Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  American immigration into the Canadas dried up after the war, but immigration from Britain and Ireland became more evenly divided between the United States and the Canadas, after the American colonies had for more than fifty years siphoned off almost all the natural population expansion of the British Isles. The early years of crop failures and chronic food shortages in Ireland sharply increased the volume of immigration, Protestant and Roman Catholic, from that province of the United Kingdom, and substantial numbers of Scots continued to flow into Nova Scotia. The growth of the British population of Lower Canada was more than balanced by the continuing heavy French-Canadian birthrate, but it aroused renewed fears among the French that there was a movement afoot to assimilate them and wash them out among the rising tide of English-speaking people in North America.

  The Roman Catholic Church of Quebec, having been guaranteed by the Quebec Act in 1774, though not exactly an established church in Lower Canada, had a special status but played its role as a national church with great comprehensiveness and ingenuity. The bishop of Quebec sat on the Executive Council and drew a councillor’s salary, and the Church had the right to tithe its members. It could not enforce and collect the tax through the powers of the state, though it effectively formed a pillar of the established power in the colony. But despite the steady rise of an Irish Catholic population in Quebec, the Roman Catholic Church was also the ark of the national ambitions of, and the conservator of the national distinctiveness of, the French Canadians. It provided most of the education and medical care the French population received, and although it ruled the faithful with unyielding authority, it did so with minimal corruption, moral or financial, with great social compassion, and with a burning sense of mission. In the other provinces, it was a minority church, largely representing the oppressed in the New World, as it often had in the Old.

  Among Protestants, the substantial majority in Upper Canada and Nova Scotia, there was agitation for an established church (the Church of England), but this was stiffly resisted by the non-episcopal or congregational churches, as well as by the Roman Catholics and Lutherans (the other churches that have bishops; there were few Eastern Orthodox in Canada at that time). The real public debate was over whether there should be state-supported non-denominational or multi-denominational schools. This debate played heavily into the growing controversy over the pursuit of liberal constitutional democracy, a movement that was advancing along parallel lines in Great Britain and the United States, although, of course, both were sovereign countries in which the issue of where authority resided had been determined, apart from the breadth of the franchise and the powers of the non-elected upper house. (The United States Senate was chosen by the legislatures of the states until early in the twentieth century.)

  In Lower Canada, there had already been great controversy, starting in 1806, over whether judges could sit as legislators in the councils and Assembly, and there were several rending controversies over the right of the Assembly to impeach a judge or the chief justice. Where the powers of elected versus appointed officials became more competitive was in 1818 and 1819, when the Governor of Lower Canada, Sir John Sherbrooke, and then the Duke of Richmond (who, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, had been tutored by Guy Carleton) followed by Lord Dalhousie, did not have enough to pay their governments’ expenses from discretionary sources, and were reduced to asking the Assembly to fund them. Sherbrooke did so successfully in 1818, but thereafter gridlock developed. The Legislative Council, dominated by the English commercial class, supported the governor and voted against the Assembly’s effort to restrict the salaries of members of the Executive Council and oversee the expenses of the government. In 1823, the governor was one hundred thousand pounds short, and there were widespread allegations of official corruption as well as incompetence. In the Assembly, Speaker Papineau was able to lead a powerful and often theatrical popular opposition.

  Louis-Joseph Papineau (1786–1871) was the first of a formidable sequence of popular tribunes who mobilized and expressed the collective will and ambition of the French Canadians. His father, Joseph Papineau, a successful notary, had carried messages to Carleton between Montreal and Quebec, at considerable risk to himself, in the American Revolutionary War, and Louis-Joseph, the future national leader, volunteered as a militiaman to assist in the successful defence of Lower Canada from the Americans in the War of 1812. It was in 1812 that he was first elected to the Legislative Assembly, and in 1815 he was elected its Speaker.

  He was no enemy of Britain or of monarchical institutions, but an impassioned advocate of popular rights. Papineau had been a prodigy at the Petit Séminaire of Quebec (though he was expelled from his previous college) and was moved to enter political life by the reactionary regime of Governor Sir James Craig, in office from 1807 to 1811, who was a racist and a very authoritarian soldier who had spent much of his life in the British Army fighting the French. Craig considered a legislative demand for the right to approve government expenditures to be verging on treason in wartime, and was unable to see the French Canadians otherwise than as a conquered people. The French Canadians referred to Craig’s term as the “Reign of Terror.” Sir George Prevost (1811–1816), who followed Craig, was a Swiss American by birth and much less hostile to the French. His term was dominated by the War of 1812, when a general truce between factions prevailed, which largely continued under his successors Drummond, Sherbrooke, and the Duke of Richmond.

  In the first year of Dalhousie’s term, 1820, the governor took the side of the appointed Legislative Council against the claims advanced by the Assembly, led by Papineau, that the popular house had the right to review and approve, or not, every item of the government’s budget. Papineau unearthed many instances of glaring, if rather trivial, corruption: absentee office-holders on the official payroll, judges demanding direct payments from litigants appearing before them, and so on. But what really raised the ante was the movement for a united province of Lower and Upper Canada, to water down the French, and the revival of the prohibition of the French language in debates in Lower Canada’s legislative houses. Papineau sailed to Britain from New York in January 1822 to lobby against these anti-French measures, and made a very good impression in London. By his culture, charm, felicity of expression, and imposing and patrician bearing, he belied the aspersions that had been made, and somewhat accepted, of French Canadians as virtually savages and at best serfs. Papineau won the argument, and the union of the provinces was not pursued, but he returned to spend the next five years in deadly embrace with Dalhousie over fiscal prerogatives. Papineau had the best of the argument, made his argument well, and may be said to have won, as the succeeding governors, Sir Francis Burton (Lower Canada) and Sir James Kempt (Canada), made compromises that Dalhousie opposed, and Dalhousie was effectively repudiated by the British government. But Papineau also often spoke in terms of unnecessary violence, and while he stirred popular opinion, he roused great concern among more influential groups and tended, as firebrands do, to quarrel needlessly and protractedly with his colleagues in what became the Patriote movement. For a time, he was able to cooperate with the English-Canadian moderate Reformer John Neilson, but as Papineau became more militant, all bridges to moderate English-speaking Reformers were blown up.

  This controversy continued all through the 1820s and was aggravated by the demand by the English leadership of Lower Canada to reunite the two Canadas, ostensibly to end the arguments over the division of revenue between Upper and Lower Canada under the Quebec Revenue Act of 1774, but really to try to bring the English toward a cultural majority in a united province. A bill to that effect was in preparation in committee in Westminster, with the approval of the colonial secretary, Lord Bathurst, when the protests of the French majority in Lower Canada and most of the English of Upper Canada caused it to be set aside. Bathurst was a rigorous supporter of Dalhousie’s efforts to sideline the attempt to achieve popular legislative control over supply (in other words, funding the government). Despite the ter
rible defeat in the thirteen American colonies, and all the lessons of the benign Carleton, the British authorities still tended to lapse back into authoritarian mode. Tensions built and tinder piled up throughout the 1820s in both Canadas.

  In Upper Canada, the Reform movement began in the early 1820s with a controversy over the right of Americans who had not formally been naturalized to be considered citizens of the province. This grey area was exploited to disqualify Barnabas Bidwell from taking his seat in the Assembly, and to attack his son, one of the leading Reformers, Marshall Spring Bidwell. The greatest impact of this question was on the eligibility of such contested people to hold land in Upper Canada, and it was finally resolved in 1828 with a bill naturalizing everyone who had come to the province prior to 1821 and had remained there.

  An even greater dispute arose over the Clergy Reserves. The Anglican leader, Archdeacon John Strachan, subsequently the bishop of Toronto, wished the entire vast reserve of land set aside for the churches to be consigned to the Church of England, which claimed to be an established church in Canada. This was not going to be successful, because of the size and status of the Roman Catholic Church and the alliance between the British governors and the Catholic bishops. The senior legal officials of the colony determined in 1819 that the Church of Scotland had an equal right. The issue took off in 1824, when it was determined to begin distributing the land for development, and the other religious denominations protested the pre-eminence of the local Churches of England and Scotland. The low church opposition was led by the leader of the Methodists, Egerton Ryerson. He caught Strachan red-handed submitting a grossly inflated Anglican share of the population to the colonial secretary. Ryerson’s campaign was instrumental in obtaining a Reform majority in the Assembly in 1828.

  The secular opposition was led by the Scottish immigrant William Lyon Mackenzie, “a shrill-toned, bristling terrier of a man.”30 Mackenzie was born in Forfarshire in 1795 and moved to Canada in 1820, setting up in Dundas a store that sold drugs, hardware, jewellery, toys, dyestuffs, and paints, as well as being a circulating library. He started his newspaper, the Colonial Advocate, in 1824. He styled himself “the westernmost journalist in the British dominions on the continent of America” and assumed on his own authority, as he put it, “the office of a public censor.”31 He helped the Reform opposition to crystallize, and they won the Assembly elections in 1824, which only served to demonstrate the impotence of the popular end of the political system, as the Family Compact carried obliviously on. In the words of Stephen Leacock, “Like the clansmen of his native land, [Mackenzie] tried to storm an entrenched and strongly fortified position by a frontal attack in which defects in equipment and in tactics were to be made good by a glorious charge whose driving force was the red blood of passion, whose reserve was the fury of hate.” He “lacked that sobriety of purpose which rescues [Reform movements] from the violence of uncharted agitation.”32 One of Mackenzie’s particularly outrageous and provoking editorial onslaughts caused a mob (including a member of the lieutenant-governor’s household) to sack his printing plant, smash his press, and scatter his type. He received a generous damages award from the courts and assumed the status of a semi-martyr.* Of course, Mackenzie and his cohorts exaggerated the evils of their opponents in the governing class in Upper Canada. They were stuffy, pompous, authoritarian, and lacking in imagination and liberality, were even hypocrites, but they weren’t overly corrupt beyond normal patronage and nepotism, nor very repressive. But they were terribly self-satisfied, resistant to change, and lacking in any panache or accessibility to popular affection; more or less what one would expect from distant British provincial officials who fancied themselves to be important, a genre that lingers yet in Southern Ontario and even lurks in the shadows in some of the mustier institutions of Toronto.

  The Atlantic provinces progressed much more calmly, even the unruly Newfoundlanders. A mixed Assembly, partly elected and partly appointed, was established there in 1832. In New Brunswick, a more civilized tug-of-war than in Quebec occurred in the 1820s over the power to raise and spend money, with the Assembly gradually gaining ground, but that debate was subsumed in the question of the right to exploit timber lands. A commissioner of Crown lands, Thomas Baillie (1796–1863), a forceful veteran of the Battle of Waterloo, was installed, and he created a force of forest rangers and instituted a policy of licensing and charging for cutting rights, a policy that impressed the Colonial Office and eased the government’s financial problems. Baillie became a member of the Executive Council and the surveyor general, but incited such antagonism that he was eventually stripped of his powers, and authority over Crown lands was conceded to the Assembly. Baillie had turned down the fallback position of postmaster general of Jamaica in 1833, and continued for a time as surveyor general of New Brunswick.

  In Prince Edward Island, the principal political issue, and the main public entertainment, was Governor Charles Douglass Smith, who quarrelled with everyone, including the militia, which, in his determination to subdue, he called in the army to surround and then fire upon. The army naturally refused, and Smith’s effort to have the officers involved court-martialled and executed was also unsuccessful. He was soon at daggers drawn with the Assembly, and smashed the windows in the provincial Parliament in January to force them out physically. He was successful in this, but they petitioned London so vehemently that Smith was recalled in 1824, and in the ensuing comparative calm relations between the governor and the legislators unfolded relatively serenely.

  In 1828, the colonial secretary, William Huskisson, received herniating masses of petitions from aggrieved supporters of the Patriotes in Lower Canada and the Reformers in Upper Canada. The principal issues were Dalhousie’s refusal to accept the re-election of Papineau as Speaker of the Assembly, a dangerous issue, as the French of the province, apart from the bishop, were excluded from the Executive Council and were only represented in the Assembly, and the speakership was the only office within their gift and choice. Questions of democratic reform were becoming poisonously combined with issues of race, language, and, to some degree, sectarianism, with the Roman Catholic Church forcefully advocating the French-Canadian interest in public and in the highest council of the province. It was seventy years since the Plains of Abraham, and the French Canadians couldn’t be treated as enemies in their own country anymore.

  The leaders of the Church advised peaceful remonstrance and action, but too reactionary a stance by the governors could undo all the good work of the enlightened agents of British rule back to Carleton and Murray. In Lower Canada, the battle for control of revenue and spending was at least as advanced as it was in Upper Canada, and the additional explosive ingredient of race greatly exacerbated it. There was also a growing demand for more complete local government in the Eastern Townships, especially courts, where the objection was largely the reverse of the province as a whole: the English-speaking population claimed it was not being adequately served in its own language, a phenomenon which in Europe in the following century would become known as irredentism: a minority within a minority. The English Lower Canadians continued to call for one big province, to increase their numbers as a percentage within the jurisdiction.

  In Upper Canada, apart from the control of the revenues and spending of the government, the battle over the effort to promote an established church where the sectarian numbers did not justify it, and the fight between Strachan and Ryerson for control of the Clergy Reserves chunk of Crown lands and of public education through the charter of King’s College, had inflamed the province’s fissiparous tendencies. An election in Upper Canada was necessitated in 1830 by the antique practice of dissolving Parliament on the death of the monarch, the stylish but profligate George IV. By this time, Mackenzie had already squandered much of the goodwill that would ordinarily accrue to the Reformers by provoking legislative battles over the post office and the chaplaincy of the house, the first an Imperial matter and the second irrelevant to any serious policy question. And b
y this time the tide had turned at the Imperial level. Lord Liverpool, who had succeeded as prime minister following the assassination of Spencer Percival in 1812, took a stroke after fifteen years as premier and retired in 1827. George Canning, Viscount Goderich, and the Duke of Wellington had succeeded as prime minister in the following three years.

  The repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and Catholic Emancipation in 1828 and 1829 indicated the drift of public events, and in this atmosphere a select committee of the House of Commons was struck to consider the mountainous petitions that had come in to Huskisson. The committee accepted all but the request for the reunification of the Province of Canada, moved yet by Edmund Burke’s comment that “to attempt to amalgamate two populations composed of races of men diverse in language, laws, and customs was a complete absurdity.” The committee recommended full control over funding by the Assembly, except for a civil list to cover the cost of the governor, the executive councillors, and judges, the amount voted for the life of the monarch. It recommended that the Executive and Legislative Councils be separated and that judges belong to neither. All public accounts should be audited, the Jesuits’ estates should be dedicated to public education, and while it could not form a recommendation about the Clergy Reserves, it did oppose the unidenominational use of the practical consequences of King’s College. Dalhousie was censured for his treatment of Papineau, and “an impartial, conciliatory and constitutional system of government” was commended to and recommended for both the Canadas. This was a pretty radical, and certainly a progressive view from the British Parliament, and Sir James Kempt was instructed by the Colonial Office to implement the entire report in Lower Canada and to assure the admission of French and pro-French members of the Executive and Legislative Councils of Quebec. Once again, the British system had distinguished itself by a show of liberality that was prescient and disinterested and broadly justified, a liberality that distinguished itself among the world’s methods of self-government and seemed to continue British competitiveness with the United States in the struggle for world leadership in the most intelligent and advanced political systems among major countries. It greatly alleviated tensions in Lower Canada for a time.