made by Bowell over language rights were part of a series of missteps by Conservative leaders that condemned the party to weak or nonexistent support in the province of Québec for generations to come.
On January 2, 1896, Parliament reopened. On January 4, seven ministers resigned. Bowell famously labelled this group of mutineers “a nest of traitors.” On January 7, one of the seven, George Eulas Foster, rose in the Commons and requested the prime minister’s retirement. Bowell, who was watching from the wings, went into the Opposition benches and shook hands with the members there, saying loudly, “It is such a comfort to shake hands with honest men, after having been in company with traitors for months.”
Bowell told the governor general that the seven men opposed remedial legislation and that their opposition to party policy could be resolved. But the so-called “traitors” despised Bowell. This crisis of confidence could not be resolved.
The constitutional limit on the life of the government was at its end and a general election had to be called by April 26, 1896. But if Bowell couldn’t organize a Cabinet, the governor general would be forced to call an election before then. When Bowell failed to unite his caucus, he offered his resignation to Lord Aberdeen.
Lord Aberdeen refused the resignation, in the hopes that the remedial legislation issue could be worked out. When the seven members found out what Bowell had said to Lord Aberdeen, they explained they were not anti- remedialists. Fearful that the governor general would call upon the Liberals to form a government, the seven returned to Bowell’s government. The Tories remained in power. But H.C. Tupper expressed his disappointment over their lack of political integrity: “We all turned in like sheep into the fold, at the very rumour of Liberals being asked to form government.”
Six of the seven were brought back into Cabinet; H.C. Tupper was left out in the shuffle, replaced by his father, Sir Charles Tupper. Bowell persisted to work with Manitoba, but it was clear that no remedial bill would pass before the April 26 deadline.
On April 27, Bowell’s resignation was accepted and he returned to his duties in the Senate where he remained leader until 1906. He also returned to the Intelligencer, after having given up its control in 1878. Bowell continued to work well into the twilight of his life, until his death from pneumonia in 1917 at the age of ninety-three.
Conservatives often blame Lord Aberdeen for the disunity that followed the death of Sir John Thompson. Indeed, history would have been entirely different had Aberdeen’s distaste for Charles Tupper not affected his judgment, or had he consulted with members of the Cabinet before selecting Bowell to succeed Thompson. Aberdeen made a difficult situation far worse by foisting Bowell upon the Conservatives.
But it is Bowell who is to blame for the fiascos of his administration. Lacking vision and leadership skills, he was unable to make important decisions in a timely manner. And he never gained the confidence of his caucus. When political capital was needed during the Manitoba Schools crisis, he had none to spend.
Bowell left his party in tatters. The Tories had gone through three leaders since the death of Macdonald without once facing the voters in an election. Now they needed a fourth. The Tory government was at the end of its constitutional mandate. And there was no reason for optimism with an election required within months.
CHAPTER 7
CHARLES TUPPER: THE LAST VETERAN OF CONFEDERATION
For the honour of having one single representative in the British Parliament, the three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants of Nova Scotia would not only be called upon to suffer an enormous amount of taxation, but the person of every man in the Colony would be liable to be drafted at an hour’s notice to fight the battles of Great Britain in India, or any other part of the world.
A founding father of confederation with one of the most illustrious careers in Canadian politics, a notorious rake known to many as “The Ram of Cumberland,” Sir Charles Tupper is a great character in Conservative history. His reign, however, was surprisingly short. The oldest prime minister, at seventy-four, ever to assume office, Tupper was never prime minister to a sitting Parliament and held onto the job for a mere sixty-nine days, the shortest term of any Canadian leader.
Charles Tupper was born on July 2, 1821, near Amherst, Nova Scotia. His father, when not tending the family farm, served as a Baptist pastor. Charles studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where he met and married Frances Morse. Though he would later be known as a womanizer, the marriage produced six children and spanned sixty-six years. The Tuppers established their home in Halifax, where Charles was an affluent and prominent doctor, presiding as president over the Medical Society of Nova Scotia from 1867–1870.
Tupper ran for election in 1855 for the Nova Scotia Parliament in Cumberland County, defeating Liberal Joseph Howe, who would later be best known as the chief opponent of Confederation. Tupper’s defeat of Howe was exceptional in an election where the Liberals won a tremendous majority.
Once in office, Tupper wanted to eliminate all religious prejudice and decreed that the Conservative party “must reverse its hostile attitude towards the Roman Catholics; that the true policy was equal rights to all, with regard to race or creed.” Tupper was a great believer that citizens of the new world should cast aside any religious or ethnic differences and work together with the resources available. After the Conservatives lost the 1859 election, largely because of sectarian divisions, F.C. O’Brien, Archbishop for Halifax, wrote to Tupper, calling him “the champion of equal rights for Catholics . . . Defeat with honour unstained is more glorious than victory purchased by the sacrifice of principle.” The Conservative party returned to power in 1863. When Premier Johnstone resigned the following year, he was succeeded by Tupper.
Tupper was a visionary who in these pre-Confederation days shared Macdonald’s passion for connecting and strengthening the British North American colonies. He initiated talks with New Brunswick and Canada to create an intercolonial railway. Although these talks ultimately failed, Tupper later became a major player in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. As premier, he championed railroads within Nova Scotia, from Truro to Pictou Landing, from Annapolis Royal to Windsor. He also made great strides in public education. In 1864, he helped pass the Free Schools Act to subsidize public education. The following year an amendment was introduced to allow funding for separate schools that conducted after hours religious studies. This allowed the Catholic school boards to receive funding.
In 1866, Tupper engaged his former political foe in a battle over Confederation. Joseph Howe had published an article entitled Confederation Considered in Relation to the Empire, where he argued against a union with Canada.
[The Maritime Provinces] owe no allegiance to Canada . . . they naturally desire to preserve the great privileges they enjoy, and to develop their resources without being involved in entanglements difficult to unravel, and from which, once enthralled, there may be no escape . . . [Canada’s] proper mission would seem to be to cultivate amicable relations with her neighbours—to fill up her sparsely populated territory—to eliminate from her political system the anachronisms of dual leadership and double majorities, to control her Irish and Orange factions, and to fuse into one race by patient tact and mutual forbearance, her Saxon, Celtic, and Norman elements.
Howe believed that through confederation, the Maritime provinces would be sucked into Canada’s ethnic and linguistic problems with little to no financial benefit. At the time, the Maritimes were confident in their abundant natural resources. Howe had no objections to the current representational system for the colonies in the British Parliament and considered debating Confederation to be “wasting precious time with schemes to dismember the Empire.”
Tupper quickly responded to Howe’s
