[1] A noted Reform politician, he is best known as the founder and editor of the Toronto Globe, Canada's most influential newspaper at the time, and his leadership in the founding of the Liberal Party in 1867.

The following year, Brown's mother and sisters immigrated to New York and the family lived in a rented home on Varick Street.

This changed when the governor-general of the province, Charles Metcalfe, prorogued the Reform-dominated Canadian assembly when several Reform politicians resigned from the government.

[17] In the subsequent weeks, Banner published editorials that disputed political accusations against Reformers and called for unity behind Liberal candidates in future elections.

[20] Although George was focused on politics, he still wrote articles for the Banner and travelled in July to Kingston to report on the Canadian Synod for the Church of Scotland.

[23] Brown declined to run as a candidate because he wanted to help his father pay off his financial debts and focus on improving his newspapers.

[26] He discovered that a rival Reform newspaper called Pilot was selling copies at a lower rate and people did not want to subscribe to more than one paper.

[29] During the 1848 Province of Canada legislative election, Hincks was in Montreal attending to business concerns and did not go to Oxford county to campaign for his re-election as the constituency's representative.

[33] In the summer of 1848, Brown was appointed by the administration to lead a Royal Commission to examine accusations of official misconduct in the Provincial Penitentiary in Portsmouth, Canada West.

[36] In October 1853 The Globe started printing new issues daily and claimed that the paper had the largest circulation in British North America.

[2] In 1848, Reformers won the majority of seats in the Province of Canada legislature and an administration was formed with Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine serving as co-premiers.

[42] In April 1851, Brown ran in a byelection to represent Haldimand County in the Canadian parliament but lost to William Lyon Mackenzie.

[43] In the following session of parliament, Baldwin and Lafontaine announced their retirement from politics,[44] and Hincks assumed leadership of the western Reform movement.

[48] He also campaigned in support of representation by population, free trade agreements with British colonies and the United States, and the development of transportation infrastructures like rail lines and canals.

[2] Brown worked with his opposition colleagues, including former Clear Grit rivals, Reformers who abandoned Hincks, and the Parti Rouge, to criticise the governing coalition.

[56] In May 1855, the Canadian legislature passed a bill that allowed the creation of Roman Catholic-based separate school boards in Upper Canada.

[61] In 1856, John A. Macdonald accused Brown of falsifying evidence and coercing witnesses in the Royal Commission on the Kingston Provincial Penitentiary in 1848.

[64] Brown helped organize a political convention on January 8, 1857, to unite his followers with Clear Grits and Liberals who left the Hincks administration.

[73] On August 2, the parliament passed an amendment stating that they did not approve of the administration, and Brown asked Head to call a general election.

[79] In 1859 Brown and other Upper Canadian Reformers organised a convention in Toronto to discuss the governance of the province, in the hopes that agreeing to a unified policy would prevent divisions within the movement on the issue.

[85] Brown became sick in 1859 and its residual effects continued into 1860, exasperated by the stress of leading the Reform faction in parliament and growing financial concerns with his businesses.

[90] Although Conservative factions successfully won another majority of seats in the parliament, their position was weak and only a few votes against the government could cause it to be disbanded.

In March 1863 the constituency of South Oxford was to hold a byelection, and Reformers selected Brown as their candidate, even though he was unfamiliar with the riding's concerns.

Brown, MacDonald, Taché, and George-Étienne Cartier agreed to form an administration later called the Great Coalition to seek a federal union with the Atlantic provinces.

The conference accepted the proposal in principle and Brown attended subsequent meetings in Halifax, Nova Scotia and Saint John, New Brunswick to determine the details of the union.

"[99] Although he supported the idea of a legislative union at the Quebec Conference,[100] Brown was eventually persuaded to favour the federal view of Confederation, which was closer to that supported by Cartier and the Bleus of Canada East, as it was the structure that would ensure that the provinces retained sufficient control over local matters to satisfy the need of the French-speaking population in Canada East for jurisdiction over matters that it considered to be essential to its survival.

[2] In 1880 the Globe was also struggling financially as Brown paid for updating the newspaper's printing press in order to produce multi-page and machine-folded papers.

On March 25, 1880, a former Globe employee, George Bennett, burst into Brown's office; he was recently fired by a foreman and wanted a certificate that showed he had worked for the paper for five years.

Canadian historian J. M. S. Careless described the family's faith as further from the Calvinist interpretation of the bible and more closely followed the tenets of the evangelical movement of the 1800s.

He was part of the Elgin Association, a group of mostly Free Kirk people that purchased land in Kent county for escaped slaves to live on.