Document Information

Date: 1866-07-17
By: Montreal Herald
Citation: “The Local Constitutions” Montreal Herald (17 July, 1866)
Other formats: TBA

The Local Constitutions.

—If in spite of hot weather any one took pains to peruse the speeches in which the two leaders of the Ministry introduced the bills for the local constitutions of Upper and Lower Canada respectively, he could not fail to remark that the arguments of Mr. Cartier in favour of a double chamber and twenty-four autocrats, whose will in Lower Canada is to be absolute, had been all answered in anticipation by Mr. Jno. A. MacDonald. That gentleman pointed out the complications and consequent embarrassments, the increased expenses, and the difficulty of finding suitable men for the second Chamber, and thence deduced an argument in favour of the projected Upper Canadian Constitution, in which there is to be only one House. But when Mr. Cartier came to explain his part of the plan he was obliged to leave these plain and common sense views on one side, and to talk about democracy and monarchy and so forth, in order to find something to say in favour of a system the reverse of that for which his colleague had just been contending. Why Lower Canada cannot do with a single chamber as well as Upper Ca- da, we cannot comprehend. Why Mr. MacDonald’s arguments for Upper Canada should be inappropriate here is just as inexplicable.