1867 by Christopher Moore

Native peoples were seen as foreigners, and they would be dealt with through treaties rather than by inclusion in colonial politics. The nineteenth-century treaties would at least underline the separate and independent status of the native nations, but they would also reflect the vast disparity in power between the contracting parties.
    On the other hand, the delegates were hardly so unrepresentative as has routinely been presumed. Coming from two parties in each of the Maritime provinces and three in the Canadas, the delegates spoke for almost the whole of their legislatures. Legislatures in the 1860s were elected by all adult males in some provinces and most of them in the rest, so the delegates had a legitimate claim to represent a large part of the political class of their society. Strongly middle-class and professional, they typified political representation then as today. A few were holdovers from the old days of
noblesse oblige
, but as many had made political careers as advocates for the common farmer against élite interests.
    Increasingly, colonial politicians were brokers, well-placed intermediaries rather than authority figures in their own right. It was no longer necessary to have inherited wealth and position to succeed in politics, but it did help to have the skills that gentlemen and lawyers and successful businessmen tended to possess. Members of Parliament were paid (in Britain they would not be until 1911), but it helped to be well-to-do, or at least to be able to carry off the lifestyle of the independently wealthy. In all these ways, mid-nineteenth-century politicians were not much different from late-twentieth-century ones.
    As the delegates gathered at Charlottetown in 1864, constitutional discussions of the sort they were about to launch were something new in British North American politics. All previous British North American constitutions, down to the most recent – the union imposed upon Upper and Lower Canada in 1841 – had been made in London to serve Imperial objectives. Responsible government, the sea-change of 1847, had changed that, too. In 1862, in response to union talk, Britain’s colonial secretary declared that the British government “do not think it their duty to initiate any movement towards such union, but they have no wish to impede any well-considered scheme which may have the concurrence of the people of the provinces through their legislatures, assuming of course that it does not interfere with Imperial interests.” The Colonial Office suggested “consultation on the subject among the leading members of the governments concerned” without much consideration of the details, beyond the need for ratification in the colonial legislatures. The bipartisan form of the mid-nineteenth-century constitutional talks was a Canadian innovation. 12
    The Charlottetown conference gave a uniquely carnivalesque air to the sober world of Canadian political history. George Brown, sailing to Charlottetown with the Canadian delegation, rose at four for a saltwater shower and saw dawn revealing the rich green shores of Prince Edward Island, “as pretty a country as you could ever putyour eye upon.” Everyone going to Charlottetown seems to have been similarly inspired. The charms of the Island and the glorious high summer weather that prevailed throughout the conference soon enveloped all the potentially quarrelsome participants in a festive, party mood. 13
    No one has evoked this mood better than Peter Waite. Waite’s 1962 book
The Life and Times of Confederation
was the first of the great 1960s histories of confederation to appear; its opening sentence notes that no book had been published on the subject since 1924. When he researched
The Life and Times
, Waite was determined that its themes would grow out of the “raucous voices” of the “vast and multifarious native sources” in the newspapers of the time. Later, he would describe himself as “driven to the newspapers, to the