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The Voice of North Dundas
Vol 4, No 13
June 29, 2023
Happy Canada Day! Industry Leader in Diesel Performance Truck and Tractor Maintenance & Repair
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Canada Day stories:
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by David Shanahan Canadians, when they think about the Fathers of Confederation, which is rarely, probably imagine them as rather stern and colourless individuals. They see the old photographs taken in Charlottetown in that summer of 1864, the old-fashioned clothes, the profusion of facial hair and the dour faces, and they judge them rather harshly. The rather odd fact of history is that the scheme of Confederation, as hammered out in September and October of that year, was carried through as much through long evenings and nights of
parties, copious consumption of alcohol, and massive amounts of food, singing and dancing. There was also, of course, serious discussion, constitutional debate, careful guarding of local and regional interests, and all the other aspects of creating a new country. But the long days of late summer of 1864 was the time in which Canada, as a new nation, was forged. When the Canadians effectively forced the Maritimers to invite them to the conference they were planning in PEI that August, it forced the Lower Colonies to finalise plans for their meeting, which was to discuss uniting in a new Acadia, a single Maritime Province
that would be stronger and more secure than its individual parts. But it cannot be said that there was a great deal of optimism among those politicians that such a union was possible, or even desired by most of the inhabitants. But the arrival of the Canadians changed all that. Before they left for Charlottetown, the members of the Canadian Coalition Government locked themselves away on August 4 to draw up a detailed plan of how a confederation of the British American colonies would work. They had already discussed the concept at length in George Brown’s Committee in May, and now they surprised themselves at how quickly, and with what unanimity, they were able
to draw up a proposal to put before the Maritimers when they travelled there in September. One member of that Government was not present for those sessions: he was away on a rather special mission. On the day the sessions began, August 4, Thomas D’Arcy McGee departed on the government steamer “Queen Victoria”, along with one hundred journalists and politicians, on a social visit to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. They had been invited by the St. John Board of Trade in an effort to improve commercial relations between the various British colonies. The timing of the invitation has been the cont'd on page 3
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