The association with the Family Compact and its underhanded practices made Reformers, including Mackenzie, regard the Bank of Upper Canada as a prop of the government.

The bank succeeded only because its promoters had the political influence to have that minimum reduced by half, and the provincial government subscribed for 2000 of its 8000 shares.

The lieutenant-governor appointed four of the bank's fifteen directors, making for a tight bond between the nominally private company and the state.

Despite the tight bonds, the Receiver General, the reform-leaning John Henry Dunn, refused to use the bank for government business.

He, like Strachan, played a key role in solidifying the Family Compact and ensuring its influence within the colonial state.

The overlapping membership on the boards of the Bank of Upper Canada and on the Executive and Legislative Councils served to integrate the economic and political activities of the church, state, and the "financial sector."

The overlapping memberships reinforced the oligarchic nature of power in the colony and allowed the administration to operate without any effective elective check.

"[5] William Lyon Mackenzie, the Reform politician and newspaper publisher, was the first to demonstrate the nature of that oligarchic power by showing that the government, its officers, and legislative councillors owned 5,381 of its 8,000 shares.

The Bank of Upper Canada at York (Toronto) had obtained its charter at the expense of the larger, more economically developed town of Kingston.

On 10 July 1832, President Andrew Jackson vetoed the bill for the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United States, arguing that it was utilized by a "moneyed aristocracy" to oppress the common man.

The dismantling of the bank plunged the Anglo-American world into an enormous depression (1836-8) that was worsened by bad wheat harvests in Upper Canada in 1836.

Shortly after its founding, Reform critic William Lyon Mackenzie published a series of articles on how speculative the Bank's loan practices were, and how close to bankruptcy it was.

That resulted in an event, now known as the Types Riot, in 1826 in which the clique of Bank officers dubbed the Family Compact destroyed Mackenzie's printing press.

Reformers tried several legislative strategies to get their own bank, including attempts to incorporate credit unions such as the Farmers' Storehouse company.

That came to an end in 1835 when Charles Duncombe produced a "Report on Currency" for the Legislative Assembly, which demonstrated the legality of the Scottish joint-stock bank system in Upper Canada.