Reconsidering Confederation

Reviewed by: Reconsidering Confederation: Canada's Founding Debates ed. by Daniel Heidt E. A. Heaman Heidt, Daniel, ed. – Reconsidering Confederation: Canada's Founding Debates, 1864–1999. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2018. Pp. 309. Histoire sociale / Social History might want to add another word or two to its title. Founded in 1968, it sought to bypass a binary two-nations political history and find common ground in social history. But half a century later, the big story of the sesquicentennial was the poverty of the "two founding nations" account of Canadian Confederation. And here, published half a century after the first issue of the journal came off the press, comes Daniel Heidt's collection of essays, Reconsidering Confederation, as a reflection and a prompt to move forward the conversation along those more pluralistic lines. Heidt's innovation is to integrate all the different kinds of treaties, compacts, and contracts that tended toward territorial expansion and political self-government into one constitutional story, albeit as an edited collection rather than a unitary monograph. But is this really social history? Isn't Confederation an example par excellence of the histoire événementielle that the Annales school sought to supersede with its long-durée analysis of demography, economy, and environment? In fact, the book shows that everyone engaged in the debates and negotiations described here was reasoning as hard as they could about precisely those long-durée trends. They thought like social historians as they reckoned with their political consequences. Above all, they confronted an American economic and demographic transformation [End Page 696] that occurred rapidly enough to debunk the long/short distinction and to threaten the very principle of autonomous political decision-making in the regions that became Canada. These treaties were all attempts to impose political will upon underlying structural economic and social transformations. The essays here calculate the degree of success and failure according to a host of political, social, and economic factors that changed over time. Ontario, as Heidt shows, drawing on his recent PhD thesis, wanted economic, territorial, and demographic growth on a quasi-American trajectory and pursued a larger sphere of direct or indirect influence and control. Quebec, which was not expanding at the same pace, as a quartet of scholars—Marcel Martel, Colin Coates, Martin Pâquet, and Maxime Gohier—show, recognized Ontario's ambitions as both opportunity and threat. But Confederation, they argue, "happened because of Quebec, not in spite of it." Quebec politicians were in a position of strength and drove a hard bargain that made Quebec a bastion of French and Catholic rights, albeit at the expense of Francophones and Catholics outside of Quebec. Phillip Buckner makes a similar point about the Maritime provinces. Nova Scotians, for example, were worried by the prospects of economic decline and well aware that rep by pop would threaten their political influence. But still, he argues, it is wrong to call Confederation a bad deal for the Maritimes. Prince Edward Island negotiated an especially good deal by holding out. Raymond Blake concisely and vividly conveys the decades of debate that finally brought Newfoundland into Confederation, thanks to a persuasive argument that "union with Canada held the best promise of a decent, prosperous future with a better and more secure standard of living" (p. 258). Negotiations for Manitoba and British Columbia similarly insinuated local interests and anti-federal momentum into their constitutional deals, according to Robert Wardhaugh, Barry Ferguson, and Patricia Roy. All these scholars tend to debunk the long-standing Ontario-centric account of Canada with a more "provincializing" one (following Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe [2000], which dethrones Europe as a universal model for progress.) The second big payoff is Heidt's insistence that Indigenous treaties and demands be hardwired into the constitutional story, as part of that provincializing and decentring project. Here we see what different Indigenous groups wanted, the extent to which they were in a position to press their demands, and how these things changed over time. Though the book's subtitle is "Canada's Founding Debates, 1864–1899," the first chapter is an account by J. R. Miller of the early compacts, contracts, and covenants between Indigenous peoples and

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