The Grandfathers of Confederation

The names of the Laurentian towns of Ste. Adele and Morin Heights commemorate a pivotal character in the history of Canada. Augustin-Norbert Morin refused to allow the town that was growing around his experimental farm to name it after him. Instead, they named it for his wife, Adèle Raymond. Morin was close to the end of his career, but he had been a perpetual witness and player in one of the most interesting periods of our history. First-born of eleven children on a farm in Saint-Michel-de-Bellechasse, he was a big, bright child but was plagued with health problems that did not allow him to work on the farm. The local priest encouraged his family to send him to the Seminaire de Québec, where his skills would help him become a priest.

During the 1790s, the decade before he was born, Great Britain divided their colony into two and gave it a constitution. Most of the French lived along the St. Lawrence River in the region they named Lower Canada and the territory to the west became Upper Canada. The new constitution was an attempt to endow the citizens of both Upper and Lower Canada with real rights, and it also included two separate assemblies that could speak for them. Its meaning was often understood more quickly by educated residents like lawyers Pierre-Stanislaus Bedard in Lower Canada and William Baldwin in Upper Canada.

The young Morin, a bright student barely 10 years old learning about the great martyrs of Catholic mythology, could not have missed the parallels in the real world beyond his seminary walls. After losing two successive elections to the Parti Canadien, in March 1810 Governor Sir James Henry Craig arrested the printer of Le Canadien and closed down the newspaper’s presses. The paper reflected the views of the Parti Canadien and Pierre-Stanislaus Bédard, its leader. Two years before, Craig had stripped the leaders of the party of their envied postings to the militia and voiced his concerns that these men were provocateurs. In fairness to Craig and the English elite, Napoleon was approaching the height of his power and radical ideas from the new republic to the south were still perceived as a threat to the stability of Great Britain’s remaining colonies. There were even rumours that the French, with the help of the Americans and certain Canadien supporters, were planning to take Canada back. The powerful British navy was also facing increased dependence upon the standing pine forests of the Ottawa Valley.

But Pierre-Stanislaus Bédard was a willing supporter of British power, seeing the constitution of 1791 that created Lower Canada as a sincere effort on the part of the imperial government to rule Canada fairly. He also believed the British would protect his land from the Americans and he held no illusions about the French. As early as 1792, he wrote of the Ancien Régime, the governance of New France, that “the people counted for nothing, or less than nothing. A [French] governor would have considered he was demeaning himself if he had let anyone contradict him in the slightest….” while under the English “…we now enjoy a constitution under which everyone has his place, and in which a man is something. The people have their rights; the powers of a governor are laid down and he knows them…” He continued to demonstrate his expectation of fair treatment and heralded the dawning of a new age even as he called upon the governor and the Tory elite to give more power to the elected Assembly. His argument was not with the imperial government, but with the Tories who surrounded the governor and told him only what they wanted him to hear. This Tory elite saw the Parti Canadien as a threat to the status quo. Among the demands that Bédard and others made was to have a member of the Assembly stationed in Great Britain to give the Colonial Office a direct line to the people and their issues.

Bédard’s power in the Assembly was limited to advising the Tory-dominated legislature and executive only when asked. If he was a radical it was through seeking the means of making his advice heard and of making the voice of the Assembly count. He was the first man to propose ministerial responsibility, an idea that would eventually produce responsible government in Canada, but in 1810 it was suppressed as dangerous.

Craig threw the three main leaders of the Parti Canadien into prison. He did not intend to bring them to trial so much as to intimidate them and force them to publicly recant. Two succumbed to the pressure – as much through illness and age perhaps – but Bédard insisted on a fair trial, forcing the governor to see that Bédard had confidence in the fairness of the courts. He insisted on publicly clearing his name. When Craig could not break him, he put pressure on Bédard’s brother, Abbé Jean-Charles Bédard, only to discover another obstinate Canadien insisting that the courts would see P.-S. Bédard for the honourable man that he was.

A full year later, in March 1811, the governor released Bédard, having failed to break him. The man must certainly have become something of a martyr in certain circles – especially in the mind of the young student, A.-N. Morin in the Petit Séminaire. Bédard was better than a martyr – he was a real-life hero.

Monsigneur McGuire directed his student into the Petit Séminaire de Québec, knowing that Morin could follow the curriculum without personal financial inconvenience. The young man could not be blamed if he saw in Bédard an inspiration much more romantic and relevant than the ancient Catholic saints who had stood up to Roman persecution long ago in a faraway land. The existence of such a leader must have guided Morin to choose law instead of the priesthood despite the huge financial challenges that decision presented. It is not surprising to discover that he found a posting at the offices of the resurrected Le Canadien in 1822. He was 19 years old.