The Canadas, continued.
In the last chapter I pointed out that in our future legislation for these provinces, we had to decide between the English and French inhabitants; up to the present the French have been in power, and have been invariably favoured by the Government, much to the injury of the English population. Before I offer any opinion on this question, let us inquire what has been the conduct of the French in their exercise of their rights as a Legislative Assembly, and what security they offer us, to incline us again to put confidence in them. In examining into this question, I prefer, as a basis, the Report of Lord Durham, made to the English Parliament. His lordship, adverting to the state of hostility between the representative and executive powers in our colonies, prefaces with a remark relative to our own country, which I think late events do not fully bear out; he says:—
“However partial the monarch might be to particular ministers, or however he might have personally committed himself to their policy, he has been invariably constrained to abandon both, as soon as the opinion of the people has been irrevocably pronounced against them, through the medium of the House of Commons.”
This he repeats in an after part of the Report:—
“When a ministry ceases to command a majority in Parliament on great questions of policy, its doom is immediately sealed; and it would appear to us as strange to attempt, for any time, to carry on a Government by means of ministers perpetually in a minority, as it would be to pass laws with a majority of votes against them.”
If such be an essential part of our constitution, as his lordship asserts, surely we have suffered an inroad into it lately.
That the system of Colonial Government is defective, I grant, but it is not so much from the check which the Legislative Council puts upon the Representative Assembly, as from the secrecy of the acts and decisions of that council. This, indeed, his lordship admits in some cases, and I think that I can fully establish that, without this salutary check, the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada would have soon voted themselves Free and Independent States. Lord Durham observes:—
“I am far from concurring in the censure which the Assembly and its advocates have attempted to cast on the acts of the Legislative Council. I have no hesitation in saying that many of the bills which it is most severely blamed for rejecting, were bills which it could not have passed without a dereliction of its duty to the constitution, the connexion with Great Britain, and the whole English population of the colony. If there is any censure to be passed on its general conduct, it is for having confined itself to the merely negative and defensive duties of a legislative body; for having too frequently contented itself with merely defeating objectionable methods of obtaining desirable ends, without completing its duty by proposing measures, which would have achieved the good in view without the mixture of evil. The national animosities which pervaded the legislation of the Assembly, and its thorough want of legislative skill or respect for constitutional principles, rendered almost all its bills obnoxious to the objections made by the Legislative Council; and the serious evil which their enactment would have occasioned, convinces me that the colony has reason to congratulate itself on the existence of an institution which possessed and used the power of stopping a course of legislation that, if successful, would have sacrificed every British interest, and overthrown every guarantee of order and national liberty.”
Again:—
“One glaring attempt which was made directly and openly to subvert the constitution of the country, was, by passing a bill for the formal repeal of those parts of the 31 Geo. 3, c. 31, commonly called the Constitutional Act, by which the constitution and powers of the Legislative Council were established. It can hardly be supposed that the framers of this bill were unaware, or hoped to make any concealment of the obvious illegality of a measure, which, commencing as all Canadian Acts do, by a recital of the 31 Geo. 3, as the foundation of the legislative authority of the Assembly, proceeded immediately to infringe some of the most important provisions of that very statute; nor can it be supposed that the Assembly hoped really to carry into effect, this extraordinary assumption of power, inasmuch as the bill could derive no legal effect from passing the Lower House, unless it should subsequently receive the assent of the very body which it purported to annihilate.”