Reform movement (Upper Canada)
Those who adopted these new forms of public mobilization for democratic reform in Upper Canada were inspired by the more radical Owenite Socialists who led the British Chartist and Mechanics Institute movements.
As demonstrations in support of Mackenzie were increasingly met with violence by Orangemen, he travelled to England to personally present his appeal in March 1832.
Its stated aim was to campaign for electoral reform of the House of Commons, "to be achieved by a general political union of the lower and middle classes of the people".
William Lyon Mackenzie was in London appealing his expulsion from the Upper Canadian Legislative Assembly to the Colonial Office at the time, and was present in the galleries of the British Parliament for the debate on the Reform Act 1832.
Disappointment about the refusal to include the working classes in the Great Reform Act 1832 led to a more protracted campaign for universal suffrage (known as Chartism) by the radical political unions.
[8] They called for adult male suffrage, the secret ballot, annual elections, equally sized electoral districts, as well as for salaries and the elimination of property qualifications for members of parliament.
To implement the Chartist plan, they called a series of mass meetings across the country in the summer of 1838 to select delegates to a "General Convention of the Industrious Classes".
The Upper Canada Central Political Union was organized in 1832–33 by Thomas David Morrison while William Lyon Mackenzie was in England.
[13] Although inspired by British examples, the Upper Canada Central Political Union was more radical than most reform organizations of the period.
This union collected 19,930 signatures by May 1833 on a petition protesting Mackenzie's unjust expulsion from the House of Assembly by the Family Compact.
In the absence of Mackenzie, the village of Hope (now Sharon), founded by the Children of Peace, a branch of Quakerism, became the new focus of reform activity.
[15] Mackenzie returned to Toronto from his London journey in the last week of August, 1833, to find his appeals to the British Parliament had been ultimately ineffective.
The three legs of the developing Reform movement were thus the political union, the Children of Peace and the Mechanics Institute; the Tories referred to it as the "Holy Alliance Hay Loft" in the market buildings.
[18] In January 1835, shortly after the elections, the Upper Canada Political Union was reorganized as the Canadian Alliance Society, with James Lesslie, a city Alderman, as president, and Timothy Parsons as secretary.
The Children of Peace immediately formed a branch of the Canadian Alliance Society in January 1835, and elected Samuel Hughes its president.
This was a source of loans for pioneer farmers hard pressed to meet expenses in bad years; its inspiration lay with the credit union formed by the Children of Peace in 1832.
The petitions were referred first to a select committee of the House of Assembly composed of Samuel Lount, Charles Duncombe, and Thomas D. Morrison; they drafted a bill, but the session ended before it could be enacted.
By March 1837, however, the more moderate reformers withdrew in disappointment with their electoral loss, leaving William Lyon Mackenzie to fill the political vacuum.
The Toronto Political Union called for a Constitutional Convention in July 1837, and began organizing local "Vigilance Committees" to elect delegates.
The meetings in the Home District met with an increasing degree of Orange Order violence, so that the reformers began to protect themselves and resort to arms to do so.
Historian Paul Romney has argued that the turn to "responsible government" was a strategy adopted by reformers in the face of charges of disloyalty to Britain in the wake of the Rebellions of 1837.
In his view, the ascendancy of Loyalism as the dominant political ideology of Upper Canada made any demand for democracy a challenge to colonial sovereignty.
Later, struggling to avoid the charge of sedition, the reformers purposefully obscured their true aims of independence from Britain and focused on their grievances against the Family Compact; responsible government thus became a "pragmatic" policy of alleviating local abuses, rather than a revolutionary anti-colonial moment.
[24] Ironically, it was not achieved until after Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine, the Premiers of the Canadas, shepherded the Rebellion Losses Bill through Parliament in 1849.
It sparked Orange riots, and the burning of the Parliament buildings as much of Europe was similarly engulfed in a wave of republican revolutions and counter-revolutions.
