The Burning of the Parliament Building in Montreal by Joseph Legare in 1849.Courtesy of the McCord Museum, Montreal
Roy MacSkimming is author of the novels Laurier in Love and Macdonald.
It’s just possible that the United States, at a tipping point politically, could learn something from the Canadian experiment.
With the anniversary of the Capitol Hill insurrection approaching, Americans are in a distressing place. Three retired U.S. Army generals recently published a startling op-ed in The Washington Post. Their warning: “We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time.”
If former president Donald Trump runs again in 2024 and loses, the generals fear another armed insurrection, this time backed by rogue elements in the American military. “It is not outlandish,” they wrote, “to say a military breakdown could lead to civil war.”
On the same day, the Post ran a column discussing How Civil Wars Start, a forthcoming book by political scientist Barbara F. Walter, an adviser to the Central Intelligence Agency. Ms. Walter believes that the U.S. is closer to civil war than people realize and “has entered very dangerous territory.” After Mr. Trump it is an “anocracy,” somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state. “We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy,” Ms. Walter writes. “That honour is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand and then Canada.”
Canadians have never suffered the ravages of civil war. But before feeling smug, we should consider what happened here in the dark month of April, 1849, 18 years before Confederation, when we had our own violent insurrection.
It occurred in Montreal, then capital of colonial Canada, consisting of the future Quebec and future Ontario. It began with a bitter political conflict conducted through parliamentary argument. On April 25, passionate language boiled over and spilled into the streets. Demagogues inflamed a mob of several thousand. Brandishing torches and chanting slogans, they marched on the undefended legislature.
Parliament was in session. Without warning the mob smashed down the doors and stormed the chamber. The legislators fought back, throwing punches and hurling books and ink bottles at their assailants. They were hopelessly outnumbered. One hooligan seized the mace, another occupied the Speaker’s chair. The mob was in possession of the House.
Soon the wooden building was ablaze. Within hours the great structure had burned to the ground.
What triggered this appalling assault on democracy? Fundamental to 19th-century Canadian society was cultural and political division based on what was then called “race” – the divide between francophones, largely Roman Catholic, and anglophones, whose political class was largely Protestant. Resentments, even hatreds, between the two “races” marred their co-existence.
In 1849 that ugly side of our politics erupted over a piece of legislation known as the Rebellion Losses Bill. The bill compensated property owners in Quebec for damages suffered during the 1837 Rebellion, the brief failed attempt to achieve independence from Britain. It was introduced by the Reform government of Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, an English-French coalition. Scandalized, the Conservative opposition charged that the legislation would reward treason by benefiting Patriote rebels whose property had been damaged when they took up arms.
Baldwin and LaFontaine were implementing a new form of governance based on the will of the people’s representatives. Innocuously termed “responsible government,” this was in fact a giant step toward democracy and nationhood. Even the British government and Canada’s governor-general, Lord Elgin, supported the principle. But the opposition feared it would result in “French domination.” Their loudest spokespersons were extreme Tory MPs and the Montreal Gazette, whose rhetoric ignited the burning of Parliament.
Mob rule continued in Montreal for days, damaging Reformers’ homes and provoking lethal shootings. But as described by John Ralston Saul in his study of LaFontaine and Baldwin, the two leaders met the violence with cool resolve. They insisted that Parliament reconvene the morning after the terrible fire to continue the work of democracy. And they refused to resort to calling out the military against their adversaries.
Another outcome had enduring consequences for our democracy. Learning from the violence of 1849, moderate Conservatives saw an urgent need to reconstitute their party on a more inclusive and national basis. Adapting the Baldwin-LaFontaine model, John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier persuaded their followers to embrace the “other” as then understood in Canada. They created a large-tent party bridging the divides of language, religion and region. That paradigm has governed the country ever since.
So the former oldest continuous democracy could learn a self-evident truth from its northern neighbour. Political polarization is corrosive and ultimately incompatible with a democratic state. But like a recovering addict, a nation can recover from its excesses and restore its political equilibrium.
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