The Key to Laurier's Success

The key to Laurier's success, as it had been with Macdonald before him, was his ability to bring men--since no woman voted, let alone sat at the Cabinet table, before 1917--representing different interests together and to make them work as a team. Of special importance to Laurier was harmonizing the interests and sentiments of French and English Canadians. And as the country grew, the task increased in complexity, because regional demands joined ethnic tensions, religious rivalries, and class conflict. For fifteen years Laurier proved himself the unrivaled master of a turbulent political scene. But by 1911 even he could no longer keep command.

--Ramsay Cook, "The Triumph and Trials of Materialism, 1900-1945," in The Illustrated History of Canada, 25th Anniversary ed., ed. Craig Brown (2012; repr., Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017), 404.

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.