Louis-Joseph Papineau

“ The attempt to create classes and distinctions among public officers (some of whom would be absolute uncontrolled in whatever excesses they might run for their salaries and other submitted to annual discussions) is so shallow and preposterous a scheme to consolidate the present vicious system that it scarcely requires refutation. ”

“ To whatever extent the blessings of a just, cheap and responsible system of Government are obtained by us, to that extent and amount will the people of the other British North American colonies also participate in the same blessings. ”

“ Such good offices, it is the duty of every Colony to tender and to accept in turn.
The present colonial Minister who is forced to acknowledge the correct axiom that British colonists possessing a representative Assembly are of right freed from the legislation of the Imperial Parliament, is so attached to the privileges enjoyed by his predecessors in office of misgoverning these distant possessions, that he hesitates not to lay bare (in his instructions to Sir Francis Head) in all its naked diformity the Colonial system as it is understood and expounded in Downing Street. ”

“ The Colonial Minister, four thousand miles distant from the scene of our sufferings, and naturally unable from the multiplicity of his avocations, to become acquainted of the extent of our wrongs, arrogantly tells the Assemblies that have declared that all remedial measures short of rendering the seats in the Legislative Councils dependent on popular Election will be futile and unsatisfactory, that "the King is most unwilling to admit as open to debate the question whether one of the vital principles of this provincial Government shall undergo alteration." ”

“ An odious monopoly which retards the settlement of the Country has been created; the administration of justice has been impeded by an attempt to introduce a second system of laws in a Country where courts were constituted and judges commissioned and sworn to administer a different system of law.
Of this unconstitutional parliamentary legislation, on the part of Great Britain, on subjects of an exclusively internal nature, in a British Colony possessing a representative Assembly, this House has repeatedly but hitherto ineffectually complained. ”

“ The people of the Canadas laboring under the accumulating wrongs proceeding from an act of Parliament, unite as one man in demanding that that act be amended in such of its provisions as relate to their Legislative Councils, which they denounce as the cause and mainspring of all the heart burnings, distractions and sufferings in these Provinces. ”

“ Lord Glenelg seems not to understand that however great is the rank, station and importance of a colonial Minister and of all the other Ministers of His Majesty, his Crown officers and legal advisors, they hold their large emoluments of office by a more precarious tenure than Colonial officers subject to the annual vote of the Assemblies. ”

“ The remonstrances of near a million people in the Canadas constitutionally expressed by their representatives, disturb too much the set doctrines and practices traditionally transmitted from Tories to Whigs, from Lord North to Lord Glenelg, to expect the concession of any remedial measures which the sufferers claim. ”

“ Policy such as this might be considered a disingenuous effort to uphold by mild palliatives the system which generated these and much greater abuses. But on the other hand open and violent attacks are directed in those menacing Instructions against the most necessary and just rules by which freeborn British Colonists have striven to protect themselves against improper interference on the part of meddling colonial Ministers. ”

“ They moreover have secured the responsibility of the highest functionaries by the establishment of a proper tribunal to bring to the most condign punishment, yea, even to the forfeiture of life, any of those who in the discharge of their official duties had become the oppressors of the People. ”

“ All she requires is direct responsibility to her people in the several Departments of the state and economy in her Government. Should she succeed in obtaining these, there cannot be a doubt but the people of the other British Provinces must obtain the same extent of political liberty. ”

“ They have demanded the option of measures alone adequate to the cure of the various abuses which have sprung from imperfect institutions, acknowledged by a Committee of the House of Commons so far back as 1828, to have been viciously administered. ”