Quebec Act

6 Key excerpts on "Quebec Act"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Entangling the Quebec Act

  Transnational Contexts, Meanings, and Legacies in North America and the British Empire

  • Ollivier Hubert, François Furstenberg, Ollivier Hubert, François Furstenberg(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • McGill-Queen's University Press

    (Publisher)

  By breaking radically with the Empire’s past treatment of Catholics, the Quebec Act pointed toward a new policy of religious pluralism abroad – and at home. Luca Codignola paints a striking portrait of ecclesiastical networks stretching across the new and old territories of the British Empire, connecting authorities in Rome to Quebec, London, Grenada, Minorca, Florida, and Newfoundland; officials in older parts of the Empire, such as Ireland; as well as a related-but-distinct Jesuit network linking London and the North American British colonies (later the United States). Initially, Church authorities in London, led by an aging vicar apostolic, showed little interest in the formulation of the Act. That indifference is ironic, because, in the end, Codignola argues, the Act would play a significant role in English Catholic history – and, perhaps more importantly, in situating London at the heart of Catholicism in the British Empire. By the 1820s, London’s vicar apostolic had become the centre of a Catholic network spanning the globe from America to the East Indies, and the Pacific. From this longer temporal perspective, the Quebec Act emerges as an important step in the creation of the modern British Catholic Church. It shaped precedent not just for the governance of empire, but of the metropole too, foreshadowing Catholic emancipation and the transformation of the Church’s place in British life. The Quebec Act also played a decisive role in the construction of the Canadian Catholic Church. Traditionally Gallican, it gradually redefined the nature of its relations with the colonial authorities and established closer relations with the Holy See, thus gaining an unprecedented level of autonomy from the state. The negotiations surrounding the status of Catholicism in Quebec also mark an important step in the Vatican’s consideration of North American churches. Codignola’s text, which is based on a thorough and rare knowledge of religious archives, offers fascinating insight into an aspect of Quebec and Church history neglected by the scholarship on the period.

  It is impossible to understand the caution with which the British Catholic Church and the imperial government inched towards religious tolerance without assessing the centrality of a militant Protestant patriotism in the British imperial identity. Brad A. Jones provides a striking illustration in his analysis of the Quebec Act’s reception in the New York and Halifax press. He shows how the Act catalyzed latent but powerful anti-Catholic strains in British political culture, fuelling an extreme paranoia about a Catholic plot and even a Catholic invasion. Recall that, by 1774, not even a century had passed since King James II had been overthrown in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The event was about as far from peoples’ living memory then as the Great Depression of the 1930s is to us today. A plot to secretly restore Catholicism might not have seemed so far-fetched as many historians now view it.74 Little wonder Protestants in New York and New England – where a language of Popery had long featured in the political discourse and where bitter memories of the French and Native attacks on British settlements remained vivid – were so quick to react violently. The timing of the Quebec Act – promulgated just as imperial tensions reached a boiling point – could hardly have been worse. “What,” asked one New Yorker, could have led officials to pass a bill meant “to rob, enslave and murder their fellow subjects at the expense of the protestant cause?” So powerful were anti-Catholic sentiments, they could even shake settlers’ faith in “Popish King George” himself, who “had broken his coronation oath, and established the popish religion in Canada.” Well before Thomas Paine published Common Sense

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The King’s Peace

  Law and Order in the British Empire

  • Lisa Ford(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  The Regulating Act, passed for “the better manage-ment” of the East India Company in 1773, gave parliamentary im-primatur to an existing but ill-defined variable-rights regime when it established a Supreme Court for British subjects (a category from which South Asian people were excluded). The Quebec Act did more radical work. While the act failed to resolve the status of American Indians, it flattened new Francophone Catholic subjects and old British subjects into a new kind of colonial subject—a subject who could be ruled without a legislature regardless of their place of birth, their religion, or how much property they owned. By reinstating French civil law and withholding a legislature, and by extending Quebec to subsume much of the land within the Indian boundaries drawn after the Proclamation of 1763, the act made every non-Indian within this enormous jurisdiction the object of a special peace. The Quebec Act turned Catholic Canadians into purveyors of order in a disorderly world. Through the volumes written about Walker and the troubles he fomented in Montréal, we begin to understand how very local controversies of the peace shaped empire. The mess in Mon-tréal suggests that solving the problem of governance was beyond the ken of the few men sent to the fringes of the wilderness to do it. Limited experience, amities, enmities, ambitions, and vastly inad-equate resources all shaped their constitutional musings. They may well have read about and visited far-flung corners of the empire, and had clear ideas about what empire was and what it should be, but in the wintry wilds of Canada they struggled to solve a very few of a M i l i t a r y a s s a s s i n a t i o n i n M o n t r é a l 97 the problems they had before them. Close constraints of time, space, and capacity made a new kind of colonial constitution not just imaginable but desirable in Quebec.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Parliaments of Autonomous Nations

  • Guy Laforest, André Lecours(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • McGill-Queen's University Press

    (Publisher)

  19

  The parliamentary institutions of Upper and Lower Canada were structured like Westminster.20 The Parliament of Lower Canada was composed of three legislative bodies – a governor, the Legislative Assembly, and the Legislative Council. The governor was responsible for the executive function, which was assisted by an Executive Council whose members were appointed by London.21 Until the early nineteenth century, the three branches of the legislature worked collegially, but the situation became complicated when Lower Canada members encountered the limits of their representative body within the colonial state.22 The Legislative Assembly, which was elected, marked the legal recognition of the local population’s new-found and collective sovereignty, but the governor continued to reflect the metropolitan government’s traditional sovereignty. The opposition between monarchical and popular sovereignty seemed to offer a way, in Quebec, to meet the very different interests of the imperial government and the colony’s local government.23 But the system only appeared democratic. In reality, it was distinguished by different measures of centralization: confusing and overlapping powers concentrated within the executive branch, centralized authority, impunity of public administrators, and political domination of property owners.24 The elected assembly had legislative power, but London and the colonial aristocracy held executive power over the government.25 This is where the fight for ministerial responsibility – a true parliamentary democracy – and struggles over subsidies and language use in parliamentary debates began.26

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Reconsidering Confederation

  Canada's Founding Debates, 1864-1999

  • Daniel Heidt(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • University of Calgary Press

    (Publisher)

  Reconciling the rights and concerns of French- and English-speaking colonists had been a major political and constitutional issue in British North America since the Treaty of Paris in 1763, which ceded New France to the British. For over a century, British authorities had imposed constitutional reorganizations on their Empire in North America without substantial input from colonists. A series of constitutional changes attempted to wrestle with the issue of integrating a large Catholic and French-speaking population into a colonial political structure administered from London. In 1774, Britain enlarged the boundaries of the province of Quebec, recognized French civil law, and permitted Catholics to take oaths that allowed them to occupy state offices. Only seventeen years later, British authorities again modified constitutional arrangements: they divided the province of Quebec into two distinct territories, Lower Canada and Upper Canada, and gave both colonies representative parliamentary institutions.

  Following the 1837–38 rebellions, Britain attempted to assimilate French Canada by decreeing the union of Lower Canada and Upper Canada. Despite being less populous, Canada West (the former Upper Canada) received the same number of representatives as Canada East (Lower Canada) in the new legislature that would govern both sections of the colony. The use of French in the colonial parliament was also initially disallowed, though it was subsequently restored in 1848. This attempt to assimilate French-Canadian society into a broader British North American polity was also unsuccessful. French-Canadian politicians had to address complaints from reform politicians in Upper Canada. Anxious to flex their increasing demographic muscle, Protestant political leaders wished to enhance their autonomy from the large number of Catholic voters. However, French-Canadian politicians like Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine brilliantly used ideological differences among their English-speaking counterparts to develop workable coalitions that relied on substantial support from Francophone legislators to maintain power. For example, after the 1851 census had proved that Upper Canada had become more populated than Lower Canada, Protestants demanded “representation by population” hoping that it would guarantee their section greater autonomy from Catholic political influence. But French-Canadian allegiances with moderate Upper Canadian politicians allowed them to stonewall all attempts to implement this policy throughout the 1850s and early 1860s. This recognition among French-Canadian leaders that the French- and British-Canadian duality could be harnessed to serve their interests shaped their political thought and strategy throughout the next fifteen years.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Franchise and Politics in British North America 1755-1867

  • John Garner(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • University of Toronto Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER SIX THE CANADAS I. LOWER CANADA FOLLOWING THE CESSION of Quebec to the British Crown, the colony was governed for nearly thirty years without benefit of representative institutions. Although there had been intermittent agitation on the part of the British settlers for an assembly, the agitation did not receive attentive consideration until after the American Revolut-tionary War. On Dorchester's reappointment as Governor General, and because of the influx of loyalists and the continuing controversy over the retention of the French Civil Code, he was instructed to report on public sentiment. 1 When Dorchester, by nature hostile to democracy, had to report that the agitation for an assembly would annually increase and when the agitators were successful in presenting their case at the Bar of the House, the Home Government determined to revise the government of Quebec. 2 The decision to concede an assembly to Quebec required Imperial legislation. The other British North American colonies had received an assembly through the exercise of the royal prerogative, but in Quebec it was necessary first to repeal the Quebec Act. Grenville, the Home Secretary, in whose department the administration of the colonies rested, was required to prepare the necessary legislation. He decided to create two distinct colonies, Lower and Upper Canada, and in order to end the racial and legal controversy, to allow Lower Canada and its French Canadian majority to retain the French Civil Code while Upper Canada was to follow the Common Law. The draft bill, 3 submitted to Dorchester for comment, make it plain that no religious restraint was to be placed on the exercise of the suffrage, that the franchise was to be confined to persons of twenty-one years who were natural-born British subjects or were residents of the province and had been born within the province prior to the conquest.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Quebec Conference of 1864

  Understanding the Emergence of the Canadian Federation

  • Eugénie Brouillet, Alain-G. Gagnon, Guy Laforest, Eugénie Brouillet, Alain-G. Gagnon, Guy Laforest(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • McGill-Queen's University Press

    (Publisher)

  Avoiding the “iniquitous pit of liberty”: The Centralizing Federalism of Joseph-Edouard Cauchon ÉRIC BÉDARD

  The events leading up to the passage of the British North America Act, and the key figures who defended or fought against the Quebec Resolutions, have not received much attention from historians in recent years, at least in Quebec. Since Nature abhors a vacuum, the theme has been taken up by political scientists, who have a different approach to the past. However, following the work of Christopher Moore, I believe that we can all benefit from reviewing the course of events and the ideology that guided the leading players, if only to add nuance to existing judgments and avoid over-simplification.1

  Researchers hold two ideas to be true when looking at the foundation of Canada in 1867 with respect to the bloc of French-Canadian parliamentarians in the 1860s. The first is that they were fiercely opposed to legislative union. According to this point of view, the French-Canadian representatives, besides playing a fundamental role in the creation of a “federal” regime (alongside the Ontario reformers) and thereby promoting a healthy dialogue based on the sharing of sovereignty between two levels of government, were able to carve out a degree of freedom for a minority national community. This federal regime, as explained by political scientist Guy Laforest and legal expert Eugénie Brouillet in their respective studies, was then denatured by the Constitution Act, 1982.2 The second idea that has gained general acceptance, because multiple traces of it can be seen in the debates of 1865, is that the support of French-Canadian conservatives for the Quebec Resolutions was based on a fear of American hegemony. The fears raised by the theory of manifest destiny proposed by US intellectuals and politicians in the northern camp, including the powerful Secretary of State William Seward, a close advisor to President Abraham Lincoln during the US Civil War,3

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book