The Canadian Department of Justice and the Completion of Confederation, 1867-78

David E. Smith is a professor of political Studies at the University of
Saskatchewan. He is the author of Building a Province: A History of
Saskatchewan in Documents, The Invisible Crown, and Republican Option in
Canada, Past and Present.

This is a study of government, administration, and political parties;
its author is a historian. While there is nothing inherently problematic
about this association of teller and tale, it can (and in this case
does) lead to disappointment. Professor Swainger advances a proposition
about the role the Department of Justice was to play in completing
Confederation—that is, up to 1878, when Macdonald’s Conservatives
returned from electoral exile. The department was expected to be a
central actor in the administrative “rounding out” of Canada.
However, that expectation was never realized. The anticipated national
imprint, and much else for which the department was responsible, proved,
in the author’s words, to be “fictive,” “elusive,” and a
“veneer.”

In this intensely detailed account, Swainger traces the causes to an
underdeveloped appreciation of the constraints politics impose on law
and to the primacy of partisanism over every other consideration in the
determination of policy. An absence of order and will at the centre
explain the sad stories the author recounts about the exercise of the
prerogative of mercy and the founding of Canada’s penitentiaries.
Always, the local triumphed over the national, the particular over the
general.

There is no reason to doubt the facts presented here: Professor
Swainger is a convincing chronicler. But in the absence of some
explanatory theory of public administration or federalism, there is
reason to question the book’s pessimistic conclusion. Neither the
literature on state-building in other continental countries nor the
experience of administering modern Canada—as, for instance, set down
in the Report of the Royal Commission on Financial Management and
Accountability (1979)—suggest that Canada got off to a particularly
rocky start then, as opposed to later or in contrast to experience
elsewhere.

Departmental histories have an important contribution to make to an
understanding of national history. For that reason, Swainger’s book is
a welcome addition to the literature. The regret is that it is too
highly focused to permit or advance a general theory of administration.