The Dominion Government as the Master, the Provincial Governments as Subservient

Disallowance, the unfettered power given to the federal Cabinet to strike down any provincial law for whatever reason, be the law constitutional or not, was emphasized. In a famous memorandum in June 1868, just a year after Confederation, Macdonald told the provinces that in future they could expect to see disallowance, a weapon used infrequently by Great Britain against colonial legislation, employed much more often by Ottawa. Macdonald saw the Dominion government as the master, the provincial governments as subservient. He probably hoped that in the long run he might shake the provinces down into quasi-municipal governments, like those of New Zealand.

--Peter Waite, "Between Three Oceans: Challenges of a Continental Destiny, 1840-1900," in The Illustrated History of Canada, 25th Anniversary ed., ed. Craig Brown (2012; repr., Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017), 326.