Canada: Designed to become an Empire

The Quebec scheme, critics argued, would extract "tribute" from the peripheries and pull power and wealth to the political centre. That's what empires did, and that's what Canada was designed to become. Confederation supporter Thomas D'Arcy McGee had once, as an Irish radical, espoused the "commonplace" view that "monopoly capitalism was the driving force behind the empire." In the 1860s, many expatriate Irish papers still took that view, but McGee had changed his tune and now championed both the British and Canadian unions.

--E.A. Heaman, Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017), 58.