Ballots and Brawls

Open voting — without secret ballots or closed voting booths — still prevailed in most provinces. Voters, still all men, had to stand up and call out their choice in public, at the risk of getting hit on the head for it. Yet, turnout among eligible voters was an impressive 75 per cent. Amid local rivalries and prejudices, voters elected a lasting Parliament from a tangle of Liberals and Conservatives, including both pro- and anti-Confederates.

Some of Dutil’s claims about Canada in the 1860s seem as disputable as those of the newspapers he quotes. He tells us this was “a completely undemocratic election” since only about 15 per cent of the population could vote. But in 1867, two-thirds of the population was underage, and a still profoundly patriarchal society disqualified half of the remainder as women. We would not tolerate that today, but 15 per cent meant nearly every adult, non-Indigenous man could vote. That gave Canada possibly the broadest electoral franchise in the world at the time, and one that kept MPs accountable — a hallmark of democracy.

Dutil proposes Confederation was “a coup de force … from the business community and the British establishment.” More plausibly, it arose from a series of Canadian constitutional conferences whose consensus recommendations were ratified by legislative majorities in every participating province — and provinces that chose not to join were free to remain outside.

Dutil is very harsh on Ontario reformer George Brown, whom he constantly assails as an anti-French bigot. Brown did love to denounce the “state-churchism” of Quebec’s powerful Catholic clergy. But those who accused him of francophobia were mainly people who benefited from the clergy’s efforts to control how Quebecers voted. Arguing in favour of Quebecers’ right to make political decisions free of clerical interference did not make Brown anti-French.

John A. Macdonald, Dutil’s hero, emerges as Canada’s first national political strategist, skilfully assembling blocs of support in each province to win the election while his rivals, including Brown, remained mostly local, lacking a national message. Even in 1867, strong leaders won at the ballot box.