George Brown (Canadian politician)

George Brown was born in Alloa, Clackmannanshire, Scotland, United Kingdom, on November 29, 1818. His father, Peter Brown, ran a wholesale business in Edinburgh and managed a glassworks in Alloa.[2] His mother was Marianne (née Mackenzie).[3] George was their eldest son; he had two older sisters, two younger sisters and four younger brothers, although three of the brothers died in infancy. He was baptised in St. Cuthbert's Chapel of Ease.[3] He lived in Alloa until he moved to Edinburgh before he turned eight.[2] He attended Royal High School, then transferred to the Southern Academy of Edinburgh.[4]

Upon graduation his father wanted George to attend university but George convinced his father to let him work in the family's business. He briefly lived in London to be taught by agents of the business before returning to Edinburgh.[5] He joined the Philo-Lectic Society of Edinburgh, where young men would meet and discuss topics in a parliamentary debate.[6] Brown's father also worked as a collector of assessments. Some of the funds he collected for the municipality were mixed with his business bank accounts, and in 1836 some of the funds in these accounts were lost in business speculations. Peter was not accused of corruption, but he sought to repair his reputation and recoup the lost funds. He attempted to collect from people he lent money to but was unable to after the onset of the economic depression in 1837. Peter decided to emigrate to New York City to seek business opportunities and rebuild his reputation.[7] George accompanied his father to North America, and they left Europe in May 1837.[8]

The Browns landed in New York in June 1837.[9] Peter opened a dry goods store on Broadway and George worked as his assistant. The following year, Brown's mother and sisters immigrated to New York and the family lived in a rented home on Varick Street.[10] When the store grew larger, George travelled to New England, upstate New York, and Canada to continue growing their business.[11] In July 1842 Peter published the first edition of a newspaper called the British Chronicle, which advocated a Whig-Liberal political ideology and published articles on British news and politics. As circulation increased in Canada, the paper devoted articles to the political news in the Province of Canada.[12] George became the paper's publisher in March 1843 and travelled to New England, upstate New York, and Canada to promote the paper. While in Canada, Brown spoke with politicians and editors in Toronto, Kingston, and Montreal. Brown might have also been writing articles for the paper; J.M.S. Careless, a historian, notes that a series of articles called "A Tour of Canada" were published in the same writing style of Brown's later articles while Brown was in Canada.[13]

Peter Brown supported the evangelical faction during the Disruption of 1843 within the Church of Scotland.[2] These members separated from the Church of Scotland in May 1843 and formed the Free Church of Scotland. While George was touring Canada, they asked him to present an offer to his father: to move publication of the British Chronicle to Upper Canada in exchange for a bond of $2500.[14] George supported the proposal, as he felt there were more opportunities to succeed in Canada.[2] He thought that there was hostility towards the paper in New York because of the paper's focus on Britain. Upon meeting Reform politicians in his travels through Canada, George felt that they would support his paper should it relocate to the province. George convinced his father to move to Canada and they published the last issue of the British Chronicle on July 22, 1843.[15]

December 2, 1845

George and Peter rented a storefront in Toronto and on August 18, 1843, they published the first edition a new paper called Banner. George managed the secular department of the newspaper, commenting on non-religious issues.[16] Banner initially did not commit to any political causes, although it supported many policies advocated by Reformers. This changed when the governor-general of the province, Charles Metcalfe, prorogued the Reform-dominated Canadian assembly when several Reform politicians resigned from the government. George published an editorial on December 15 that was critical of the governor-general's actions.[17] In the subsequent weeks, Banner published editorials that disputed political accusations against Reformers and called for unity behind Liberal candidates in future elections.[18]

In 1844, Reformers were concerned that Tories, in the upcoming election for the legislature of the Province of Canada, would appeal to the citizen's sense of loyalty to the British monarch and thus not vote for Reformers. They wanted to establish newspapers that would publish their ideas and offered Brown £250 (equivalent to £27,000 in 2021) to begin a new paper. In March, Brown published the first issue of The Globe as its editor and publisher.[19] Two months later, Brown bought a rotary press, the first press of this type used in Upper Canada. This purchase increased his printer's efficiency and allowed Brown to create a book publishing and printing office business.[20] Although George was focused on politics, he still wrote articles for the Banner and travelled in July to Kingston to report on the Canadian Synod for the Church of Scotland.[21] After the meeting, Brown sat on the committee of Free Kirks in Kingston who wanted to secede from the Church of Scotland.[22] In the fall, Brown campaigned for Reform candidates in communities surrounding Toronto. In Halton, Reformers asked Brown to convince one of the three Reform candidates to end their campaign as the county would only elect two candidates and Reformers did not want to split the vote; Brown convinced Caleb Hopkins to end his campaign.[23] Brown declined to run as a candidate because he wanted to help his father pay off his financial debts and focus on improving his newspapers.[24] Reformers were mostly unsuccessful in the election, with many prominent members not returning to the legislature.[25]

In the summer of 1845, Brown put his father in charge of The Globe and travelled to Southwestern Ontario to increase subscriptions to his paper.[26] He discovered that a rival Reform newspaper called Pilot was selling copies at a lower rate and people did not want to subscribe to more than one paper. Brown appealed to Reform leaders, who convinced Francis Hincks, the editor of Pilot, to raise the cost of his paper.[27] In October, Brown published the first edition of Western Globe in London, Canada West, which combined editorials from The Globe with local stories from the southwestern region.[28] In 1846, Brown began publishing the Globe semi-weekly, proclaiming that he was the first Reform-newspaper in Toronto to do so.[29]

During the 1848 Province of Canada legislative election, Hincks was in Montreal attending to business concerns and did not go to Oxford county to campaign for his re-election as the constituency's representative.[30] Brown spoke at the nomination meeting on Hincks's behalf and Hincks was successfully reelected.[31] Reformers won the majority of seats in the election to form an administration led by Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine.[32] In July 1848 Brown and his father closed the Banner to focus on expanding The Globe and their publishing business.[33]

In the summer of 1848, Brown was appointed by the administration to lead a Royal Commission to examine accusations of official misconduct in the Provincial Penitentiary in Portsmouth, Canada West.[34] The commission's report, drafted by Brown in early 1849, documented abuse within the penitentiary perpetrated by its staff members. He recommended changes in the jail's structure such as separating juvenile, first-time, and long-term prisoners and hiring prison inspectors.[35] While the commission was conducting its investigation, the prison's Board of Inspectors resigned and Brown, along with Adam Fergusson and William Bristow. Although initially volunteers, Brown and Bristow were later paid for their work, becoming the first government inspectors to be employed in this role.[36] In October 1853 The Globe started printing new issues daily and claimed that the paper had the largest circulation in British North America.[2]

In 1848, Reformers won the majority of seats in the Province of Canada legislature and an administration was formed with Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine serving as co-premiers.[37] By the following year, two factions formed among the Reformers over disagreements among secularising clergy reserves,[38] whether the Province of Canada should be annexed by the United States,[39] and how much influence should be given to Reformers who participated in the Upper Canada Rebellion.[40] Brown remained aligned with the Reform party while others split off to form the Clear Grit movement.[41] He joined the Toronto Anti-Clergy Reserves Association in May 1850 to advocate for the abolition of clergy reserves; he did not think French-Canadian reformers would support these measures, but thought that promoting this policy would prevent further Reform defections to the Clear Grits.[42]

In April 1851, Brown ran in a byelection to represent Haldimand County in the Canadian parliament but lost to William Lyon Mackenzie.[43] In the following session of parliament, Baldwin and Lafontaine announced their retirement from politics,[44] and Hincks assumed leadership of the western Reform movement. Hincks renewed his rivalry with Brown, criticising the Globe for opposing state support for religious institutions.[45] In the fall of 1851, Brown bought agricultural land in Kent county, Upper Canada, to begin work as a farmer.[46] Later that year, Reformers in Kent county, including Alexander Mackenzie and Archibald McKellar, encouraged Brown to run in the upcoming Canadian parliament election for the constituency of Kent county.[47] Brown accepted their offer and was nominated as a Reform candidate, even though he planned to campaign against the current Reform ministry's state support for religious institutions.[48] He also campaigned in support of representation by population, free trade agreements with British colonies and the United States, and the development of transportation infrastructures like rail lines and canals.[49] Brown won the election as an independent Reform candidate, defeating Arthur Rankin, the Reformer's ministry-approved candidate, and a Tory opponent.[50]

Brown supported an administration led by Hincks and Augustin-Norbert Morin as successors to the Baldin-Lafontaine government,[2] though he criticised the government for abandoning liberal ideals.[51] Brown worked to end state support for religious institutions, opposed government funding for a religious separate school system and endorsed representation by population in the legislature.[2] His newspaper, the Globe, still had widespread circulation and on October 1 started publishing every day as the Daily Globe to compete with other newspapers who had previously started to publish daily.[52] Brown's support deteriorated when scandals against Hincks were reported in the fall of 1853 and Brown toured Canada West, demanding new leadership for the Reform party.[53] For the 1854 general election, the constituency he represented was split into two and he decided to run in Lambton, as he was not confident that he could win the other Kent constitutency.[54] At the election's conclusion, Hincks formed a new Liberal-Conservative administration with Allan MacNab, causing Brown to become a member of the opposition.[2]

Brown worked with his opposition colleagues, including former Clear Grit rivals, Reformers who abandoned Hincks, and the Parti Rouge, to criticise the governing coalition. For these efforts, Brown assumed an unofficial role as one of the leaders of the opposition members.[55] He also bought two Grit-aligned newspapers and merged their staffs to his Globe paper.[56] In May 1855, the Canadian legislature passed a bill that allowed the creation of Roman Catholic-based separate school boards in Upper Canada. This was seen as French-Canadian encroachment into Upper Canadian matters, as the bill passed without the support of the majority of Upper Canadian parliamentarians. Brown used the event to campaign for representation by population, in which electoral districts would be divided so that each one contained a roughly equal number of electors.[57] Brown's pursuit of that goal of correcting what he perceived to be a great wrong to Canada West[58] was accompanied at times by stridently critical remarks against French Canadians and the power exerted by the Catholic population of Canada East over the affairs of a predominately anglophone and Protestant Canada West.[59] However, he did not want the dissolution of the Canadas as much of Canada West's trade went through Canada East along the St. Lawrence River, and splitting the union would give the eastern province control over the waterway before they entered Canada West.[60]

In 1855, Brown organised and provided the credit for the development of the town of Bothwell, in his constituency of Lambton, and set aside farmland for his own use.[61] In 1856, John A. Macdonald accused Brown of falsifying evidence and coercing witnesses in the Royal Commission on the Kingston Provincial Penitentiary in 1848.[62] A committee of inquiry produced a report that was non-committal of Brown's guilt.[63] Macdonald's accusations and subsequent investigation caused a political rivalry to deepen between Brown and Macdonald.[64]

Brown helped organize a political convention on January 8, 1857, to unite his followers with Clear Grits and Liberals who left the Hincks administration.[2] Brown served as one of the meeting's "joint secretaries of the local committee".[65] This convention marked the Reform party's transition away from a radicalism and towards a political ideology more closely aligned with the liberal ideology in Britain.[2] The meeting adopted a new political platform for Reformer that was mostly of the political positions of Brown and his newspaper.[66]

An election for the Parliament of the Province of Canada was held in November 1857.[2] Brown did not want to run for the seat in Lambton because its constituency concerns took up much of his time and he wanted to focus on Reform party matters. Brown accepted the candidacy nomination for North Oxford because it would have fewer constituency affairs and, since it often elected Liberal candidates, he could campaign for other Liberal candidates elsewhere in the province.[67] In Toronto, a petition circulated for Brown to run for one of its two seats. It was signed by groups that traditionally did not support Reform candidates, such as Orangemen, who felt that Conservative candidates were cooperating too much with French Canadians. Brown decided to run in both constituencies, focusing his attention on the Toronto campaign.[68] Brown was elected in both constituencies, and his Reformers won the majority of seats in Canada West.[69] His allies in the Parti Rouge were unsuccessful in Canada East and Brown returned to the legislature as an opposition member.[2]

After the election Brown met with Liberal political influencers from Canada East to discuss proposals for working together. Liberals in Canada West had conceded that they would need Canada East legislators to form a ministry and take control of the Canadian government. The Conservative Montreal Gazette newspaper reported that these meetings were proposals for an alliance, and Lower Canadians did not react particularly negatively to this. Topics such as representative by population, the creation of a federal government in Canada, and Catholic influence in government were discussed.[70]

In the legislative session after the election, Brown served as the de facto leader of the opposition.[71] On July 28, 1858, the cabinet of the Macdonald-Cartier administration resigned when the legislature rejected Ottawa as the new permanent capital of the province.[72] Edmund Walker Head, the governor-general of Canada, asked Brown to form a new administration. Brown did not have a majority of support in the legislature, and he negotiated a cabinet under a co-premiership with Antoine-Aimé Dorion.[73] The Brown-Dorion administration was rejected by the legislature on August 2. Brown resigned on August 4 when Head refused to call a general election,[2] and Macdonald and Cartier were able to form a new ministry with Alexander Tilloch Galt.[74]

In 1859 the Globe, influenced by Brown's encouragement, published articles in favour of a new federal government. This would allow Canada East and Canada West to govern their own affairs in their own provincial legislatures and the federal legislature would pass bills concerning mutual concerns. The newspaper also supported representation by population within this proposed federal government. On April 30, 1860, Brown proposed a bill in the Province of Canada's legislature to form a convention that would discuss federalism. The bill was defeated, but the Reform party's support for federalism was documented in the vote.[2]

• Careless, J. M. S. (1959). Brown of The Globe. Toronto: Macmillan Company of Canada. ISBN 978-0-7705-0935-4.