, Macdonald needed only to deliver a handful of anglophone seats in order to give the Macdonald–Cartier partnership something close to a permanent majority.
    Macdonald and his supporters saw themselves as adroit politicians, building the coalitions of interests that union politics demanded. Brown’s reformers drew a different lesson: “sectional equality” meant the imposition of French Canada’s agenda, no matter how unpopular, upon Canada West whenever Canada East got the support of a few western collaborationists, who would sacrifice western interests for the sake of the alliance that kept them in power. Brown