Brown-Dorion government was sworn into office and was immediately put to a test of no-confidence in the legislature. With his Cabinet ministers unable to vote, the government was defeated. Brown appealed to Governor Head to dissolve Parliament and call an election. The Governor refused. Brown’s became the shortest government in Canadian his tory, lasting all of four days.
With Brown out, Governor Head invited Alexander Galt to form a government, but Galt declined. Next, Cartier was summoned and he accepted the invitation with Macdonald as his deputy premier. Cartier and Macdonald faced the same problem as Brown had: appointing ministers would weaken their numbers in the House. But Macdonald was familiar with the fine print of the seventh clause of the Independence of Parliament Act, which provided that an officeholder who accepted a different portfolio within a one-month period was not obligated to resign his seat. The provision was originally designed to allow a change in ministry within the same government, but it now proved useful to Macdonald for a different purpose. So on August 6, the ex-ministers from the last Macdonald-Cartier administration were brought back into the Cabinet, but in a different ministry from the one they previously held. Within hours the ministers resigned their new portfolios and took up the ones they had held in the previous administration. The reinstated government retained its strength with sufficient numbers to lead Parliament. In less than a week, the Macdonald-Cartier government had been defeated, replaced, and then returned to power. This episode was famously called the “double shuffle.”
Brown and his Grit supporters were humiliated. They accused Macdonald of fraud and his Cabinet ministers of perjury. Brown claimed the one-day ministries were a sham and offensive to parliamentary tradition. Macdonald replied just as vigorously: “It is a charge that I am a dishonorable man. . . . I say it is false as hell.”
In executing the double shuffle, Macdonald showed himself to be a master of political strategy. Like a chess player, he anticipated many moves ahead to put himself in the best possible position. He was once accused in a campaign of being “the biggest liar in all of Canada.” Macdonald replied, “I dare say it’s true enough.” What mattered was not how he played the game, but that, in the end, he won the game. While Brown bore the brunt of defeat within his party, subsequent Liberal leaders took note. Perhaps the best contemporary parallel is the defeat of Joe Clark’s Tory government in 1979 mere months after an election that left the Conservatives a few seats shy of a majority. Clark naively assumed the Liberals would not defeat his government to reclaim the power they had held for the previous seventeen years. Like Macdonald, however, Trudeau, who had resigned his post, was wily and nervy. Clark was ousted while, brazenly, Trudeau was returned to office.
Had the mischievous Double Shuffle not played out as it did, Confederation might never have happened. With renewed confidence, the Cartier-Macdonald government made the most of its political victory. On August 7, 1858, Cartier boldly spoke in Parliament of a new arrangement for Canada that would unite the provinces of British North America.
A delegation not including Macdonald—consisting of Cartier, John Ross, and Alexander Galt—travelled to England to explore the case for a Canadian federation. The five colonies included in Canada’s proposal were Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, and Canada. At the time, the Maritime provinces were considering a union among themselves and were opposed to joining with the Canadian provinces. The colonial office supported Confederation but it was looking for some indication that the venture would succeed before endorsing it.
Brown continued to articulate an alternate vision. He liked the design of the United States of America: representation by population, a written constitution, the separation of executive from the legislature, and restraints on federal powers. But above all, Brown wanted a rebalancing of the Union Parliament. He was inspired by the 1861 census that revealed that the population of Canada West had outstripped that of Canada East by approximately 285,000.
If the American model had any credibility, it vanished on April 12, 1861 when cannons were fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, starting the Civil War. The American design, with its weak central government, now looked flawed. Macdonald, in fact, thought it so unstable that it would eventually divide America in two. With talk of a federal union of British colonies in North America, Macdonald feared that powerful provinces in a federated state of British colonies could also lead to conflict and war.
Unlike Brown, Macdonald wanted the federal government to have all the key powers of sovereignty. He wanted Canada to speak with one clear voice to avoid the risk of interprovincial conflict. He envisioned, “an immense Confederation of free men, the greatest confederacy of civilized and intelligent men that ever had an existence on the face of the globe.”
In the election campaign of 1861, Macdonald argued for his design of Confederation. Macdonald’s remarks in that campaign indicate that, even 150 years ago, Canada learned from America’s weaknesses. “We must take advantage of the faults and defects in their constitution [and] not run the risk in this country, which we see on the other side of the frontier, of one part of the country destroying the other part.”
Macdonald used the American Civil War not only to argue for a strong central government but to make the case that Confederation itself would counter an American takeover. The American threat was evident from many sources. William Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, believed Canada was “ripe fruit” that would naturally fall into the hands of post–Civil War America.
J.R. Potter, American consul general in Montréal, told a group of international businessmen that problems over trade and duties could easily be solved by the United States annexing Canada. Macdonald thought otherwise.
Not long before the critical debates on Confederation were held, the Macdonald-Cartier government resigned after a group of French-Canadian supporters sided with the opposition to defeat a bill to appropriate $500,000 for the militia in May 1862.The bill called for a military of 50,000 men, in large measure to protect Canada against an invasion from America (then in the middle of a civil war). The defeat met with annoyance in Great Britain as an editorial in the London Spectator noted in July 1862: “It is, perhaps, our duty to defend the empire at all hazards; it is not part of it to defend men who will not defend themselves.”
Macdonald wrote to his sister to express, not disappointment, but relief, sensing he was free of the burden of politics. “You will have seen that I am out of office. I am at last free, thank God . . . and can now feel as a free man. I have longed for this hour and only a sense of honour has kept me chained to my post ...I have now fulfilled my duty to my party and begin to think of myself.”
Yet even in defeat, Macdonald was strategic and patient and his sense of relief was less than sincere. To Macdonald, there was a time to be in power and a time to consolidate a coalition, a political astuteness that led to his nickname of “Old Tomorrow.” “We can put a Ministry out whenever we like, but the pear is not yet ripe . . .We have shown that we did not wish to cling to office for its own sake and we wish to show that we prefer the good of the country to mere party triumph. . . .”
His was right. The Liberal government of John Sandfield Macdonald was defeated, leaving John A. Macdonald and Étienne-Paschal Taché to form an administration under the banner of the Liberal-Conservative party on May 30, 1864. Macdonald appealed to his caucus to follow only one maxim: “Let there be no splits.”
The Macdonald-Taché government did not take the lead on Confederation. It was Macdonald’s longtime nemesis, George Brown, who introduced a resolution in the legislature asking that a committee examine alternative forms of federation. Most likely because it was a Brown initiative, Macdonald, Cartier, and Galt voted against the resolution. Nonetheless, it passed. The committee reported on June 14 that, “A strong feeling was found to exist among members of the committee in favour of changes in the direction of a federative system, applied either to Canada alone or to the whole British North American provinces.” To Brown, a federation was a way to segregate Canada West and Canada East and achieve both representation by population and a diminished influence by the French over Canada West. It would provide a framework to consider the interests of both parts of the province and settle them. Including the Atlantic provinces in a federation was a possibility, but Brown would have been satisfied with a “mini-confederation” of Canada West and Canada