Remember where we came from
For many Canadians, last week’s National Post series on the Confederation Debates would have been their first exposure to the beliefs and ambitions of the country’s founders. Here, Professor Geoffrey Kellow decries the historical vacuum into which our founding documents have been tossed.
Days after his extraordinary speech in defence of the Quebec Resolutions, George Brown wrote poignantly to his wife Anne about all that he had hoped to accomplish and how history might one day judge him. Brown imagined his daughter, looking back on his role in Confederation. “Would you not like that darling little Maddie should be able twenty years hence — when we may be gone — to look back with satisfaction to the share her father had in these great events? For great they are, dearest Anne, and history will tell the tale of them.” Sadly, for Brown and for the country he helped create, history has done no such thing.
There were early warnings that Canadians were not overly interested in one of the most vital of civic duties, the duty of memory. As the Legislative Council and Assembly in the Province of Canada prepared to debate Confederation, they argued about whether their speeches, both for and against the Quebec Resolutions, ought to be recorded in some official and distinctive fashion. At its heart, the question turned not on historical, but fiscal considerations. How much would recording Canada’s origins cost? Eventually they decided to publish a complete set of the debates. Alas, the debates ended up costing seven times as much to publish as was originally estimated, and disappeared from view almost immediately afterward. They would not see print again for a century.
Eventually, to mark the centenary, Dalhousie historian P.B. Waite edited a severely abridged edition of the Confederation debates in the Province of Canada. But it was not until 1999 that McMaster University’s Janet Ajzenstat and a team of editors compiled Canada’s Founding Debates, collecting the debates on the Quebec resolutions from all the Canadian legislatures and assemblies. This volume, which organizes the speeches by topic as opposed to time or place, is a laudable introduction to the Confederation Debates, but it, too, is radically incomplete. As we mark the sesquicentennial of those debates there remains no single source or location, save the stacks at Library and Archives Canada, where Canadians can read the speeches of the Fathers of Confederation in their entirety.
In contrast, the American equivalent to the founding debates, The Federalist Papers, has never been out of print. Since they were originally published in 1787 and 1788, these essays, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madi-
son and John Jay, have been issued and reissued countless times. Even the great arguments of their opponents, The Anti-Federalist Papers, were compiled shortly after the American bicentenary and remain in print to this day.
Beyond these, the most famous papers surrounding the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, Americans have easy access to the five volume Founder’s Constitution, a thematically organized collection of letters, state papers, legislation, pamphlets and other texts directly connected to the Revolutionary War and the American Founding. Finally, almost every important American Founder, from Benjamin Franklin to John Adams, has had their papers compiled and curated both in print and online.
What every American can access, with ease, is nothing less than the original arguments for the institutions and politics they still live under today. Every American high school student, in learning about the separation of powers and the principle of checks and balances, reads James Madison’s famous tenth Federalist paper. In debating the U.S. role in the world, in evaluating multilateral and unilateral approaches to treaty, trade and conflict, every American with an Internet connection can easily consult Washington’s Farewell Address.
Unlike Americans, Canadians live in self-imposed ignorance of the great arguments that informed the shape and substance of our fundamental federal institutions. In this, we miss out on an opportunity almost unique to Canada and the United States. Our
institutions didn’t evolve over centuries; they were designed and debated in the full light of history. We are able, or rather should be able, to examine the rationale behind our institutions in a way that the ancient polities of Europe never can.
That rationale provides citizens with two vital pieces of information. First, access gives us a unique insight into the character of our institutions. Such access fundamentally distinguishes the political from the natural world. In contact with both design and designer we can know what a bicameral house is for in a way that, for example, we can never know the purpose or plan behind a turkey’s wattle and snood. Reading the Confederation debates, we can learn what Macdonald and Cartier had in mind and we can evaluate whether they were right or wrong in their hopes, reasons and plans.
But there is another, even more important reason for restoring full access to the documentary history of Canada’s founding. An exposure to the founding debates in their entirety would reveal to Canadians that the project, from its outset, was a politic-
ally and philosophically serious enterprise. This should be obvious. In the Province of Canada alone almost a million words were spilled debating the Quebec Resolutions. That’s a lot of talk for a bargain among shopkeepers.
The full record would tend towards the recognition that Confederation was not simply a pragmatic bargain but a project illuminated by contentious conceptions of citizenship and culture, religious and political liberty and even national greatness. That record would recall to our memory that, as with our American cousins, our nation was born not out of self-interest but was conceived in liberty; that the Fathers of Confederation didn’t merely make a deal, but rather, they debated and ultimately were dedicated to profound political propositions.
Consider only George Brown’s constitutional address in its fullness, the remarks that he had hoped his young daughter would one day recall. Speaking on Feb. 8, 1865, Brown delivered a speech of almost 30,000 words. Brown used the speech to canvas the moral, political and economic justifications for his decision to cross the floor and join a coalition with Macdonald, a man he despised.
The speech outlined the problems with the current political order but, more importantly, it provided nine of what Brown called “unanswerable arguments” for Confederation, all of which had at their heart a deep appeal to the idea of national greatness. Brown promised that Confederation would allow Canada to “occupy a position in the eyes of the world, and command a degree of respect and influence, that we never can enjoy as separate provinces.” Speaking fourth, batting cleanup after Macdonald, Cartier and Galt, Brown’s remarks appealed to the politics of recognition, to the basic desire to count for something in the world. This was no bourgeois compromise; these were words meant to appeal to the most profound and primordial political passions.
At the end of his speech, Brown turned somber. Considering the Confederation plan, Brown appealed to the memory of the members of the legislative assembly. Contemplating all that had passed from crisis and gridlock to Charlottetown and then Quebec, Brown suggested of their work: “Let us look at it in the light of a few months back — in the light of the evils and injustice to which it applies a remedy — in the light of the years of discourse and strife we have spent in seeking that remedy — in the light with which the people of Canada would regard this measure were it to be lost, and all the veil of past years brought back upon us again.” Brown believed that the appeal to memory, to the political past, would in and of itself make the case for Confederation, that the project stood vindicated by the light of recollection.
Today, outside of rare books collections and scholarly libraries, a full recollection of what Confederation built and why is impossible. Until that changes, to quote Brown again, we live amongst institutions and traditions concealed behind “the veil of past years brought back upon us again.”
Why is it so hard to access Canada’s founding debates?