| Chapter 1: | New Brunswick and Canadian Confederation, 1861–1866 |
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representative and the leader of an elected majority, were still being worked out in the 1840s and 1850s as responsible government evolved and established its local conventions. In Canada, the governor, the earl of Elgin, confronted the supremacy of party interest and the “reckless” use of power and privilege in politics with quiet tact and diplomacy. He accepted the results of elections overturning ministers in 1847 and invited the leaders of the majority to form a government, making clear they had his confidence and bore the consequences of all their acts in government. Thus, he hoped to win a measure of moral influence to compensate for loss of the governor's power “consequent on the surrender of patronage to an executive responsible to the local Parliament.” 6
It took time for this principle to be worked out in practice in Canada and the Maritimes. In Nova Scotia, the lieutenant-governor, like most imperial officials in British North America, was critical of the “spoils system” as an inherent American and “Jacksonian” evil. Elgin, however, took a more tolerant attitude to party patronage for its benefit to public welfare and for government stability. 7The secretary of state, Earl Grey, advised that the executive council could contain a majority of a successful party with any vacancies being made up by the lieutenant-governor's appointments. But he was opposed to excessive intrusion of the spoils system into tenure of office by civil servants and he made a distinction between political and administrative posts, following British practice. Except for the case of the judiciary (and not always there), such a distinction was hard to maintain, especially in the smaller provinces. In 1850, Lieutenant-Governor Head informed Grey that the more capable New Brunswickians found it difficult to serve in a responsible government when a majority of the nine-member executive council lived far from the capital and were without emoluments in an administration where only the provincial secretary, attorney general, and solicitor general were paid officials. In these conditions, the lieutenant-governor found it impossible to run anything on the exact model of the English system of parliamentary government.
The underlying problem remained (as Gordon was to find out) that the executive council was responsible to the assembly, but the lieutenant-governor was responsible to crown and parliament, and this anomaly