A history of Canada, 1763-1812

by Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas

Sir James Craig’s administration.

It is not easy to form an accurate estimate of Sir James Craig’s administration. His views and his methods have been judged in the light of later history rather than in that of the years which had gone before. It is somewhat overlooked that at the beginning of the nineteenth century the normal conditions of the world were conditions of war not of peace, and that the governors of colonies were as a rule soldiers whose first duty was the military charge of possessions held by no very certain tenure. The account usually given and received is that Craig was an honest but mistaken man, tactless and overbearing, trying to uphold an impossible system of bureaucratic despotism, instead of realizing the merits of representative institutions and giving them full play. The apology made for him has been that he was guided by and saw with the eyes of a few rapacious officials, who had no interest in the general welfare of the community. ‘The government, in fact,’ writes Christie, ‘was a bureaucracy, the governor himself little better than a hostage, and the people looked upon and treated as serfs and vassals by their official lords.’[229]

Constitutions and systems of government are good or bad according to the kinds of people to which they are applied, the stage of development which they have reached, and the particular circumstances existing at a given time inside and outside the land. It was only with much hesitation that representative institutions had been given to Canada; and one governor and another, bearing in mind the conditions which had preceded the War of Independence, had laid stress on the necessity of having a strong Executive, and on the growing danger of colonial democracy. They were not ignorant or shortsighted men; they looked facts in the face and argued from past experience in America. Again, if the officials were incompetent placemen, out of sympathy with the people, it was the governors who laid stress on the necessity of filling official positions with first-rate men and who occasionally took a strong line with the men whom they did not consider to be adequate. Moreover some of the officials, notably the judicial and legal officers, placed themselves in opposition to the local government and posed as defenders of the people. Craig dispensed, for the time at any rate, with the services of two law officers. One of them, Uniacke, who had Uniacke. been in Nova Scotia, was made Attorney-General of Lower Canada by Lord Liverpool, and, being considered by the governor to be unfit for his duties, was sent on leave to England in 1810 with a request that he should be removed from his office. He subsequently returned to his work in Canada. The other, James Stuart, became James Stuart. a notable figure in Canadian history. He was the son of a United Empire Loyalist, the rector of Kingston in Ontario. He had been appointed Solicitor-General of Lower Canada by Milnes in 1801, but after Craig’s arrival ranged himself, as a member of the Assembly, in opposition to the governor, and in 1809 was obliged to resign his appointment. After some years of bitter opposition to the government, he lived to become a leading advocate of reunion of the two provinces, to be appointed Attorney-General, to be impeached by the Assembly and again deprived of his office, and finally to be appointed by Lord Durham Chief Justice of Lower Canada and to be created a baronet for his public services.

Meanwhile in Upper Canada, where a young Lieutenant-Governor, Francis Gore, from 1807 to 1811 carried on the administration firmly and well, various holders of offices opposed the government and tried to play the part of popular leaders. Judge Thorpe has already been mentioned, Thorpe and Willcocks. on the Bench and in the House of Assembly a blatant and disloyal demagogue; another man of the same kind was Wyatt the Surveyor-General, and another Willcocks, sheriff of one of the districts, and owner or nominal owner of a libellous newspaper, for the contents of which the House of Assembly committed him to jail on the ground of breach of privilege. These three men were suspended from their appointments, and eventually disappeared from Canada to make their voices heard in England or in the United States; and the end of Willcocks was to be killed fighting against his country in the war of 1812. One thing is certain that in their official positions they were disloyal to the government, and that in their disloyalty they received no support from the elected Assembly of Upper Canada. Gore had a difficulty too with his Attorney-General, Firth, a man sent out from England. Firth ended by returning to England without leave and joining in misrepresentations against the Lieutenant-Governor.

It may fairly be summed up that in the Canadas many men were found in office who had been pitchforked into appointments for which they were unsuited; but that they were by no means invariably supporters of the Executive against the representatives of the people, nor were the governors their tools. On the contrary there were constant cases of such officials opposing the governors, while the governors in their turn stood out conspicuously in opposition to the practice of appointing men from outside to offices in Canada which required special qualifications in addition to good character and general capacity. But a distinction must be drawn between Upper and Lower Canada. In Upper Canada the voters and their nominees, however democratic, were, with the exception of a few traitorous individuals, intensely loyal to the British connexion. In Lower Canada, on the other hand, the all-important race question complicated the situation, and here Craig saw in the French Canadians, who were also the democratic party, the elements of disloyalty to Great Britain and rapprochement with France. In August, 1808, he wrote Craig’s opinion of the French Canadians. that the Canadians were French at heart; that, while they did not deny the advantages which they enjoyed under British rule, there would not be fifty dissentient voices, if the proposition was made of their re-annexation to France: and that the general opinion among the English in Canada was that they would even join the Americans if the latter were commanded by a French officer. His views on this point were fully shared by another man of clear head and sound judgement, Isaac Brock. For reasons which have been given Craig seems Real attitude of the French Canadians. to have exaggerated any danger of the kind. Republican France, which attracted American sympathies, repelled those of the French Canadians. France under Napoleon, brought back to law and order and to at any rate the outward conventionalities of religion, became more attractive to the French Canadians, but at the same time, in view of the Napoleonic despotism, it became less attractive to the United States. But at no time probably was there any real intention on the part of the French Canadians to take any active step to overthrow British supremacy. Certainly at no time was there the slightest possibility of their changing their status except by becoming absorbed in the United States. They were as a whole an unthinking people, to whom representative institutions and a free press were a novelty; their leaders liked the words and phrases which they had learnt from English-speaking demagogues or imported from revolutionary France. Their priesthood was not loyal, because it claimed to be independent of the civil government, especially when it was the government of a Protestant Power. The general aim was to see to what uses the new privileges could be applied and how much latitude would be given. The elected representatives opposed the second chamber, the Legislative Council, as much as they opposed the governor; they played with edged tools, but it may be doubted whether at this early stage of the proceedings they meant much more than play.

Under the circumstances, perhaps a fair judgement upon Sir James Craig’s administration would be that he took the Parliamentary situation in Lower Canada too seriously, and did not give sufficient rope to the local politicians. He reprimanded the Assembly when they acted unconstitutionally, and dissolved them when they did not do their work. The strong measures which he adopted, and the repeated dissolutions, were a bad precedent for the future: and the course which he recommended, viz. suspension of the constitution, would, if carried into effect, have been premature and unwise. But for the moment the steps which he took were effective. By his summary action in regard to the newspaper Le Canadien, he showed that he had the ultimate power and was not afraid to use it; and the result was that the very law which gave the Executive extraordinary powers was renewed by the Assembly which objected to those powers. Meanwhile Canada thrived, the governor was personally respected, and repeated elections did no one any harm. It was a time of danger from without and unrest within, but many countries with admirable constitutions have fared much worse than did Lower Canada under the rule of a strong soldier confronted by a recalcitrant Assembly.

He was succeeded by a man of wholly different type, Sir George Prevost, who endeared himself greatly to the French Canadians; but internal differences were soon to be overshadowed by foreign invasion, for in one year to the day from the date when Sir James Craig left Canada, Madison, President of the United States, issued a proclamation which began the war of 1812.

FOOTNOTES:

[216] He belonged to the same family as the Earl of Crewe, Secretary of State for the Colonies.