Constitutional Act Divides Quebec into Upper and Lower Canada
Britain divided Quebec into two provinces in 1791 to give the loyalists an English-speaking one. The problem was demographic. The conquest of 1760 had brought some 70,000 French Catholic subjects, the Quebec Act of 1774 had guaranteed their language, civil law and religion in order to keep them out of the American revolt, and after 1783 about 10,000 loyalists arrived expecting English common law, freehold tenure and an elected assembly. The two arrangements were incompatible in one province. The act created Lower Canada along the St Lawrence, French-speaking, with seigneurial land tenure and French civil law, and Upper Canada to the west, English-speaking, with freehold tenure and English law. Each was given an elected assembly, which was the first in either, and an appointed legislative council and executive council answering to a governor rather than to the assembly. That last provision is the flaw the whole thing turned on. An assembly that could vote and be ignored produced thirty years of constitutional deadlock, and both provinces rebelled in 1837. The act also reserved a seventh of the land for the support of a Protestant clergy, which created a grievance that ran for fifty years. Lord Durham's report of 1839 recommended reuniting the provinces and granting responsible government, the first of which was done in 1841 and the second in 1848. The federal arrangement of 1867 went back to separate provinces, which is where Ontario and Quebec come from. The act is also the first British statute to establish an elected legislature for a French-speaking Catholic population, at a moment when Catholics could not sit in the parliament at Westminster. That inconsistency was noticed at the time and defended on the grounds that Canada was a special case.
- Year: 1791 CE
- Category: Political
