Joint Premiers of The Province of Canada

Joint Premiers of the Province of Canada were the leaders of the Province of Canada, from the 1841 unification of Upper Canada and Lower Canada until Confederation in 1867.

Following the abortive Rebellions of 1837, Lord Durham was appointed governor in chief of British North America. In his 1839 Report on the Affairs of British North America, he recommended that Upper and Lower Canada be united under a single Parliament, with responsible government. As a result, in 1841, the first Parliament of the Province of Canada was convened.

Although Canada East (the former Lower Canada, now Quebec) and Canada West (the former Upper Canada, now Ontario) were united as a single province with a single government, each administration was led by two men, one from each half of the province. Officially, one of them at any given time had the title of Premier, while the other had the title of Deputy. Says Canadian journalist Colby Cosh: "In truth, one or the other was ordinarily recognized as the formal head of government: the Macdonald-Cartier ministry was at times a Cartier-Macdonald ministry, for example, as the first ministership switched from the proto-Ontarian to the proto-Quebecker."

This form of government proved to be fractious and difficult, leading to frequent changes in leadership — in just 26 years, the joint premiership changed hands eighteen times, with twenty different people holding the office over the course of its history.

With the introduction of responsible government in 1848, Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine became the first truly democratic leaders of what would eventually become the provinces of Ontario and Quebec in present-day Canada, and some modern historians, most notably John Ralston Saul, have promoted the idea that they should be viewed as Canada's true first Prime Ministers.