11.12 Responsible Government
Durham’s perspective on the goal of eradicating the Canadien culture was presented very clearly in his report. There was nothing subtle about it. But to what were they to be assimilated? As a liberal parliamentarian, what Durham saw in the Canadas was an anglophone middle class in Quebec City and Montreal that was being held back from a natural economic leadership role by a peasant sub-stratum. The three pillars of la survivance — Catholicism, language, and an agrarian tradition that included seigneurialism — had to be swept away to put Canadiens on the path to a liberal democratic society.
The principal mechanism of this strategy was to be government. The executive for the united Province of Canada was, as before, drawn from the colonial elite although now its members could be dismissed by the governor. The same was true of the legislative council, which now had two dozen members. The assembly, of course, increased substantially to include elected representatives from what was referred to as Canada West and Canada East. Each received 42 seats in the assembly. Given the presence of a sizable propertied anglophone electorate in Canada East (especially in Montreal), anglophones would instantly dominate the elected body.
At first this seemed to work as planned. Charles Poulett Thomson (later Lord Sydenham) replaced Durham as governor general and moved quickly to achieve assimilationist goals. He relocated the seat of government from Quebec to Kingston, an anglophone town with strong Loyalist roots, safe from Canadien agitation. English was decreed the only language of debate and government business. He created additional safe seats for English-speaking candidates and encouraged immigration from Britain. He didn’t flinch at the use of violence against French voters and candidates where needed to secure a favourable (i.e., English-speaking) outcome. The assembly seemed destined to function along English versus French, Protestant versus Catholic lines with the Anglo-Protestants in the metaphorical driver’s seat.
Fractures and Alliances
This arrangement began to fracture quickly under the weight of ideologies. Toryism had always been present in the assemblies of the Canadas and its power under the new constitution appeared to be growing. It was, however, changing. Conservatives like John A. Macdonald were different. His conservativism borrowed elements of liberalism and he regarded the Tory element as “old fogeys.” The Anglican core of the party reciprocated by viewing the marginally successful Kingston lawyer as a Presbyterian outsider and unwelcome social climber. It is for these reasons that one of Macdonald’s biographers has said that he had to “gatecrash [the] local elite.”[1] Fissures like these — cracks that ran along the lines of ideological, sectarian, and social class difference — were opening up on the Tory side of the assembly.
On the Reformer side, matters were hardly better. For every pro-parliamentary moderate