Free 1867 by Christopher Moore Page A

the seafaring towns of western Nova Scotia, no Scots Catholics, no one from Cape Breton. Tupper had reached far by inviting leading opposition figures, but each constituency left out of the delegation would view its work with deep suspicion.
    New Brunswick’s politicians were even more cautious than Nova Scotia’s about the Maritime union conference. Nova Scotia was the largest, richest, oldest of the three provinces, with 350,000 people to New Brunswick’s 270,000. For all its doubts, it could expect to dominate any union of the three provinces, and its resolution appointing delegates was the one most optimistic about the outcome. New Brunswick’s legislature appointed delegates, not to “arrange,” but only to “consider,” this idea about Maritime union. In New Brunswick, the premier was reformer Leonard Tilley, a businessman who, at forty-six, was a fifteen-year veteran of colonial politics. Union, particularly a union which might reduce New Brunswick tosubservience to Halifax, had produced no wave of enthusiasm in New Brunswick, but it could appeal to Tilley’s hard-headed appreciation of such progressive virtues as tariff reductions, improved communications, expanded trading units, and governmental efficiency.
    Tilley took with him his attorney-general, John Mercer Johnson, and the reform leader in the upper house, William Steeves, a lumberer and shipbuilder. From the opposition came Edward Chandler, a lawyer and a scion of the old loyalist gentry of the province. An old-fashioned politician from before the days of responsible government, Chandler had a touch of tory
noblesse oblige
about him; he was considered sympathetic to the Acadian and Catholic interests of north-shore New Brunswick. The other conservative delegate was lawyer John Hamilton Gray, who at different times had been both an ally and a rival of Tilley’s, and who was himself a former premier. Formidable as a courtroom lawyer, Gray was considered a weathercock politician, likely to follow the prevailing trends.
    Notably absent from New Brunswick’s delegation were spokesmen for two large New Brunswick minorities, the Irish Catholics and the Acadian French. Both groups had representatives in the legislature, but none was appointed. Tilley, an evangelical Protestant, had never had much Catholic support. Absent by their own choice were two powerful figures who wanted no part of Maritime union: Albert Smith, a fiery reform lawyer, and Timothy Anglin, a Saint John journalist who would have spoken for New Brunswick’s Irish Catholics. Smith and Anglin would become confederation’s implacable foes in New Brunswick. They would use it to drive Tilley, nominally a fellow reformer, from office.
    In Prince Edward Island, neither party saw much advantage in having Prince Edward Island joined to the larger colonies across Northumberland Strait. Prince Edward Island was not all bucolic charm and hayseed amusements. Even the farmers among the Island’s 80,000 people were hardly lost in rural contentment. Most were tenants on lands owned by great absentee landlords, and in1864 a new mass movement, the Tenant League, was launching a campaign of non-payment of rents that would sweep the Island during the summer of Charlottetown. Island people were also timber-cutters, shipbuilders, and cargo-traders, and the Island’s merchant fleet linked Charlottetown’s harbour to all the seaports of the world. As the collector of customs reported with calm pride, sea trades had become “the means of introducing into our colony a large amount of gold or its equivalent in exchange.” Why, many asked, should the Island yield its independence and its customs revenues to become a small unit in a large union? 10
    “If the provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were to be annexed to Prince Edward Island, great benefits might result to our people,” said Colonel John Hamilton Gray, the retired Imperial soldier who was premier, “but if this colony were to be annexed to