The Province of Quebec

Following the war, Great Britain renamed the colony the “Province of Quebec.” The French-speaking Catholic people, known as habitants or Canadiens, strove to preserve their way of life in the English-speaking, Protestant-ruled British Empire.

A Tradition of Accomodation

To better govern the French Roman Catholic majority, the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act of 1774. One of the constitutional foundations of Canada, the Quebec Act accommodated the principles of British institutions to the reality of the province. It allowed religious freedom for Catholics and permitted them to hold public office, a practice not then allowed in Britain. The Quebec Act restored French civil law while maintaining British criminal law.

United Empire Loyalists

In 1776, the 13 British colonies to the south of Quebec declared independence and formed the United States. North America was again divided by war. More than 40,000 people loyal to the Crown, called “Loyalists,” fled the oppression of the American Revolution to settle in Nova Scotia and Quebec.
Joseph Brant led thousands of Loyalist Mohawk Indians into Canada. The Loyalists came from Dutch, German, British, Scandinavian, Aboriginal and other origins and from Presbyterian, Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, Jewish, Quaker, and Catholic religious backgrounds. About 3,000 black Loyalists, freedmen and slaves, came north seeking a better life. In turn, in 1792, some black Nova Scotians, who were given poor land, moved on to establish Freetown, Sierra Leone (West Africa), a new British colony for freed slaves.

Picture: (From Left to Right) Count Frontenac refused to surrender Quebec to the English in 1690, saying: “My only reply will be from the mouths of my cannons!” Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, was a great hero of New France, winning many victories over the English, from James Bay in the north to Nevis in the Caribbean, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Sir Guy Carleton (Lord Dorchester), as Governor of
Quebec, defended the rights of the Canadiens, defeated an American military invasion of Quebec in 1775, and supervised the Loyalist migration to Nova Scotia and Quebec in 1782-83.

The Beginnings of Democracy

Democratic institutions developed gradually and peacefully. The first representative assembly was elected in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1758. Prince Edward Island followed in 1773, New Brunswick in 1785. The Constitutional Act of 1791 divided the Province of Quebec into Upper Canada (later Ontario), which
was mainly Loyalist, Protestant and English-speaking, and Lower Canada (later Quebec), heavily Catholic and Frenchspeaking.

The Act also granted to the Canadas, for the first time, legislative assemblies elected by the people. The name Canada also became official at this time and has been used ever since. The Atlantic colonies and the two Canadas were known collectively as British North America.

Picture: The first elected Assembly of Lower Canada, in Qubec City, debates whether to use both French and English, January 21, 179