On October 19^th advocates of passing Bill C-22 “An Act to reduce poverty and to support the financial security of persons with disabilities by establishing the Canada disability benefit” gathered on Parliament hill. They were also there to celebrate a small miracle. The previous day, by a unanimous vote of 328-0, the House of Commons had given second reading (approval in principle) to the bill and sent it to committee for detailed hearings.

Not since the passage of the Medical Care Act in the mid- 1960’s had all the members of all the parties in the House of Commons come together to endorse such a significant measure of social policy.

While the details of the measure remain to be worked out, its intent is clear. Like the Guaranteed Income Supplement to the Old Age Pension and the Child Benefit it will provide a direct monthly payment on an income-tested basis to persons 18-64 with physical and cognitive disabilities. The need for such a program is clear. In 2020 673,000 Canadians 16-64 with a disability were living in poverty, almost half the 1,541,000 persons living in poverty in that age group although they accounted for just over one-quarter of all Canadians 16-64. Provincial disability benefits such as the ODSP are woefully inadequate and are becoming more so as the cost of groceries and rents have risen sharply over the past year.

My spouse, Martha, encouraged me to attend. We are both are involved with our local Food Centre in Centretown. Surveys of our clients find that persons whose main source of income is a disability benefit make up more than half the people using our service. I also met a former colleague from work at the rally who told me that a young relative of his who had been on ODSP had recently found a full-time minimum wage job which had effectively doubled her income.

Stories like these had clearly gotten through to the members of Parliament from all parties who supported the bill at second reading. But the need is urgent, and a number of legislative steps must be passed in both the House of Commons and the Senate before the bill becomes law and benefits begin to flow. May all parties in Parliament crown their unanimity on October 18^th by fast tracking C-22 into a funded program as early as possible in 2023.

                                                                               

“Your job is to do everything possible to enable every eligible person who comes to the polls wanting to cast a ballot to do so.”

That was the key message Elections Ottawa officials gave in the training session I attended early in October for persons who applied to work in the October 24^th municipal election. In a time when we read and hear of efforts to make it more difficult to for people to vote in our neighbour to the south this was a welcome message. Our job was to help people overcome any obstacles they faced in voting not to up our hands and shrug our shoulders.

On election day I was assigned to work as an Election Assistant greeting and directing voters at the five polls located in Centretown United Church at 507 Bank Street. I was interested to see how successful our team of twelve election workers would be in applying the message we had been giving in our training.  

The challenges we faced were many. There had been insufficient advance planning to enable easy and accessible entrance to and exit from the room where voters cast their ballots. Many voters had not received voter notification forms or had received those forms but had lost or forgotten them. Others had recently moved so that the address on the notification form did not match the address on their driver’s licence or other forms of personal identification. All these people had to be sent to the small team of revising officers to either register to get their names on the voters list, correct their addresses or find a document such as a lease or Hydro, phone or cable bill which had their current correct address and matched the information on the voter’s list.

There was a steady turnout of prospective voters with such problems throughout the ten hours of voting. The result: people often faced long lines and waits of several minutes to confirm their eligibility to vote. They were met with courtesy and patience by the revising officers who used their ingenuity and assistance from other election workers to help persons satisfy the eligibility requirements.

The returning officer for the location and Church staff worked together quickly once the polls opened to facilitate accessibility to the polling location for handicapped persons and provide better options to exit the polls once voters had cast their ballots. As a result, no voter had to be turned away from the location because they could not access the polling location. However, several did have to endure long waits to use the one small accessible elevator.

Two voters arrived just as the polls were about to close with no paper documentation at all.  One, with the help of the election assistants and the revising officers, was able to use electronic documents on his cell phone to confirm his address and eligibility. The other, with the help of the Returning Officer and information on file at Elections Ottawa headquarters, was also able to establish his eligibility to vote. Both cast their ballots just after 8 p.m.

At the end of the day we had good reason to be satisfied with our efforts to carry out the responsibility we had been given.

Just over five years ago (“It’s time to tackle inequality and poverty in Canada” The Hill Times, November 28, 2016), I made some bold predictions. I declared that high rates of poverty, real income gains only for the wealthiest households, and steadily rising income inequality were not inevitable.  

I further argued that real progress against poverty and income inequality could be achieved simply by building on policies that were working. These strategies had provided significant real disposable income gains for those at the bottom and in the middle of the income distribution and had slightly reversed the increase in market income (income less transfer payments) and disposable income (market income plus transfer payments less income tax) inequality which had occurred between 1990 and 2000.  

Data from the recently released Statistics Canada annual Canadian Income Survey for 2020 shows my optimism of a half decade earlier was not misplaced. Despite the Covid-19 lockdowns which sharply reduced employment and earned income for much of that year, all measures of poverty in Canada and disposable income inequality were at all-time lows. 

Yet this startlingly good news has been almost ignored. 

The official Canadian poverty rate, based on the 2018 base Market Basket Measure (MBM), is down to less than half its 2015 level, from 14.5% to just 6.4%. It was also at an all-time low for children under age 18 (4.7%), working-age adults 18-64 (7.8%) and for persons sixty-five and over (3.1%). The rates for all three age groups have been more than halved since 2015. The MBM counts as poor all persons in households who do not have the disposable income to purchase a basket of goods and services representing a basic decent standard of living where they live. 

Similar progress in reducing poverty is recorded in a second poverty measure used for making international comparisons. The post-income tax Low Income Measure (LIM-I AT) counts as poor all persons in households with less than half the disposable household income of the household in the exact middle of the disposable income distribution. The LIM-IAT rate was also at an all-time low in 2020 at 9.4%, down from 12.1% in 2019 and from 14.3% in 2015. Using this measure, children under age 18 (7.5%) and adults aged 18-64 (8.3%) also had record low poverty rates in 2020.  

Disposable income inequality tied its previous record low in 2020 (matching the level in 1989). However, market income inequality rose from 2019 to 2020 reflecting a decline in earnings due to Covid lockdowns which disproportionately affected low-earning workers. Its level in 2019 had been the lowest since 1990.  

What do these data tell us? They convey several positive messages, with one negative warning.  

The first positive message is that the number of Canadians in households unable to afford a basic decent standard of living plunged over 50% from just over 5 million in 2015 to 2.4million in 2020. 

Further, while real disposable incomes have risen for all parts of the income distribution, the biggest gains have come for those households with the lowest incomes. Between 2015 and 2020 real disposable income in the middle of the income distribution rose by 9.5%. But for those in the bottom 10% it rose by 37.8%, and by 25.0% for those in the next 10%. For the top 10% it rose by only 2%. The gaps between those in the top 10% and the middle and between those at the middle and the bottom are closing. 

The one cloud on all this progress is that the rise in market income inequality between 2019 and 2020 shows that households earning low incomes were particularly hard hit by the Covid lockdowns in 2020. Fortunately, large increases in transfer payments from new and existing government programs such as the Canadian Economic Recovery Benefit (CERB) and Employment Insurance to low-paid workers more than offset the declines in paid hours and earnings for most such workers. This explains why disposable income inequality declined to an all-time low while market income inequality rose. 

But will the good news about substantial progress against poverty and inequality in 2020 be reversed in 2021? We know EI benefits and CERB payments were already being reduced in 2021 as lockdowns diminished and people returned to paid work. We will have to wait for the results of the 2021 Canadian Income Survey to know for sure, but aggregate data indicate that much of this progress described above may have been maintained. 

First, while total real transfer payments from governments to households fell in 2021, they remained substantially above their level in the pre-pandemic year of 2019. Further, total real wages and salaries rose in 2021 from 2020, compensating for much of the decline in transfer payments for low and middle- income Canadians. 

If these two developments offset each other for households in the lower half of the income distribution, the result may well be a decline in market income inequality between 2020 and 2021 combined with only slight changes in disposable income inequality and in MBM and LIM-IAT poverty rates. 

The other mystery to be solved is why this historic success in combating poverty and disposable income inequality received so little attention. It’s not as if Stats Can didn’t draw attention to the progress being made. An article accompanying the 2020 Canadian Income Survey release and a statement drawn from that article by the Department of Employment and Social Development both drew attention to significant achievements. 

Perhaps commentators were not interested in data from over a year ago. Moreover, releases from the Canadian Income Survey often receive little attention. But it still seems strange that such important developments in critical issues of public policy such as poverty and income inequality have elicited only minimal interest, while Canadians are exposed monthly to bad news stories on inflation and fluctuating developments in employment and real gross domestic product. When it comes to poverty and income inequality is good news no news? 

There’s Gotta Be a Better Way

Is a Guaranteed Basic Income (GBI) the best way to tackle poverty?

Many Canadians would answer yes. This policy is appealing because it is easy to understand. In Canada we already have such a system for people over sixty-five, based on the universal Old Age Security Pension, the income-tested Guaranteed Income Supplement and supplemental income from income-tested programs such as the GST/HST refundable tax credits.

Partly because of this system, the share of the population over age 65 living in poverty has fallen from 30% in the mid 1970s to low single digits in 2020. However, much of this welcome reduction in senior poverty rates after the mid 1970s occurred not just because of the income support programs mentioned above, but because an increasing number of seniors began to qualify for earnings-based retirement pensions under the Canada and Quebec pension plans.

Nevertheless, if a combination of universal social insurance and targeted programs reduced poverty so much among Canadians 65 and older, why can’t we have a similarly generous income guarantee for those under age 65? There is currently a private members’ bill in the House of Commons (C-223) in the name of Winnipeg Centre NDP MP Leah Gazan and another in the Senate (S-223) by Senator Kim Pate both calling for “An act to develop a national framework for the implementation of a guaranteed livable basic income program throughout Canada.”

It is worth remembering that we already have a form of GBI for the non-elderly in Canada, made up of provincial and territorial welfare benefits combined with a range of income-tested refundable tax credits such as the Canada Child Benefit and the GST/HST credits that are not deducted from welfare benefits. However, the total of these payments falls far below the official poverty line in most provinces. In Ontario for example, 2020 benefits for a single unattached person considered employable were only 42% of the official poverty line in Toronto. Benefits for couples with children, lone parents and disabled single people were more generous but were all less than 70% of the poverty line.

Why are welfare payments so low? A reasonable assumption is that provincial and territorial governments and a majority of the voters who elect them are concerned not just about the financial cost of higher benefits, but about the moral effect of guaranteeing non-disabled adults under the age of sixty-five and their families an adequate income not provided at least in part from their own earnings. This concern is expressed in a line from a song by the Québécois folk singer Felix LeClerc: “The best way to kill a man is to pay him to do nothing.”

These[MM1]  concerns are supported by empirical evidence. When welfare incomes in Ontario increased between 1986 and 1994 to levels exceeding poverty thresholds for families with children, the number of people living on welfare increased by a whopping 280 per cent. In other provinces where welfare incomes remained well below poverty thresholds the increase was 22 percent.

An income guarantee, in itself, is not a powerful disincentive to seeking paid employment. Canada’s largest GBI experiment (Mincome), funded jointly by the Canadian and Manitoba governments between1975 and 1978 in the community of Dauphin did not appear to discourage people from seeking paid employment. However, the income guarantee under Mincome for a family of four was under half the poverty line for that community.

But when – as was the case in Ontario – adequate benefits are combined with a policy where earnings reduced benefits dollar for dollar beyond very small amounts, the impetus to give up looking for a low wage job to go on welfare increases as does the risk of leaving welfare to take such a job.

Welfare benefits are essential to provide people who are unable to earn or who experience sharp declines in their incomes or rises in their living expenses from falling into abject destitution. However, the welfare model is not an effective way to tackle poverty.

That is why the goal of those asking for a GBI is an adequate basic income which does not bear the stigma of welfare or provide significant disincentives to take entry level paid work.

Fortunately, a policy tool to do just that is already available. Since the mid 1990s, governments have gradually developed targeted support payments that improve adequacy of income, are non-stigmatizing and minimize disincentives to earn up to adequate household net income levels. This tool is the refundable income tax credit for specific socio-demographic groups. Examples include the Canada Workers Benefit for households with low earnings and the Canada Child Credit for families with dependent children. These benefits can be applied for simply by filing an income tax return. They also minimize disincentives to take low-paying jobs since the maximum benefit is not reduced at all until an adequate net household income level is reached and is reduced only gradually above that income level.

As was pointed out in the most recent report of the National Advisory Council on Poverty, despite significant declines in overall poverty rates since 2015 poverty remains highly concentrated among specific socio-demographic groups such as persons with disabilities, lone parents, and unattached persons under age 65. The refundable income tax tool enables precise targeting of benefits to persons in such groups with low incomes and thus reduces poverty on a more cost-effective basis than a universal payment.

A key reason it took so long for this tool to be developed is that influential supporters of income support programs such as the former leader of the NDP Ed Broadbent argued from the early 1970s on that all federal income support programs should be universal rather than income tested. They contended that programs which benefited only the poor and near poor were “poor programs” and would be vulnerable to cutbacks since their direct beneficiaries would amount to only a small minority of the voting-age population. This argument delayed the introduction and enrichment of the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS)  to the universal Old Age Security pension and efforts to add income-tested supplemental payments beyond the universal Family Allowance to low-income parents with children.

The fear that targeted programs would be more vulnerable to cuts than universal programs proved misplaced. It was the universal benefits that were threatened by cutbacks in the 1970s and 1980s while benefits to income-tested programs have steadily been enriched in real terms since their introduction. Moreover, the broad reach of programs such as the Canada Child Benefit, which provides substantial benefits to all but the most affluent families with children, provides a powerful political constituency for this program.

However, its advocates argue that only an adequate Guaranteed Basic Income can make substantial inroads against poverty among the non-elderly. If that is so, substantial poverty reduction in Canada is a lost cause because there is no evidence that either a universal or an income tested GBI has enough public support to be taken on by any Canadian government. Why? For the same reason that no government over the past fifty years chose to tackle poverty by paying adequate benefits under such universal programs as the Old Age Security pension and the former Family Allowance program.

Adequate benefits that are truly universal, rather than income-tested, would be enormously expensive. And an income-tested program like the GIS, the Canada Child Benefit and the Canada Workers Benefit would not, by definition, be universal. Either a universal or an income tested GBI would thus disappoint at least one of the constituencies now attracted to the idea of a single simple program to address poverty.

Yet, poverty data between 2015 and 2020 provide ample evidence that a combination of relentless incrementalism in the generosity of targeted benefits such as the Canada Child Benefit and the Canada Workers Benefit, steady increases in inflation-adjusted (real) minimum wages by the provinces and territories and expanding employment opportunities with rising real wages can also meet the challenge of substantially reducing poverty in Canada. Over that period, poverty rates for the overall population, for children under age 18 and for working-age Canadians 18-64 have all been more than halved, taking over 2.5 million Canadians off the poverty rolls.

This multi-pronged approach lacks the theoretical simplicity of a universal GBI, but it has been delivering the goods in practice. And there is scope for more progress using the refundable tax credit tool to enrich income support for groups, such as persons with disabilities, accounting for a disproportionate share of the poor. Just before the 2021 federal election, the federal government introduced a Canada Disability Benefit bill modelled on programs like the Canada Child Benefit. When it died on the order paper with the dissolution of Parliament for the election, the Liberal party pledged in their election platform to reintroduce a monthly Canada Disability Benefit “for low-income Canadians with disabilities aged 18-64.”

The reintroduction and passage of such a bill would be a significant addition to the multi-pronged approach which has been so successful in reducing poverty since 2015.

There is indeed a better, and more politically realistic way to tackle poverty than a GBI.

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“In the summer of 1982, during the 1981-82 recession, a Gallup poll was published showing the federal Liberals at 28%. Undaunted by this, the Liberal research softball team appeared at their next game wearing T-shirts with the slogan “28 in 82, 48 in 84.” And, indeed, in 1984 just after John Turner was elected Liberal leader replacing Pierre Trudeau, a Gallup poll came out showing the Liberals leading the Progressive Conservatives by 48% to 41%. Unfortunately for Mr. Turner fortune turned massively against the Liberals again before the 1984 election.
I have always remembered this as a classic illustration of how political fortunes can rise and fall with dizzying speed and ruthless efficiency. In the words of another short-lived Prime Minister, Arthur Meighen, for John Turner in 1984 “fortune came and fortune fled.

On September 14th New Brunswick held the first general election in Canada since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite some fears turnout was almost identical to the last three elections in the province. However, New Brunswick has one of the lowest incidences of infection of any jurisdiction in North America. This result may not hold for provinces nearing elections with higher infection rates such as Saskatchewan.
Women will be a much larger share of the governing PC caucus, accounting for 9 of its 27 members, up from 4 in 2018. Three of the new women PC MLAs gained seats from the Liberals, accounting for half the seats gained by the party in the election.
Kevin Vickers did not meet the expectations of those Liberals who hoped his celebrity status would allow them to make inroads in anglophone ridings, particularly in his home area of the Miramichi. He failed to win the Miramichi riding from the incumbent People’s Alliance member and gained no anglophone ridings elsewhere in the province. The Liberals gained only one seat they lost in 2018, capturing the almost exclusively francophone constituency of Shippagan-Lemeque-Miscou. This constituency narrowly gave the PCs their only francophone member in 2018, but it went over 80% Liberal this time.
That result was part of a larger pattern. The PCs increased their share of the vote in 41 of the 49 constituencies and picked up five urban seats in Moncton, Saint John and Fredericton. But except for Campbellton-Dalhousie, the eight constituencies where their vote share fell, often from already very low levels, were the most heavily francophone areas of the province. (the Shediac seat, three in Northwest New Brunswick and three on the Acadian Peninsula in Gloucester County). Despite their election of a francophone member in Moncton East the PCs clearly have a lot of work to do to become competitive in francophone majority constituencies which supported Bernard Lord and Richard Hatfield in their terms as PC premiers.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” This is the best-known and most commonly used form of a prayer written by the American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971).
However, it differs significantly from Niebuhr’s original fuller version which he delivered as part of a sermon at Heath Evangelical Union Church in Heath, Massachusetts in 1934. That original version reads:
God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things which cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.
Amen
This version recognizes that it is only with God’s grace that we can accept with serenity the evils of this world we cannot change. It goes on to ask for courage to try to change only “the things that should be changed.” This is followed by a request for wisdom from God to distinguish between the two. Crucially, it acknowledges that our efforts to “change the things which should be changed” must begin by trusting in God to “make all things right” and surrendering to His will.
The commonly cited version of this prayer, in contrast, asks for courage to change indiscriminately everything we can without first determining whether such change accords with God’s will. It concludes by asking for wisdom simply to distinguish between things we cannot change and those we can. This is very different from asking God for the ability to distinguish between what should be changed with our help and what should be changed but cannot be, at least for now.
It is the original prayer which balances our responsibility to act to change things “which should be changed” with the humility to seek God’s guidance as to what should be changed and the faith to leave to God those things which need changing but which are beyond our human power to accomplish. This combination, Niebuhr tells us, is the only way we can accept our responsibility to advance the work of God’s kingdom and yet, “be reasonably happy in this life.”

No other Father of Confederation fits the model of tragic hero so well as Louis Riel. Drawing on youthful audacity and precocious political skills, Riel by his mid-20’s had achieved the remarkable feat of bringing the Red River settlements of the Hudson’s Bay Company into Confederation as a province. But his youthful insecurity and insistence on being respected provoked him into a blunder which undermined this legacy and put him on a path which led to exile, mental illness and finally execution as a traitor to the nation he helped to create.
An aspect of Louis Riel’s controversial career which is too often overlooked is his youth at the time he came forward to found the Province of Manitoba. In the summer of 1869 Riel was only 25 when he began to organize the francophone and anglophone Metis residents of the Red River communities within the vast Northwest Territory of the Hudson Bay Company to negotiate the terms under which they would join the Canadian confederation.
By March of 1870 he had established a representative provisional government for the region which was recognized by the Canadian authorities. He also achieved consensus on the new government’s negotiating strategy and nominated the emissaries who would persuade the Canadian government to bring the Red River settlements into confederation as the Province of Manitoba later that year. Under the Manitoba Act, the Metis community had its land claims recognized and achieved guarantees for Roman Catholic schools and acceptance of French as an official language in government institutions.
However, this remarkable achievement was undermined by a blunder which occurred just as the provisional government’s negotiators were on their way to Canada in March 1870.
The formation and authority of the provisional government had been actively resisted by the so-called Canadian Party, consisting of a small number of recent English Protestant settlers in the territory under the leadership of John Schultz. Several members of the Canadian Party including Schultz, Charles Mair and an Orangeman, Thomas Scott, had been arrested and imprisoned by the Metis in late 1869. Schultz, Mair and Scott escaped from their guards in January 1870. They immediately organized an armed force under militia Captain, Charles Boulton, with the avowed purpose of freeing the other Canadian prisoners at Fort Garry.
Riel had adopted a policy of clemency, and by February 15, 1870 all the prisoners had been released. This did not deter Boulton’s party who now determined to overthrow the Metis-dominated provisional government by force. They were intercepted and arrested by a Metis armed group on February 17. By this time Schultz had already fled to Ontario, but Boulton and Scott were imprisoned. Boulton, as the military leader of the Canadians was condemned to death, by a jury, but Riel, as a gesture to promote peace within the community, pardoned and released him.
Scott, who had nothing but contempt for the Metis took Boulton’s pardon as a sign of weakness. He insulted and mocked his guards relentlessly. They insisted on his trial by court martial for insubordination, at which he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Provoked by Scott’s conduct and determined, in his own words, “to demonstrate to the Canadians that the Metis must be taken seriously,” Riel ordered Scott’s execution by firing squad on March 4, 1870.
This was a fatal blunder. Ontario Protestants were aroused and the Ontario government offered a $5000 reward for Riel’s arrest for the “murder of Thomas Scott”. A promised amnesty for all acts of the provisional government was withheld, and Riel was forced into exile in the United States. The toll on him of these events led to bouts of mental illness.
In 1884, Riel, now an American citizen, was invited by a group of Metis, local Indians and white settlers in what is now Saskatchewan to negotiate with the Canadian government concerning a series of land and other grievances they had against the federal and territorial authorities. After initially counselling a moderate, peaceful approach, Riel became increasingly irrational. He became convinced he was the prophet of a new nation on the banks of the Saskatchewan River, inspired by a successor religion to the Church of Rome. Influenced by these delusions, he endorsed armed resistance to the Canadian government. With the help of troops transported by the new Canadian Pacific Railway, the Canadian government swiftly crushed the rebellion. Riel was tried and convicted of high treason. Despite pleas for clemency from Quebec and lenient sentences for other participants in the rebellion, he was hanged in Regina at age 41 in November, 1885.
Riel’s story is a true Canadian tragedy, illustrating the potential of youth both for constructive political leadership and for immature and ultimately fatal political blunders.

Of all the original Fathers of Confederation Charles Tupper of Nova Scotia was its most tenacious champion in one of its most inhospitable environments. It is therefore fitting that he was also the last surviving original Father of Confederation, dying in 1915 at age 94. Tupper remained active in politics until his eighties, leading the federal Conservative Party in the elections of 1896 and 1900.
Tupper was in his early forties and Premier of Nova Scotia at the time of the 1864 Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences. Donald Creighton described him at that time as “radiating some of the physical exuberance of a successful prize-fighter…ready to take on all comers.” He needed all that determination and staying power to bring a reluctant Nova Scotia into the union and keep it there. Public opinion in Nova Scotia turned radically against Confederation shortly after the 1864 Quebec Conference and remained opposed to union through the provincial and federal elections following the passage of the British North America Act in 1867. This, despite support for Confederation both from Tupper’s Conservatives and the leaders of the provincial Liberal party in the Legislature.
In large part the opposition to Confederation in Nova Scotia was economic. In the mid 1860’s Nova Scotia was enjoying buoyant prosperity. Its merchants and bankers feared that union with the Province of Canada would mean high tariffs on imports which would reduce their trade and shipping with the United Kingdom and the United States. Even worse, they argued, loss of tariff revenues to the central government would be inadequately compensated for by the proposed per capita provincial subsidy from Ottawa of eighty cents a head.
As in New Brunswick, the spring 1866 combination of the threat of invasion by the American Irish nationalist Fenians, the consequent support for Confederation by the province’s Catholic bishops and pressure from the British Colonial Office enabled Tupper to pass Confederation through the Nova Scotia legislature by a vote of 31-19 on April 18, 1866. Tupper also benefited from the collapse of the anti-Confederate government in New Brunswick which paved the way for Tilley’s successful pro-Confederation election victory a few weeks later.
The anti-Confederates in Nova Scotia got their revenge in the first federal election in 1867 winning every one of the province’s twenty-one seats except for Tupper’s in Cumberland which he carried by a narrow 97 votes. In 1869 Tupper engineered better financial terms for Nova Scotia from the Macdonald government and the entry of anti-Confederate leader, Joseph Howe, into the federal cabinet. The anti-Confederate movement collapsed and supporters of Tupper and Macdonald won half the province’s seats in the 1872 election.
Nova Scotia’s separatists revived in the 1880’s in the face of economic stagnation in the province. William Fielding’s provincial Liberal party won a smashing victory in June 1886 on a platform of repeal of Confederation. Tupper, who had overseen the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway as a member of Macdonald’s cabinet in 1885, was recalled from his post of Canadian High Commissioner to London to combat the new anti-Confederate movement. He successfully led the federal Conservatives to victory in 14 of Nova Scotia’s 21 seats in 1887, silencing the agitation for repeal.
Three of the next six Prime Ministers of Canada – Sir John Thompson, Tupper himself and Robert Borden came from Nova Scotia, cementing Tupper’s legacy and the province’s commitment to Canada. Tupper, the pugilist of the Confederation had taken on all comers over a quarter of a century on its behalf and emerged a triumphant champion of his cause.

When British North American colonial leaders gathered at Quebec City in 1864 to shape the details of the Confederation project, one man stood out, in historian P.B. Waite’s words, as “the rare example of a politician who knew when not to talk.” This was Samuel Leonard Tilley, a Saint John druggist and leader of the New Brunswick Liberal Party. Waite notes that he was “not a frequent speaker at the Quebec Conference, but one always clear and to the point.” Yet it was the self-effacing Tilley who, with the timely help of some external forces, became the unlikely saviour of Confederation in 1866.

This tale begins with the fact that New Brunswick was the only British North American colony to put the Confederation project to its voters in a general election. And it did so twice. The Province of Canada and Nova Scotia adopted Confederation through resolutions passed by their legislatures. The New Brunswick election of February and March, 1865, sharply rejected both Tilley and Confederation. The anti-Confederates under A.J.M. Smith won 30 of the 41 seats in the legislature with Tilley losing his own seat.

This was a crushing blow to the Confederation cause. The Nova Scotia legislature would never have endorsed union with Canada without the land connection through New Brunswick. Had Tilley been a less persistent and tenacious supporter of Confederation, the project would have ended up as a mere federal union of Ontario and Quebec.

The British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, once famously remarked that “a week is a long time in politics.” In the slower- moving environment of mid-nineteenth century New Brunswick it took Tilley longer to turn the tide of public opinion. But, in the elections of May and June 1866, Tilley won an even larger majority for Confederation (33-8) than Smith’s majority against it (30-11) only fifteen months earlier.

Tilley’s personal qualities contributed a great deal to this remarkable turnaround. Waite describes him as “clever; he was like a fox, quick, resourceful, persistent, and at times courageous.” A contemporary newspaper prophetically observed in 1864 that “Mr. Tilley is never so dangerous, so fertile in expedients…as when his adversaries think they have him cornered.”
But even the redoubtable Tilley needed the assistance of three key external factors to pull off this reversal of the verdict of 1865.
First, the British government, through the provincial Lieutenant-Governor, Arthur Gordon, persistently pressed Smith’s government to reconsider joining Confederation. Finally in April 1866 Gordon forced Smith to resign and call a new election.
Second, the Smith government had hoped that the Americans could be persuaded to reverse their decision to abrogate the Reciprocity Treaty with British North America in March 1866. Supporters of Confederation promoted the benefits of an Intercolonial Railway linking New Brunswick to the Province of Canada. But Smith had argued that with the continuation of the Reciprocity Treaty a much more valuable project would be a Western Extension of New Brunswick’s railways from Saint John to the much larger American market through Maine. American determination to end the Reciprocity Treaty on schedule and the Smith government’s inability to obtain financial backing for Western Extension either by British or local capitalists left no alternative economic policy to Confederation.
Third, several hundred members of an American Irish nationalist group, the Fenians, gathered in Eastport, Maine in April 1866. Some of them launched an abortive invasion of Indian Island in Southwest New Brunswick later that month. The Fenian goal was to annex the province to the USA, thwart Confederation and pressure the British government to grant independence to Ireland. The Catholic hierarchy of New Brunswick responded to this event by issuing a pastoral letter endorsing Confederation. Also, coming just prior to the May-June 1866 election, the Fenian threat moved several constituencies bordering on Maine in southern and western New Brunswick from the Anti- to the Pro-Confederate camp. The only constituencies Smith carried were the ones farthest from the American border in southeast New Brunswick.
The Anti-Confederate cause had flourished in 1865 on the expectation that New Brunswick could remain a distinct self-governing colony and maintain and even extend its access to the lucrative United States market. The realities of American economic and military hostility and the determination of the British government to unite New Brunswick and Nova Scotia with the Province of Canada into a new Dominion dashed this vision. Britain believed union would make British North America more responsible for its own defence and less likely to entangle it into a war with the United States.
Tilley’s tenacity saved Confederation, but only with the powerful assistance of Confederation’s opponents in the United States. These external enemies of Confederation turned out to be Tilley’s most effective allies in reversing its stinging defeat of 1865.