(North) American Ingenuity
How a good 250-year-old law made a good neighbor
Over the long weekend—yesterday was Thanksgiving Day in Canada—my son and I had the pleasure of visiting the world-class city of Montreal. Wouldn’t you know, I felt like I was visiting a foreign country: different language (though the French spoken there is markedly unlike what you’d hear in Paris), different currency (yes dollars, though different value), and different measurements (100km is 60 mph, n’est-ce pas?). Naturally, I spent most of my time in Old Town Montreal, enchanted by its colonial-era buildings. The highlight of the trip was a stint at Château Ramezay, the home of the city’s governor Claude de Ramezay (1657-1724), who built it in 1705. The site is now a superb museum and garden that vividly evokes multiple aspects of early Montreal from a variety of race, class, and gender perspectives.
As I went through the exhibits (including an intriguing one about the fruitless 1776 visit of Benjamin Franklin, who could not convince Canadians to join the Revolutionary War effort), I found myself struck by repeated references to the Quebec Act, a British law that went into effect in 1774. Provincial that I am, I always considered it a forgettable part of the package known by Americans known as the Intolerable Acts implemented after the Boston Tea Party. While I’ve tended to focus on the Boston Port Act (which shut down the city’s trade) or the Massachusetts Government Act (which placed the colony under martial law), it was the Quebec Act that had the most lasting significance. It had two related purposes: the first was to secure the loyalty of territory recently acquired in the French and Indian War, and the second (perhaps more importantly at the time) was to check overweening American influence/aggression. The law essentially reassured the French-speaking population of the province by removing Protestantism from the imperial oath of allegiance, allowing the Catholic Church to retain its taxing privileges, maintaining the French civil code, and granting the province a measure of self-government through a legislative council.
Whatever one may feel about the different aspects of the law—the Catholic Church is not typically regarded as a benevolent political force in European power politics—it’s hard not to conclude that the Quebec Act was a simply brilliant piece of statecraft that secured the loyalty of Canada for the next century. (And beyond: the nation remains part of the British Commonwealth.) To at least some extent, England learned from its American experience and implemented changes that allowed it to prosper even after revolutionary defeat. Over time, Canada Anglicized—particularly the large piece of it known as Upper (primarily English-speaking) Canada, distinct from Francophone Lower Canada). But Quebec has remained resolutely distinct culturally, even as it was integrated politically into the nation. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Montreal was smaller than Quebec City, but with the coming of industrialization, the latter came into its own as a rail and riverine link with the American Midwest. While now smaller as a port than Pacific Rim Vancouver, Montreal is a thoroughly modern city in its diversity, vitality, and sophistication. Unsuccessfully invaded twice by the Americans in 1775 and again in 1812, it stands as a monument of enlightened administration, True North proud and free.
