September 23, 1867
98-62-18
The Conservative coalition, led by Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, has won the recently completed Dominion elections.
Macdonald and his supporters, running as Conservatives and “Liberal-Conservatives” have won a combined 98 of the 181 seats in the House of Commons, with the Conservatives winning 70 seats and the Liberal-Conservatives winning 28. The Liberals have won 62 seats. The Anti-Confederates, led by Joseph Howe, have won 18 of the 19 seats in Nova Scotia.
Three seats are currently vacant, all in Québec. The writs for Gaspé and Chicoutimi-Saugenay are not due in Ottawa for another month so those elections have been delayed. The third vacancy is in the riding of Kamouraska, where Hon. Jean Charles Chapais (Agriculture) was to be a candidate. The election there was cancelled following riots that occurred on the nomination day. The riding is to remain unrepresented for the duration of the first Parliament.
Macdonald’s victory comes on the strength of his Coalition’s performance in Ontario and Québec where his supporters took 48 of 82 and 46 of 65 seats respectively. In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick the results were decidedly against the Coalition with Macdonald & Co. winning just 3 of the 24 seats available across the two provinces. It was in Nova Scotia, in Colchester, where Macdonald lost his only cabinet minister, Hon. Adams Archibald (Secretary of State for the Provinces) who fell to Anti-Confederate Archibald McLellan.
Despite his weakness in Eastern Canada, Macdonald has a majority of 18 seats, which should be enough to ensure the passage of government legislation, although this is by no means guaranteed. Macdonald’s Coalition has been held together solely on the strength of Macdonald’s personality (and, no doubt, the depth of his pockets). Throughout the six week campaign there was very little of substance discussed and in riding after riding, men secured their nominations and subsequent electoral victories solely for promising to support “the Government”, which is to say Macdonald. For how long will that support hold?
First, there is the report from the Ottawa Daily News that with the election now complete and victory secured, Macdonald plans to resign in favour of an appointment to the bench. Should this come to pass, who will be able to fill Macdonald’s shoes? Will the Ontario MPs follow a Québec prime minister in the person of Hon. George-Étienne Cartier, or any other of pretenders from that province? Are their any in Ontario fit to assume the mantle of leadership from Macdonald? Is Mackenzie Bowell, newly elected in North Hastings, prime ministerial material? It is a question we may have come to regret asking. Of all those arrayed on the government benches Macdonald is the best shot at holding the Coalition together but he seems intent on leaving.
Second, in the event that Macdonald does stay he faces the difficulty of holding the Coalition together once all of the jobs have been passed out. Given the outcry over the size of the pre-election cabinet, Macdonald won’t likely add too many more members to the Privy Council before the Commons meets for the first time. This means that somewhere around 70-75 members, each the finest in his county, will be bound, not by cabinet solidarity, but only by their pledge to “give the Government a fair hearing.” When jobs are the promise, their failure to materialize can create hard feelings.
This is especially true for those “Liberal-Conservatives” who are representing ridings that returned Liberal members to their local legislatures, of whom there are 9, all based in Ontario. A switch of this many members from the Government benches to the Opposition ones is the precise number needed to hang the Commons with its current 178 members.
Holding the government together may be of little consequence for Macdonald (or his replacement) if he is unable to put down the Anti-Confederate insurrection led by Joseph Howe from Nova Scotia. The anger in that province at Confederation is palpable and has not diminished one bit from those early days when the Eastern Chronicle and Pictou County Advocatedescribed the Dominion as an “infant monster” the product of a marriage arranged by the British Parliament and “Canadian Rebels and Annexationists and home-born Traitors”, a marriage for which “prompt and decided steps” would be taken “to procure a divorce”. By giving the supporters of divorce 18 of 19 federal seats and 36 of 38 seats, the people of this province have registered their concurrence with the idea of secession.
The threat is not confined only to Nova Scotia. Many public men, and many elected to the House of Commons hold are sympathetic to the Anti-Confederate cause, though they may not have flown the banner in the election. These include Ontario premier John Sandfield Macdonald, who was elected to the Commons as a Liberal.
The significance of this threat is recognized by Conservatives, some of whom have begun to agitate for the inclusion of Joseph Howe in the cabinet. Co-opting the Anti-Confederate leader to the cause of making the Dominion work (as appears to have been done with Ontario’s Sandfield) is about the only hope that Macdonald has to keep the young Dominion together. However, making Howe an advisor to Her Majesty, means keeping some other well-deserving, and loyal, man out of the Privy Council Chambers, which only serves to add kindling to the second challenge, already discussed, that Macdonald is facing. All of which may be the very reason why Macdonald is said to be leaving, bringing us back to the first problem which adds fuel to the third.
All of this before the Government can even begin to contemplate a legislative program which contains its own challenges, including the approval of supply, the construction of the Intercolonial Railway, the balancing of the accounts of the new provinces, the question of free trade with the United States, and whether or not to admit the Red River Colony, British Columbia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland to the Dominion (on the assumption it survives long enough to get to that debate).
The newly elected Commons is a powder keg atop which the new Dominion sits. It will take steady hands and a steady nerve to keep the whole project from being blown apart.
ONTARIO PARLIAMENT HUNG
The Conservatives and Liberals have each won 41 seats in the 82-seat Legislative Assembly of Ontario. The result is no less amusing for the difficulty Premier John Sandfield Macdonald faced when trying to construct a Coalition cabinet consisting of an equal number of Conservative and Liberal members.
Indeed, the Liberal press castigated Macdonald and the idea of Coalition on the grounds that Ontario was a Liberal province and, as such, ought to have a Liberal government. It was an justice, they said, that Conservatives should have equal voice in the Cabinet when they were so clearly in the minority.
With the final results in it appears the electors of Ontario are enamoured with the idea of the Coalition, having returned a balanced number of Liberal and Conservative members not just to the provincial house, but also to the Commons. Ontario’s have returned 34 Liberals, 33 Conservatives, and 15 Liberal-Conservatives to Ottawa.
TORIES SWEEP QUEBEC
With two seats remaining to report, the Conservatives have won 49 seats and the Liberals 13 in the Legislative Assembly of Québec. In the Commons races, the Conservatives won 35 seats, the Liberal-Conservatives 11, and the Liberals 16.
LIBERALS SWEEP NOVA SCOTIA
The Liberals have won all but two of the seats in the Legislative Assembly of Nova Scotia. They have returned 36 members while the Conservatives have elected only 2. In the Dominion race, the Anti-Confederates won 18 seats and the Conservatives were elected in 1, to account for all of the seats available here.
No provincial election has yet been called in New Brunswick. In the Dominion races, the Liberals won 12 seats, the Liberal-Conservatives won 2, and the Conservatives 1.
A full list of elected members is available here.