Delphi complete works of.., p.481
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 481
In despite of this, the LaFontaine-Baldwin administration throughout the years 1849 and 1850 remained in a position of exceptional power. It suffered indeed to some extent from the desertion of Malcolm Cameron who resigned his place in a ministry that moved too slowly for his liking (December, 1849), and from the elevation of so strong a combatant as Mr. Blake to the calmer atmosphere of the bench. But it gained something also from the propitious circumstances of the time. The cloud of commercial depression that had hung over Canada was passing away. The removal of the last of the British Navigation Acts in 1849 — for which Baldwin, a convinced free trader, and his fellow-Reformers had long since petitioned the imperial government — brought to the ports of the St. Lawrence in the ensuing year an entry of nearly one hundred foreign vessels: the completion of the works on the Welland Canal, on which in all some $6,269,000 had been expended, seemed to inaugurate a new era for the shipping trade of the Great Lakes, while the prospect of an early reciprocity with the United States and the Maritime Provinces, and the extension of the railroad system, were rapidly reviving the agriculture and commerce of the united provinces. The bountiful harvest of 1850 came presently to add the climax to the national prosperity.
The ministry, therefore, in despite of the prowess of Radicalism, which was soon to threaten its existence, was able in the session of 1850 to carry out several reform measures of great importance. The seat of government had meantime, in accordance with an address from the legislature, been transferred to the city of Toronto, which was henceforth to alternate with Quebec, in four year periods, in the honour of being the provincial capital. The appearance of Lord Elgin at the old parliament buildings on Front Street was greeted with loud acclamations from a loyal population, and the Tory party, after one or two unsuccessful attempts to undo the Act of Indemnification by further legislation, found themselves compelled to accept the inevitable. The reorganization of the postal system, now transferred to the control of Canada, with the lowering of postal rates, was one of the leading reforms effected in the session. A new school law for Upper Canada carried out more completely the system inaugurated under Mr. Draper’s Act, and confirmed the principle of granting separate schools to Roman Catholics. An improved jury system, a reorganization of the division courts and certain amendments in the election law, were also among the results of the session’s work. It was noted with congratulation by the friends of the ministry that not a single bill adopted by the legislature was reserved by the governor-general. The Globe in calling attention to the fact, “unprecedented in Canadian history,” declared that it proved “the practical existence of responsible government.”
See above .
The legislative success of the session of 1850 was perhaps more apparent than real. Some great questions of practical reform — notably those of the Clergy Reserves and of Seigniorial Tenure — were still pressing for solution. In these two vexed problems, which had stood before the politicians of the two Canadas for a generation past like twin riddles of the sphinx, were contained the eternal problem of the Church and the State, and the like problem of landed aristocracy against unlanded democracy. On these the party of the Reformers could find no common ground of agreement. These two issues and the natural drift of political thought of the time were bringing out more clearly each day the difference between Radicals and Reformers. Neither Baldwin nor LaFontaine had anything of the complexion of a Radical. The former, indeed, showed in his private walk of life much of that reverence for the things and ideas of the past, which is often a part of the inconsistent equipment of the Liberal politician. In his Municipal Act his resuscitation of the Saxon term “reeve” had excited the kindly ridicule of his contemporaries. LaFontaine too had much that was conservative in his temperament, and though in his younger years no over zealous practitioner of religion, he set his face strongly against anything that savoured of spoliation of the rightful claims of the Church. As against the moderation and tempered zeal of the chiefs, the intemperate haste and unqualified doctrines of some of their followers now began to stand in rude contrast. The latter urged the full measure of the Democratic programme. “Take from the churches,” they said, “their reserved lands that are merely a relic of old time ecclesiastical privilege, change this mediæval seignior of Lower Canada and his tenants into ordinary property-holders, and give us in our constitutions a full and untrammelled application of the principles of popular election, — an elected assembly, an elected Upper House and an elected governor at the head.”
Many of the leaders of the new Radicalism were men not without influence in the community. There was, in Upper Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie, now returned from his ungrateful exile to fish in the troubled waters as an Independent, and aspiring again to popular leadership; Dr. John Rolph, the agitator of the pre-rebellion days, who had ridden out with Baldwin to interview the rebels at Montgomery’s tavern, and who, like Mackenzie, had known the bitterness of exile; Macdougall, a lawyer by title but by predilection a politician and journalist, once a contributor to the Examiner but now the editor of a Radical publication called the North American. With these was Malcolm Cameron, the recently resigned commissioner of public works. Out of this material was being formed the new party of the Radicals, a party that boasted that it wanted only men of “clear grit,” and whose members presently became known as the Clear Grits. Their platform, which shows the infection of European democratic movements, consisted of the following demands: The application of the elective principle to all the officials and institutions of the country, from the head of the government downwards; universal suffrage; vote by ballot; biennial parliaments; abolition of the property qualification for members of parliament; a fixed term for the holding of general elections and for the meeting of the legislature; retrenchment; abolition of pensions to judges; abolition of the courts of common pleas and chancery and the enlargement of the jurisdiction of the court of queen’s bench; reduction of lawyers’ fees; free trade; direct taxation; an amended jury law; abolition or modification of the usury laws; abolition of primogeniture; secularization of the Clergy Reserves and the abolition of the rectories that had been created out of that endowment.
Mackenzie called himself Independent, but naturally fell into alliance with the Grits.
Platform adopted at a meeting of the party at Markham, March 23rd, 1850.
Such was the original group of the Clear Grits. In later times their designation — or at least the term “Grit” — was applied to the Reformers generally and especially to the adherents of George Brown. But in the beginning Brown had little sympathy with the new party and remained, in spite of certain Radical leanings, an adherent of LaFontaine and Baldwin till the last. His paper, the Globe, at first denounced the Grits as “a miserable clique of office-seeking, bunkum-talking cormorants, that met in a certain lawyer’s office on King Street [Macdougall’s] and announced their intention to form a new party on Clear Grit principles.”
John Lewis, George Brown (Makers of Canada Series), p, 41.
At the same time in Lower Canada a Radical party, following the lead of Papineau, was being formed in opposition to the policy of LaFontaine. The career of Papineau has been the subject of so many conflicting opinions, has met with such extremes of approbation and censure, that it is difficult to hazard an opinion on the merit of his political conduct at this time. With LaFontaine and the ministry he was entirely out of sympathy. Lord Elgin, who spoke of him as “Guy Fawkes,” viewed him with dislike. But among his compatriots a group of the younger men, now called the Parti Rouge and including A. A. Dorion, Doutre, Dessaules and others, followed the lead of Papineau and advocated a programme of an equally Radical character to that of the Clear Grits. In their party organ, L’Avenir, they demanded universal suffrage, the repeal of the union with Upper Canada, the abolition of the church tithes and election of the Upper House, while many of them openly advocated republicanism and annexation to the United States. In the legislature of 1850 Papineau maintained against the measures of LaFontaine an unremitting opposition, and made common cause with MacNab and his party in voting against the government. To add to the difficulties that were gathering about the administration, Brown, of the Globe (hitherto their firm supporter), incited by the agitation in England over the Ecclesiastical Titles controversy, commenced an outcry against Roman Catholicism and all its works.
By far the worst difficulties of the ministry lay, however, in the Clergy Reserves question. The history of this long-standing controversy may be epitomized thus: the Constitutional Act of 1791 empowered the Crown to set apart in each province for the maintenance and support of a Protestant clergy one-eighth of the public lands as yet unallotted: the Crown also had power to erect and endow rectories out of the reserve, whose incumbents should be “presented” by the governor, after the practice of presentation in England. In other words, the aim of the Act was to create in the two provinces an endowed State Church. The same statute gave to the parliament of each province power to alter or repeal these arrangements as it might see fit, provided always that such action was sanctioned by the imperial parliament. The Reserves had been at first exclusively claimed and enjoyed by the Church of England. Grave dissatisfaction arose. The other Protestant Churches claimed that the terms of the Act permitted of their participation in the reserve. The settlers also complained that the arrangement impeded settlement, hindered the making of roads and tended to interpose waste spaces among the farms of the colonies.
See Charles Lindsey, The Clergy Reserves.
31 Geo. III. c. 31. See W. Houston, Documents Illustrative of the Canadian Constitution, for text of the Act with comments.
In 1819 an opinion, delivered by the law officers of the Crown, declared that the ministers of the Church of Scotland were entitled to a share in the Reserves. The old Reform party in Upper Canada of the days before the rebellion, protested against this form of State aid to the two Churches. Some Reformers wanted all sects to participate, others wished the whole system abolished. In 1831 the imperial government had invited the legislature of Upper Canada to adopt a measure for the settlement of the question. Nothing, however, was agreed upon. No special endowments of rectories were made until 1836, when Sir John Colborne signed patents creating forty-four of them. This occasioned still louder protest. In Lower Canada, already settled and less subject to the allotment of new lands, the matter of the Clergy Reserves never became an acute question. It was the policy of the Roman Catholic Church not to oppose ecclesiastical endowment by the State.
In Upper Canada 2,395,687 acres were reserved; in Lower Canada 934,050 acres.
In 1840 the parliament of Upper Canada passed an Act distributing the lands among the various Protestant sects. This Act was disallowed, but an imperial Act of 1840 made a new disposition of the Reserves. Certain parts of the Church land had already been sold. The funds arising from these sales were to be distributed, in the proportion of two to one, between the Churches of England and Scotland. The rest of the Reserves were now to be sold. Of the proceeds arising, one-third was to go to the Church of England, one-sixth to the Church of Scotland, and the remainder, at the discretion of the governor in council, was to be applied to “purposes of public worship and religious instruction in Canada.” In accordance with this, distribution was made of these funds among the Dissenting denominations.
3 and 4 Vict. c. 78.
In virtue of 7 and 8 Geo. IV. c. 62.
Such was the position of the Reserves question in the year 1850: the Church lands, while no longer blocking settlement, since they were offered for sale when allotted, constituted a fund of which the Anglican Church received the lion’s share, but in which all Protestant denominations participated. Many of the Reform party were anxious to leave the matter where it was, but the Radicals were determined to have done with all connection between Church and State and to force the question to an issue. Price, the commissioner of Crown lands, in the session of 1850, brought in a series of resolutions declaring the reservation of the public domain for religious purposes to have long been a source of intense discontent, and asking the imperial parliament to grant to the Canadian legislature plenary powers to deal with the lands as it should see fit. One of these resolutions (June 21st, 1850) read: “No religious denomination can be held to have such vested interest in the revenue derived from the proceeds of the said Clergy Reserves as should prevent further legislation with respect to the disposal of them.” On Price’s resolutions, which were finally carried, the ministry was divided. Hincks, who had seconded the resolutions, was in favour of the secularization of the Reserves. Of this policy he had been a consistent advocate for many years past.
Previous to 1827 the lands reserved could not be sold for the benefit of the Church. They could only be leased. In 1827 power was given to sell one-quarter of the land. The amount which could be sold in any one year was limited to one hundred thousand acres.
Reminiscences, p et seq. Hincks published a series of letters on the Clergy Reserves question in the Montreal Herald, December, 1882.
Secularization, however, could only be accomplished by first inducing the imperial parliament to repeal the Act of 1840 and to refer the whole question to the Canadian legislature. Hincks’s practical political experience told him that this end could be best accomplished by avoiding any action which might antagonize the British parliament, and in especial the House of Lords, by seeming to make Canadian jurisdiction a menace to the privileges of the Church. “It was clearly our policy,” he wrote subsequently, “to ask for a repeal of the imperial Act on the ground of our constitutional right to settle the question according to Canadian opinion, and not to declare to a body sufficiently prejudiced and containing a bench of bishops, that our object was secularization.” Hincks was, therefore, of opinion that the existing ministry should content itself with asking for the repeal. The policy to be afterwards adopted could be agreed upon in its own time. Though aware of the difference of opinion between himself and certain of his colleagues, he saw nothing in that difference to demand a reconstruction of the administration. Whatever the individual opinions of the ministers might be on the subject, there were no immediate measures, he argued, which the Canadian government could take towards secularization. “To have broken up the LaFontaine government,” he wrote, “because its leader would not pledge himself to support secularization, when it was uncertain whether we could obtain the repeal of the imperial Act of 1840, would have been an act of consummate folly, indeed hardly short of madness.”
Nevertheless, the divergence of opinion in the cabinet was a palpable fact. LaFontaine believed in Canadian control: he desired the repeal of the Act of 1840: but he did not believe in the policy of secularization. Rightly conceiving that the alienation of the Reserves to other than religious purposes was the intent of Price’s resolution quoted above, he gave his vote against it. Baldwin, to his deep regret, found himself compelled to vote against LaFontaine on this resolution. His attitude, as expressed in his speech on this occasion, honest though it was, was hardly calculated to hold political support. He admitted that previous to the imperial Act of 1840, he had, along with his fellow-Reformers, believed in the secularization of the Reserves and their application to provincial education: the passage of the Act had altered his opinion and he believed they ought to adhere as far as possible to the purpose it indicated. He did not regard the reserved lands as being entirely the property of the people, but recognized the vested interest created by imperial legislation. At the same time he expressed himself as opposed to any union between Church and State, and declared that he did not regard the Act of 1840 as necessarily a final settlement. With this rather vague statement of his position, Baldwin voted in favour of the resolution condemned by LaFontaine. The opportunity offered by the evident lack of union on the part of the ministry was not lost on the Opposition. Even before the vote referred to, Boulton of the Conservative party tried to amend one of the resolutions by substituting a motion, “that, in the language of the Hon. Robert Baldwin in his address to the electors of the fourth riding of the county of York on December 8th, 1847, preparatory to the last election, when an adviser of the Crown on a great public question avows a scheme which his colleagues dare not approve, public safety and public morals require that they should separate.”
The difference of opinion thus evinced among the members of the ministry was not calculated to strengthen their hold on their majority. At the same time the parallel question of seigniorial tenure was weakening their support in Lower Canada. This was a legacy of the old French régime under which about eight million arpents of land had been granted to the seigniors on a feudal basis. The holders of land (censitaires) under the seigniors had a permanent right of occupancy but were compelled to pay fixed yearly dues in money and in kind, and in the event of their selling out their tenancy must pay one-twelfth of the purchase price to their lord. The latter had also various vexatious privileges, such as the droit de banalité, or sole right of grinding corn. Whatever may have been the merits of the system in aiding the first establishment of the colony, it had long since become an anachronism. Agitation against the tenure had gone on for years, but with the exception of a law of 1825 which permitted the seignior and censitaire by joint consent to terminate the tenure, nothing had been done. Granted that the system was to be abolished, the difficult question remained, how to abolish it. Was the land to be handed over to the censitaire as his property in fee simple, or was it to be given to the seignior as his absolute property, or was some adjustment, involving proper compensation, possible? The Reformers of Lower Canada were much divided; some of them wished to see the seigniors expropriated without compensation; others to expropriate them with compensation; others to leave the matter to voluntary arrangement aided by legislation, but not compulsory; and others, finally, such as Papineau (himself a seignior) wished to leave the matter where it was. LaFontaine, while believing in the historic value of the system, considered it injurious at the present time to the interests of agriculture; he wished to see it abolished, but wished to find means to respect the interests of the seigniors by a proper compensation. The reference of the matter to a committee, and the presentation of various tentative bills, afforded no solution, and the matter dragged forward from the session of 1850 to that of 1851, while the prolonged delay led several of the Reformers to accuse LaFontaine of deliberately temporizing for fear of losing parliamentary support.
