The upper Canada district councils act of 1841 and British Colonial policy

Abstract

The transfer of ideas and institutions from the mother country to her colonies is a common process; but the enforced implantation of democratic forms of government by the orders of the Colonial Office might be considered odd enough to warrant close investigation. This article explores the origins of a district council concept in the English reforms of the 1830s and contemporary theories about colonies, and then examines in some detail the political context in which that idea was imposed upon Upper Canada as a means of furthering certain imperial objectives in settler colonies. Attempts to impose a similar system on Lower Canada, New Brunswick and New South Wales all failed, and some comments on these attempts are offered en passant. Canadian historians have noted the role of the district councils, introduced by Governor General Lord Sydenham in 1841, as beginning a process of devolution in Upper Canada that is usually held to have culminated in the Municipal Corporations Act of 1849 (the Baldwin Act, after the leading reformer).1 The provenance of the 1841 bill has not, however, been much explored. Some authors have perpetuated the incorrect notion that the Baldwin Act was the outcome of 'a long and bitter struggle to wrest from a reluctant [imperial] government the right of local self-rule';2 this may be an appropriate description for some aspects of colonial self-rule, but not for its subordinate local government division. Others view the present Ontario system as mainly borrowed from the United States;3 but this is at best very marginally true for the earlier nineteenth century, even if certain forms of city government in the twentieth century have borrowed from American patterns.