TUPPER, SIR CHARLES, BART. (1821-1915), British colonial statesman, son of the Rev. Charles Tupper, D.D., was born at Amherst, Nova Scotia, on July 2, 1821, and was educated at Horton Academy. He afterwards studied for the medical pro fession at Edinburgh University, where he received the diplomas of M.D. and L.R.C.S. In 1855 he was returned to the Nova Scotia Assembly for Cumberland county. In 1862 he was ap pointed governor of Dalhousie College, Halifax; and from 1867 till 1870 he was president of the Canadian Medical Association. Tupper was a member of the executive council and provincial secretary of Nova Scotia to 186o, and from 1863 to 1867. He became prime minister of Nova Scotia in 1864, and held that office until the Union Act came into force on July 1, 1867, when his government retired. He was a delegate to Great Britain on public business from the Nova Scotia government in 1858 and 1865, and from the Dominion government in March 1868. Tupper was leader of the delegation from Nova Scotia to the Union conference at Charlottetown in 1864, and to that of Quebec during the same year; and to the final colonial conference in London, which assembled to complete the terms of union, in 1866-1867. He was sworn a member of the privy council of Canada, June 1870, and was president of that body from that date until July 1, 1872, when he was appointed minister of inland revenue. This office he held until February 1873, when he became minister of customs under Sir John Macdonald, resigning with the ministry at the close of 1873. On Sir John's return to power in 1878, Tupper became minister of public works, and in the follow ing year minister of railways and canals. Tupper was the author of the Public Schools Act of Nova Scotia, and had been largely instrumental in moulding the Dominion Confederation Bill and other important measures. Sir Charles represented the county
of Cumberland, Nova Scotia, for thirty-two years in succession— first in the Nova Scotia Assembly, and subsequently in the Dominion parliament until 1884, when he resigned his seat on being appointed high commissioner for Canada in London.
Shortly before the Canadian Federal elections of February 1887, Tupper re-entered the Conservative cabinet as finance minister. By his efforts the Canadian Pacific railway was enabled to float a loan of $30,000,000, on the strength of which the line was finished several years before the expiration of the contract time. He resigned the office of finance minister in May 1888, when he was reappointed high commissioner for the Dominion of Canada in London. Tupper was one of the British plenipotentiaries to the Fisheries Convention at Washington in 1887. When the Dominion cabinet, under Sir Mackenzie Bowell, was reconstituted in Jan uary 1896 Tupper accepted office, and in the following April he succeeded Bowell in the premiership. On both patriotic and commercial grounds he urged the adoption of a preferential tariff with Great Britain and the sister colonies. At the general election in the ensuing June the Conservatives were severely defeated, and Tupper and his colleagues resigned, Sir Wilfrid Laurier becoming premier. At the next general election, in 1900, Tupper, long the Conservative leader, sustained in his own constituency of Cape Breton his first defeat in forty years.
See his Recollections of Sixty Years (1914); and E. M. Saunders. Life and Letters of Sir Charles Tupper (2 vols., 1916).