Politics
History
Something has already been said of the various political groups in the colony, for they corresponded roughly to the different strata of settlement—French, Loyalist, and men of the later immigration. It is true, as Sydenham and Elgin pointed out, that the British party names hardly corresponded to local divisions—and that these divisions were really too petty to deserve the name of parties. Yet it would be foolish to deny the actual existence of the groups, or to refuse to see in their turbulence and strife the beginning of national self-consciousness, and the first stage in a notable political development.
Most conspicuous among the political forces, because the bond of party union was for them something deeper than opinion, and must be called racial, was the French-Canadian group, with the whole weight of habitant support behind it. From the publication of Lord Durham’s Report, through the Sydenham regime, and down till Sir Charles Bagot surrendered to their claims, the French politicians presented an unbroken and hostile front to the British community. Colborne had repressed their risings at the point of the bayonet; a Whig government had deprived them temporarily of free institutions; Durham—their friend after his fashion—had bidden them be absorbed into the greater British community; Sydenham came to enforce what Durham had suggested; and, with each new check, their pride had grown more stubborn and their nationalism more intense.
Bagot, who understood them and whom they came to trust, may be allowed to describe their characteristics, through the troubled first years of union: “On Lord Sydenham’s arrival,” he wrote to Stanley, “he found the Lower Province deprived of a constitution, the legislative functions of the government being administered by a special council, consisting of a small number of members nominated by the Crown. A large portion of the people, at least those of French origin, prostrate under the effects of the Rebellion, overawed by the power of Great Britain, and excluded from all share in the government, had resigned themselves to a sullen and reluctant submission, or to a perverse but passive resistance to the government. This temper was not improved by the passing of the Act of Union. In this measure, heedless of the generosity of the Imperial government, in overlooking their recent disaffection, and giving them a free and popular constitution, … they apprehended a new instrument of subjection, and accordingly prepared to resist it. Lord Sydenham found them in this disposition, and despairing, from its early manifestations, of the possibility of overcoming or appeasing it, before the period at which it would be necessary to put in force the Act of Union, he determined upon evincing his indifference to it, and upon taking steps to carry out his views, in spite of the opposition of the French party…. They have from that time declared and evinced their hostility to the Union … and have maintained a consistent, united, and uncompromising opposition to the government which was concerned in carrying it into execution.”
To describe the French in politics, it has been necessary to advance a year or two beyond 1839, for the Rebellion had terminated one phase of their political existence, and the characteristics of the next phase did not become apparent till the Union Assembly of 1841 and 1842. It was indeed an abnormal form of the national and racial question which there presented itself. French Canada found itself represented by a party, over twenty in number, the most compact in the House of Assembly, and with la nation Canadienne solidly behind them. In La Fontaine, Viger, Morin and others, it had leaders both skilful and fully trusted. Yet the party of the British supremacy quoted Durham and others in favour of a plan for the absorption of French Canada in the British element; and the same party could recount, with telling effect, the past misdeeds, or at least the old suspicions, connected with the names of the French leaders. Misunderstood, and yet half excusably misunderstood; self-governing, and yet deprived of many of the legitimate consequences and fruits of self-government; without places or honours, and yet coherent, passionately French, and competently led, the French party stood across the path of Canadian peace, menacing, and with a racial rather than a party threat.
In the Upper Province, the party in possession, the so-called Family Compact group, posed as the only friends of Britain. They had never possessed more than an accidental majority in the Lower House, and, since Durham’s rule, it seemed likely that their old supremacy in the Executive and Legislative Councils had come to an end. Yet as their power receded, their language became the more peremptory, and their contempt for other groups the more bitter. One of the most respectable of the group, J. S. Cartwright, frankly confessed that he thought his fellow-colonists unfit for any extension of self-government “in a country where almost universal suffrage prevails, where the great mass of the people are uneducated, and where there is but little of that salutary influence which hereditary rank and great wealth exercise in Great Britain.”Their position had an apparent but unreal strength, because they knew that the older type of Colonial official, the entire British Conservative party, and the Church of England, at home and abroad, supported them. As late as July, 1839, Arthur, the representative of the Crown in Upper Canada, could write thus to his government concerning more than half the population under his authority: “There is a considerable section of persons who are disloyal to the core; reform is on their lips, but separation is in their hearts. These people having for the last two or three years made a ‘responsible government’ their watch-word, are now extravagantly elated because the Earl of Durham has recommended that measure. They regard it as an unerring means to get rid of all British connection, while the Earl of Durham, on the contrary, has recommended it as a measure for cementing the existing bond of union with the mother country.”
Their programme was precise and consistent. The influence of a too democratic franchise was to be modified by a Conservative upper house, and an executive council, chosen not in accordance with popular wishes, but from the class—their own—which had so long been dominant in the executive. The British connection depended, in their view, on the permanent alliance between their group and whatsoever representative the British crown might send to Canada. French Canadian feeling they were prepared to repress as a thing rebellious and un-English, and the {62} friends of the French in Upper Canada they regarded very much as a South African might the Englishman who should be prepared to strengthen his political position by an alliance with the native peoples; although events were to prove that, when other elements of self-interest dictated a different course, they were not unwilling to co-operate in the interests of disorder with the French.
In ecclesiastical affairs, they supported the establishment of an Anglican Church in Canada, and insulted religion never found more eloquent defenders than did the Clergy Reserve establishment at the hands of Sir Allan MacNab, the Conservative leader, and his allies. But events and their own factious excesses had broken their power. They had allowed nothing for the possibilities of political education, in a land where the poorest had infinite chances of gaining independence. They scorned democracy at a time when nothing else in politics had a stable future; and the country naturally distrusted constitutional logicians whose conclusions invariably landed them in the sole possession of emoluments and place. Sydenham’s quick eye foresaw the coming rout, and it was his opinion, before the Assembly of 1841 came to make matters certain, that moderate men would overturn the sway of old Toryism, and that the wild heads under MacNab would stultify themselves by their foolish conduct.
In Upper Canada, the Conservative and Family Compact group had to face a vigorous Reforming opposition. It is well, however, after 1838, to discriminate between any remnants of the old Mackenzie school, and the men under whom Canada was to secure unrestricted self-government. The truth is that the situation up to 1837 had been too abnormal to permit the constitutional radicals to show themselves in their true character. Mackenzie himself, in the rather abject letter with which he sought reinstatement in 1848, admitted the falsity of his old position: “Had I seen things in 1837 as I do in 1848, I would have shuddered at the very idea of revolt, no matter what our wrongs might have been. I ought, as a Scotsman, to have stood by the government in America to the last; exerted any energy I possessed to make it better, more just, more perfect; left it for a time, if too oppressive, but never tried, as I did, to put it down.”Mackenzie’s ideal, discovered {64} by him too late to be very useful, was actually that of the Reforming Loyalists who refused to indulge in treason in 1837, but who determined to secure their ends by peaceful persuasion.
Their leader in public affairs was Robert Baldwin, whose career and opinions may be more fitly considered at a later point, and Francis Hincks expounded their views in his paper The Examiner. They were devoted adherents of the Responsible Government school; that is, they desired to have provincial cabinets, not simply chosen so that they might not conflict with public opinion, but imposed upon the governor by public opinion through its representatives in the House of Assembly. They had for years protested against the Clergy Reserves monopoly, and although Baldwin seems always to have favoured the retention of some form of assistance to religion, the ordinary reformer was vehement for absolute secularization. Sydenham when he came, refused to admit that the British party names were anything but misnomers in Canada; and yet Hincks was not singular among the reformers when he said that he had been in favour of all the measures advocated by the British progressives—Catholic Emancipation, the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Abolition of Slavery, and Parliamentary Reform. Their relation to the French was curious. Unlike the French, they were usually strong advocates of a union of the two provinces, and they sympathized neither with Papineau’s doctrinaire republicanism, nor with the sullen negative hatred of things British which then possessed so many minds in Lower Canada. But grievances still unredressed created a fellow-feeling with the French, and from 1839 until 1842 the gradual formation of an Anglo-French reforming bloc, under Baldwin and La Fontaine, was one of the most notable developments in Canadian political life.
After the Union, as before it, the political life of Canada was characterized by a readiness to resort to violence, and a lack of political good manners, which contrasted painfully with the eloquent phrases and professions of the orators on either side. The earliest impression which the first governor-general of the Union received of politics in his province was one of disorder and mismanagement. “You can form no idea of the manner in which a Colonial Parliament transacts its business,” Poulett Thomson wrote from Toronto, in 1839. “When they came to their own affairs, and, above all, to the money matters, there was a scene of confusion and riot of which no one in England can have any idea. Every man proposes a vote for his own job, and bills are introduced without notice, and carried through all their stages in a quarter of an hour.” The first efforts in the struggle for responsible government were rendered needlessly irritating by the absence of that spirit of courteous moderation which usually characterizes the proceedings of the Imperial Parliament.
The relations between the governor and his ministers, at the best difficult, were made impossible for a man like Metcalfe by the ill-mannered disdain with which, as all the citizens of his capital knew, the cabinet spoke of their official head; and in debate the personal element played far too prominent a part. In all the early Union assemblies, too, the house betrayed its inexperience by passing rapidly from serious constitutional questions to petty jobs and quarrels, and as rapidly back again to first principles. There was a general failure to see the risk run by too frequent discussions on fundamentals, and much of the bitterness of party strife would have been avoided if the rival parties could have prosecuted their adverse operations by slower and more scientific approaches.
The warmth of feeling and the disorder exhibited in the councils of state and the assembly, met with a ready response in the country. It is only fair to say that many of the gravest disturbances were caused by recent immigrants, more especially by the Irish labourers on the canals in the neighbourhood of Montreal.[66] But the whole community must share in the discredit. The days had not yet ceased when political bills called on adherents of one or other party to assemble “with music and good shillelaghs”; and indeed the decade from 1840 to 1850 was distinctly one of political rioting. The election of 1841 was disgraced, more especially in Lower Canada, by very violent strife. In 1843 an Act was deemed necessary “to provide for the calling and orderly holding of public meetings in this province and for the better preservation of the public peace thereat.”
In the Montreal election of April, 1844, Metcalfe accused both his former inspector-general and the reform candidate of using inflammatory and reckless language, and {68} certainly both then and in November disgraceful riots made the elections no true register of public sentiment. At the very end of the decade, the riots caused by the passing of the “Rebellion Losses” Act, organized, it must be remembered, by the so-called loyal party, endangered the life of a governor-general, and made Montreal no longer possible as the seat of government. One may perhaps over-estimate the importance of these details; for, after all, the communal life of Canada was yet in its extreme youth, and in England itself there were still remnants of the old eighteenth century disorders, with hints of the newer revolutionism. Their importance is rather that they complicated the task of adjusting imperial standards to suit Canadian self-government, and introduced unnecessary errors into the conduct of affairs by the provincial statesmen.
It was obvious then that the United Provinces of Canada had, in 1839, still some distance to travel before their social, religious, and political organization could be regarded as satisfactory. Individually and collectively poor, the citizens of Canada required direct aid from the resources of the mother country. Material improvements in roads and canals, the introduction of steam, the organization of labour, were immediately necessary. Education in all its stages must receive encouragement and recognition. Religion must be freed from the encumbrance of a vexatious controversy. Municipal institutions and local government had still to be introduced to teach the people the elements of self-government; and a broader system of colonial legislation and administration substituted for the discredited rule of assemblies and councils at Toronto and Quebec. There was racial hate to be quenched; and petty party jealousies to be transmuted into more useful political energy. A nation was at its birth. The problem was whether in Great Britain there were minds acute and imaginative enough to see the actual dangers; generous enough not to be dissuaded from trying to avert them by any rudeness on the part of those who were being assisted; prophetic enough to recognize that Anglo-Saxon communities, whether at home or across the seas, will always claim the right to govern themselves, and that to such self-government none but the community actually affected may set a limit. (1)
Politics
Definition of Politics by Rand Dyck and Christopher Cochrane (in their book “Canadian Politics: Critical Approaches”) in the context of political science in Canada: The activity in which conflicting interests struggle for advantage or dominance in the making and execution of public policies.
Resources
See Also
- Politics
- Political Science
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Notes
- J. L. Morison, “British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government 1839-1854” (1919), Toronto, S. B. Gundy