1867 Read Online Free PDF Page B

him. His temptation began when the parliamentary system he had always extolled delivered him his most humiliating setback. George Brown tasted power in 1858 – for two days. Then he fell victim to the double shuffle.
    The double shuffle of August 1858 is the kind of event that persuades historians not to write about nineteenth-century politics. It dependson such an accumulation of period detail and constitutional arcana that making it plausible is like trying to explain the notwithstanding clause to a visiting Martian. Nevertheless, the effort may be worthwhile. The obscurities of the double shuffle can help to suggest constitutional choices of the 1860s that echoed in the 1990s.
    The fundamental fact of union politics was the diversity of political faiths and factions. The split between reformers and conservatives, compounded by regional and linguistic divisions, resulted in two sets of reform and tory caucuses, one each for Canada West and Canada East. Those blocs often divided into the alliance-minded (Hincks, the reformer, for instance) and the no-compromisers (the Clear Grits, for example). In addition, there were independents, who joined parties or followed leaders only on their own terms and schedules. Such diversity made for lively politics, frequent crises, and endless jockeying (sometimes subtle, sometimes startlingly ruthless) to make parliamentary coalitions and to build voter loyalties. If deal-making is the essence of politics, then the politics of the union of the Canadas was second to none in the world.
    Brown’s moment of power in the summer of 1858 began with the fall of one coalition ministry and the fight to build another. Macdonald and Cartier’s government, caught in a compromise that had managed to alienate supporters on both edges of the coalition, had lost its majority and decided to resign. Barely six months had passed since a general election, and Brown seized his chance by offering to avert an election. He offered to see if he could assemble a legislative majority where Macdonald and Cartier had just failed. In association with Antoine-Aimé Dorion, leader of the French-Canadian reformers called the
rouges
, Brown went to see the governor general, a scholarly Englishman named Sir Edmund Walker Head.
    We will see more of Antoine-Aimé Dorion and the
rouges
in another chapter. Suffice it here to acknowledge that French-Canadian politics was not monolithic. George-Étienne Cartier, secure in the approval of the church, a spokesman for conservative French-Canadian opinion, and approved by the tycoons of English Montreal’sSquare Mile, might dominate politics in Canada East, but the
rouges
had inherited a minority tradition that was reformist and frequently secular-minded, if not actually anti-clerical, when such positions exposed them to fiercer attack in Catholic Canada East than Brown’s voluntaryism had to endure in Protestant Canada West.
    As reformers, the
rouges
had some common ground with the western reformers, but only some. The
rouges
expressed anti-English grievances as vigorously as the reformers expressed anti-French ones, and the coalition was risky for both partners. Dorion and his group were to join George Brown, universally condemned in Canada East as a bigot, an anti-Catholic, and an Upper Canadian imperialist. For his part, Brown, the scourge of French domination and sectional equality, was proposing to lead his reformers into a government as dependent on the votes of Canada East as any of John A. Macdonald’s.
    Brown saw this as his moment to show he was not merely a sectional protest leader – or a bigot either. He and Dorion promised a government that would prove reform ideas were not impossible, and that they could save the union rather than destroy it. Brown and Dorion promised to introduce rep-by-pop while safeguarding the position of Canada East, to build a secular education policy without threatening Catholic education, and generally to advance Canada West’s interests