In 1840 the colonies of British North America were still scattered and separated. Their individual status was symbolized by the first postage stamps of the 1850s, each colony having its own: Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, the Province of Canada, and, in 1858, both Vancouver Island and British Columbia. Each had its own governor, administration, customs houses. Each was concerned with its own relations with Great Britain. Nova Scotia had had representative government since 1758, Prince Edward Island since 1769 (when it was created a colony). New Brunswick since 1784, the Canadas since 1791, Newfoundland since 1832. During the early stages of colonial government the system had worked well enough, though some friction between an elected Assembly, and an appointed Council that in effect combined legislative and executive functions, was inevitable. As the colonies grew bigger, as assemblies began to criticize more openly the abuses they saw in executive power, the problems of governing such colonies became more difficult. This growing tension was something that the American colonies and Britain had failed to resolve in the 1760s. But in the British North America of the 1840s the problem was not so much tyranny by the British government as a stranglehold on colonial executive control exercised by a powerful few. Governors appointed from London could only do so much; their tenure was usually from five to seven years, so
They came and went. Members of provincial executive councils were there a great deal longer. A governor, Joseph Howe of Nova Scotia pointed out forcefully in 1839,
... must carry on the government by and with the few officials whom he finds in possession when he arrives. He may flutter and struggle in the net, as some well-meaning Governors have done, but he must at last... like a snared bird, be content with the narrow limits assigned to him by his keepers. I have known a Governor bullied, sneered at, and almost shut out of society... but I never knew one, who, even with the best intentions... was able to contend, on anything like fair terms, with the small knot of functionaries who form the Councils, fill the offices, and wield the powers of the government.
In the 1830s the Executive Council of Nova Scotia was based upon four or five families and their intermarriages. The problem was not that such oligarchies were stupid or ineffective; they were generally all too efficient—at looking after friends and relations and using the government, when it suited them, for their own purposes. They had learned how to recruit able young men to their ranks by marrying off their daughters to bright aspirants on the prowl for place, preferment, and patronage. Only in New Brunswick did the Assembly have a semblance of control over the Executive Council, and that was owing to a quasi-American style of government the Loyalists, who had supported the British cause during the American Revolution, brought with them from the U. S. after 1782-83. Other colonial assemblies felt that they too should be able to control their Executive Councils, by forcing reliance on a majority in the elected Assembly. That way, if an Executive Council became too outrageous it could be dismissed. Governors, technically, always had the power to do this, but because of the difficulties described by Joseph Howe they rarely did.
Colonial reformers saw their struggle for a cabinet system—that is, “responsible government”—as a matter of high principle, as an attempt to apply the party system that had evolved in Britain in the 1830s to their own colonial circumstances in the 1840s and 1850s. The development of the British cabinet system had been closely watched by discerning observers in British North America, notably Joseph Howe in Halifax and Robert Baldwin in Toronto. It was no accident that Nova Scotia and the Province of Canada developed the main impetus for colonial cabinet government. The movement had its own drama, tensions, bitter arguments over principle. Tories said that Reformers who claimed to want responsible government were only after the spoils of power—control of purse strings and appointments—and that all talk of
Assembly control over the Executive was a mask to cover greed.
The Province of Canada’s first postage stamp, designed by railway surveyor Sandford Fleming (1827-1915) and issued in 1851, shows the industrious Canadian beaver on a field of trilliums (now Ontario’s provincial flower), crowned by symbols of British rule.
In Nova Scotia and in the Province of Canada the two long-established Tory regimes began to fall, in stages, and were finally defeated in two important general elections in 1847. Both governments resigned after want-of-confidence motions early in 1848. New governments, called Reform, now occupied the Executive Council chambers, made appointments, carried on the government. As Lord Elgin remarked;
That Ministers and oppositions should occasionally change places is of the very essence of our Constitutional system, & it is probably the most conservative element which it contains. By subjecting all sections of politicians in their turn to official responsibilities it obliges heated partizans to place some restraint on passion____
That was all very well. But a hard test of restraint came in 1849, when the Reform government of the Province of Canada passed the Rebellion Losses Bill. Supported by Reform majorities that included substantial numbers of French Canadians, the bill compensated those who had lost property in the Rebellion of 1837 owing to military action. But the government did not distinguish carefully enough between ordinary citizens and those actively involved in the Rebellion. Tories were furious: government ought not to pay citizens for rebelling. A Tory mob, English-speaking for the most part, rose up in anger in Montreal (at that time still the capital of the Province of Canada), assaulted Lord Elgin, the Governor who had signed the measure, and went on to burn down the Parliament Buildings with the help of its new gas
Robert Baldwin. Upper Canada’s most perceptive political thinker, Baldwin (1904-58) was partly responsible for working out the alliance between the Reformers of Upper Canada and those of Lower Canada in 1840-41; he is remembered as the popularizer of responsible government, and one of the first advocates of a bicultural nation. Oil (1848) by Theophile Hamel (1817-70)
Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine. LaFontaine (1807-64) was the leader of the French-Canadian reformers; he joined Robert Baldwin and Francis Hincks in the Reform alliance, and when the Province of Canada was granted responsible government he became the Reform premier—he was thus, in a sense, Canada’s first prime minister. Oil (1848) by Theophile Hamel.
Lighting. It was a world of direct action! The Rebellion Losses Bill remained law, but Montreal was never again the political capital of anything. In 1850 the seat of government was moved to Toronto, thence to Quebec City. Although the Losses Bill had triggered the action of the Tory mob in April 1849, the uprising was also partly the result of commercial frustration created by shifts of British economic policy. Within a year after the capital was moved westward to Toronto, business recovered, and the blackened walls of Montreal’s old Parliament Buildings were just a memory.
The Province of Canada was an odd colony, put together out of Upper Canada and Lower Canada. It stretched 1600 kilometres from Gaspe to Sarnia, united by a common geography: by the St. Lawrence, its estuary, river, and Great Lakes hinterland; by its new canal system and even newer, and growing, railway systems. But it was also disunited. Lower Canada, the future Quebec, continued to retain its language, its civil law, its educational institutions tied closely to the Catholic church.
The Burning of Parliament. When the Baldwin-LaFontaine government passed the Rebellion Losses Bill in 1849, there was a storm of protest, and on April 25—after pelting the Governor’s carriage with stones and rotten eggs—a Montreal mob invaded the Houses of Assembly and set fire to the building. Following this burst of violence the seat of government was removed from Montreal. Oil (1849) attributed to Joseph Legate (1795-1855).
These were very different from the language, law, and education in Upper Canada, the future Ontario. Most of Lower Canada still held its land under old seigneurial rules, though that was changing; legislation for the system’s abolition, devised with some skill, was laid down in 1854 and 1855. And the Province of Canada was a colony with the potential for federation built right into it: there was equal representation for both sections of the province in their common legislature. This was despite Lower Canada having nearly 50 per cent more people in 1841 than Upper Canada; equal representation was intended to negate this French-Canadian advantage. In the end that purpose was frustrated by the creation of the Reform party, when Robert Baldwin persuaded Louis LaFontaine that such an alliance would be in the interests of both French and English.
Despite their differences, the two Canadas had strong elements of potential common interest. These included commerce, transportation, and, not least, the development of a political system that might be compatible with shared colonial aspirations, a system centred on the new idea of cabinet government. And so a sense of common interests launched a colony that by the 1860s was much the most powerful and mature of all those in British North America.
World History
