The Promise of Canada: People and Ideas That Have Shaped Our Country - Softcover

Charlotte Gray, one of Canada’s pre-eminent biographers and historians, has won many awards for her work, including the prestigious Pierre Berton Award for a body of historical writing, the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, the Ottawa Book Award, the Toronto Book Award, and the CAA Birks Family Foundation Award for Biography. Over nine superb biographies, from Mrs. King and Sisters in the Wilderness to The Massey Murder, and masterful books such as The Museum Called Canada and Canada: A Portrait in Letters, she has brought our past to vivid life. Gray is a Member of the Order of Canada and was a panelist on the 2013 edition of CBC Radio’s Canada Reads. She lives in Ottawa.

The Promise of Canada Chapter 1

A Tapestry of Peoples

George-Étienne Cartier and the Idea of Federalism

In our own Federation we will have Catholic and Protestant, English, French, Irish and Scotch, and each by his efforts and his success will increase the prosperity and glory of the new Confederacy. . . . I view the diversity of races in British North America in this way: we are of different races, not for the purpose of warring against each other, but in order to compete and emulate for the general good.

—George-Étienne Cartier, Confederation Debates (1865)

Everyone acknowledges that Canadian Confederation has been a great success, and those who had the greatest doubts about the venture are now ready to confess that the plan was a wise one.

—Globe (Dominion Day, 1877)



Let’s start with one of the most famous images in Canadian history: the photograph taken in September 1864 of the Fathers of Confederation on the steps of the lieutenant-governor’s mansion in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

If I didn’t know what this old-fashioned picture recorded, I’d give it barely a glance. Our public institutions are full of similar compositions—a bunch of men standing in front of a sturdy classical building. They could be school trustees or railway engineers. It is an excruciatingly exclusive image: a blur of white-haired, bearded patriarchy, with not a woman, non-white person, or Indigenous Canadian in sight. That was official Canada 150 years ago.

But I do know that this particular photo records a momentous event. Those men had just invented a new country called the Dominion of Canada. There were still plenty of details to work out, and it would be another thirty months before the British North America Act would be signed on the other side of the Atlantic. Yet these twenty-three sombrely clad lawyers, farmers, and merchants, from five British colonies, had listened carefully to each other and reached consensus. No wonder they decided it called for a commemorative picture. Today, there would be lights, video cameras, and reporters on the spot. Back then, in the cozy little island capital, there was one local photographer with a cumbersome camera that laboriously captured images on glass plates.

When I look more closely, I see interesting dynamics in this image. Most of those posed on the porch—provincial premiers, cabinet members, opposition leaders—radiate the self-assurance of powerful men. However, at least a third of them are looking not at the camera but at the figure who is dead centre in the group: John A. Macdonald, who had just used his extraordinary negotiating skills to broker an agreement. The man who would now become the first prime minister of post-Confederation Canada draws all attention to himself as he sprawls on the steps in the nonchalant pose of a matinee idol. Very clever, John A.

However, my eye is also caught by another figure, standing to Macdonald’s right and sporting a stylish tailcoat, a well-groomed shock of white hair, and an air of private triumph. This is George-Étienne Cartier. “As bold as a lion” is how Macdonald himself described his elegant French-Canadian colleague. Macdonald even admitted, “But for him Confederation could not have been carried.”1 Without question, John A. Macdonald had the original vision that a country like Canada could exist. But it was the brains and quiet persistence of George-Étienne Cartier that turned the vision into reality.


Astute and elegant, George-Étienne Cartier ensured that French-Canadian interests would be protected within the new Dominion.

George-Étienne Cartier, a shrewd Montreal lawyer, is the man we have to thank for making Canada a federation. Unlike the “Mother Country,” as his contemporaries called Great Britain, the Dominion of Canada would not be a unitary state with one central government. Instead, the new Dominion would be designed with two levels of government: a federal government in Ottawa, to handle matters that affected the whole federation (relations with Westminster, interprovincial railways, and trade), and a more local government in each province that joined up. Unlike British counties, French départements, or even American states in the late nineteenth century, Canadian provinces would have an extraordinary degree of control over their own affairs. By pushing such a federal system, Cartier ensured that Quebec would join the Dominion. French-speaking Canadians living in the new province of Quebec were reassured that they would run everything that was essential to the survival of their culture. His major challenge was to find the right partner to help him achieve his goal. He found such a partner in Macdonald, the charismatic lawyer from Kingston, Ontario. At Charlottetown, Cartier’s idea was the most crucial component of Macdonald’s vision.

One hundred and fifty years later, the federal system that Cartier envisaged is the basic building block of Canada’s uniqueness. It is Cartier that we can thank for developing the government structure that in our country’s early years allowed two very different groups of immigrants—the French who had started settling the St. Lawrence Valley three centuries earlier, and successive waves of British who had scattered elsewhere, particularly after the mid-eighteenth century—to live alongside each other. That same federal structure has helped Canada absorb endless new stresses: dramatic expansion across the continent, a troubled relationship with Indigenous peoples, demands from regions that felt ignored, shifting economic patterns, surges of immigrants from every corner of the globe.

In any discussion of what has shaped the character of our country—not just the structure of Canadian government, but the pluralism and tolerance for difference that are still hallmarks of Canada—Cartier’s contribution forms the bedrock. That is why I decided that his vision for Canada should kick off my exploration of this country’s enduring potential.

Over the course of the past century and a half, Cartier’s reputation has been overshadowed by that of John A. Macdonald, “the man who made us,” according to Macdonald’s biographer Richard Gwyn. When Cartier is remembered at all, it is as Macdonald’s sidekick. In my hometown, Ottawa, we have the Macdonald-Cartier International Airport and the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge. In George-Étienne Cartier’s own province of Quebec, nationalists have tried to eradicate him from collective memory. But if he shaped Canada, what shaped George-Étienne Cartier? Who was this enigmatic figure in the Confederation photograph, who started his adult life as a rebel and ended it as a British baronet with a valet, a country estate, and a coat of arms?



Quebec’s Richelieu River is modest compared with the great rivers flowing through the Canadian landscape, such as the St. Lawrence, the Fraser, and the Mackenzie. The Richelieu, rarely more than half a kilometre wide and not particularly deep or fast-flowing, reminds me of a European waterway, with oaks and weeping willows along its banks and plenty of evidence of human habitation. These days, heavy traffic flows in and out of nearby Montreal along autoroutes, leaving the river to pleasure boats and fishing enthusiasts. From the water, I glimpse the silver steeples of churches and houses with the steeply sloping roofs that characterize Quebec rural architecture. Behind them stretch fields planted with corn and soybeans.

George-Étienne Cartier was born on the fertile banks of this river on September 6, 1814, in the village of Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu. Today, a bronze bust of him stands here on a granite plinth, surrounded by red impatiens flowers; the inscription reads, “Cartier: Son Village Natale, La Patrie Reconnaissante.” The bust features mutton chop whiskers and a truculent expression—every inch a senior statesman. But when he was growing up here, the community knew him first as a rambunctious little boy, and then as a young man with attitude. Only his family’s status protected him from several cuffs on the ear.

George-Étienne was the seventh of eight children of a grain merchant, who claimed (on scant evidence) that he was a descendant of the Jacques Cartier, the great French navigator who in 1534 became the first European to map the Gulf of St. Lawrence. George-Étienne’s family was probably not quite so venerable, but it undoubtedly had deep roots in North American soil: his great-grandfather, Jacques Cartier I, left Europe for Quebec City, New France’s most important city, in 1735. The Cartiers built up a lucrative grain business, then moved it closer to the rapidly expanding commercial city of Montreal. Their life in the bucolic Richelieu Valley was comfortable and privileged. Compared with most of their Saint-Antoine neighbours—farmers and tradespeople—the Cartiers were important and worldly. They lived like country squires in a large stone house, and when guests arrived, the brandy flowed and the tables groaned. Youngsters raised in such comfortable circumstances acquire a sense of entitlement.


Known as the House of the Seven Chimneys, the Cartier mansion was a landmark for boatmen on the nearby Richelieu River and had its own private wharf.

But George-Étienne would also have been aware of the battle-scarred history of his region. Originating in Lake Champlain and flowing north into the St. Lawrence River, the Richelieu River had been an important trade route for centuries. Before Europeans arrived, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Wyandot (Huron), and Algonquin peoples regularly paddled along its length. Because the river teemed with bass, sturgeon, and pike, they named it Masoliantekw, which means “water where there is plenty of food” in the local Abenaki tongue. Once French and English traders showed their faces, it also brimmed with conflict. The river’s strategic position between New France and New England meant that it was frequently the site of murderous clashes between French and Haudenosaunee, and French and English. The scuffles subsided only after the 1759 defeat by the British of the Canadiens (as inhabitants of New France were known) on the Plains of Abraham.

When George-Étienne and his brothers paddled upriver, they saw the ruins of several forts, both French and English, scattered among the willow trees and prosperous farming communities. However, they rarely caught sight of the region’s Indigenous inhabitants. Depleted by disease and hunger, most had retreated west. Local Mohawks kept to themselves in their communities at Kanesatake, on the Ottawa River, and Kahnawake, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence opposite Montreal.

For the small boy, the solid stone house in Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu and his extensive network of uncles and cousins were his whole world. There were plenty of diversions for a wealthy family like the Cartiers—dances and balls in each other’s mansions, contacts with fellow merchants in Boston and New England. However, Lower Canada (as Quebec was then known) was a small enclave in a larger backwater far from any power centres. In the year of his birth, the combined population (not including Indigenous people) of all the British colonies on the North American mainland was only about five hundred thousand, of whom perhaps three hundred thousand were French-speaking. Unlike the Cartiers, most colonists spent their days tilling the land, logging the forests, fishing the rivers and oceans, or shipping furs, grain, and logs; Montreal, which was now the largest city in British North America, had only twenty thousand residents. Compared with the booming republic to the south, with eight million citizens and big ambitions, British North America was poor, backward, and isolated. Only Halifax in Nova Scotia, with its British military base, and Quebec City, with its wealthy Roman Catholic seminaries and cathedral-basilica, offered any competition to cities like Boston or Philadelphia.

Nevertheless, Lower Canada was rich in tradition: as well as a larger population, it boasted more history and culture, and a higher birth rate, than any of the other impoverished British colonies—Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, and Upper Canada (today’s Ontario). George-Étienne’s father, Jacques Cartier III, filled his son with pride in his people. Although he named the son born in 1814 George after the reigning British monarch, King George III (on the birth certificate, the name is spelled in the French style, Georges), he loved to belt out voyageur paddle songs and point to the sturdy survival of Lower Canada’s habitants. And there was no shortage of village elders who reminisced about the old days, when their region was part of New France, owing allegiance to Paris and enjoying wine exported from French ports such as Le Havre and La Rochelle.

To a small boy, the rhythms of Canadien rural life must have seemed timeless. However, dramatic changes lay just over the horizon. Imperial power brokers in Westminster were losing interest in British North America. In their view, the North American colony was important only as a source of masts for the Royal Navy and as a dumping ground for demobilized soldiers and destitute Irish peasants. As the costs of maintaining troops and separate colonial governments in each colony rose, enthusiasm for these distant, frozen lands fell.

When he was ten years old, Cartier’s life changed abruptly: he was shipped off to the care of the most powerful institution in Lower Canada, the Roman Catholic Church. He was too young to recognize it at the time, but his political indoctrination had begun.

George-Étienne and his brother Damien were enrolled at the Collčge de Montréal, run by the Sulpician Fathers, the dominant religious order in Quebec after the Jesuits were expelled in 1762. The college was the pre-eminent seat of learning for French-speaking boys in Lower Canada. Although it has changed dramatically since George-Étienne entered its doors, it is still considered one of the best high schools in Montreal. The two Cartier youngsters would spend the next six years within the college’s forbidding stone walls and tightly disciplined routines. Their teachers, all born and trained in France, gave them a superb classical education in language, science, religion, and music. The college bridged the two solitudes of Quebec society, since it catered to the sons of the English-speaking as well as French-speaking merchant class. As a result, Cartier emerged from his years there with a strong sense of linguistic duality as well as a sturdy old boys’ network. He also absorbed a firm commitment to the idea of “survivance de la race”: the Canadiens must fight to protect their language, their culture, and their church. They must resist any attempt to drown them in a sea of Protestant English. That lesson became the lodestar of George-Étienne’s approach to public life. It would, in turn, shape the country that we live in today.

After graduating from the college, what next? For the fifth son of a good Canadien family, there was only one course: the law. In 1831, just before his seventeenth birthday, Cartier began studying for the bar in Montreal with Édouard-Étienne Rodier; he would be called to the bar four...