Charles Poulett Thomson in Canada

Life and Work

Between 1839 and 1854, four governors-general exercised authority over Canada, the Right Honourable Charles Poulett Thomson, later Lord Sydenham, Sir Charles Bagot, Charles, Lord Metcalfe, and the Earl of Elgin. Their statesmanship, their errors, the accidents which modified their policies, and the influence of their decisions and despatches on British cabinets, constitute on the whole the most important factor in the creation of the modern Canadian theory of government. In consequence, their conduct with reference to colonial autonomy and all the questions therewith connected, demands the most careful and detailed treatment.

When Lord John Russell, then leader of the House of Commons, and Secretary of State for the Colonies, selected a new governor-general of Canada to complete the work begun by Durham, he entrusted to him an elaborate system of government, most of it experimental and as yet untried. He was to superintend the completion of that Union between Upper and Lower Canada, which Durham had so strenuously advocated; and the Union was to be the centre of a general administrative reconstruction. The programme outlined in Russell’s instructions proposed “a legislative union of the two provinces, a just regard to the claims of either province in adjusting the terms of that union, the maintenance of the three Estates of the Provincial Legislature, the settlement of a permanent Civil List for securing the independence of the judges, and, to the executive government, that freedom of action which is necessary for the public good, and the establishment of a system of local government by representative bodies, freely elected in the various cities and rural districts.” In attaining these ends, all of them obviously to the advantage of the colony, the Colonial Secretary desired to consult, and, as far as possible, to defer to Canadian public opinion.

Nevertheless, Lord John Russell had no sooner entered upon his administrative reforms, than he found himself face to face with a fundamental constitutional difficulty. He proposed to play the part of a reformer in Canada; but the majority of reformers in that province added to his programme the demand for executive councils, not merely sympathetic to popular claims, but responsible to the representatives of the people in a Canadian Parliament. Now according to all the traditions of imperial government a demand so far-reaching involved the disruption of the empire, and ended the connection between Canada and England. To this general objection the British minister added a subtler point in constitutional law.

To yield to colonial reforming ideas would be to contradict the existing conventions of the constitution. “The power for which a minister is responsible in England,” he wrote to his new governor, “is not his own power, but the power of the crown, of which he is for the time the organ. It is obvious that the executive councillor of a colony is in a situation totally different…. Can the colonial council be the advisers of the crown of England? Evidently not, for the crown has other advisers for the same functions, and with superior authority. It may happen, therefore, that the governor receives, at one and the same time, instructions from the Queen and advice from his executive council totally at variance with each other. If he is to obey his instructions from England, the parallel of constitutional responsibility entirely fails; if, on the other hand, he is to follow the advice of his council, he is no longer a subordinate officer, but an independent sovereign.” The governor-general, then, was in no way to concede to the Canadian assembly a responsibility and power which resided only in the British ministry. (…)

Poulett Thomson determined if possible to settle the Clergy Reserve trouble out of hand. As has been shown above, this ecclesiastical difficulty affected the whole life of the community; and its settlement would mean peace, such as Upper Canada had not known for a generation. The pacificator, however, had to face two groups of irreconcilables, the Bishop of Toronto with his extremist following, and the secularizing party resolute to have done with any form of subsidy to religion. As he himself confessed, he had little hope of succeeding in the Assembly, but he trusted to his new popularity, then at its spring tide, and he won. Before the end of January the question had been settled on a compromise, by a majority of 28 to 20 in the Assembly, and of 14 to 4 in the Council. It was even more satisfactory to know that out of 22 members of Assembly who were communicants of the Church of England, only 8 {91} voted in favour of the status quo. There was but one set-back. Legal opinion in England decided that the local assembly had not powers to change the original act of 1791; and in the Imperial legislation which this check made necessary, other influences crept in, and the governor-general bitterly complained that the monstrous proportion allotted to the Church of England, and the miserable proportion set apart for other churches, rendered the Act only less an evil than if the question had been left unsettled. (…)

It fell to Charles Poulett Thomson, President of the Board of Trade in the Whig ministry, to carry out the Union of the two Canadian provinces, and to administer them in accordance with this doctrine of modified autonomy. The choice of the government seemed both wise and foolish. Poulett Thomson had had an admirable training for the work. In a colony where trade and commerce were almost everything, he brought not Durham’s aristocratic detachment but a real knowledge of commerce, since his was a great mercantile family. In Parliament, he had become a specialist in the financial and economic issues, which had already displaced the diplomatic or purely political questions of the last generation. His speeches on the revision of taxes, the corn laws, and British foreign trade, proved that, in a utilitarian age, he knew the science of utilities and had freed himself from bureaucratic red tape. His parliamentary career too had taught him the secret of the management of assemblies, and Canada would under him be spared the friction which the rigid attitude of soldiers, trained in the school of Wellington, had been causing throughout the British colonies for many years. (…)

The first month of his governorship, in which he settled the fate of French Canada, is of greater importance than appears on the surface. The problem of governing Canada was difficult, not simply because Britons in Canada demanded self-government, but because self-government must be shared with French-Canadians. That section of the community, distinct as it was in traditions and political methods, might bring ruin on the Colony either by asserting a supremacy odious to the Anglo-Saxon elements of the population, or by resenting the efforts of the British to assimilate or dominate them. When Poulett Thomson landed, on October 19th, 1839, at Quebec, he was brought at once face to face with the relation between French nationalism and the constitutional resettlement of Canada.

Durham had had no doubt about the true solution. It was to confer free institutions on the colony, and to trust to the natural energy and increase of the Anglo-Saxon element to swamp French nationalité. “I have little doubt,” he said, “that the French, when once placed, by the legitimate course of events and the working of natural causes, in a minority, would abandon their vain hopes of nationality.”It was in this spirit that his successor endeavoured to govern the French section in Canada. Being both rationalist and utilitarian, like others of his school he minimized the strength of an irrational fact like racial pride, and, almost from the first he discounted the force of French opposition, while he let it, consciously or unconsciously, influence his behaviour towards his French subjects. “If it were possible,” he wrote in November, 1839, “the best thing for Lower Canada would be a despotism for ten years more; for, in truth, the people are not yet fit for the higher class of self-government, scarcely indeed, at present, for any description of it.”

A few months later, his language had become even stronger:—”I have been back three weeks, and have set to work in earnest in this province. It is a bad prospect, however, and presents a lamentable contrast to Upper Canada. There great excitement existed; the people were quarrelling for realities, for political opinions and with a view to ulterior measures. Here there is no such thing as a political opinion. No man looks to a practical measure of improvement. Talk to any one upon education, or public works, or better laws, let him be English or French, you might as well talk Greek to him. Not a man cares for a single practical measure—the only end, one would suppose, of a better form of government. They have only one feeling—a hatred of race.” (…)

Pushing on from Quebec to Montreal, he lost no time in calling a meeting of the Special Council, whose members, eighteen in number, he purposely left unchanged from the regime of his predecessor On November 13th and 14th, after discussions in which the minority never exceeded three, that body accepted Union with the Upper Province in six propositions, affirming the principle of union, agreeing to the assimilation of the two provincial debts, and declaring it to be their opinion “that the present temporary legislature should, as soon as practicable, be succeeded by a permanent legislature, in which the people of these two provinces may be adequately represented, and their constitutional rights exercised and maintained.”[11] Before he left Montreal, he assured the British ministry that the large majority of those with whom he had spoken, English and French, in the Lower Province were warm advocates of Union. (…)

Nothing could be done to remedy the evil in Upper Canada, until the new parliament had met, but the temporary dictatorship still remained in French Canada, and at once Sydenham set to work to create all that he wanted there, recognizing shrewdly that what had been granted in the Lower Province to the French must prove a powerful argument for a similar grant to Upper Canada, when the time should come for action. About the same time, he established by ordinance a popular system of registry offices, to simplify the difficulties introduced into land transfers by the French law—”all {96} the old French law of before the Revolution, Hypothèques tacites et occultes, Dowers’ and Minors’ rights, Actes par devant notaires, and all the horrible processes by which the unsuspecting are sure to be deluded, and the most wary are often taken in.”

Curiously enough, although his love of good government drove him to amend conditions among the French, Sydenham’s relations with that people seem to have grown steadily worse. He had made advances to the foremost French politician, La Fontaine, offering him the solicitor-generalship of Lower Canada; but La Fontaine, who never had any enthusiasm for British Whig statesmanship, regarded the offer as a bribe to draw him away from his countrymen and their national ideal, and declined it, thereby increasing the tension. Thus, as the time for the election drew near, the French were still further hardening their hearts against the governor-general of United Canada, and Sydenham, his patience now exhausted, could but exclaim in baffled anger, “As for the French, nothing but time will do anything with them. They hate British rule—British connection—improvements of all kinds, whether in their laws or their roads; so they will sulk, and will try, that is, their leaders, to do all the mischief they can.” (…)

There had been much violence at the recent elections; and, among others, La Fontaine had a most just complaint to make, for disorder, and, as he thought, government trickery had ousted him from a safe seat at Terrebonne. Unfortunately the protests were lodged too late, and a furious struggle sprang up, as to whether the legal period should, in the cases under consideration, be extended, or whether, as the government contended, an inquiry and amendments affecting only the future should suffice. It was ominous for the cause of limited responsibility, that the government had to own defeat in the Lower House, and saved itself only by the veto of the Legislative Council. Nor was that the end. A mosaic work of opposition, old Tories, French Canadians, British anti-unionists, and Upper Canada Reformers, was gradually formed, and at any moment some chance issue might lure over a few from the centre to wreck the administration. Most of the greater measures passed through the ordeal safely, including a bill reforming the common schools and another establishing a Board of Works.

The critical moment of the latter part of the session, however, came with the introduction of a bill to establish District Councils in Upper Canada, to complete the work already done in Lower Canada. The forces in opposition rallied to the attack, Conservatives because the bill would increase the popular element in government, Radicals because the fourth clause enacted that the governor of the province might appoint, under the Great Seal of the province, fit and proper persons to hold during his pleasure the office of Warden of the various districts;[56] and, as Sydenham himself hinted, there were those who regretted the loss to members of Assembly of a great opportunity for jobbery. One motion passed by the chairman’s casting vote; {119} and nothing, in the governor-general’s judgment, saved the bill but the circumstance of his having already established such councils in Lower Canada. (…)

There was one more attack in force before the session ended. On September 3rd, Baldwin, seconded by a French Canadian, moved “that the most important as well as the most undoubted of the political rights of the people of the province, is that of having a provincial parliament for the protection of their liberties, for the exercise of a constitutional influence over the executive departments of the government, and for legislation upon all matters, which do not on the ground of absolute necessity constitutionally belong to the jurisdiction of the Imperial parliament, as the paramount authority of the Empire. (…)

The failure of the home ministry to include the local government clauses, which formed a fundamental {94} part of the Union Bill, made such efforts even more necessary than before. It had been plain to Durham and Charles Buller, as well as to Sydenham, that, if an Act of Union were to pass, it could only be made operative by joining to it an entirely new system of local government. Accordingly, when opposition forced Russell to omit the essential clauses from his Act of Union, Sydenham penned one of his most vigorous despatches in reply. “Owing to this (rejection), duties the most unfit to be discharged by the general legislature are thrown upon it; powers equally dangerous to the subject and to the Crown are assumed by the Assembly. The people receive no training in those habits of self-government which are indispensable to enable them rightly to exercise the power of choosing representatives in parliament. (…)

“There were,” he wrote to Russell in March, 1841, “attached to the cities, both of Montreal and Quebec, very extensive suburbs, inhabited generally by a poor population, unconnected with the mercantile interests to which these cities owe their importance. Had these cities been brought within the electoral limits, the number of their population would have enabled them to return one, if not both, of the members for each city. But such a result would have been directly at variance with the grounds on which increased representation was given by Parliament to these cities. On referring to the discussions which took place in both houses when the Union Bill was before them, I find that members on all sides laid great stress on the necessity of securing ample representation to the mercantile interests of Canada…. Feeling myself, therefore, bound in duty to carry out the views of the British parliament in this matter, I was compelled in fixing the limits of Quebec and Montreal to transfer to the county a large portion of the suburbs of each.” (…)

Whatever were the characteristic faults of the parliament in 1841, sloth was not one of them. All through the summer it worked with feverish energy. Writing to his brother at the end of August, Sydenham boasted—”The five great works I aimed at have been got through—the establishment of a board of works with ample powers; the admission of aliens; a new system of county courts; the regulation of the public lands ceded by the Crown under the Union Act; and lastly the District Council Bill. (…)

Little was he a self-seeker, that he earned the lasting ill-will of his eldest son by passing a bill abolishing primogeniture, and thus ending any hopes that existed of founding a great colonial family. (…)

Both by his errors, and by his acts of statesmanship, Sydenham contributed more than any other {123} man, except Elgin, to establish that autonomy in Canada which his theories rejected. Before self-government could flourish in the colony, there must be some solid material progress, and two years of incessant legislation and administrative innovation, all of it suggested by Sydenham, had turned the tide of Canadian fortunes. It was necessary, too, that some larger field than a trivial provincial assembly with its local jobs should be provided for the new adventure in self-government; and Sydenham not only engineered a difficult Act of Union past all preliminary obstacles, but, of his own initiative, gave Canada the local institutions through which alone the country could grow into disciplined self-dependence. (…) (1)

Resources

Notes

1. J. L. Morison, “British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government 1839-1854” (1919), Toronto, S. B. Gundy

See Also

Law is our Passion

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This entry was last updated: October 29, 2016