Louis Riel: Father of Manitoba

Louis Riel is one of the most commanding and complex public personalities in Canadian history. More distinctive yet, he is the only truly romantic figure--fighting for a small, threatened people, and dying for them--that we have ever had.... Once regarded as a traitor, he has since been sanctified by the state, with public statues erected in his honour. He now carries the title of Father of Manitoba.

--Richard Gwyn, Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald; His Life, Our Times (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2012), 102.

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.

Edward Blake and the Compact Theory of Confederation

At Queen's Park in Toronto, he went further, breaking radically new ground. "Our province [Ontario] agreed to part with a certain part of its jurisdiction upon certain conditions," he said, and these conditions were embodied into an Imperial act that gave us security, "a charter of our rights." He concluded precisely, "This compact under which we have surrendered so much of our rights is not alterable except by the power that made it."... Blake was the first to advance the concept of Confederation as a "compact" between the provinces, which had got together to create a federal government to fulfill certain common functions.

--Richard Gwyn, Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald; His Life, Our Times (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2012), 69.