The Constitutional Act (often called the Canada Act) was itself very much a product of “Ontario” developments. By the late 1780s Loyalists settling along the upper St. Lawrence and Lower Lakes had planted a new and mainly English-speaking community in what were then the western districts of Quebec. True, some newcomers to this area had Gaelic or German or other first languages, while there were also small numbers of French inhabitants who had settled there earlier and there were native peoples within this region as well. Yet the Loyalists shaped a society very different from the long-established French-Canadian world to the east. They wanted English laws, rights to land ownership, local administration and government such as they had known in the former British colonies, not the French civil law, seigneurial system of landholding and rule by a distant governor and appointed council that they had found in a mainly Francophone province, a system guaranteed to it, in fact, by Britain’s own Quebec Act of 1774.

Weighing this problem, British officials in London, by 1790, had drafted a bill to create two separate Canadas, each having representative government with an elected assembly of its own. An overwhelmingly French Lower Canada would keep the special terms of the Quebec Act, but Upper Canada could obtain English laws and institutions, particularly freehold tenure (that is, full land ownership). The proposed bill went to parliament at Westminster in March 1791, receiving royal assent in June of the same year as the Constitutional Act.

Basically the Constitutional Act of 1791 created a legislature or parliament for the new province of Upper Canada. The new province would have an appointed upper house (the Legislative Council) and a representative chamber (the Legislative Assembly) to be elected at least every four years. Council members sat for life; there was even a provision, never acted upon, to make them a hereditary body like the British House of Lords. Members of the Assembly, as in Britain’s House of Commons, would be chosen either for counties (rural areas) by the old English “forty-shilling freehold franchise” or would hold town seats where voters had to either own property worth five pounds yearly or pay rent worth ten pounds per annum. The Act also made mention of the Executive Council, traditionally a small group of the governor’s chief advisors and administrators. Yet this somewhat indefinite ancestor of a cabinet depended heavily on the governor’s own ample powers: its functions were not spelled out in the way that those of the law-making, tax-providing legislative units were. The Act itself was largely seen as transferring the free, time-honoured British parliamentary system to colonies overseas where it was to root and flourish in Ontario soil.

This was, however, rather a conservative sort of transfer, made during the conservative-minded era in which Britain had recently experienced the American Revolution and now faced the upsurge of the French Revolution in Europe. As a result the Constitutional Act sought to buttress order and stability against any dangers of popular excess: the public irresponsibility and licence presumably roused by radicals and demagogues, the lawless seizures and mob violence that Loyalists might all too well recall. Thus the new Legislative Assembly, though broadly based, was to be checked by a select, solidly entrenched Legislative Council. The governor would still hold considerable financial power under his own control. And the firm hand of organized religion would be sustained in Upper Canada through the system of clergy reserves provided in the Act whereby an amount of crown land equal to one-seventh of that granted out was to be set aside to support “a Protestant clergy.”

This planned endowment of the Protestant religion from clergy-reserve rents or sales was in many ways a counterpart to the state support already given to Catholicism in French Canada where the Quebec Act had legally required the payment of tithes to a strongly dominant Roman Catholic Church. But while Upper Canada was chiefly and increasingly Protestant in faith, it had no such single main church. The reserves, nevertheless, were assigned to the Anglican Church, which was state-established back in England: indeed, the Act also provided local “rectories” specifically for Church of England ministers and parsons. Yet all this left out Presbyterians whose own mother church was state-established in Scotland, not to mention popular and growing Methodism as well as other Protestant bodies thriving in Upper Canada. Hence the system of clergy reserves promised problems for the future.

When the Act took effect, however, the clergy land provisions caused no great concern in Upper Canada where a huge supply of other Crown land remained freely available. Nor did the conservative cast of the statute much trouble the Loyalist residents of that day who maintained their own staunch allegiance to the Crown and the British constitution and regarded American claims of democracy as expressing the same detested republicanism that had loosed anarchy and suffering upon them. These sturdily venturing pioneers were not lacking in self-reliance or a sense of their individual worth, but they earnestly believed in a stable, ordered, British parliamentary system. They would also believe in the lieutenant governor soon sent to put it into operation: the former commander of the Loyalist Queen’s Rangers during the American Revolution, Colonel John Graves Simcoe.

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A professional British soldier, Simcoe had served in the Revolutionary War right from 1775, had been repeatedly wounded and for a time had been a prisoner of war. He was also a strong and able commander, who made his Queen’s Rangers, initially drawn from New York and Connecticut Loyalists, a highly efficient fighting force full of battle honours and devoted to their leader. When invalided home at the close of the conflict, Simcoe himself did not forget his Loyalist comrades. In 1784, recently married, he and his young wife Elizabeth settled down on an estate at Wolford, Devon. He published a history of the campaigns of the Queen’s Rangers and still hoped to redeem the cause of his “cherished soldiers.” Thus he began discussions with government figures in London, urging that “the miserable feudal system of old Canada” be done away with and offering his services there “in preference to any other situation.”

In 1790 Simcoe entered parliament, and so was present as the Constitutional Act moved forward. He also proposed to the British government that a new Rangers corps be raised for Canadian duty to help clear and build, as well as defend, the new country that was developing fast inland. Eventually proposals and discussions led to the official decision by which, on September 12, 1791, he was formally commissioned first governor of a largely Loyalist Upper Canada. It was a most important choice. Accustomed to command, this seasoned military man, still only 39, could be imperious, stiff-necked and aggressive, but he cared deeply about Upper Canada and its pioneer community. His mind teemed with enthusiastic plans and projects — not always practicable, yet remarkably effective over all. In sum, Simcoe’s driving energy, determination and commitment left marks on Upper Canada — Ontario — that endure today.

It was well into November 1791 when the governor-to-be, his wife, little daughter Sophia, and baby son Francis, landed at Quebec after a long Atlantic passage in a naval frigate. The Constitutional Act was not to go into force until December 26, by which time navigation up the St. Lawrence was definitely closed.

Simcoe could only legally be sworn into his new office before a quorum of his provincial Executive Council. Thus he also had to await the arrival from Britain of William Osgoode, named as his Chief Justice, and Peter Russell, his Receiver-General, neither of whom was able to reach Canada until the next June. But the governor-in-waiting used his unavoidable delay in Lower Canada busily and well, learning in depth about the province, consulting with Lower Canada authorities in both Quebec and Montreal, and drafting policies and designs which showed that Simcoe, for all his enthusiasms, planned his projects in careful detail.

Most of these can best be discussed later, yet one action of vital significance needs noting now: his call, issued in his proclamation of February 7, 1792, for new settlers to come from the United States to Upper Canada. It offered basic free grants of 200-acre lots in return for undertaking to farm and improve them — and an oath of loyalty to the Crown. Simcoe, in brief, believed that there were many of Loyalist sympathies still in the American republic who would be eager to emigrate back to their true allegiance. That was the way he had felt about his own “cherished soldiers”; and this was an invitation for any faithful to return, to find new homes, security and contentment in a model British province, which is assuredly what Simcoe wanted Upper Canada to be.