The Division and Union Of Canada
During this period economic expansion was principally generated by the English-speaking merchants who now controlled the Montreal-based fur trade, organized as the North West Company . Seeking political changes that would enhance their economic power, they wanted their own legislative assembly and the universal application of English law, which of course would not have been acceptable to the French-speakers. In 1791, through the Canada Act , the British government imposed a compromise, dividing the region into Upper and Lower Canada , which broadly separated the ethnic groups along the line of the Ottawa River. In Lower Canada, the French-based legal system was retained, as was the right of the Catholic Church to collect tithes, while in Upper Canada, English common law was introduced. Each of the new provinces had an elective assembly, though these shared their limited powers with an appointed assembly, whilst the executive council of each province was responsible to the appointed governor, not the elected assembly. This arrangement allowed the assemblies to become the focal points for vocal opposition, but ultimately condemned them to impotence. At the same time, the plutocrats built up chains of influence and power around the appointed provincial governments: in Upper Canada this grouping was called the " Family Compact ", in Lower Canada the " Chateau Clique ". By the late 1830s considerable opposition had developed to these cliques. In Upper Canada the Reform Movement led by William Lyon Mackenzie demanded a government accountable to a broad electorate, and the expansion of credit facilities for small farmers. In 1837 both Mackenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau , the reform leader in Lower Canada, were sufficiently frustrated to attempt open rebellion. Neither was successful and both were forced into exile in the United States, but the rebellions did bring home to the British Government the need for effective reform, prompting the Act of Union of 1840, which united Lower and Upper Canada with a single assembly. The rationale for this arrangement was the racist belief that the French-Canadians were incapable of handling elective government without Anglo-Saxon guidance. Nevertheless, the assembly provided equal representation for Canada East and West - in effect the old Lower and Upper Canadas. A few years later, this new assembly achieved responsible government almost accidentally. In 1849 the Reform Party, which had a majority of the seats, passed an Act compensating those involved in the 1837 rebellions. The Governor-General, Lord Elgin, disapproved, but he didn't exercise his veto - so, for the first time, a Canadian administration acted on the vote of an elected assembly, rather than imperial sanction. The Reform Party, which pushed through the compensation scheme, included both French- and English-speakers and mainly represented small farmers and businessmen opposed to the power of the cliques. In the 1850s it became the Canadian Liberal Party , but this French- English coalition fell apart with the emergence of "Clear Grit" Liberals in Canada West in the 1860s. This group argued for "Representation by Population" - in other words, instead of equal representation for the two halves of Canada, they wanted constituencies based on the total population. As the English-speakers outnumbered the French, the "Rep by Poppers" rhetoric seemed a direct threat to many of the institutions of French Canada. As a consequence, many French-Canadians transferred their support to the Conservative Party , while the radicals of Canada East, the Rouges , developed a nationalist creed. The Conservative Party represented the fusion of a number of elements, including the rump of the business cliques who had been so infuriated by their loss of control that they burnt the Montreal parliament building to the ground in 1849. Some of this group campaigned to break the imperial tie and join the United States, but, when the party fully emerged in 1854, the old "Compact Tories" were much less influential than a younger generation of moderate conservatives. The lynchpin of this younger group was John A. Macdonald , who was to form the first federal government in 1868. Such moderates sought, by overcoming the democratic excesses of the "Grits" and the nationalism of the "Rouges", to weld together an economic and political state that would not be absorbed into the increasingly powerful United States.
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