The date of February 10 should prompt an instant reminder to the political class that sits in the National Assembly. As Robert Comeau pointed out, three significant moments in our history are associated with it. 1763: Treaty of Paris by which France ceded Canada to England. 1838: “temporary” suspension of the 1791 Constitution authorizing the establishment of a People’s House of Assembly. 1841: proclamation of United Canada by Governor General Poulett Thomson following the favorable vote of the Special Council made up of 22 hand-picked members. These three events with a high symbolic charge were sealed on February 10.
A unique and little-known document refers in particular to the date of February 10, 1838: the “secret and confidential” dispatch of August 9, 1838 signed by the British High Commissioner Lord Durham. This document is exceptional because of the very nature of the data it contains: they are obviously the responsibility of the intelligence services and the army with regard to the exact causes of the outbreak of a “national conflict which ended in civil war”.
The confidential data contained therein are such that Durham even leaves it to the discretion of the Secretary of State for the Colonies to censor those which appear to him too embarrassing (if not compromising) for parliamentarians and English public opinion, subjugated by the appeals for Anglo-Saxon racial solidarity launched loudly by the Tory and ultra-Tory press of Montreal in the face of the specter of the incessant creation of a “French-Canadian republic” on the banks of the St. Lawrence.
It took almost 100 years to find the unredacted version thanks to the copy that Durham himself had kept. But it remains largely unknown.
A rigorous contextualization of this dispatch is essential. Faced with the high probability of a resumption of the Canadian “civil war” at the time when Durham wrote it, this dispatch makes it possible to specify that the fundamental issue of the conflict bears precisely, according to him, on the uncertain fate of the House of Assembly (the prototype of the current National Assembly). London’s suspension measure was originally intended to be temporary. In his project of federal institutions, Durham had moreover provided for their reactivation.
From 1838 to 1841, “moderates” (or “vire-capots”) such as La Fontaine, Bleury or John Neilson still expected his reinstatement, in agreement with English “radicals” such as W. Molesworth or JS Mill, according to whom London had proceeded no more and no less than “the confiscation of the free constitution of a people by sweeping away the recognized principles of constitutional government”.
However, gauging the possibility of the restoration of the representative body of the Canadians, Durham puts in the balance the diktat of the leaders of what he calls the “British party” of Montreal (at the head of which is the military commander Colborne) and glosses this (the passage in bold has been censored):
“I have been assured that the chiefs and their followers, from the first to the last, are in the habit of declaring that at a new enslavement to the French [voulant dire par là : plutôt que de voir une autre majorité canadienne à l’Assemblée], they would much prefer a union with the United States; and that if the imperial government let them down [j’emploie leurs propres termes], [ils] would know how to find the means to take themselves in hand. »
Dispatched to London to defend the cause of the English-speaking community, the Moffatt-Badgley duo of the Montreal business lobby had already pleaded the cause of the repeal of “a separate French government” on April 5, 1838. that the existence of a separate French government would not be tolerated on the North American continent, we must candidly say to Your Lordship [Durham] our unshakeable conviction that the provincial inhabitants of British origin in Lower Canada are resolved not to submit any longer than they might be forced to do so [je souligne] to the predominant power of French-Canadian ancestry due to which the Province’s resources were tainted and its progression on the ladder of colonial growth, retarded […] »
Also juggling with the risk of renewing a “Canadian majority” in the Assembly, Governor Craig, in 1810, had not gone too far. “The first and most obvious remedy that presents itself is to deprive them [les Canadiens] of the constitution, as they call it, that is, of that representative part of the government which was no doubt given to them prematurely. »
At the time of the union project of 1822, James Stuart had also perfectly discerned that “it is not without reason that French Canadians designate themselves as the Canadian Nation, in anticipation of the future national character with which they will be imprinted. and of the high destinies which await them as a separate and independent people”.
“Another Canadian majority in the assembly”—such is, then, as Nancy Christie has seen (The Formal and Informal Politics of British Rule in Post-Conquest Quebec. 1760-1837: A Northern Bastille)the common thread that innervated the political thought of the English-speaking bourgeois of Montreal in the making for the entire period 1791-1841.
February 10. A simple date, of course, in “homogeneous and empty time”, but which covers a well-rooted living memory that can reveal new horizons.