Finally, it remained for a colonial government inquiry, the Bagot Commission, in what after 1840 was the united Province of Canada, to reformulate the assimilationist policy and detail the role of residential education in it. By the mid-1840s the Canadian State was ready to proceed with its policy of peaceful assimilation.

    Major Protestant church bodies were prepared to cooperate with the plan. The New England Company was already established near Brantford with its 'manual labor school,' which fit precisely into the assimilationist policy by removing Indian children from their homes and infusing them with Euro-Canadian learning, Christianity, and work skills appropriate to a settled, agricultural colony. The Methodists, too, by now had come to the conclusion that boarding schools were the only efficacious means of carrying their message to the Mississauga and other Indian groups to whom they had been ministering for decades.

    Surprisingly, perhaps, so were many of the Indians of what had formerly been Upper Canada, and after 1867 would be southern Ontario. In fact, indigenous support for education was understandable; Upper Canadian Indians recognized that changing circumstances in an age of agricultural immigration made it necessary that they acquire new skills. During the 1820s many Indian groups had asked for or agreed to accept day schools from the Methodists. In 1827 Ashagashe, a northern Ojibwa, had complained that the Americans were providing schooling to Indians in their territory, while the British were not.