In 1779[1] William Black, born in England but raised in Nova Scotia was converted to Methodism and commenced evangelizing in the Maritimes, his work falling under the supervision of the British Wesleyan Methodist Church in 1800.

[2] Under the leadership of William Losee, meanwhile, the Methodist Episcopal Church in the US, established on Christmas Day in 1784, began work in 1791 among British immigrants to Upper Canada.

This lattermost union made the Methodist Church the largest Protestant denomination in Canada.

The Methodist Church with its notable benefactors the Eaton and Massey families was the sponsor of Victoria College at the University of Toronto, once and still a mainstay of intellectual rigour at that university, and the alma mater of many of Canada's leaders and most famous thinkers.

[citation needed] Although Methodists were never a majority of anglophone Canadians or even Torontonians, they exerted significant political and social influence in southern Ontario, particularly in Toronto.