The Upper Canadian Anglican Tory Mind: A Cultural Fragment by Robert W. Passfield is the most comprehensive elaboration of the beliefs, values and worldview of Anglican Toryism since the works of the Anglican divine, Richard Hooker, at the English Reformation, to which has been added the Tory concept of the 18th Century balanced British Constitution and the Tory view of the ultimate purpose of education, within the context of the politics of an English colony: the Province of Upper Canada.

Tory loyalty, in addition to demanding unquestioning adherence to the imperial connection, was exclusive. It was used both to distinguish Loyalists from the American late-comers and to differentiate supporters of the political status quo from opponents of the administration. Tories and Reformers attached different qualities to loyalty. Although the Tories framed the political debate, a moderate Reform conception developed in response. The importance of loyalty was unchallenged by moderate Reformers, but they wished to redefine it in ways that would legitimize their own political goals. They appealed to British political traditions that emphasized the idea of individual dissent based on constitutional rights and the necessary independence of legislators threatened by the use of prerogative power as well as the corruption of the executive. By the 1830s, the polarization of politics seemed to offer only two choices - loyalty or disloyalty. This transitional period led to the emergence of moderate and accommodative Toryism as a response to the exclusiveness of the Family Compact. Moderate Toryism developed because other groups, who were not prepared to give up their political and social exclusion, had been drawn into the debate. The moderate Reformers survived through the 1840s and entered the administration. Tories also prospered through adoption of the Reform position permitting new groups to enter the High Tory elite. The result was the formation of a conservative consensus which dominated Upper Canada, whose conservatism lay in a new definition of loyalty which had evolved through the initiatives of moderate Reformers.

In Upper Canada it was the Anglican Tories alone who articulated a national vision for the province and who struggled to defend a traditional Church-State 'nation' in North America independent of the new United States. Had the Tories not acted on their beliefs, Upper Canada might well have succumbed to either conquest or absorption by the American republic, or have become thoroughly Americanized. In disparaging and denigrating the principles, beliefs and values of the Upper Canadian Anglican Tories, and in ignoring their achievements -- while focussing on the supposedly progressive Reform Party and the purportedly liberal values of its component 'outgroups' -- historians have produced a national history that is truly 'hollow at the core'. This present study rejects the liberal-Whig (liberal-progressive) interpretation of the political history of Upper Canada in favour of an interactive, intellectual-history approach that focusses on the interplay of ideas, conflicting ideologies and the influence of ideas on historical events. From the Preface: This book is a supplement to an earlier publication by the author-The Upper Canadian Anglican Tory Mind, A Cultural Fragment (2018)-that reconstructed the ideas, beliefs, and principles of the Upper Canadian Anglican Tories with respect to the British constitution, religion and education, and their Christian worldview.... An underlying assumption ... was that 'ideas influence actions', and that a reconstruction of the Tory mind would permit historians to attain a better understanding of the reason why the Upper Canadian Tories took the particular positions that they did on the major political issues of their day. The present book carries forward the concept that 'ideas influence actions'. It does so through an examination of the response of the Anglican Tories to several major public issues of their day, and through setting forth an explanation for their actions in keeping with the tenets of their political philosophy: viz. the principles, values, beliefs and worldview of the Anglican Tory mind. The chapters of the book focus on the critical years, 1812-1840, when the Anglican Tories were defending the cultural values and institutions of the Loyalist asylum of Upper Canada, and were engaged in a veritable struggle for survival against an external threat posed by the imperialism of the United States and its democratic republican ideology, and an internal political threat posed by democratic radicals and evangelical sectariansespousing American political ideas and religious beliefs. In that struggle, the Anglican Tories strove to ensure the sustainability of their traditional Church-State polity through the maintenance of the balanced British Constitution, the extension of the ministrations of the established Church of England, and the teaching of the youth of the province in a 'national system' of education under the direction of the Established Church.... Secondarily, this book analyzes the ideas and character of the politicized 'outgroups' who were assailing the Tory establishment from within the province, and the threat posed externally-both militarily and ideologically--by the new American democratic republic on the borders of Upper Canada. In doing so, this study yields a deeper understanding of the ideological struggle, a veritable 'battle of ideas', in which the Anglican Tories were engaged in Upper Canada following the close of the War of 1812.

Five leading Canadian religious historians address the Canadian Protestant experience. Each author considers a separate period, taking into account the major underlying themes of the time and noting the influence exerted by key personalities. As this collection shows, Protestantism had its most profound effects on Canadian life in the nineteenth century. As the twentieth century unfolded, however, Canadian Protestantism, battered by demographic change, profound inner doubt, so-called modernity, and secularization, was gradually pushed to the periphery of Canadian experience. The contributors are Phyllis D. Airhart, Nancy Christie, Michael Gauvreau, John G. Stackhouse Jr, and Robert A. Wright.

A significant struggle began in the year 1776 over the fate of a continent, and there are those who believe that this struggle ended in the year 1783, with the ancient ways of the Old World being given over entirely to those of a New. Is it true, however, that the end of what has been called 'The First American Civil' saw the complete victory of the republican way, and the banishment of the older Tory tradition from these shores? The North American High Tory Tradition tells another story, one in which a different vision for life in North America emerges from the cold of the True North where its flame has been kept burning until the present day. George Grant (1918-1988), the most influential High Tory intellectual of the 20th century, warned us in his Lament for a Nation of the collision course which lies ahead for these two different 'North Americas'?---that embodied in the Dominion of the North, and that in the Republic to its South. Is the disappearance of the Tory alternative an inevitable fate to our future as 'North Americans'? In The North American High Tory Tradition Ron Dart shines light upon the classical lineage, deep wisdom and enduring nature of the High Tory tradition as it has been planted and grown in the soil of North America, and in doing so reveals how Canada may serve as a north star to lead North Americans to a different destiny than that planned for them by a certain few in 1776.

In the twenty-first century, the word Presbyterian is virtually synonymous with “austere” and “parochial.” These associations are by no means historically unfounded, as early Canadian Presbyterians insisted on Sabbath observance and had a penchant for inter- and intra-denominational disagreement. However, many other ideas circulated within this religious community’s collective psyche. Boundless Dominion delves into the elaborate worldview that galvanized nineteenth-century Canadian Presbyterianism. Denis McKim uncovers a vibrant print culture and Presbyterian support for such initiatives as Indigenous evangelism, temperance advocacy, and anti-slavery activism and finds that many of the denomination’s characteristics contrast sharply with its dour and quarrelsome reputation. Tracing the themes of providence, politics, nature, and history in Presbyterian communities across five provinces, from Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick to Lower and Upper Canada, this book reveals that at the heart of this denomination lay a desire to facilitate God’s dominion and to promote Protestant piety across northern North America and beyond. Through an innovative approach to the study of religious ideas, Boundless Dominion highlights the permeability of borders and the myriad ways in which nineteenth-century Canada – including its Presbyterian community – shaped and was shaped by interactions with the wider world.

Internet version contains all the information in the 14 volume print and CD-ROM versions; fully searchable by keyword or by browsing the name index.

From the first worship services onboard English ships during the sixteenth century to the contentious toughmindedness of early clergymen to current debates about sexuality, Alan L. Hayes provides a comprehensive survey of the history of the Canadian Anglican Church. Unprecedented in the annals of Canadian religious history, it examines whether something like an Anglican identity emerged from within the changing forms of doctrine, worship, ministry, and institutions. With writing that conveys a strong sense of place and people, Hayes ultimately finds such an identity not in the relatively few agreements within Anglicanism but within the disagreements themselves. Including hard-to-find historical documents, Anglicans in Canada is ideal for research, classroom use, and as a resource for church groups.

Was Canada's Dominion experiment of 1867 an experiment in political domination? Looking to taxes provides the answer: they are a privileged measure of both political agency and political domination. To pay one's taxes was the sine qua non of entry into political life, but taxes are also the point of politics, which is always about the control of wealth. Modern states have everywhere been born of tax revolts, and Canada was no exception. Heaman shows that the competing claims of the propertied versus the people are hardwired constituents of Canadian political history. Tax debates in early Canada were philosophically charged, politically consequential dialogues about the relationship between wealth and poverty. Extensive archival research, from private papers, commissions, the press, and all levels of government, serves to identify a rising popular challenge to the patrician politics that were entrenched in the Constitutional Act of 1867 under the credo "Peace, Order, and good Government." Canadians wrote themselves a new constitution in 1867 because they needed a new tax deal, one that reflected the changing balance of regional, racial, and religious political accommodations. In the fifty years that followed, politics became social politics and a liberal state became a modern administrative one. But emerging conceptions of fiscal fairness met with intense resistance from conservative statesmen, culminating in 1917 in a progressive income tax and the bitterest election in Canadian history. Tax, Order, and Good Government tells the story of Confederation without exceptionalism or misplaced sentimentality and, in so doing, reads Canadian history as a lesson in how the state works. Tax, Order, and Good Government follows the money and returns taxation to where it belongs: at the heart of Canada's political, economic, and social history.

In studies of the Rideau Canal construction project, Labour historians have focused on the suffering of the canal workers, and have posited that the military deployed troops to suppress labour unrest and were indifferent to the suffering of the workers. This book provides a different perspective through placing the canal project within its natural and physiccal environments, and through taking into account cultural factors in examining the labour as it evolved during the construction of the canal. Within that broader framework, a totally different view emerges with respect to the causes of the suffering experienced by the canal workers, and the role of the military on the canal project. Moreover, the paternalism of Lt. Col. John By is revealed in his efforts to promote the physical, material, and moral well-being of the canal workers. Lastly, the phenomenon of military paternalism is examined further within a Marxist context, and in terms of Anglican toryism and and Lockean liberalism.