Canadian Financial Distress Constituted the "Secret History of Confederation," and the Revenues of Nova Scotia Would Go to Canada's Creditors

Joseph Howe saw identical causes operating to impoverish the workingman and the region. Canadian financial distress constituted the "secret history of Confederation," and the revenues of Nova Scotia would go to Canada's creditors. . . . This was not traditional British rule but something very different, Howe argued in a letter. The imperial metropolis, though it had controlled some casual revenues, rarely interfered with inferior patronage and "could levy no new taxes." The new "Downing Street at Ottawa will appoint our Governors, Councillors, and Judges--will have unlimited powers of external and internal taxation--At the start, will control and dispense a surplus revenue, drawn from Nova Scotia alone, of £234,000 or nearly twenty times the highest amount that the Colonial Secretary ever dispensed. And besides Downing Street never took a pound out of the country. If sometimes lavishly expended, the Casual revenue was all spent in the Country which raised it, but the Finance Minister of Canada may, annually, draw out of Nova Scotia an enormous sum and spend it where he likes. That our nineteen members will afford us any protection it is in vain to hope."

--E.A. Heaman, Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917, Carleton Library Series 240 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017), 68-69.