Origins
On recommendation from Lord Grenville, British Home Secretary, appointments were made to the Executive and Legislative Council of Upper Canada. The Councils were intended to operate independently. Section 38 of the Constitutional Act of 1791 referred to the independence of the offices indirectly. This indirect reference is the birth of the Compact. While Sir Guy Carleton lieutenant governor of Lower Canada pointed out that the offices were intended to be separate, Lord Grenville set the wheels in motion with John Graves Simcoe lieutenant governor of Upper Canada by pointing out that there was no legal impediment to prevent cross-appointments. Simcoe used the vague statement in Section 38 to make the following appointments
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Fully developed after the War of 1812, the Compact lasted until Upper and Lower Canada were united in 1841. In Lower Canada, its equivalent was the Château Clique. The influence of the Family Compact on the government administration at different levels lasted to the 1880s. The Family Compact controlled the government through the Executive Council and Legislative Council, the advisers to the Lieutenant Governor, leaving the popularly elected Legislative Assembly with little real power. Members ensured their conservative friends held the important positions in the colony through political patronage.
The centre of the Compact was Toronto, then called York. Its most important member was Bishop John Strachan; many of the other members were his former students, or people who were related to him. The most prominent of Strachan's pupils was Sir John Beverley Robinson who was from 1829 the Chief Justice of Upper Canada for 34 years. The rest of the members were mostly descendants of United Empire Loyalists or recent upper-class British settlers.
The role of speculation in the vacant lands of Upper Canada ensured the development of group solidarity and cohesion of interest among the members of the Family Compact. Of the 26 largest landowners in Peel County between 1820 and 1840, 23 were absentee proprietors, of whom 17 were involved in the administration of the province; of these 17, 12 were part of the Family Compact. Society and politics in Upper Canada were dominated by interest and connection based on landed property, and only secondarily affected by ideologies and personalities.
Read more about this topic: Family Compact
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