Free 1867 by Christopher Moore Page B

these provinces, the opposite might be the effect.” * Gray’s government agreed to participate in the conference, it was said, only because the other colonies proposed to meet at Charlottetown, making it seem churlish for the Islanders not to take part. Prince Edward Island appointed delegates only to “discuss the expediency” of a union, and it took a party vote by the government side to see even that halfhearted measure adopted. Premier Gray was joined in the delegation by Attorney-General Edward Palmer, an ultra-tory who even then was working to undermine Gray’s leadership of the party, and by William Henry Pope, who was almost the only strong enthusiast for union in the government. 11
    The opposition had voted against appointing delegates, but the bipartisan principle prevailed here as well, and reformers filled two of the five places in the Island’s delegation. Opposition leader GeorgeColes, a successful brewer and the Island’s former premier, had denounced the whole notion of Maritime union as “bogus,” but he accepted a place in the delegation along with Andrew Macdonald, reform leader in the elected upper house, who was a shipbuilder and merchant from an established Island family and the only Catholic among the Maritime delegates.
    The fifteen Maritime delegates who gathered at Charlottetown on the last day of August 1864 were joined the next day by eight Canadians, all ministers in the coalition cabinet. Macdonald, Cartier, and Brown, the leaders of the three main parties in the governing coalition, had each brought one additional member from their own parties. Macdonald and Cartier were each supported by former law students turned political protégés. Macdonald’s colleague, Alexander Campbell, would remain mostly a backroom fixer until Macdonald made him lieutenant-governor of Ontario. The public career of Cartier’s supporter, Hector Langevin, still a relative novice in 1864, would be much longer and more prominent. George Brown brought William McDougall, a Toronto lawyer and journalist with a Clear Grit background and an independent streak that irritated all the party leaders he served. Two other Canadian delegates spoke for the powerful, uneasy, English minorities in Quebec. Businessman and railway promoter Alexander Tilloch Galt was an early advocate of confederation and an expert on its finances. Thomas D’Arcy McGee was an Irish Catholic journalist who dreamed that ethnic and religious tribalism would soon be submerged in a new Canadian nation.
    Striking by their absence from the Canadian delegation were men such as Antoine-Aimé Dorion, Brown’s ill-fated ally of 1858 and former premier of the united Canadas in his own right. His
rouge
party remained powerful in Quebec, but the Canadian delegation was a governmental one, and the
rouges
were not partners in the coalition. Cartier, unlike Tupper and the other Maritime leaders, had seen no reason to bring his strongest political rivals into the constitutional discussions. The
rouges
were the only substantialpolitical party in any of the colonies not to be included in the confederation bargaining. The confederation movement would suffer for having excluded them.
    The twenty-three delegates to the Charlottetown conference illustrated the weaknesses
and
the strengths of political representation in that time. There were no women and only a handful of Catholics from a population that was half female and almost half Catholic. * The two French Quebeckers could hope to wield a veto through their power in the Canadian cabinet, but there were no Acadians or Irish from New Brunswick, no Scots from Nova Scotia. There were no workers or farmers in a society where almost everyone lived by manual labour and most people lived in the countryside. The confederation-makers never imagined seeking participation from the native nations. In the mid-nineteenth century, British North Americans looked ahead to the rapid extinction or assimilation of native society.