Direct Democracy in Canada: The History and Future of Referendums

Direct Democracy

in Canada

The History and Future

of Referendums

Patrick Boyer

Copyright © Patrick Boyer, 1992

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Patrick Boyer, obtained through Dundurn Press Limited. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Reprography Collective.

Editing: David McCorquodale

Design and Production: Ron and Ron Design Photography

Cover design: Ron and Ron Design Photography

Printing and Binding: Gagné Printing Ltd., Louiseville, Quebec, Canada

The publisher wishes to acknowledge the generous assistance and ongoing support of The Canada Council, The Book Publishing Industry Development Program of the Department of Communications, The Ontario Arts Council, and The Ontario Publishing Centre of the Ministry of Culture and Communications. The author neither sought nor received any government grants in connection with the writing of this book.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in the text (including the illustrations). Credit for each quotation is given at the end of the selection. The author and publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any reference or credit in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, Publisher

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Boyer, J. Patrick

Direct Democracy in Canada

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-55002-183-4

1. Plebiscite – Canada – History. 2. Referendum – Canada – History. I. Title.

JF493.C34B7  1992    328.271     C92-095301-8

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the three million, three hundred thousand Canadians with varying degrees of mental and physical disability, most of whom value the dignity of risk in being able to make decisions for themselves regarding their transportation, education, employment, accommodation, and recreation.

Contents

Foreword – Michael Bliss

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Timid Democracy?

Chapter 1: Canada’s Long Journey towards Direct Democracy

Introduction

The Quest for Direct Popular Endorsement of Confederation

1898 and the Plebiscite on Prohibition of Alcohol

Naval Policy and Senate Reform – The Plebiscite Proposals in 1910 and 1914

Seeking a Mandate to Fight World War I

The People’s Mandate on Conscription in World War II

Approaches to Referendums by the Trudeau Government

Parliamentarians’ Proposals for Direct Votes

Approaches to Referendums by the Mulroney Government

The Constitutional Referendum of October 26, 1992

Conclusion

Chapter 2: An Early Start with Direct Democracy in Western Canada

Introduction

Saskatchewan Pioneers Direct Voting Legislation

Alberta Enters the Direct Voting Field

Manitoba’s Amazing Experiences with Direct Democracy

British Columbia’s Openness to Direct Voting

Conclusion

Chapter 3: On to the Ballot Box! Direct Voting over the Past Seventy-five Years

Introduction

The 1916 British Columbia Women’s Suffrage Referendum

The 1937 British Columbia Public Health Insurance Plebiscite

Newfoundland’s 1948 Referendums on Joining Confederation

Alberta’s 1948 Plebiscite on Ownership of Power Companies

A Question of Time – BC, Saskatchewan, and Alberta Set Their Clocks by Ballot

Quebec – Before, During, and After the 1980 Referendum on Sovereignty-Association

The 1983 Municipal Plebiscites in Manitoba on French-Language Services

Direct Voting for Agricultural Producers

The 1987 Referendum on Northern Quebec’s Constitutional Future

Prince Edward Island’s 1988 Plebiscite on a Fixed-Link Crossing

Direct Votes in Canada’s Aboriginal Communities

Abortion, Budgets, and Constitution-Making – The 1991 Plebiscites in Saskatchewan

The 1991 British Columbia Referendum on Initiative and Recall

The 1982 and 1992 Territorial Division Plebiscites in the Northwest Territories

Conclusion

Chapter 4: The Changing Legal Framework of Direct Democracy in Canada

Introduction

Referendums and Plebiscites for Canada

Referendums and Plebiscites in British Columbia

Referendums and Plebiscites in Alberta

Referendums and Plebiscites in Saskatchewan

Referendums and Plebiscites in Manitoba

Referendums and Plebiscites in Ontario

Referendums and Plebiscites in Quebec

Referendums and Plebiscites in New Brunswick

Referendums and Plebiscites in Nova Scotia

Referendums and Plebiscites in Prince Edward Island

Referendums and Plebiscites in Newfoundland

Referendums and Plebiscites in Yukon Territory

Referendums and Plebiscites in the Northwest Territories

Conclusion

Chapter 5: The Future of Direct Democracy in Canada

Lessons from the 1992 Referendum

The Past as Prologue

Our Democratic Reformation

Appendix 1

Referendums and Plebiscites Held in Canada

Appendix 2

Summary of the Canada Referendum Act of 1992

Appendix 3

List of Statutes Giving the Legal Right to Direct Democracy

Appendix 4

Summary of Statutes Giving the Legal Right to Direct Democracy

Notes

Bibliography

Subject Index

Foreword

When historians come to write about the recent evolution of Canadian parliamentary democracy, Patrick Boyer and his works will be singled out for special attention. In the last few years, most members of Parliament have fallen increasingly out of touch with the country and the people they have been elected to govern. The credibility gap between people and politicians, present to a certain degree in all democracies, has become a widening chasm. Huddled on their well-perked side of it, our members of Parliament and Senators have tended to fault the voters for being irrationally critical and cantankerous, as well as ignorant of the complexities of current issues. The conventional view from Parliament Hill is that it is terribly unfair of voters to elect members to govern the country and then condemn them for making the difficult choices involved in modern government.

Patrick Boyer is virtually unique among our national politicians in understanding that the ongoing health of our political system depends on reforming it to build solid institutional bridges across the gulf between the people and their legislators. This Progressive Conservative MP, well educated in history, understands that the best cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. For years he has championed the notion that a more frequent reliance on some of the tools of direct democracy, particularly the plebiscite or referendum, can ease Canadians’ sense of alienation and powerlessness and thus ameliorate the anger they feel towards politicians. This book is a learned, powerful, extended application of Mr. Boyer’s insights.

The author makes two compelling arguments. First, the devices of direct democracy have been used much more frequently in Canadian political history than most of us realize. He presents exhaustive evidence of our reliance on plebiscites and referendums – direct tests of the people’s will – to guide us on questions ranging from conscription and the future of Quebec through the marketing of asparagus and the establishment of public libraries. Thousands of plebiscites and referendums have been held in Canadian history. National politicians should note that it is precisely the levels of government thought to be closest to the people – municipal and provincial – that have formally consulted the people most often. The devices of direct democracy are not foreign to the Canadian political tradition; they are only foreign to a reactionary, elitist doctrine of parliamentary politics, most clearly enunciated in Great Britain some two hundred years ago by Edmund Burke. Mr. Burke died some time ago.

Patrick Boyer’s second argument is that there are real benefits to be gained in further bending our parliamentary system in the direction of direct democracy, particularly on such major issues as constitutional change. He shows, for example, that the fear of divisiveness is largely mythical. Even the 1942 national conscription plebiscite had the virtue of indicating Canadians’ real feelings on the issue and should be understood as part of a total process that led to a shorter period of disunity concerning conscription in World War II than was the case after World War I. Generally the magic of holding a vote on an issue is that the losing side accepts defeat graciously (so long as the contest has been fair – a further merit of these chapters is the attention Boyer gives to the essential minutiae of holding fair votes) and does not feel cheated or manipulated. Boyer quotes former Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Meighen to good effect: It is the very spirit and genius of British institutions that a minority knows how to submit to the will of a majority, provided it has had a chance first to show its full strength at the poll.

As a history professor, I would like to think that Patrick Boyer’s training in the discipline of history has given him a broader perspective on current political trends than many of his colleagues. One of the paradoxes of a well-developed sense of history is that it tells us when to stop clinging to an outdated past. Throughout the twentieth century, and particularly in the last three decades, North American society has been evolving very rapidly in the direction of greater individualism. Of course, there are many exceptions, but citizens tend to be better educated, more self-reliant, and less deferential to traditional authorities. We think for ourselves. We make up our own minds. We want to take responsibility for the decisions that control our lives. The crisis of political legitimacy in our times has arisen because people are less willing than ever to delegate powers through the electoral system. The 1990s buzz-word for every organization trying to keep up with modern sensibilities is empowerment. The devices of direct democracy, Patrick Boyer understands, aim in the direction of empowering citizens to govern themselves.

Mr. Boyer has been carrying on his campaign to modernize our political system at a time when most of his colleagues, their consultants, and large chunks of our academic and media communities were still imprisoned by the orthodoxies of the old politics. In the frantic attempt to buttress obsolete Burkean notions of parliamentary democracy, governments developed an immense advertising/manipulation apparatus to persuade voters to go along with whatever the politicians decided. It was a rickety, jerry-built, crumbling structure by the late 1980s and collapsed utterly under the stresses of popular resistance to constitutional deals. In the aftermath of the failure of the Meech Lake accord, the first ministers finally agreed to put their next round, the Charlottetown agreement, to a national vote. When we staged the third national plebiscite in our history, on October 26, 1992, the age of the manipulators and the spin doctors and their kept pollsters came to a dramatic end.

Old-fashioned politicians still struggled to understand the dimensions of the new democracy that had come into being literally in spite of them. In this book one of our new-fashioned politicians works hard to help us develop a broader vision of the future of our political system.

Michael Bliss

Professor of History

University of Toronto

October 25, 1992

Acknowledgments

In gathering material for this book, I was helped by a number of people who deserve recognition and thanks.

Pierre-F. Coté, chief electoral officer of Quebec; Eddy Giguere, avocat, assistant du directeur général des élections; Louis R. Mac Habee and France Lavergne, both of the Chief Electoral Office of Quebec; Joan Hudson, librarian at Fraser & Beatty, Toronto; and the staff of the Library of Parliament, all helped obtain needed information in timely fashion.

William Young, historian and friend, read portions of this manuscript in early draft and made valuable suggestions.

Alison M. Stodin, my thoughtful and industrious assistant on Parliament Hill, volunteered to transform the text into its final typed version and helped with good humour, ideas, and information all along the way. Helena Ferreira, of my constituency office, likewise assisted with skill and calm intelligence.

My life partner, Corinne Boyer, again with this book as with all my previous manuscripts, found countless ways to inspire and support, question and contribute, as the work evolved. Ultimately, this is yet another of our joint endeavours, one that could not have been done without her.

Professor Michael Bliss, historian at the University of Toronto, has contributed a foreword, and for this I am grateful. I am also appreciative of his role in Canadian public affairs, which demonstrates how academics who study our country can participate in Canada’s evolution by bringing their knowledge and views into the current debates and contemporary controversies.

Patrick Boyer

Etobicoke

November 21, 1992

Introduction

A Timid Democracy?

When I first finished writing this book, it was at the end of a long study of our country’s pattern of direct voting and the end of a decade-long personal struggle to win wider acceptance in current Canadian politics of the important role of referendums and plebiscites. For most of that time, the story involved many frustrations. The pattern of reluctance to share power with the people, a time-worn hallmark of those accustomed to being in public office, seemed to have stamped Canada indelibly with the imprint of a timid democracy.

Then Parliament passed the Referendum Act in June 1992, the Charlottetown Agreement was reached in August, Parliament adopted the wording of a constitutional ballot question in September, and the country plunged into the historic referendum campaign culminating in the vote on October 26. In a breathless rush, our on-again, off-again relationship with direct democracy over the past century surged once more, and timidity was shunted to the sidelines. It will be historians eventually who can tell this to future generations of Canadians, but I genuinely believe the democratic exercise of 1992 to be transforming in nature, that Canada will happily not be the same again, indeed, that in a peculiarly Canadian way, we have experienced something of a quiet and bloodless revolution.

That assessment, in a word, is what this book is all about. While future historians will have to place our times and transformations in a context, we can look back from our present-day vantage point in the early 1990s to evaluate what we have been struggling against even to reach this point.

Canada’s political establishment has long displayed a dismissive and rather dull opposition to letting the people decide on constitutional arrangements or other questions of transcending national importance. Direct democracy – where all citizens vote on a ballot question in a plebiscite or referendum – has been unduly eclipsed by our system of representative democracy where elected legislators vote on all questions on behalf of the entire population. In our constitution of 1867, peace, order and good government formed a constitutional trinity which accurately captured the objectives of Canadian governance, but over the intervening decades an unwarranted and smug timidity emerged, based on the unfortunate notion that direct democracy was incompatible with all three.

Deference and Indifference

This prevailing conventional wisdom (for some, almost an ideology) concerning the nature of democracy in Canada drew, in part, upon our instinctive deference, and for the rest, perhaps, on indifference. Until the 1992 referendum on the constitution, many Canadians had nestled snugly in this cocoon for so long that one might have doubted if the spirit could ever break free, whether we should ever be able to transform ourselves from this comforting conformity into the next stage of democratic life.

We are not a very anarchistic or radical or wild or free or open kind of society, Douglas Fisher, observer of Canadian political life and public affairs, told the assembled participants at a conference on the theme Sovereign People or Sovereign Governments at Dalhousie University in Halifax in April 1979. Fisher gazed sternly around the room, with just the wry hint of a twinkle in his eye. We tend to sit just as I am here, he admonished his audience, looking at each other with great seriousness.¹

Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset documented convincingly the great deference to authority in Canada and our habit of obedience.² Years ago, James Bryce accurately observed how the sentiment of deference to legal authority, planted deep in days when that authority was regarded with awe as having an almost sacred sanction, has lived on into a time when the awe and sacredness has departed.³

An early basis for this deference, as Bryce intimates, was the role of the Crown. To many Canadian settlers who took up their new life on Crown lands, the Crown was no mere abstract symbol of authority; it was a very real element in their daily lives. Crown agents made their rounds, executed their duties, and fostered an immediate relevance for the Crown in the emerging society on both a personal and public level.

Strong Tory values in early Canadian society which stressed prescription, authority, order, and hierarchy, all reinforced this deference to authority by animating and directing life in an integrated community where the collective good superseded concern for individual rights.⁴ As a consequence, individuals instinctively developed a sense of their place in the grand order of things, and it was a place, fundamentally, from which one did not routinely challenge authority.

This outlook stood in sharp relief to the attitude developed by Americans, whose constitutional doctrines, following their successful war of rebellion against the same Crown, instead flowed from the concept that the people themselves are sovereign. Ultimate power and authority in the United States is derived, according to its constitution, from We, the People, and not from the Crown.

For Americans, who developed constitutional doctrines and a political culture based on popular sovereignty, government does not play as big a role or serve as important a reference point as it does for Canadians. Where a Canadian accepts and defers to government and authority, an American more often finds government an inconvenience to be circumvented. A Canadian would turn instinctively to the government for a solution to almost any problem, when most Americans might consider government to be the last resort. Americans incessantly speak of liberty, a word virtually absent from a Canadian’s vocabulary.

Other factors have reinforced the orderly Canadian way of approaching the structures of our governance and the politics of our decision-making. The fact that we became pre-eminently a country of big organizations imperceptibly sapped the will of individuals to strike out on their own, to express contrary views, or to resign on principle without fear of being labelled a quitter who lacked team spirit and loyalty. The yeast of democracy has found it hard to leaven the great Canadian lump. Seeking consensus, hoping for approbation, leery of untidiness, fond of regulation, Canadians inhabited a setting which up to now has provided for the emergence of a generally timid form of democracy.

Unwilling to Wait

Not all have rested peacefully within the confines of this Canadian version of democracy. The long struggle by a number of Canadians to break through the controlling structures and attitudes of Canadian-style democracy has not been aberrant behaviour on their part. If the current antipathy toward the political system and politicians can be taken as an attitudinal shift which will endure, Canadians are again attempting to break out of these confines.

Canadians are feeling far more empowered and are less willing to wait for organizations or government to take the initiative. People have become especially frustrated with the governmental type of response over the past two decades. A local initiative or interest by the people is developing as they realize that they can control how policies and programs affect them. The issues range from street crime and personal safety to pollution control and land use for airport expansion and garbage dump locations. Progress in recent years has meant governments developing laws with environmental standards and impact assessment panels to consider environmentally degrading projects. The sham lies in that governments often exempt themselves from the strict environmental criteria they demand of others. Canadians now recognize this double standard and insist that turn-about is fair play. Either impose the standards and procedures on everyone, including government, or repeal them. This is the sentiment of people-up, rather than top-down, government.

We are on the cusp of an era of great change, a phase of governance where people, not the government, own the issue, where people initiate policy and government serves to support and follow their lead. This is in direct contrast to the past, where government took the lead and the masses followed, or at least were supposed to. Until a community owns an idea, it is difficult and perhaps wrong for a government to impose one on it.

If political manipulation through the use of opinion polling, media presentation, and top-down government regulation was effective for the establishment, it has only created for most Canadians what philosopher Jacques Ellul calls the political illusion. Our democratic methods, as understood until recently, have not worked for many people. If Parliament hadn’t seized an issue, special-interest groups moved into the vacuum and worked around the regular structure. The direct action of special-interest groups, which often distorts the public agenda, has grown in inverse proportion to the political parties’ willingness to take up public issues. Parliament and the parties have failed to take up some issues because the structures and workings of Canadian public governance have increasingly tended to bypass both of them since World War II. Today’s political parties have lost much of their role in the shaping of issues and policies. Parliament is often ignored, because the information, interpretation, and decision-making are centred elsewhere.

In response, a fundamentally different political environment is developing in Canada. Twenty years ago, organized confrontations were the best way for frustrated Canadians to express their views on an issue, and the media covered the drama of these political battles. Today, people are looking for a win-win approach.

Long ago other democracies, including Australia with its many similarities to Canada, realized and accepted that if their country was truly to operate upon the consent of the governed and to enjoy majority support for the basic rules by which the country would work constitutionally, then it was appropriate, even desirable, that the people should ratify or reject by direct vote any proposed changes in that constitution. The Australians chose the directvoting procedure in 1900 as the best method for educating and involving those who not only had the greatest stake in the matter, but from whom consent was ultimately required.

In the timid and controlled Canadian democracy, meanwhile, people remained perplexed as to why politicians should be perpetually talking about our constitution, the playdough of the political establishment. Nations begin by forming their institutions, but in the end, are continuously formed by them or under their influence, observed Lord Hailsham in the 1987 Granada Guildhall Lecture.⁵ The influence of our institutions, over the long course of Canadian history, has reinforced an élitist approach to the political agenda, a top-down pattern of government, and a timidity or reluctance to involve the Canadian people more directly.

The Legal Right to Direct Democracy

There really is such a thing as a citizen’s right to vote in referendums and plebiscites in Canada. Yet it is only a statutory right and is not enshrined in our constitution. Indeed, for all the attention devoted during the past three decades to the constitutional entrenchment of basic rights of Canadians, there have been some notable and curious omissions.

In 1981, for example, I identified and described the fundamental political rights and freedoms in Canada. My list included 10: the right to elect governments periodically; the right to vote for one’s representative; the right to vote on certain laws; the right to a secret ballot; the right to free speech; the right to assemble freely; the right to information about public policies; the right to be a candidate for public office; the freedom to participate in the political process; and the freedom to form a political party.⁶ This was as complete a list of our democratic rights and freedoms as I could conceive, and it certainly incorporated the right to direct voting by citizens. The list includes both rights and freedoms – the former being specific and enforceable in court, the latter being general and bespeaking more an absence of restraint or prohibition.

Yet this list does not coincide fully with the democratic rights found in either the Bill of Rights or the Charter. Both these public documents give us fewer rights. Was it because we survived for so many years without an entrenched charter or a written bill of rights that Canadians were fairly off-hand in compiling the list of our democratic rights and liberties when the spirit finally moved us? For example, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who unsuccessfully ran for Parliament many times before ever getting elected, certainly knew the importance of voting. He made a point in the 1960 revisions of the Canada Elections Act of giving the right to vote to Canada’s Eskimos, Indians, and Doukhobors, who until then had been expressly disfranchised by law.⁷ Yet in his landmark Canadian Bill of Rights, over which he laboured mightily, John Diefenbaker never even listed the right to vote.

Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, in his turn, had staked out the entrenchment of a charter of rights in the constitution as one of his central goals. Indeed, in 1967, as Justice Minister, when he addressed the Canadian Bar Association at Quebec City, Trudeau spoke of nothing else. By the time it finally became a constitutional reality in 1981, his coveted charter listed as our democratic rights in section 3: the right to vote for our representative in the House of Commons and our provincial legislature and to be a candidate for such assemblies. Among the fundamental freedoms declared in section 2 to exist for all Canadians are: freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression (including freedom of the press and other media of communication), freedom of peaceful assembly, and freedom of association. Significantly, no mention is made in Trudeau’s long-sought charter of the right to a secret ballot, the right to information, or the right to vote on certain laws, although each of these, too, are basic aspects of a free and democratic society.

The one omission from the rights enumerated in both the Canadian Bill of Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which holds particular interest here, of course, is the right of a citizen to vote directly on certain laws. Of all the political rights and freedoms that Canadians enjoy, this right to vote on certain laws is clearly one of the more ephemeral. It is a right for which the legal source is statutory, and several statutes which accorded this right have been remarkably short-lived. Sometimes the relevant act has been struck down by the courts as unconstitutional. In other cases, the act has simply been removed at a later date by the government that had earlier sponsored it or by the legislature that had formerly enacted it.

Flirting with Democracy

All in all, our history has been one of Canadians’ on-off flirtation with democracy and of cycles of confidence and doubt in entrusting decisions directly to those people who will have to live with the consequences. That history is the prelude or introduction to the 1992 referendum and the next crucial stage in Canada’s long and muted struggle to emerge as a robust and self-confident country with a genuine democracy.

1

Canada’s Long Journey towards Direct Democracy

Introduction

The concept that Canadian citizens should vote directly on major constitutional questions seemed to be, even well into 1992, a novel and still risky proposition in the minds of many within the policy élite of our country.

The experience promises to be unnerving and markedly un-Canadian, suggested Peter C. Newman, writing in June about the then almost certain prospect of a national referendum on the constitutional question in the autumn of 1992. As a people, said Newman, we have always shied away from traumatic public confrontations, resorting to compromise and bungling through. He envisaged the looming national referendum as the equivalent to the civil war Canada never had, an intensely fought confrontation between opposing views of Canada’s destiny, bitterly debated across the country, with a winner-take-all climax on voting day. Newman was correct in suggesting this would be radically different, requiring each of us personally to get off the fence and cast a vote for or against specific and contrary visions of our future.¹ The radical difference would be the opportunity for Canadians to personally and directly express their individual decisions on a truly fundamental matter facing the country.

From the quest for direct popular endorsement of Confederation 125 years ago, up to the efforts by the Trudeau and the Mulroney governments to accommodate referendum provisions for constitutional change, this chapter traces not only how familiar the issues of earlier times still sound today, but also how the timidity of Canada’s governing classes to allow direct popular participation has been a constantly played wrong note in the symphony, so exuberantly conducted by our leaders, of our virtues as a democracy. Indeed, even Newman, an astute observer and engaging chronicler of the exercise of political power in Canada, actually wrote in his civil war column that Once the people have spoken, they can’t be ignored, and went on to conclude, perversely, The stakes are too high to warrant the risk.

That same paternalistic attitude, ever seeking to keep the Canadian people from the risk of decision-making, has been the prevailing dogma that for too long kept Canadians from achieving true maturity as a people and in the process denied us an opportunity for the cultural reconfederation so devoutly sought by the late Northrop Frye.

This chapter shows at least one dimension of this multi-sided process of maturation and how that growth, which has struggled to occur at the national level in Canada’s long journey towards direct democracy, in 1992 finally entered a new phase.

The Quest for Direct Popular Endorsement of Confederation

The call from the leaders of national parties and special parliamentary committees in 1991 and 1992 for a plebiscite to approve a new constitutional package marked a refreshing change. Exclusion of the general public from a role in ratifying constitutional change in our country goes back a long, long way.

Let the People Vote on Having a New Country

In 1866, 20 members of Parliament from Canada East (now Quebec) addressed a remonstrance to the secretary of state for the colonies in London. Their petition of complaint was an attempt to stop implementation of Confederation until the colonial governments in British North America had received a mandate from their people to create a new country with a new constitution.

About one-third of the elected representatives of Canada East declared that the people of Lower Canada had not yet consented to the sweeping changes in their institutions, and in their relations to the other Provinces and in the Empire, contemplated by this scheme of Confederation and had never had an opportunity of pronouncing a decision upon the question. A proper regard for their rights, and every principle of sound statesmanship required the postponement of the final decision by London until it could be shown that the measure be a good one and the people are really in favour of it.

The MPs pointed out the irony of how all those who now advocated Confederation had previously spoken against it. They did not see the logic of allowing some political leaders to change their mind without affording everyone a chance to go through the same process. Confederation had not been mentioned during the 1861 and 1863 elections, so the MPs concluded there was no mandate from the people to proceed with such a fundamental change.

The crux of their argument was that the current Parliament of Canada would expire the next summer in 1867 and that the existing Parliament of Nova Scotia would likewise end the following spring. The pending general elections in both provinces should take place at the regular periods fixed by law, they argued, and these elections would necessarily turn on the question of Confederation. The desirability of Confederation and the conditions on which it would be acceptable would be fully debated, and the result would be an election of Parliaments representing the settled convictions and the matured purposes of the people.

The decisions of Parliaments elected under these circumstances, they reasoned, if favourable to Confederation, would go far to ensure the success of a system which at best could only be regarded as an experiment. Confederation should only be attempted under the most favourable conditions, and that would include positive mandates in the two pending general elections. If the results were adverse to Confederation, the MPs added, that fact alone would demonstrate the wisdom of the delay for which we plead.

They endeavoured to show that the promotion of Confederation was to be traced to the party or personal exigencies of Canadian politicians, and not to a spontaneous or general desire among the people for fundamental changes in their political institutions, or in their political relations. Their remonstrance also sought to show that the details of the project had not been considered, in the sense in which the clauses of a bill are considered, in any of the provincial parliaments; that in Canada and Nova Scotia, the people had not had an opportunity of pronouncing on either the principle or the details; and that in New Brunswick, where an election had recently been held, the people cannot be said to have assented to the Quebec scheme, which was the only definite plan of union then under consideration.

We seek delay, they explained, not to frustrate the purpose of a majority of our countrymen, but to prevent their being surprised, against their will, or without their consent, into a political change which, however obnoxious or oppressive to them it might prove, could not be reversed without such an agitation as every well-wisher of his country must desire to avert.²

Appeal to People Unstatesmanlike

The appeal encountered what historian and political scientist R. McGregor Dawson described as the consistent reluctance to submit the question of federation to any popular verdict.³ That reluctance was forcefully expressed by John A. Macdonald, who earlier had spoken against Confederation and then changed his mind.

Ironically, Macdonald still maintained his belief that the fickle public could not be relied on. The course of the New Brunswick Government in dissolving their Parliament, and appealing to the people, wrote Macdonald, was unstatesmanlike and unsuccessful, as it deserved to be ... Whatever might have been the result in the legislature, the subject would have been fairly discussed and its merits understood, and if he (the Premier) had been defeated, he then had an appeal to the people.⁴

In reply to a query as to whether the Confederation scheme should be ratified by the electorate in a referendum, Macdonald stated: As it would be obviously absurd to submit the complicated details of such a measure to the people, it is not proposed to seek their sanction before asking the Imperial Government to introduce a Bill in the British Parliament.⁵ This desire to avoid an election or to hold any form of plebiscite, explains Dawson, was conveniently explained as being in accord with British ideas of the functions of a representative legislature; but it also sprang from a shaky belief in the solid virtues of popular government.⁶

Unexpressed Views Get Channelled Elsewhere

The denial of a direct vote on the constitutional issue of Confederation meant that the contending views had to be channelled through the second-best procedure – a general election campaign. That, indeed, was all the 20 MPs from Lower Canada had ever sought.

The case of Nova Scotia was instructive of the problems inherent in using such a blunt device as an election to decide the precise constitutional question. Nova Scotia Premier Charles Tupper, elected in 1863, did not need to go to the polls until after Confederation had come into effect on July 1, 1867. In the September elections which ensued, anti-Confederates captured 36 of 38 seats in the legislature and 18 of 19 seats in the Dominion Parliament. Historian Peter B. Waite, noting how it had been fortunate for Confederation that Tupper did not test his electorate until after the new constitution arrangement had taken effect, subsequently read the election results as if it had been a referendum. Then, too late, it was clear that 65% of Nova Scotians opposed Confederation, concluded Waite, assessing voting returns in that general election as a specific verdict on a single issue, and assuming that a single factor influenced every vote cast. This mistake, or constitutional fiction, recurs frequently in Canadian experience, where an election is subsequently interpreted as a decision on one matter only (reciprocity in 1911, free trade in 1988), but in reality voters were, as always, influenced by considerations of party, personality, local politics, and the general mix of prejudice and principles.⁷

Opposition to Confederation within Nova Scotia was based on the conviction that the maritime community had a natural affinity to Britain and historical ties with New England. Confederation meant a reorientation of commercial life towards the interior of the continent, an unattractive prospect for those whose prosperity was based upon international commerce and shipping. Britain was unwilling to allow Nova Scotia to secede, however, writes historian Colin D. Howell,⁸ and when Joseph Howe accepted the inevitable, agreeing to enter Sir John A. Macdonald’s government in return for an increased provincial subsidy in 1869, the anti-Confederate protest collapsed. In the clear Canadian pattern, such matters had been quietly settled by the powers-that-be, through negotiation and exercise of brute political power. The people who had to live with the consequences could merely retaliate later in the context of a general election, and then only when the government could no longer escape it.

By 1886 the Nova Scotia secession movement had re-emerged, led this time by Liberal Premier William S. Fielding. Campaigning in a provincial election on the issue of repeal and stressing as an alternative the need for increased subsidies to the province, Fielding’s party won 29 of 38 seats. The bulk of support for secession from Canada came from those areas most closely tied to the traditional Maritime economy and the international shipping trades, notes Howell.⁹ Opposition to repeal was strongest in those parts of the province which were beginning to industrialize, particularly in coal-mining areas and towns along the intercolonial railway which linked Nova Scotia to the continental interior.

This second repeal movement also collapsed, however, when the Conservative party won 14 of 21 seats in Nova Scotia during the federal election the following year on February 22, 1887. Once again, the issue had not been put directly to the people.

In those pioneering times, the instruments of democracy being used in Canada were still rather blunt and crude tools. The means to fashion a more responsive and responsible political system by blending representative democracy with occasional direct democracy on a transcending issue – such as joining, or seceding from, Canada – had not yet been appreciated.

1898 and the Plebiscite on Prohibition of Alcohol

The social, moral, and political ordeal over how to cope with alcohol abuse occupies a prominent place in Canadian history. It was a sure-fire guarantor of controversy. Alcohol was disparagingly dubbed demon rum by some people because of the social evils, health problems, and personal calamities it produced. To others, it meant pleasure. To still others, it spelled profit. Everyone had an opinion on the moral and business aspects of alcohol, and their views and interests formed the basis of the largest number of Canadian plebiscites on one subject – 34.

The issue which galvanized such strong support and traumatized many working politicians who sought compromise but failed to find it, was whether the problems created by alcohol should, or could, be solved by removing the source of the problem itself through outright banning of booze. The quest for prohibition and the politics which surrounded the Prohibition movement propelled Canada further in our long journey towards direct democracy. In this, the Canadian plebiscite on prohibition in 1898 became an important milestone.

Democratic Decision-Making under the Canada Temperance Act

Two decades earlier, in 1878, following five years of heavy lobbying, Parliament had enacted the Canada Temperance Act which provided for the prohibition, on a local option basis, of the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquor. Local option meant that the choice would be up to voters in a local community to opt for or against prohibition by means of collectively answering a ballot question in a referendum. This process was more than a plebiscite, since the voting results were binding in law. The Canada Temperance Act was an effort to allow communities concerned about the liquor trade to vote directly. The local option was an astutely democratic approach, and avoided the daunting task of developing a single, nation-wide standard for prohibition.

The Canada Temperance Act was divided into five parts; the first two concerned the referendum. Part I set out the voting procedures, and Part II comprised the sections prohibiting traffic in intoxicating liquors. In short, to invoke or repeal prohibition as provided for in Part II, a vote had to be taken pursuant to Part I. Part I contained 112 sections outlining the steps from the presentation of a petition to the Governor-General-in-Council from the electors of any county or city in order to have a vote, through to the requirement of an order-in-council to bring prohibition into force where it has been adopted by the electors. Part I also constituted a complete code for conducting the vote, with provisions for establishing a poll, returning officers and their duties, voting procedures, proceedings after the close of the poll, summing up the votes and returns, secrecy of voting, preservation of peace and good order, and prevention of corrupt practices and other illegal acts. All aspects of the procedure, form and substance of the petition and the ballot paper, and directions to the deputy returning officers were also set out.

The Canada Temperance Act constituted an important advance in Canadian direct democracy, and this statutory expression of citizen voting rights on a policy with which they would have to live marked an important refinement in our democratic decisionmaking. The system of local option was a two-way street. Its fair and democratic nature meant people could cause a vote to repeal prohibition, not only to impose it.

Emergence of Province-Wide Prohibition Plebiscites

As the Gay Nineties rolled on, Canada was still embroiled in prohibition. The issue became one of transcending importance and could not be confined to the legislatures for resolution, so several provinces began to involve the people directly to try to settle the issue.

One of the first plebiscites that appears to have ever taken place in Canada, held in Prince Edward Island in 1878, was on the subject of liquor prohibition. By the time of the Manitoba direct vote on prohibition on July 23, 1892, at least four provincial plebiscites had been held. This experience did not necessarily resolve the issue, but it certainly let everyone understand and share in its complexity.

Pressure continued in the provinces for further action on the liquor trade. A decade later in Manitoba, a second province-wide plebiscite on prohibition took place on April 2, 1902. Meanwhile, the example of these provinces had sparked an interest among many prohibitionists in what could be possible for the country as a whole: a Canadian plebiscite on prohibition of liquor.

Fuelling a Canada-Wide Vote on Prohibition

The Liberal Party of Canada, during its years in Opposition, was a receptive home to the idea of holding a Canada-wide vote on prohibition. The Liberals, observed one historian of the prohibition era, made considerable overtures to the temperance vote, and obtained noteworthy support from it at the 1896 election, on the promise of an adequate Dominion measure of temperance reform.¹⁰

Liberal leader Wilfrid Laurier, in what his biographer Joseph Schull termed an unwary moment, had been lured into promising a national referendum on prohibition.¹¹ In fact, it is not clear that Laurier was as indifferent to the possibilities of direct voting as Schull suggests. Schull wrote that at the end of the prohibition vote, there would be no more off-hand referendums for Laurier;¹² yet the matter had not been taken up on a whim.

The Liberal party had deliberately voted in a policy convention in 1893 for a nationwide direct vote on prohibition, so the matter had hardly caught Laurier by surprise. It was clear party policy before, during, and after the general election of 1896. (Moreover, during World War I, the same pattern would again be followed by Laurier when, in 1917, he brought a resolution before Parliament urging the Borden government to hold a referendum on conscription.) This, too, showed that he was more open to the possibilities of direct democracy than his official biographer, in the pattern of many within the Canadian policy and political establishment to bury or dismiss the democratic struggle as an important theme in our history and national evolution, would admit.

Special Legislation Needed for Voting

Because Canada possessed no general enabling legislation for holding a plebiscite in 1898, Parliament had to enact a specific statute for this purpose, with the inevitable result that the prohibition issue itself became entangled in the procedural aspects for conducting the vote. The legislation which the Laurier government brought before the Commons for this purpose, and which became the focus of debate, was the Prohibition Plebiscite Act, 1898.¹³

When the debate in Parliament began in earnest in the spring of 1898, it was outstanding and comprehensive. MPs presented arguments which ranged from the issue of liquor and prohibition to detailed aspects of the propriety of holding any such vote at all. Most of the issues raised about whether Canada should adopt direct voting were well argued, just as they would again be echoed in 1917, 1942, 1978, and 1992.

What about Quebec?

On April 21, 1898, MP Joseph Bergeron raised the spectre of what the government would do if Quebec voted differently from the rest of the country. Bergeron, representing the Quebec constituency of Beauharnois, reported to the Commons he had just been at a demonstration in Quebec at which the provincial Attorney General had declared that if Parliament submitted the prohibition question to a plebiscite and it should carry in the Dominion as a whole while the majority in Quebec voted against it, he would move in the Quebec legislature that an address be presented to the Imperial Parliament in London to preserve Quebec from being subjected to the federal act.

Before taking this step of holding the plebiscite, said Bergeron, he wanted to know whether the government would impose prohibition on Quebec if the majority in the province voted against it as he believed they would. We should be perfectly sure, he cautioned, that we are not doing something that is unconstitutional.¹⁴ This was no abstract point, but one which became a real political and legal issue in Quebec and would eventually be argued before the courts all the way to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London.

What about Parliament’s Role?

The Minister of Agriculture, Hon. Sidney Fisher, entered the debate on May 3 and accurately expressed the proper relationship between parliamentarians and the general public in a plebiscite process.

The issue before the House, Fisher clarified, was the bill to fulfil the voting procedures, not the question of prohibition itself. That is not the question which is before the House of Commons, that is a question which by the very nature of this Bill, is to be removed from the arena of the House of Commons for the time being and to be relegated to the electorate of the country for them to declare their views upon it. It would, Fisher explained, be at the hustings where the question will be thrashed out. When the vote has been given, when the people of the country have declared their will in respect to this question, it will come back again to the floor of Parliament and will have to be dealt with again by the representatives of the people in Parliament.¹⁵

Hon. George Foster, the former Conservative Cabinet minister who had been responsible for the establishment of the Royal Commission on Prohibition in 1892, insisted from the Opposition benches that the government should not hold a plebiscite unless it was prepared to be bound by the majority view and act accordingly. Noting that the House was being asked to approve a plebiscite which would cost $250,000, Foster held we have no business to do that unless the government are prepared and Parliament is prepared, if the vote is in the affirmative, to take up the question, and translate the will of the people into a stern, strong, prohibitory law.

What If Some Parts of Canada Vote Differently from the Rest?

A question which presents a problem in any Canada-wide plebiscite is what constitutes a majority. Just as this issue was considered in 1991 by the Beaudoin-Edwards Parliamentary Committee on constitutional amendment and debated again in 1992 in Parliament in the context of the Mulroney government’s legislation to permit a referendum on constitutional proposals, so it posed a challenge one century ago.

Unless there is a majority in every province in the Dominion in the affirmative, George Foster asked, would the government consider that it did not have "a mandate from the electorate of this country to introduce a prohibition bill and carry it out into law? Is it to be considered that the decision of the majority