1867 Read Online Free Page A

of Canada East.
    Brown respected the right of all people to worship as they pleased. Individual liberties and freedom of conscience were touchstones of his politics, amply demonstrated in his support of anti-slavery movements and of American slaves who had escaped to Upper Canada. He believed in economic freedom too: freedom of trade, freedom of contract, unfettered competition of the kind the
Globe
had with many rival newspapers. But the kind of religious freedom Brown ringingly defended was not the kind most Roman Catholics wanted.
    In the 1850s, the Catholic Church was on the move. In Lower Canada, dynamic bishops, supported by energetic priests from newly founded seminaries, had shored up the church’s institutions and extended its moral influence. The church no longer needed to curry the support or tolerance of powerful governors. As political power shifted from royal governors to elected parliamentarians, bishops and priests could influence Catholic voters directly, and they did so openly and willingly. Few politicians seeking election in Catholic communities cared to provoke the disapproval of the church.
    The church’s social role and political power were most evident in francophone Lower Canada. But as Irish Catholics poured into Upper Canada, the church was eager to acquire the same place there for its bishops, its separate schools, and its social message. No admirer of the church’s social and political sway in Lower Canada, George Brown was all the more alarmed to sense Catholicism on the march in Upper Canada.
    Brown’s opposition to separate schools, to the extension of Catholic dioceses, to the political influence of priests and bishops –to what he called “priestcraft and statechurchism” – all flowed from his voluntaryist principles. And they tended to alienate every Catholic who heard them. It made little difference to faithful Catholics whether Brown was in his heart a principled voluntaryist or simply an anti-Catholic fanatic. They understood he was no friend to them or to their religion as it was practised.
    Whether voluntaryism or bigotry, Brown’s campaign to separate church from state was no friend to his own political ambitions either. In the union of Canada East and Canada West, where the East was heavily Catholic and the West mostly Protestant, anything that raised Catholic–Protestant tensions was hotly political. Catholic legislators wanted nothing to do with Brown, and voluntaryism as Brown espoused it played a vital role in keeping his reform cause out of power for a generation. Voluntaryism cemented his reputation as an anti-French politician at a time when the first requirement for political success was the building of French–English alliances.
    Britain had forged the Province of Canada in 1841 amidst ringing declarations that its purpose was to absorb and assimilate French Canada into a properly British colony. In renaming Lower and Upper Canada as Canada East and Canada West and fusing them together under a single parliament, the Colonial Office hoped to see the anglophone majority take firm control. It did not happen. Under responsible government, the provincial Parliament became the forum in which the political power of the francophone minority of what is now Canada was permanently established. In retrospect, the reason seemed obvious to anyone who could count votes: Canada East had half the seats in the assembly of the new union, and most of those depended on francophone votes. Minority status encouraged the francophones, much more than their anglophone neighbours, to vote as a cohesive bloc. As a result, Canada East was never much more than one vote away from a working majority.
    As soon as the union of the Canadas was formed in 1841, reform strategists in Canada West grasped that an alliance with Canada East was their sure and only route to power, and the man they hadto talk to was Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine. LaFontaine had seen in the assembly a forum in which to defend