Introduction
In 1839, Lord Durham, Governor General of Canada, reported to Westminster on mounting civil unrest in Canada. He was expected to blame Anglo-French antagonism, but chose to highlight a system in which elected Parliaments were mere window-dressing, while real power lay with bureaucrats appointed by the Crown.
IT is impossible to observe the great similarity of the constitutions established in all our North American Provinces, and the striking tendency of all to terminate in pretty nearly the same result, without entertaining a belief that some defect in the form of government, and some erroneous principle of administration, have been common to all; the hostility of the races being palpably insufficient to account for all the evils which have affected Lower Canada,* inasmuch as nearly the same results have been exhibited among the homogeneous population of the other provinces.
It may fairly be said, that the natural state of government in all these Colonies is that of collision between the executive and the representative body.* In all of them the administration of public affairs is habitually confided to those who do not co-operate harmoniously with the popular branch of the legislature; and the Government is constantly proposing measures which the majority of the Assembly reject, and refusing its assent to bills which that body has passed.
At the time, British North America consisted of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, the primarily French-speaking Lower Canada and the primarily English-speaking Upper Canada. ‘Upper’ meant higher up the St Lawrence River and hugging the Great Lakes; ‘Lower’ meant downriver towards the northeast and the Gulf of St Lawrence. Lower Canada had been a French colony called New France, which came into the possession of Great Britain as a result of The Seven Years’ War.
Conventionally, there are three branches of government: the Legislature (those who make the laws), the Executive (those who carry them out) and the Judiciary (those who interpret them). In the United Kingdom, that means Parliament, the Prime Minister and his Cabinet, and the Courts respectively. In colonial Canada, the Executive (i.e. the Governor-General and those under him) could pass its own laws, and did not have to run them past an elected assembly; equally, any motion that an elected assembly passed could simply be ignored. It was quite literally a bureaucracy, government by officials, rather than a democracy. A later Governor-General of Canada, John Buchan, reminded us that having an elected Parliament does not necessarily make a country into a democracy: see A Parliament for Scotland.
The ‘popular branch of the legislature’ means Parliament, that part of government elected by the public in order to represent their interests and keep the Executive in check.