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In the spirit of the times, let me add my own grievance to the gathering national pile. If by some oversight Confederation should somehow be discussed in its 150th anniversary year, it is a safe bet one figure in particular will be mentioned only in passing, if at all: George Brown. Father of Confederation, leader and principal architect of what was to become the Liberal party, founder of The Globe (later the Globe and Mail) newspaper, Brown is the forgotten man of Canadian history.

Even in accounts of our founding as a unified state, his role is generally downplayed, if not omitted: the Bank of Canada was hardly unusual in thinking to include George-Etienne Cartier, Macdonald’s Quebec ally, as the other Confederation-era statesman, but not Brown. Which is odd, because it was more or less his idea.

It was Brown who first championed, in the pages of the Globe, the idea of a federation of the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, conjoined since 1841 as the single, though decidedly not united, province of Canada, as the solution to the impasse and instability that had enveloped its politics. He it was who committed the reborn Reform party, cobbled together out of various political factions — moderate Reformers, Clear Grit radicals and Lower Canadian Rouges — to the same proposal, and it was his motion, and the report of the all-party committee he chaired, that led to the idea being adopted by Parliament in 1864.

Most important, it was his decision to join the “Great Coalition” with the Conservative Macdonald, his bitter personal enemy and political rival, that broke the impasse and launched the broader project, a federation of all the British North American provinces, on its way. Much of the work of the Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences, indeed, was tailored to his design. Brown may not have invented the idea of “rep by pop” — representation by population in the House of Commons, rather than the equal distribution of seats between the two Canadas that had been the case until then — but it was he who insisted on it.