As the bleu chief, he had as a co-premier with John MacDonald in the Union parliaments of 1857-58 and 1858-62. In ministry, he had set motion to the movement towards confederation.
Throughout this period one of Cartier’s chief achievements had been the engineering of the queen's choice for Ottawa be in the capital of the Canadas in 1857, his reason being that Ottawa had a more defensible military than Kingston, Toronto, Montreal or Quebec. And being on the border of two provinces of the union as well as being on the route for the planned railway to the northwest that would make Montreal an entrepôt of the continental trading system.
For the years that lead up to confederation Cartier, along with a large block of his supporters from Canada east had raided to ally with MacDonalds’s cohort conservatives from Canada west with resulted in the creation of a political deadlock within the province of Canada. This finally came to end when they were able to convince George Brown and his supporters to join the coalition and work towards a wider Union of the provinces of British North America.
In the following conferences, Cartier worked to ensure his goal of Canada not being a single legislative union but a federation of …show more content…
During the Quebec conference Cartier had argued for the creation of new “political nationality” and denounced the rouge leader A.A. Dorian’s contention for the joining of French Canada and the United States Being the best option by stating that French interest could possibly be preserved under the proposed confederation. At confederation Cartier had chosen a militia portfolio with the aim of building a national force that would be strong enough to resist and invasion or interference from the United States seeming gay a strong military would be key to securing the entry of northwest into confederation.
Cartier had often served as an acting prime minister in the place of MacDonald during his time of illnesses and had played the key role in securing Rupert's land in the drafting of the Manitoba act in 1870 and the British Columbia act in 1871.
From 1868 to 1869, in London, Cartier with William McDougall had negotiated for the transfer of HBC territory of both Rupert's land and the Northwestern territory to the domain. Due his close relations with military officials, British railway builders and financiers, Cartier had finally been able to
Be in tune with imperial interests regarding the eventual “all red route” to both Asia and the Pacific through Canada's large territory.