June's Policy Options magazine offers a download of Desmond Morton's irony-laced reflections on Canadian constitutional history in a talk to constitutional law students. His thesis that confederation was something stage-managed by the British and mostly driven by the US Civil War seems to me a bit, ah,... evidence-challenged. The federalism-for-Rep-by-Pop deal between George Brown and George Etienne Cartier in the spring of 1864, made entirely for domestic reasons, was surely a more direct cause.
Not that the Brits were cool to confederation. But British historian Ged Martin in Britain and the Origin of Canadian Confederation a decade ago demonstrated that Britain had a rather limited role in creating confederation, despite its sympathetic interest in the process. Some reviewers, however, seemed to read the title and assume Martin had proved Britain was the origin.
