Free 1867 by Christopher Moore

experience of situations where they might need to
seek
parliamentary support or to defuse parliamentary resistance, modern premiers and prime ministers saw no advantage in letting members of the opposition participate in constitutional deal-making.
    Nevertheless, even in the debased parliamentary system of the 1990s, it is intriguing to consider the long list of premiers who went home from Meech Lake or Charlottetown to proclaim themselves new fathers of confederation – only to be chopped down brutally by the voters after opposition leaders accused them of having gotten too little and given too much at the constitutional table. The opposition leaders, excluded from the negotiations, were free to claim they could have done better. The modern presidential-style premiers, never having had reason to grasp the benefits of sharing thecredit as Tupper did, repeatedly reaped the disastrous consequences Tupper skilfully avoided. Neither more noble nor more devious than his modern counterparts, Tupper simply enjoyed the benefits of superior experience in adapting parliamentary process to his political needs – a by-product of living in a time that put its trust in parliamentary processes.
    The Nova Scotia legislature had voted to send five delegates to Charlottetown “for the purpose of arranging a preliminary plan for the union of the three provinces under one government and legislature.” Tupper, now premier in his own right, was the dominant figure in the delegation, and the one earliest inclined to favour a union. Tupper had a Victorian faith in railways and economic growth, and a rather less Victorian eagerness to draw new groups into his coalitions. Tupper favoured throwing railroads across the colonies, doing away with their separate postages, coinages, and customs tariffs, and finding new political supporters among their disparate populations. Any union that could do these would have Tupper’s instinctive support.
    To complete the government side of the Charlottetown delegation, Tupper took with him two lawyers: his attorney-general, William Henry, and Robert Dickey from Nova Scotia’s appointive upper house. From the opposition he did not want merely token representatives. He first tried to recruit his great rival, Joseph Howe. Howe, like most colonial politicians, had often mused about a union of the colonies. Just two weeks before the Charlottetown meeting, he rhetorically asked a boozy, sociable dinner organized to welcome Canadian visitors to Halifax: “Why should union not be brought about? Was it because we wish to live and die in our insignificance?” Howe was formally out of elective politics in 1864, but his prestige was enormous and his campaigning skills legendary. Had Tupper recruited Howe to Charlottetown and the union cause, he would have had few concerns about political risks at home. But a year earlier, Howe, eager to prove that colonials could help to run theEmpire in which he considered them equals, not subjects, had accepted an Imperial commission to report on the Atlantic fishery. He could not go to Charlottetown. 8
    Replacing Howe in the delegation to Charlottetown were Adams Archibald, who had succeeded Howe as leader of the liberal opposition, and Jonathan McCully, who faced Robert Dickey in Nova Scotia’s upper house. When the matchless Howe had retired from journalism, McCully had become the most successful political journalist in the province. Both he and Archibald had dismissed colonial union as an impractical fancy. Weeks before Charlottetown, McCully had hooted at confederation as “a new, untried, and more than doubtful expediency adapted to the exigencies of Canadian necessities.” 9
    Tupper had not sought yes-men; his four fellow delegates were strong figures in Nova Scotia’s two houses. But the delegation consisted of four lawyers and a doctor. There were no financiers from the Halifax banking houses who might crack open the details of a complicated financial proposal, no one from