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Date: 1866-08-03
By: True Witness
Citation: “GUARANTEES” True Witness (3 August, 1866)
Other formats: TBA

GUARANTEES.

—In connection with the Confederation of the British North American Provinces, we hear a good deal about constitutional guarantees for the rights, civil and political, of the English speaking and Protestant minority of Lower Canada. To this no reasonable objection can be urged, for it is but natural that our fellow citizens, being in a minority, should feel anxious to secure themselves against the possible encroachments of a majority differing from them in language, political traditions, and religion. Majorities at their best, and no matter how, or of what elements composed, are always apt to overlook the fact that minorities have rights; are always too ready to encroach, and to assert their will as the supreme law.

But what about constitutional guarantees for the civil and political rights of the Catholic minority of Upper Canada? who in the event of Confederation, will find themselves in the same position as towards the Protestant majority of their Province, as under similar circumstances the Protestant minority of Lower Canada will be placed as towards the Catholic majority of this Province. The Catholics of Upper Canada have, as men, the same natural rights, as have their Protestant neighbors; as British subjects, they have the same civil and political rights. Why then should not those rights, which will be as much menaced by the possible encroachments of a majority of a hostile creed, as will the rights of the Protestant minority of Lower Canada by the possible encroachments of a Catholic majority, be as much the object of anxious legislative solicitude, as are the rights of the last mentioned?

Hitherto it cannot be pretended that the Catholics of Lower Canada, though in a great majority, have ever displayed any disposition to curtail the civil or political privileges of their brethren and fellow citizens of a different race and creed. Content with the liberty to manage their own affairs, ecclesiastical and educational, they have always been content to leave their Protestant neighbors equally at liberty to manage Protestant affairs; and thus the past is a guarantee for the future: But not so has it hitherto been in Upper Canada, where Protestantism is politically ascendent. There the majority has never ceased to attempt to enforce its peculiar views, especially in matters of education, upon the Catholic minority; and the proposition made in Parliament to place the Protestant minority of Lower Canada upon a footing of perfect equality in respect of schools and educational establishments, with the Catholic minority of Upper Canada, elicits from the Montreal Witness an indignant protest, a bitter cry of indignation. It is not equality then as before the law, but political ascendency that our Protestant neighbors are aiming at, and for which they demand guarantees.

And it is on the school question especially that the overweening arrogance of Protestantism most conspicuously betrays itself. There is no injustice, so contends its organ and exponent, the Montreal Witness, in compelling a Catholic minority in Upper Canada to support and pay for non-Catholic schools; but there is a wrong done, so it more than insinuates, to a Lower Canada non-Catholic minority, if it have not the power, not merely of establishing and supporting non-Catholic Schools, and a share in proportion to their numbers in all public monies granted for educational purposes—(for this right every Catholic is willing to concede to them); but of compelling the Catholic majority to support an exclusive non-Catholic system of education, to which Catholics entertain profound conscientious objections. If we may judge from the tone of the Witness, we say, Protestants, the more extreme amongst them at least, insist not only that they shall be at liberty to educate their children as they please, but that the Legislature shall confer upon them the power of enforcing their views on educational matters, upon Catholics, there even where the latter are in the majority. If they be thus arrogant, thus exorbitant in Lower Canada, what may we not anticipate of arrogance and tyranny from them in Upper Canada, where they form the majority; and where under the proposed Confederation, they will be at liberty to work their will on the unrepresented and unprotected Catholic minority and to wallop their Popish niggers to their heart’s content?

We know from the teachings of history how Protestant majorities have dealt with Catholic minorities. We have before us the stern lesson of the Penal Laws, of which all traces in Ireland are even now far from being extinct. What Protestants have done against Catholics in the last named country, they may in some measure be tempted to repeat against a Catholic minority in Upper Canada; and though we are far from attributing evil sentiments to the generality of our separated brethren, we fear that there exists amongst them a strong and energetic party, whose theory is, that it is the first duty of the State, when it has the power, to discourage, and put down Popery. Well may we ask them:—What guarantees are to be given to the Upper Canadian Catholic minority, against the possible encroachments of a Protestant majority?