The Other Fathers of Confederation

Author

Epoch Magazine
June 09, 2025

The Fathers of Confederation at the London Conference in 1866, by John David Kelly. (Public Domain)

Commentary

While Lower and Upper Canadians were grappling with the 1840 Constitution that forced them together in an unpopular Union, Pope Pius IX, 6,500 kilometres away in Rome, was planning a Confederation of the Italian states with himself as president.

But Italian nationalists had other plans. One extremist assassinated the Pope’s prime minister, Pellegrino Rossi, in 1848. The nationalists proceeded to conquer Italy piece by piece from 1859 to 1866 until, in 1870, the Pope himself fell under siege, the Vatican walls guarded by French and Spanish troops or, as the English priest and convert John Henry Newman put it, “protected from his own people by foreign bayonets.” Later that year, when Pius IX officially declared the dogma of Papal Infallibility (mostly to remind the world that, in spiritual matters, the church is not subject to the authority of secular governments), Father Newman compared Pius’s action to “nothing less than shooting Niagara,” perhaps in a papal canoe.

In the 1850s and 1860s, many influential Catholics supported Canadian Confederation to resist an expansionist United States. To cite a prominent example, Joseph-Charles Taché, nephew of War of 1812 veteran and statesman Sir Étienne-Paschal Taché, advocated federation in the Courrier du Canada in 1857. His 1858 book served as a basis for the Quebec Resolutions in 1864.

Another, Monsignor Louis-François Laflèche of Trois-Rivières, wrote in 1865 that Confederation “offers us a lifeline” to avert the “destruction of our institutions” by rep by pop (representation by population). A federation seemed to be “the best thing for us in the current circumstances,” much better than the United Province. The Bishop of Trois-Rivières, Thomas Cooke, declared in a June 8, 1867, letter written by Laflèche, who was his vicar general, that Confederation was desirable to block American annexation, a grave threat to French Canada’s survival.

Laflèche was the top clerical intellectual and author of the famous 1866 book, “Quelques considérations” (“Some Considerations”), about how civil society, religion, and the family are interconnected.

Monsignor Louis-François Richer Laflèche (1818–1898). (Public Domain)

Laflèche had served as a military chaplain to the Métis during the era of their great buffalo hunts, constantly offering Mass with them in the open prairie. During the Métis’ epic two-day battle with Sioux warriors at Grand Coteau in 1851, when Sioux horsemen attacked their circled Red River carts in three waves, Laflèche, wearing his white “surplice with the star at the neck, and … crucifix in his hand,” his “tall white figure” moving within the Métis lines, encouraged their leader, Jean-Baptiste Falcon and his 77 gunmen, and comforted the women and children among them. Finally, the Sioux gave up, saying, “They have a shaman; we cannot overcome them”—a victory that the Métis took as their divine appointment to rule the Prairie unchallenged. That self-confidence helps explain Métis resistance when Canadian surveyors showed up uninvited at Red River in 1869, precipitating the Riel Rebellion.

In the spirit of Pope Pius IX, Laflèche later denounced encroachments by the “so-called liberal” state upon the rights of parents and educators in his 1866 manifesto. He cited the closure of Catholic schools by force in France as an example of “liberalism today,” proving the injustice of any “universal monopoly” of state education.

For that very reason, Archbishop Thomas Connolly of Halifax actually attended the London Conference of 1866, where the Fathers of Confederation made the final deal. It’s largely forgotten that a bishop took part, and he is not included in the famous 1889 painting by John David Kelly. But Thomas D’Arcy McGee called Connolly a “Father of Confederation,” others the “Godfather of Confederation.”

Archbishop Thomas Connolly (1814–1876). (Public Domain)

In London, Connolly lobbied for the right of minority Catholic parents in Protestant-dominated Nova Scotia to keep and control their schools. He himself had established several, inviting De La Salle brothers and Sacred Heart sisters to serve as teachers.

Born in Cork, Ireland, Connolly joined the Capuchin Order, trained at the Irish College in Rome, and served as a prison chaplain in Ireland. He was sent as secretary to the Bishop of Halifax, and later, when he was only 37, was named Bishop of St. John, New Brunswick. As Archbishop of Halifax in 1867–68, Connolly built relationships over dinner and a glass of brandy. He offered “his fine country home as a holiday residence for the Governor-General.” And he worked face to face with the poor, contracting “plague” two or three times.

John Lynch, the Catholic Bishop of Toronto, also supported Confederation in the hope of getting a better arrangement for Catholic schools in Protestant-dominated Ontario. On Cape Breton Island, Colin Francis MacKinnon, Bishop of Arichat, assured Nova Scotia Premier Charles Tupper of his support. McKinnon pointed to the Fenian Raids, in which American-based Irish revolutionaries attacked Canada and New Brunswick in 1866. “Owing to the great emergency and the necessities of the times,” he said, the colonies must unite. Connolly, too, warned of U.S. annexation. He believed Confederation was necessary to “avoid being gobbled up by Yankees,” according to historian David B. Flemming.

Bishop John Lynch (1816–1888). (Public Domain)

McKinnon grew up among Nova Scotia’s Scottish Highland settlers and later earned two doctorates at the Urban College in Rome (named for its founder Pope Urban VIII). He served as a parish priest in St. Andrews (now Antigonish) on the mainland, 60 kilometres from Cape Breton. He too had established schools now under threat from “public” education.

The problem was that 19th-century Protestants and liberals wanted to impose one public education system regardless of religious and language differences. They believed that “separate” schools by definition posed a threat to unity. They refused to see that a one-size-fits-all system would, in practice, be Protestant and authoritarian. A diversity of school types would also prevent the tendency towards mediocrity.

Connolly and Tupper made a “gentleman’s agreement” to protect Catholic minorities, but Tupper refused any guarantee in law. Section 93 in the proposed Constitution, to protect minority schools that already existed by law in Ontario and Quebec, would not apply in Nova Scotia. However, Sections 55, 56, and 90 would give the federal government and the British government, through the governor general and lieutenant governors, the power to reserve and disallow provincial laws deemed improper or unjust. Connolly hoped Confederation would create a strong central government that could keep the provinces in check and protect minorities.

Monsignor Ignace Bourget (1799–1885). (Public Domain)

In contrast, Ignace Bourget, born in 1799 and appointed Bishop of Montreal in 1840 by Pope Gregory XVI, was more cautious and enigmatic, saying little about Confederation and offering the prayer “that nothing may happen to us that could harm Religion and the well-being of our dear homeland.”

In 1865, Bourget had a fascinating audience with Pope Pius IX, who was well-informed about “what is happening in our country … about Confederation, about the American War.” It’s unclear who briefed Pius, but we know that Father Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau, then Rector of Laval University, was also in Rome, as was Bishop Edward J. Horan of Kingston, born in Quebec in 1817, who had a good relationship with the assemblyman for Kingston, John A. Macdonald.

Bourget did not fully trust George-Étienne Cartier, and took measures that can be understood only in supernatural terms to protect the faith of Quebecers. He brought back dozens of relics from Rome—fragments of bone from martyrs of the Catacombs—and placed them in a chain of churches dedicated to obscure early saints and popes like Abondius, Zénon, Télesphore, Zotique, Asellus, and Janvière in villages all along the border of Quebec with the United States and Ontario. This created a kind of osseous or intercessory equivalent of the NORAD North Warning System to protect his flock from unwanted Protestant and liberal influences.

We usually think of the Fathers of Confederation as the men who were delegates to the Charlottetown and Quebec conferences of 1864 and the London conference of 1866. But there were other extraordinary “Fathers” who should also be counted among the founders of our country.