Who Speaks for Canada?

The better terms Macdonald had convinced Joseph Howe to accept were in fact quite modest. They merely brought Nova Scotia up to the level Leonard Tilley had secured for New Brunswick in the pre-Confederation negotiations. Edward Blake, the most prominent member of the Liberal Opposition in Ottawa and, simultaneously, a leading member of the Ontario legislature, considered the terms dangerous--not for the additional money Ottawa had to send to Halifax every year, but because of the constitutional precedent the new terms set. The money had to come from revenues raised by the federal government in the other provinces, even though they had not been given any opportunity to discuss and approve this change. To Blake, this affair raised a cardinal issue of Canadian politics: namely, "Who speaks for Canada?" in the phrase that so dominated late twentieth-century federal-provincial debates. Did the federal government alone have this role, or, instead, did Ottawa and the provinces conjointly, in some manner not mentioned in the constitution?

--Richard Gwyn, Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald; His Life, Our Times (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2012), 65.