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This could become a serious wedge between Canada and Quebec

This, Durham blindly assumed, was what they wished, was the cause of the minor rebellion (little more than a few rowdies in a bar north of Toronto, and the florid tracts of some Quebec pamphleteers) and would be a form of liberation for French Canadians. Durham was quickly fired for exceeding his jurisdiction, but his report was implemented and Quebec and Ontario were united. Fortunately, the leaders of the two communities, Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, ignored the nonsense about assimilation and worked closely together to gain responsible government — legislative autonomy in everything except defence and foreign affairs and external trade, and to secularize the University of Toronto and open a great deal of land reserved to the Church of England for non-sectarian development. These were great causes in the day, and on their achievement, Baldwin and LaFontaine, having accomplished their purposes, graciously retired, selfless public servants, like Cincinnatus and Washington. Their places were shortly taken by John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier and George Brown to bring on Confederation (and restore the provinces of Quebec and Ontario).

Photo by Ashley Fraser/Postmedia News

Confederation accorded authority over property and civil rights to the provinces and ever since there have been frictions intermittently over the English Common Law defence of individual rights and the French Civil Law tradition of putting the collective rights of society on vital issues ahead of the rights of individuals, which are otherwise as respected as they are in common law jurisdictions. The Anglo-Saxon view that rights must be universal to individuals, even opposite the state, other than in extreme and temporary emergencies, sometimes collides with the Quebec traditional view that it is nonsense to allow official promotion of rights to be abused by people who agitate for systems of belief and government that suppress rights. This issue arose with Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis’ Padlock Law, which allowed the provincial police to close buildings where communist literature was published for up to a year and impound subversive materials. It was a publicity stunt that was only resorted to a few times between its adoption in 1937 and the determination by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1957 that while it was within the provincial jurisdiction of civil rights, it trespassed in the federal jurisdiction of criminal law (although the penalties involved did not extend to imprisonment and the offence was not designated a crime).