The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.1964, Page 49

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
47
VIEWS OF CONFEDERATION
by Richard Daignault
The following is one of a series of
articles on Confederation which have
appeared in Canadian Scene, an organ-
ization with headquarters in Toronto
devoted to the task of writing short
and timely articles on phases of Can-
adian history with emphasis on the
present scene. The editor is Ruth
Gordon of Toronto.
*
From the Treaty of Versailles in
1763, by which Canada became a Bri-
tish Colony, to the establishment of
Canadian Confederation in 1867,
guaranteeing Quebec a large degree of
self-government in its own internal af-
fairs, is a short span of 104 years.
There were only 65,000 Frenchmen in
America in 1763, but they had grown
to close to 1,000,000 by 1867.' How
did this group of French-speaking
people, surrounded by a fast-growing
English-speaking society, manage to
salvage not only its language and its
religion but also its institutions, its
civil laws, its system of education, the
organization of the parish, and even
its professions? Above all, how did it
manage to obtain an important meas-
ure of political control? The hard
core of French Quebec’s successful sur-
vival was fierce pride in its traditions.
If one considers the miracle of the
survival of French-speaking Acadians
in the Maritime Provinces, in spite of
the cruel fate which history inflicted
upon them, one might readily conclude
that the unbending character of the
French settler was the essential guaran-
tee of his survival. But history is
tricky. Quebec was to benefit from its
quirks.
The course of history, in 1763, was
only 12 years away from the cataclysm
of violent revolution in the United
States, and 26 years away from a deep-
er upheaval in France; the world was
on the brink of an era of social revol-
ution. Quebec found itself removed
from this change, not in the sense that
it was as a moth in a cocoon, but it
was in the shelter of an English colony
loyal to the institutions of monarchy.
It had no real leaders other than its
clergy, royalist by tradition and French
by culture. They advocated a French
policy that would safeguard religion,
language and traditional institutions.
While the clergy fought every attempt
by the new government to assimilate
the French, it urged Quebecers to fight
in defense of the British Crown;
French-Canadians helped repel the
American invasion of Canada during
the American revolution, and perform-
ed similarly during the War of 1812
between the United States and Can-
ada. Meanwhile, the English author-
ities accorded Quebec the right to
write a French Civil Code of its own
and elect members to the legislature.
But soon, in Upper and Lower Can-
ada, voices were raised against excess-
ive privileges of the English Crown.
Greater control over spending of pub-
lic funds was the demand in both Eng-
lish and French Canada. This talk was
repressed by the authorities and the
movement for more democratic govern-
ment took on the aspect of a rebellion.
In Quebec, the leader of the fight for
complete parliamentary control of
public funds by the elected deputies
was Louis-Joseph Papineau whose re-
publican ideas fired the imagination