At the time this article was
written David Farr was Professor Emeritus of history at Carleton University in
Ottawa. He was a former President of the Canadian Historical Association and
was working on editing the House of Commons Debates for 1872 and 1873.
The debates of Canada's Parliament
(Hansard) form an impressive component in the holdings of any reference
library. Occupying over 250 linear feet of shelf-space, the substantial
volumes, authoritative in their black bindings stamped with gold, represent an
indispensable source for the study of Canada, its regions and peoples. The long
series of Commons debates runs without a break from the report of the Second
Session of the Third Parliament, 1875, a span of almost 120 years. The gap at
the beginning of this record is occupied at the present time by three volumes,
covering the years 1867 through 1870. Although bound like the other volumes in
the series, these are modern productions, unofficial reports. At least four
more are required to reach the point where the official Hansard begins. To close
the gap in the Parliamentary record has been the purpose of the project to
reconstruct the early debates of the House of Commons and Senate.
Parliamentary Reporting
1867-1875
Why did the House of Commons not
authorize an official report of its proceedings before 1875? It was not for
lack of trying on the part of certain members. The subject came up every year
but one during the terms of the First and Second Parliaments. Most members saw
no merit in the proposal for an official Hansard and in free votes regularly
turned it down. It is instructive to look at their reasons.
Most important, in the minds of
many members, was the conviction that the task was already being accomplished.
As Malcolm Cameron, Liberal member for Huron South put it in 1870:
"everything worth reporting was reported in the Toronto and Montreal
papers."1
There was some truth in this
statement. The Toronto Globe devoted, on a daily basis when the House was in
session, 14 columns of dense print to its proceedings. Its circulation of
45,000 in 1872 was the largest in Canada. Other Toronto papers, the Mail and
the Leader, carried briefer accounts. The Montreal Gazette regularly reported
important debates. In Ottawa a young paper, the Times, which hoped to secure
the contract to publish an official report, vied with the Globe in its coverage
of the Commons and reported Senate debates faithfully. (The Parliamentary
reports from the Globe and the Times, and sometimes the Mail, were
systematically pasted into scrapbooks by the staff of the Library of
Parliament. They form the "Scrapbook Debates", our principal source
for the debates of the early years.) In the newspapers of the Maritime
provinces space for the deliberations of Parliament was only occasionally
provided and in the French-language press of Quebec rarely given.
Although the majority of members
were satisfied with this newspaper coverage, at least for the first years of
the new Parliament, there were also critics. The newspaper reports were not
verbatim accounts but usually comprised about a third of what was said in the
chambers. Reporters were responsible for compressing the material they took
down; who could be sure they did this fairly? Even Prime Minister Macdonald who
was, on the whole, happy with the newspaper reports, occasionally worried about
distortions they might contain. Quebec members complained that the
English-speaking reporters would not (or could not) report their speeches given
in French. If they were reported, the versions prepared by the Ontario
reporters were imperfect or severely abridged. The larger Ontario newspapers,
such as the Globe, tended to provide a fuller account of the French
contributions to the debates. Maritime members believed that the point of view
of their provinces was inadequately presented in the accounts of reporters from
Ontario. Curiously, few members complained of political bias in the reporting
of debates. One who did was David Mills, the legal scholar and earnest
colleague of Alexander Mackenzie. In 1874 Mills, welcoming the decision to
establish an official Hansard, said there had been too much "party
reporting" in the newspapers. The shorthand reporters were mere
"boys" who did not possess the knowledge or judgment of members.
Members should not be placed at their mercy in taking down what was said in the
House.2
As experience with newspaper
reporting broadened, members became aware of problems arising from late night
sittings. James Young, Liberal member from Waterloo South, in proposing the
official reporting of debates in 1874, pointed out that reporters found
difficulty in covering speeches late at night since they had to rush their copy
to Toronto or Montreal for the 4 a.m. publication of their newspapers. This
deadline meant that they often gave short shrift to speeches at the end of a
sitting. Accuracy suffered, resulting in reports which Young described as
"burlesques" of what had gone on in the House.3 Parliamentary
reporting by private means, it appeared, possessed its limitations.
Another obstacle to official
reporting, in the minds of many members, was the actual or supposed costs. The
first proposal for an official Hansard, made by a committee under Liberal
leader Alexander Mackenzie a few months after the new Parliament opened,
estimated that to report the Commons in one language would cost $7801 a
session, with another $4218 required to translate the text into the other
language. Twelve thousand dollars, said Mackenzie, should suffice for a year's
debates. This figure was repeated frequently in later discussions of the
subject. Some members believed it to be a prodigious sum for a project of
unproven value; others mocked it as an estimate which would turn out to be
wildly short of the mark. The fact that the estimate for publishing the
Confederation Debates of the Province of Canada (the only debates officially
published by the legislature of that jurisdiction) had been $8000 while the
actual cost had been $14,600, was often cited by the defenders of economy.
Backbenchers and ministers (Sir Francis Hincks was one) questioned Mackenzie's estimate
of $12,000. Other members pointed to the enormous financial burdens the new
Dominion was assuming for railways, canals and settlement.
A more intangible argument occurred
over the effect of official reports of debates on the lengths of speeches in
the House. There were those who asserted that the publication of debates would
encourage even more verbosity in the House. It might even lengthen the
Parliamentary session. J.H. Pope, Minister of Agriculture in 1870, was of the
opinion that the citizens of Canada would display little interest in long
Commons debates. He felt reports should be left to the newspapers, who would
risk their capital and not the public's, on the task. Alexander Mackenzie took
the opposite point of view. Publishing verbatim accounts of debates would tend
to shorten and improve speeches in the House. Senator Robert Hazen of New
Brunswick displayed a refreshing note of modesty about having his speeches
recorded. "He did not pretend to be a statesman, but was an humble member of
the Senate, and he had no desire to have his utterances handed down to
posterity."4
At a time when the sessional
indemnity for members was $600 a year, to spend twenty times that sum on
publishing debates seemed wildly extravagant.
Members who favoured the official
publication of debates were to be found in both the political parties. There
were two broad arguments upon which they rested their cases. Alexander
Mackenzie, as a tried Reformer, saw the non-partisan official reporting of
Commons debates as a step towards a more democratic political system. Together
with the secret ballot, a single polling day for general elections and the
abolition of dual representation, the publication of debates would point the
way towards a more accountable Parliament purged of dubious political
practices. Mackenzie prepared the first report on the matter in the 1867-68
session and worked on the subject again in 1869. When his plans were rejected,
he gave up an active interest, although he continued to speak in favour of an
official version of debates. His sponsorship of the project was taken over by
Charles Tupper, who had as ammunition his native Nova Scotia's experience in
publishing an official Hansard since 1855. The results had been beneficial, Tupper
claimed, and provided a lesson for Canada. It was vital that a "fair
report" of the proceedings of Parliament be placed before the Canadian
people and made available to prospective investors and settlers abroad. In 1870
he moved for the appointment of a committee to study the reporting and
publishing of Commons debates. It was a great pity that the House had turned
down Mackenzie's proposal of 1868, he stated. "In the interests of history
it was to be regretted that the two most important years of this Parliament had
passed without its being in the power of the future historian to put his hand
on an authentic narrative of the deliberations of the House." Do not look
at the scheme, he urged members, with the "narrow spirit of
economy."5 Tupper's appeal was in vain. The House decided that it was
inexpedient to take any action on the subject in the present session. The same
response was given to a similar proposal in 1871.
As the years passed opinion on the
official reporting of debates began to change. Mackenzie made an attractive
point when he said that with an official record, members would be able to
correct the proofs of their speeches before permanent publication. Private
enterprise could not offer that service. It is significant that in divisions on
the Hansard proposal in 1870 and 1871 leading members from both sides of the
chamber—Mackenzie, Blake, Cartier, Howe, Langevin, Tupper—came out in favour of
an official report.
In 1872 the Commons took a step
towards a permanent record of its debates. On the day before the formal end of
the First Parliament, 13 June, Prime Minister Macdonald rose to announce that
he had received a "round robin" signed by 130 of the 190 members of
the House praying that two volumes of the so-called "Cotton Debates"
be purchased, two copies to be given to each member. He recommended that the
purchase be made. Alexander Mackenzie disagreed, alleging that the Cotton
reports were partisan. They were also very much abbreviated, "a skeleton,
not a fair report."6 A thin House, after a desultory discussion, approved
Macdonald's motion, 41-5. Six hundred copies of the "Cotton Debates"
for 1870 and 1871 were therefore purchased and distributed.
The "Cotton Debates" were
the work of James Cotton, editor of the Ottawa Times. They were a version based
on the reports in the Times. This newspaper was a newcomer to the Ottawa
journalistic scene, having launched itself in the capital late in 1865 in order
to report the first sitting of the legislature of the Province of Canada in its
new building in the following year. It was an offshoot of the Quebec Morning
Chronicle and was frankly ministerialist. James Cotton had declared publicly
that its position would be similar to that of its London counterpart, i.e. to
be "always for the government in power."7
Cotton had tendered for the
publication of the debates in 1870, when he had beaten out Hunter, Rose and Co.
of Toronto by his price. His tender had been recommended to the House by
Tupper. But it was not to be when the House rejected Tupper's proposal.
Undeterred, James Cotton went ahead and published a volume of Commons debates
for the 1870 session at his own expense. He repeated the process for the next
two sessions. Now he was rewarded by the House decision of 1872. It was the
closest he ever came to becoming the official reporter for the House of
Commons. He did not receive the contract to report or print the debates when it
was awarded by the Mackenzie administration in 1874. Three years later the
Ottawa Times ceased publication.8
The Senate was more receptive to
the proposal that the publication of its debates be supported with public
funds. In its first session it took note of the Commons' rejection of Alexander
Mackenzie's plan for an official report. Senators were happy with the newspaper
reports, although uneasy their debates were not being covered as fully as those
of the lower house. The Times was diligent in assigning a reporter to the upper
chamber, the Globe much less so. A remedy appeared to be to encourage the Times
through a subsidy. For $60 a week the Times was persuaded to give three columns
to each day of Senate proceedings. The "arrangement", as it was
delicately called, was put in practice for 1869 and continued through 1870.
Then the subject was reviewed. Senator D.L. Macpherson of Toronto announced
that the general feeling in the chamber seemed to be in favour of "a full
official report … so that the country would be disabused of the impression that
the Senate did nothing."9 It was pointed out that there was on the staff
of the Senate an experienced shorthand reporter who had recorded the debates of
the Nova Scotia legislature since 1861. This was John George Bourinot of
Sydney, the son of the senator of the same name. He had joined the Senate staff
as a clerk in 1869. Now it was suggested that he report Senate debates. On 4
May 1870 Bourinot was given a new title, "Short-Hand Writer to the Senate
and Committees of the Senate", and ordered to record its debates.
The first session Bourinot reported
was that of 1871, the volume he produced being printed by the Times Printing
and Publishing Co. of Ottawa. Thus the Senate Debates for 1871 represent the
first official publication of debates for the Parliament of Canada. Bourinot
reported the Senate debates until 1873, using the language of the speakers,
which was mostly English. He went on to become Sir John Bourinot, the eminent
constitutional authority. The shorthand reporters who worked on the Senate
debates served on a contractual basis until as late as 1916, when a reporting
branch was formed as part of the Senate staff. Beginning in 1896 a French
version of Senate debates was brought out.
The Commons had still to settle the
question of whether it should take responsibility for publishing its debates.
Towards the end of the 1873 session, a session made tumultuous by the Pacific
Scandal charges, the matter came up again. As in 1872 a "round robin"
was presented to the government requesting that copies of the "Cotton
Debates" for 1872 and 1873 be purchased for members. Macdonald gave his approval
but on condition there should be no objection to the purchase. Mackenzie
demurred, pointed out that the last day before the House adjourned until an
August sitting was not the time to decide on such an important question. The
same practice had occurred the year before. He favoured an official report but
did not believe that the present solution was the one to adopt. His lieutenant,
Félix Geoffrion, agreed. The "Cotton Debates"were one-sided and did
not give French-speaking members a fair report. He hoped the government would
sponsor a plan next year for an official bilingual report. Macdonald
acknowledged Mackenzie's objection and the matter was dropped. The prime
minister stated, however, that the government would bring down "a measure
next session providing for the official reports."10
When the session of 1874 began,
Macdonald and his colleagues were no longer in power. However the new Liberal
administration headed by Alexander Mackenzie moved promptly to honour
Macdonald's pledge. It struck a select committee of nine members under James
Young of Waterloo South to enquire into "the most effectual and cheapest
mode of obtaining the publication of a Canadian Hansard."11 Charles Tupper
seconded the motion for the appointment of the committee. It reported on 8 May.
A system of reporting debates should be established, not necessarily to provide
a verbatim record but "a fair and accurate account", as close to the
original as possible. Each speech should be reported in its own language. There
should be a Chief Reporter of debates, a permanent employee of the House, and
under him four reporters, one French-speaking. Reporters would be paid $5.00
for each session of a committee meeting they reported, or 30 cents per folio of
100 words for debates. Two thousand copies of Hansard should be printed in
sheet form, one for each newspaper in Canada and six for each member. Five
hundred copies would later be bound. The probable cost of the operation would
be $7984 for a session, of which $5000 would be needed for reporting.12 (A year
later the estimate had climbed to $9000.) The report occasioned a spirited
debate as the opponents of official reporting, led by two Liberal members,
Frank Killam of Yarmouth and Robert Wilkes of Toronto Centre, moved an
amendment to leave reporting to private enterprise. Their attempt was defeated
without a division. Mackenzie, Macdonald, Blake, Mills, Cauchon—all entered the
discussion to endorse the plan of an official report.
Thus official reports of Commons
debates began in 1875. A.M. Burgess was the Chief Reporter, or editor, at a
salary of $5000 a session, expected to last ten weeks. His tasks were to
supervise the reporting team, revise proofs and prepare a careful index for
each volume of proceedings. Printing of the debates went to tender, the job
being won by C.W. Mitchell at the Ottawa Free Press office on Elgin Street.
There were only two hurdles to be overcome before the new practice became
firmly established. Where should the reporters sit? Macdonald favoured
constructing a Reporters' Gallery over the door of the chamber but Mackenzie
feared that a new structure would disfigure "the internal appearance of
the House."13 In the end it was agreed that reporters might be admitted to
the floor of the House as a temporary measure. There they have remained. The
other problem concerned the way the official languages would be used in
reporting. The original plan was to have an English edition in which French
speeches would be recorded in the original language, then translated into English.
Accompanying this "polyglot", as some members called this mixed
volume, would be an entirely French edition. The plan did not meet with
approval, Macdonald and Mills, among others, objecting. Eventually George W.
Ross of Middlesex West, the chairman of the Hansard committee, agreed to having
two editions of the debates, one in English and one in French. The struggle was
over and Canada had an official Hansard. The majority of the House appeared
satisfied that the principle of official reporting had been accepted, and at a
modest cost!
Reconstituting the Debates
To fill the missing years at the
beginning of the Parliamentary record it is necessary to draw upon the
newspaper reports of the day. Newspaper coverage of the early debates, as the
Library of Parliament discovered in a survey, is scattered and intermittent.
The largest void is found in the province of Quebec whose newspapers, except
for special occasions or when local members spoke possibly subsidizing reports
of their speeches, largely ignored the Parliament in Ottawa. They preferred to
concentrate on the discussions in the Quebec assembly. This emphasis is
understandable in a society still very self-contained. It also derived from the
mainly English character of the early Ottawa debates. To make a mark in the
Commons one had to speak in English, a facility which many Quebec members did
not possess. The degree of frustration they experienced in listening to, or
attempting to read, lengthy speeches in a language they only vaguely
understood, can only be imagined. One senses their difficulties in the
pathetically-grateful remarks made by Quebec members when Cartier or Langevin
provided a quick summary of a topic for them in their own tongue.
The "symbiotic
relationship", in Norman Ward's phrase,14 between newspapers and political
parties also constitutes a limitation of newspaper sources. Each needed the
other to survive and flourish. George Brown, editor and politician, recognized
as clearly as any observer the consequences of the link between journalism and
politics in the making of the public record. Speaking in 1854 he remarked that
of course the leading speakers in a legislature were most fully reported.
"The others have a smaller space given to them, and of them those of the
men in the opposite side in politics to the editor of the paper in which the
speeches are reported are given in the most contracted form."15
Reconstituting the Early Debates of the Parliament of Canda
|
Senate
|
First Parliament
|
Editor
|
Language
|
1st session
(1867-68) vol 1
|
P.B. Waite
|
English text
(1968); French text (1968)
|
2nd
session (1869) vol II
|
P.B. Waite
|
Bilingual text
(1975)
|
3rd
session (1870) vol III
|
P.B. Waite
|
Bilingual text
(1977)
|
4th
session (1871) vol IV
|
A. Pamela Hardisty
|
Reprint, with
French translation of J.G. Bourinot edition of 1871 (1980)
|
Official
reporting was only in English until 1896 when a French language text was
authorized. A French translation is now underway forthe years 1872-1995.
|
|
|
|
House of Commons
|
First Parliament
|
Editor
|
Language
|
1st
session 1867-1868 vol 1
|
P.B. Waite
|
English (1967);
French text (1968)
|
2nd
session 1869 vol II
|
P.B. Waite
|
Bilingual (1975)
|
3rd
session 1870 vol III
|
P.B. Waite
|
Bilingual (1979)
|
4th
session 1871 vol IV
|
Norman Ward
|
Bilingual text in
press
|
5th
session 1872 vol V
|
David Farr
|
Bilingual text in
preparation
|
Second Parliament
|
|
|
|
David Farr
|
Bilingual text in
preparation
|
|
David Farr
|
Bilingual text in
preparation
|
Third Parliament
|
|
|
First session
(1874)
|
to be undertaken
|
|
Second session
(1875)
|
to be undertaken
|
Official
reporting begins English and French texts in 1875
|
If excessive political bias in the
reporting of early Canadian debates is not apparent, a newspaper's sympathy
towards party spokesmen is unavoidable. The Globe was founded in 1844 by George
Brown to be the journal of the Reformers in Canada West. Brown led the
Reformers until they became the Liberals in the first decade after
Confederation. He then passed on his political mantle to Alexander Mackenzie
and Edward Blake, the leaders of the next generation of Reformers/Liberals.
Mackenzie and Blake dominated the Liberals in opposition and in government in
the 1870s. It is not surprising that the Globe should be more attentive to
their interventions in Commons debates than to those of their Conservative
opponents. Here the Ottawa Times, frankly ministerialist, provides a
counterweight. During the years of the first Macdonald administration it made
sure that Conservative figures in Parliament were well-reported in its columns.
The two newspapers also demonstrated differences in their coverage of members
from outside Ontario. The Globe was less interested in the views of unknown
Quebec and Maritime members; the Times, seeking government favour, paid more
attention to the opinions of government supporters from beyond Ontario. Thus
there is a rough balance in the emphases of the two newspapers, a balance that
offers a basis for an approximation of the truth.
Beyond the limitation of
partisanship, contemporary newspaper accounts reveal human frailty. Shorthand
reporters became fatigued, especially after sitting in a stuffy poorly-lit
chamber since 3 o'clock in the afternoon. They were dealing with names and
geographical terms from the Maritimes and the West for the first time; they
were clearly indifferent or uninterested in some of the topics such as issues
connected with the Maritime provinces that occupied the House. They were
sometimes inattentive, so that their transcriptions are obscure, even
inaccurate. Yet their reports are all that we have to reconstitute the pith and
substance of what passed in the House of Commons and Senate for almost the
first decade after Confederation.
The reconstruction of the early
debates of the Dominion Parliament is founded on the "Scrapbook
Debates", i.e. the reports printed in the Toronto Globe, the Ottawa Times
and, occasionally, the Toronto Mail. The importance of this source was
recognized as early as 1886, eleven years after official reporting began. In
that year the Joint Librarians of Parliament, A.D. De Celles and Martin
Griffin, recommended that a proper index be prepared for the proceedings of
both Houses. They also urged that the debates from 1867 to 1874 for the Commons
be reprinted after they had been edited by "an impartial and capable
man".16 It was to be eighty years before the suggestion of the Joint
Librarians was acted upon.
Credit for the initiation of the
reconstitution project that is now moving forward must go to three men: the
late Professor Norman Ward, a leading student of Parliament; Roland Michener,
Speaker of the House in 1961 and Erik J. Spicer, Parliamentary Librarian since
1960. In 1961 Professor Ward proposed to Speaker Michener that a balanced
version of the early debates be prepared from existing newspaper sources for
the use of researchers. Mr. Michener heartily favoured the proposal and Mr.
Spicer recognized in it a Centennial project of enduring value. He convinced
the two Speakers of the day, Hon. Sydney J. Smith of the Senate and Hon. Lucien
Lamoureux of the Commons, to endorse it.
Thus the project required "an
impartial and capable man" with which to commence. The man to whom the
sponsors turned was Peter B. Waite, professor of history at Dalhousie
University and a foremost authority on the Confederation period. Professor
Waite undertook the reconstitution of the debates of the First Session of the First
Parliament (1867-68), a volume that appeared in Centennial year. He went on to
edit two succeeding volumes of Commons debates and three volumes of debates of
the Senate, 1867-70. His accounts, using the English of the original versions,
were reproduced in French by the Translation Operations Branch of the
Department of the Secretary of State. The bilingual text was then transcribed
by the Directorate of Parliamentary Publications of the House of Commons into
the format of contemporary Hansard. The volumes were furnished with a list of
the members of the early Houses and their constituencies, a list of members of
the cabinet and an index. The editor contributed an introduction describing how
the account of the debates had been reconstructed, as well as a note on the
character of the House and the subjects before it during each session.
The debate reconstitution project,
in its formative phase, was supervised by A. Pamela Hardisty, formerly
Assistant Parliamentary Librarian, and initially implemented by the Reference
and Information Branch of the Library of Parliament under the direction of
Simonne Chiasson. Later supervision was provided by Margot Montgomery, director
of the Information and Technical Services Branch of the Library. As the project
continued, oversight for it has passed to François LeMay, director, and Mike
Graham, chief of the public service division in the Information and Technical
Services Branch of the Library.
Peter Waite's major contribution to
the reconstitution of the early debates has been in working out a set of
editorial guidelines that later compilers have followed. He laid down the rule
at the beginning of the project that editorial interventions into the text
should be kept to a minimum. The text should be "cleaned up" as far
as possible but left to speak for itself. Most contributions to the debates are
recorded by the shorthand writers as third person narratives; few direct
quotations are recorded. The text had been left in this form. Another guideline
established by the first editor is that the sources of the accounts are not
separately identified. An introduction to each volume makes clear that the
material is drawn from the Times or the Globe, the basis of the "Scrapbook
Debates".
In settling on a text, the longer report
from the two newspapers is generally preferred, on the assumption that it is
probably a more accurate reflection of what was actually said. Often it will
contain the allusions and illustrations that make it more lively than its
abbreviated counterpart. Where sources are comparable in length, Professor
Waite suggested selecting "the most literate and salty version"17 and
his successors have adopted the same approach. Sometimes newspaper reports are
combined if aspects of a speech are brought out more fully in one account than
in another.
The reports of the Times tend to be
fuller in the early years of Parliament than in 1872 or 1873. Perhaps James
Cotton and his staff were losing interest in their task as the prospects of a
Hansard contract receded? The Globe reports become fuller as the crisis in
Parliament occasioned by the Pacific scandal and Macdonald's resignation comes
to a climax; they were often livelier than the accounts in the Times.
The task of the editors, beyond the
selection of the text, has been to correct errors in spelling, grammar, syntax,
names and constituencies of members, geographical names, and names of companies
whose bills for incorporation were being introduced. Where members have the
same surname (there were six "Ross's" in the Commons in 1873, for
instance) they have also been given a Christian name. Where constituency
designations are similar, they have been more precisely identified. Where
archaic words such as "shew" are used, they have been retained, as
have the classical and literary allusions that the Victorians loved and
sprinkled so liberally throughout their discourse. These terms provide the
flavour of an age that has disappeared for ever. These have been the editors'
tasks: not to interfere in what was said a century and more ago but to be
conscientious in tidying and making explicable unrehearsed, passionate and
often unruly discussion.
The early debates of Parliament
offer a unique window through which to view the founding and fashioning of the
Canadian state. The apparatus of a transcontinental government is being
constructed before our eyes. We witness competing policies for national
development being thrashed out. The issues with which Macdonald and his
colleagues had to deal are the issues of our day in different dress: the
strains within a federal system, the power of the executive over against the
legislative, the impact of United States trade measures upon the Canadian
economy, pollution and the protection of the environment, immigration, the
place of the aboriginal people, even Senate reform! Our ancestors wrestled with
these questions. We would be unwise to ignore the insights (and the
blindnesses) which they brought to their discussion. The reconstitution of the
early debates of Parliament is recovering a valuable historical source. The
Commons trenchantly expressed the significance of this source in authorizing
the publication of an official record of debates in 1874. "(Hansard) is
the only means at (the public's) command of knowing correctly what their representatives
say and do in Parliament, as well as its immense future value as a record of
our Constitutional, Commercial and Political history."18 For all those who
desire the health of parliamentary democracy in Canada it is good to know that
a valuable project, so long put aside, is well on its way towards completion.
Notes
1. Canada, House of Commons,
Debates, April 25, 1870, p.1178.
2. Canada, House of Commons, Scrapbook
Debates, May 18, 1874, p. 105, reported in Toronto Mail.
3. Ibid., p. 104.
4. Canada, Senate, Debates,
March 27, 1868, p. 152.
5. Canada, House of Commons, Debates,
March 3, 1870, p. 219.
6. Canada, House of Commons,
Debates, June 13, 1872, p. 1138 (Cotton Debates).
7. Quoted in R.U. Mahaffy,
"Ottawa Journalism, 1860-1870", Ontario History, XLII, 4
(October, 1950), p. 210.
8. Canadian Library Association,
News Notes, Microfilm Project, 4, (December 1965), pp. 21-22.
9. Canada, Senate, Debates,
April 29, 1870, p. 162.
10. Canada, House of Commons, Debates,
as reported in the Ottawa Times, May 23, 1873.
11. Canada, House of Commons,
Journals, April 27, 1874, p. 120.
12. Ibid., May 8, 1874, p. 200.
13. Canada, House of Commons, Debates,
February 5, 1875, p. 4.
14. Canada, House of Commons, Debates,
1871, introduction, p. vii. Professor Ward's edition of the Commons debates for
1871 is forthcoming.
15. Quoted in David B. Knight, A
Capital for Canada: Conflict and Compromise in the Nineteenth Century,
University of Chicago, Department of Geography, Research Paper 182 (1977), p.
317.
16. Canada, House of Commons, Debates,
1867-68, preface by Erik J. Spicer, unpaged.
17. Canada, House of Commons, Debates,
1867-68, introduction, p. viii.
18. Canada, House of Commons, Journals,
May 8, 1874, p. 201.