But soon it was time to go back to Toronto and make ready for the trip to parliament. There was a brighter side to it, however: Anne would accompany her husband for this first return. They would be together in Quebec. They would also stop en route in Montreal to visit the Holtons, so that Mrs. Brown could meet Mrs. Holton and the children.75 Accordingly, the session had already recommenced when the member for South Oxford and his wife finally established themselves in comfortable rooms at Mrs. Steele’s residential house in the Lower Canadian capital.76
Brown found the Sandfield Macdonald-Sicotte government deep in difficulty when he arrived. Indeed, it had known little else since its constitution the previous summer. In the Lower Canadian half of the ministry Sicotte had managed to include McGee and Dorion, bringing the latter back into parliament in June of 1862. Yet the long-time Rouge leader had not been comfortable in office, even though there was no barrier of principle to keep him or McGee from the cabinet. The eastern Liberals had not been committed to any set policy of constitutional reform, much less to rep by pop. Dorion, however, was firmly devoted to the cause of retrenchment and hostile to railway entanglements. When in September the government had adopted expensive proposals actually to build the Intercolonial Railway, he had very soon resigned, and efforts made in January of 1863 to win him back had failed.77
The ministry, in fact, had made rather a mess of its Intercolonial policy. At Quebec, in September 1862, an interprovincial conference of the governments of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia had agreed to send new delegations to negotiate with the imperial authorities for an Intercolonial railway, and had even agreed on a provisional sharing of the costs. Doubtless there was mounting popular interest in the project in Canada, particularly in the East, and doubtless it found Liberal as well as Conservative advocates. D’Arcy McGee was one, impressed as he was with the need of effective communications for development and defence.78 The ministry, moreover, took the line that the Intercolonial was necessary as a quid pro quo for further imperial military aid; Canada must prove that she would take her own share of burdens.
Nevertheless, it was still a shock when a government that had proclaimed rigid retrenchment boldly announced a huge new programme of railway expansion, and when ministers who had won office by defeating a militia bill because it far exceeded the needs of defence now urged defence needs as justification for their costly railway. Upper Canadian Reformers, who had accepted the Macdonald-Sicotte régime because it at least promised an end to Coalition extravagance and Grand Trunk railway jobs, were particularly upset. Consequently, even while Howland and Sicotte were being sent to London as Canadian delegates to negotiate on the Intercolonial, Sandfield Macdonald and Co. realized that they had gone too far. They could not hope to keep western Reform votes on an Intercolonial bill. And so the Canadian delegates in London suddenly broke off the successfully advancing negotiations, on the pretext that a sinking fund proposed by the imperial government to safeguard the financing of the line was unacceptable. When they returned home at the beginning of 1863, the Macdonald-Sicotte ministry had been saved from its blunder at the cost of a bad taste in everyone’s mouth – and a bad reputation for Canadian probity in the angry and disgruntled Maritime Provinces.
Then, when parliament opened in February, the government went still further in its career of alienating friends and disillusioning people. Naturally, the representation question at once came up. Some western Conservatives moved rep-by-pop amendments in an attempt to embarrass the ministry. As could be expected, their motions were readily defeated by a solid block of Lower Canadians voting in combination with the western moderates.79 But what was more significant, the Macdonald-Sicotte ministers did not introduce their own resolutions on the double-majority principle, promised on their taking office. The fact was that they did not dare to. There were too many hostile interests, Reform and Conservative, which, though mutually opposed, would assuredly combine to defeat resolutions on the double majority. And so the government strove to avoid the whole issue, and Sandfield Macdonald used all his undoubted resources of peppery courage, biting wit, and parliamentary strategem just to keep his administration alive. Now, however, came the fatal mistake, the result of a new separate-schools bill put forward by Richard Scott, member for Ottawa and a Roman Catholic.
Scott had been introducing similar measures since 1860, to remove certain anomalies in the provisions for Roman Catholic state-supported schools and round out Catholic educational rights in Upper Canada. He had made little headway until 1862, when John A. Macdonald, Chief Superintendent Ryerson, and the Catholic hierarchy reached agreement on a modified bill, which was then brought in by Scott. But on the fall of the Cartier-Macdonald régime he had withdrawn his measure, presumably because the new Macdonald-Sicotte government had promised him better consideration at the next session, when they were more prepared.80
Sandfield Macdonald himself, though a Roman Catholic, was no great believer in separate schools. But his cabinet contained their most eloquent and devoted champion, D’Arcy McGee, who endorsed Scott’s bill as a government measure designed to bring final settlement to the perennial schools question.81 Sicotte, another Lower Canadian, was no less eager to settle Upper Canada’s school affairs.82 Consequently, when the bill came before parliament in March of 1863, it was bound to involve the ministry deeply, and no less to revive bitter religious controversies over education. In general, it made only minor adjustments and small enlargements to the scope of Catholic schools. Yet an Upper Canadian Protestant majority stood flatly opposed, precisely because they did not believe that these would be final adjustments, but merely further nibbles at Upper Canada’s publicschool system, just as previous “final” claims had been. The fact that a leading Roman Catholic organ, the Canadian Freeman, declared Scott’s bill only an instalment did not prove this opposition wholly wrong.83 Two years later, indeed, new “final” terms would be demanded.
As a result, the Scott bill was hotly contested in parliament, and a whole series of amendments put forward, which were only overcome by majorities dependent on the votes of French Catholic Canada. It passed its third reading on March 13 by a vote of 76 to 31.84 Yet this decisive vote was most instructive. Upper Canada itself had definitely rejected the measure, 31 to 22; and the twenty-two western members who had supported it were all Conservatives except for one Liberal and three ministers.85 Several things accordingly were clear. First, the Upper Canada Reform party had voted overwhelmingly against the cabinet on an actual ministerial measure. Second, Lower Canadian domination had been demonstrated once more, for the West now had another school act by virtue of eastern votes. And, third, the Macdonald-Sicotte ministry had ignored – no, flatly contradicted – its own doctrine of the double majority by forcing a measure on one-half of Canada against the clearly expressed will of that section. It, too, had had to govern by using Lower Canada against Upper.
The “moderate” government did not resign, but it was doomed. Its raison d’etre had proved void and meaningless. In short, the sectional differences had exposed the double-majority principle as the impossibility it was: the Canadian union could not be maintained on such a basis. Constitutional reform was only made the more inevitable – as George Brown would have predicted long before.
6
These events had occurred before parliament’s recess, and before Brown rejoined the House in mid-April. In consequence, he had played no part in the fight over the Scott bill, although there was no doubt where he stood, especially when the Globe condemned the measure as heralding a new assault upon the national school system.86