Documents on the Confederation of British North America (review)

On Dominion Day 1895, Joseph Pope affixed his signature to the preface of the book Confederation: Being a Series of Hitherto Unpublished Documents Bearing on the British North America Act. Pope explained that while completing his two-volume biography of John A. Macdonald he had stumbled across a 'mass of documents awaiting examination' (xlix). These documents – Macdonald's draft minutes from the Quebec Conference in October 1864 and the motions and amendments handwritten by their movers – became the backbone of Confederation. Seventy-three years after Confederation was published, it re-emerged as the basis of Gerald P. Browne's Documents on the Confederation of British North America, a collection designed to celebrate Canada's centenary. However, Documents did not only include the papers Pope had collected. It also incorporated the 'Notes on the Quebec Conference' by Prince Edward Island delegate Andrew A. Macdonald, which had been edited by Dominion Archivist Arthur Doughty in 1920. Also included were the minutes kept at the Charlottetown Conference in September 1864 by Charles Tupper, a delegate from Nova Scotia, which were edited by Assistant Dominion Archivist William Smith and published by this journal in 1967. Unlike Pope, who explained that the context for these documents was 'self-explanatory' (l), Documents included an introduction designed for 'university students' that intended to 'outline the controversies' that surrounded Confederation. Browne argued that this 'body of official and quasi-official material' would 'furnish a documentary foundation for a study of the origins, and intended character, of the Canadian confederacy' (xi).

Browne's Documents, a hybrid of earlier publications, contains ninety documents (many of them excerpts) organized into nine sections. The documents span the period from August 1858 when Governor General Sir Edmund Head, upon the prorogation of Parliament in the Province of Canada, proposed 'uniting … the Provinces of British North America,' to February 1867, when the final draft of the British North America Bill was completed in London. These documents contain the views expressed by members of the British Colonial Office, colonial politicians, and metropolitan statesmen personally and politically connected to the conferences in Charlottetown and Quebec in 1864, and in London in 1866–7, where the nitty-gritty details of the federal union were deliberated and drafted. These previously published documents, now easily accessible on Google Books and the online version of this journal, have been republished by Janet Ajzenstat in a recent reincarnation of Documents. Regrettably this 2009 edition breaks little new ground: no new sources have been included and no time has been spent updating the now obsolete accession numbers used by the former Public Records Office and the Public Archives of Canada to help individuals locate the original documents. Moreover, the failure to include new (or updated) explanatory notes is unfortunate because they would not only help students better contextualize the numerous issues and debates, but also more readily identify the principal actors and situate them in twenty-first-century historiographies.

The major difference between this edition and the original is Azjenstat's introduction that celebrates the accomplishments of the 'winners' (xlii) – the fathers of Confederation – and endeavours to determine if we, in 1867, got a 'good constitution' (xxix). 'Good,' however, can mean many different and contradictory things. Ajzenstat argues that Canada's constitution is good because it weighed equally on all individuals, secured minorities their political rights, and took 'no interest in the individual citizen's "race," county of origin, religion, particular history, etc' (xl). However, to compare the various drafts of the British North America Bill and the changes that Ajzenstat characterizes as 'only minor' (xxxii) yields a narrative that is worthy of contemplation rather than celebration.

It is unclear which colonial and metropolitan statesmen framed and reframed the Quebec Resolutions in preparation for ratification; however, these alterations demand examination as 'historical negatives.' Ann Laura Stoler defines historical negatives as 'non-events' that reveal the variety of blueprints upon which colonial...