LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR SIMCOE
Down at Quebec things were managed with more pomp, and no social event was complete without the presence of the Duke of Kent, military commandant, now living in Haldimand's old house at Montmorency. Nova Scotia had held parliaments since 1758, when Halifax elected her first members.
Besides the United Empire Loyalists, other settlers were coming to Canada. The Earl of Selkirk, a patriotic young Scotch nobleman, had arranged for the removal of evicted Highlanders to Prince Edward Island in 1803 and to Baldoon on Lake St. Clair. Then "Mad Tom Talbot," Governor Simcoe's aid, descendant of the Talbots of Castle Malahide and boon comrade of the young soldier who became the Duke of Wellington, becomes so enamored of wilderness life that he gives up his career in Europe, gains grant of lands between London and Port Dover, and lays foundations of settlements in western Ontario, spite of the fact he remains a bachelor. The man who had danced at royalty's balls and drunk deep of pleasure at the beck of princes now lived in a log house of three rooms, laughed at difficulties, "baked his own bread, milked his own cows, made his own butter, washed his own clothes, ironed his own linen," and taught colonists who bought his lands "how to do without the rotten refuse of Manchester warehouses,"—the term he applied to the broadcloth of the newcomer.
Under the French régime, Canada had consisted of a string of fur posts isolated in a wilderness. It will be noticed that it now consisted of five distinct provinces of nation builders.