Protest Petition Against the Act of Union, Documents Relating to the Constitutional History of Canada, 1819-1828

[Numerous petitions opposed The Act of Union.]

We proceed humbly to state our objections to an union of the Legislators of the Canadas on any terms.

The population of this province is chiefly composed of subjects, who have emigrated from Great Britain and Ireland, or from His Majesty’s late American colonies and their descendants, who from a sameness of origin, language, customs, and government, easily unite, commix and become one people.

While His Majesty’s subjects, our brethren of Lower Canada, sprung from a distinct origin, speak a different language, profess a different form of religion, are wedded to their own peculiar manners and customs, and each Legislature having enacted, adopted and retained laws suitable to their own usages, customs and local wants; and these two provinces having been separated into different governments for more than thirty years; your petitioners do not believe that two bodies so heterogeneous and discordant in all their parts as the Legislatures of Upper and Lower Canada must necessarily be, can unite cement and become one so as to render equal advantages to both, which each has a right to expect from its own separate Legislature; and, if an ascendancy should be given to the representation of Upper Canada over that of Lower Canada, to which we do not feel entitled from our population it would be offering injustice to our brethren of the Lower province, with whom, we have no desire to quarrel nor by any measure to break in upon their rights and peace; and should the advantage be on the part of Lower Canada we must be at their mercy, and we have no right to expect that attention to our interests which our wants and circumstances require, the only ground of difference heretofore existing between us being on account of our quota of revenue, which having been put in an amicable train of adjustment by the prompt and timely interference of the British Parliament and His Majesty’s government, at once does away with every semblance of reasonable argument, that might be offered by those anxious for a reunion: and also the extent of territory would be so great, that were it inhabited by the same people throughout, it must necessarily present such varied local interests that, the wants of some parts of so extensive a colony will be more liable to suffer from neglect, from ignorance or from clashing interests, than a less extent of territory would be.

To sum up all, your petitioners are of opinion that the different origin of the population of the two provinces, the difference of their languages, habits, manners, customs and religions, together with their varied interests, will necessarily produce efforts for ascendancy, create jealousies, strifes animosities and contentions, which may break out in consequences of an alarming nature, and all, without answering any one desirable object, which we can foresee, or that may balance the least of the evils that appear to us so obvious.—Wherefore we His Majesty’s faithful subjects most earnestly beseech your honorable House to abstain from placing us in a situation so perilous, so contrary to our wishes, and as we fear, so destructive of our best interests, and that your honorable House would forbear passing the said or any other Bill, of a like nature into a law for uniting the Legislatures of Upper and Lower Canada, at any future session of the Imperial Parliament.