Ex Uno Plures: Federal-Provincial Relations in Canada, 1867-1896

Randall White is the author of Voice of Region: On the Long Journey to
Senate Reform in Canada and Global Spin: Probing the Globalization
Debate, and the co-author of Toronto Women.

Originally published in hardcover in 1993, this first comprehensive
study of early Canadian federal–provincial relations, from
Confederation in 1867 to the accession of Laurier in 1896, has quickly
established itself as a staple of reading lists on Canadian political
and constitutional history. In it the author concludes that, contrary to
John A. Macdonald’s high hopes, the “‘bone’ into which
Confederation had hardened” by as early as 1877 “was a regime in
which strong autonomous provincial governments competed on fairly equal
terms with the central government for political authority, legitimacy,
and power.” Moreover, this had at least as much to do with Ontario and
the Atlantic provinces (to say nothing of what was, in those days, the
still embryonic Canadian West) as it did with the French-speaking
majority in Quebec.

Each era, of course, writes history from the standpoint of its own
preoccupations. Donald Creighton and his colleagues once took a more
sanguine view of John A. Macdonald’s hopes. Garth Stevenson, looking
deeper beneath the surface of the British North America Act, has written
a book for our own times. One might gently complain that the title, Ex
Uno Plures, tries a little too hard to turn the parallel but quite
different experience of federalism in the United States inside out, but
perhaps this is inevitable. In any case, this book is a worthy read for
anyone who is interested in why Canadian federalism became what it is
today.