Some Assembly Required: PEI Democracy Turns 250

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the Governor of St. John’s Island (present day Prince Edward Island) scraped together the only 18 men in the colony he deemed potentially “respectable representatives” for its first elected Assembly. Over the course of two days, they passed 13 pieces of legislation – including retroactively approving actions the Governor had taken over the past three years and an act that required getting the Governor’s approval before anyone could leave the island. It was an inauspicious start to PEI’s democracy, but it did pave the way for what would become a thriving province. In this article, the author traces the earliest days of democracy in PEI.

Sean McQuaid

Sean McQuaid is a Research Officer at the Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island.

Graves Aichin. John Budd. George Burns. Elisha and Nathaniel Coffin. William Craig. Alex Farquhar. Alex Fletcher. James Haythorne. Thomas Hopkins. David, John and William Lawson. John Lord. James McCallum. Dugald and Robert Stewart. William Warren. These 18 men are largely obscure now, but they played a key role in Prince Edward Island history. About 250 years ago, they made up the Island’s first-ever elected Assembly.¹

The Island’s first elected House of Assembly – the second-oldest parliament in Canada, preceded only by Nova Scotia’s in 1758 – first sat on July 7, 1773 and ended its session on July 12. The sitting occupied two days during that span at a total cost of £11 (250 years of inflation would make that sum worth about £2,150.58 today, or $3,612.97 in modern Canadian dollars).

That House of Assembly– whose original members were seemingly hand-picked to stand for office by the colony’s first Governor (Walter Patterson), considering them the only worthy candidates in a very thin professional talent pool – was smaller than today’s Assembly and less diverse even than the tiny populace of its time (about 1,200 people), let alone the larger, more varied populace of today. Only Protestant males were eligible to vote or to hold office, an electorate perhaps 200 strong. This left out (among others) women, Indigenous peoples, and Catholics (in keeping with British anti-Catholic policies of the time). This franchise excluded the colony’s largely Catholic population of Acadians.

The Island of 1773 was a very different place. The Mi’kmaq people who predated colonization called it Epekwitk (oft-anglicized as “Abegweit”), loosely translated as cradled on the waves. Early French colonists, including Acadian migrants from the mainland, called it Île Saint-Jean, anglicized into the Island of Saint John or St. John’s Island after the British empire took over in 1758. The name was changed to Prince Edward Island in 1799 partly to avoid confusion with the similarly named Saint John, New Brunswick and St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Back in 1773, however, PEI was still St. John’s Island, a colony ill-prepared to legislate much of anything. Historian Frank MacKinnon describes the colony’s early governments as “often a farce” due to pushing too far and too fast, trying to create a full British-style administration in a colony that was insufficiently sized or developed to service such a sophisticated structure. With the Acadians having been driven out or reduced to isolated rural pockets under British rule, the sparsely populated colony was starting over in terms of establishing a European-style society in the 1770s.

When Governor Patterson and other key British-appointed officials began arriving circa 1770-1773, they found an island that was little more than wilderness. Fiscally drained by the inter-continental Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) that had helped cement British control of St. John’s Island, the British Empire was reluctant to spend any money to improve or develop its colonies, preferring they be as self-sufficient as possible.

Ownership of most of the colony’s land was divided up by the Crown into lots awarded to well-connected British proprietors who were expected to develop these properties and pay “quit rents” to fund colonial administration; but many of these oft-absentee landlords shirked both duties, resulting in a primitive, cash-starved colony. Governor Patterson’s early days on the Island were spent largely on building himself a house for shelter. He and other initial appointees went unpaid for over five years. The colony’s first Chief Justice even died of gout and starvation, and some officials either delayed their arrival indefinitely or resigned their commissions rather than move to the forbidding colonial outpost.

Empowered to appoint a Council of 12 advisors to assist him, Patterson settled for seven since he could not find enough “suitable citizens.” They helped him devise the Island’s necessary policies and regulations in 1770-1773, but this arrangement lacked an elected Assembly of the sort required by British law and Patterson’s original mandate (an Assembly would also have the taxation powers needed to reduce or eliminate any need for British financial support).

Advised by his superiors that he needed an elected Assembly to pass proper legislation, Patterson reluctantly worked to create one, though he was vocally skeptical as to whether a colony “so backward” could produce worthy candidates. He set the Assembly’s membership at a slim 18. Coincidentally, he had found only 18 people he regarded as potentially “respectable representatives.”

Historian Boyde Beck has described PEI’s elections of the 1700s and early 1800s as being “like a floating carnival,” an often days-long affair in which “rum was an integral part of voting day.” The very first election in 1773 was probably a somewhat quieter affair. Much of the Island being unsettled wilderness at the time, all 18 original members were voted for and elected as representatives at large “by taking the voices of the whole people collectively as belonging to one country,” rather than running in separate districts. The lack of such districts, not to mention the absence of political parties and the lack of any candidates beyond the 18 that Patterson apparently pre-selected, made the Island’s first election one of its least competitive.

Those 18 members, as historian J.M. Bumsted notes, were mostly not wealthy – almost nobody on the Island was at the time, not even many of the nascent colony’s few officials and elites – but as citizens who met Patterson’s vague standard of respectability, they mostly weren’t peasants either: “At least half a dozen resident proprietors were among those elected, and most of the remaining figures were either large tenants and agents of major proprietors (such as the Lawsons) or shopkeepers and merchant adventurers. One legislator, George Burns, was also a member of the council, a practice discouraged in more settled colonies. …they were hardly a cross-section of the population or representative of popular feeling among the average inhabitants, who were probably content enough to be left alone by an impotent government. In short, the first Island assembly represented resident landholders.”

By most accounts, those first 18 members were not ambitious legislators. Their initial work included retroactively approving business conducted by the colony’s Governor, Council and Supreme Court since 1770. Patterson often seemed to think the Assembly functioned best as a device for confirming his decisions.

Historian Henry Smith tells the story of an unspecified rural-based Assembly member, building a barn for Patterson in his off hours, who complained about coming to Charlottetown for the Assembly. “What is the use of my being here?” the Assembly member asked. “You and the Attorney-General write all the Acts and we have only to pass them, for we are not able to amend them. …[a]s soon as the barn is finished, I will go home and never come back.”

The 13 pieces of legislation passed in that first Assembly included measures regarding recovery of small debts, licensing for the retail of “Spirituous Liquors,” permission to burn items ranging from rubbish to derelict windmills, and an act devoted to extracting quit rents from landlords. Smith deems one of these 13 acts “very tyrannical” in retrospect – a law (later repealed) forbidding anyone from leaving the Island without written permission from officials.

The Governor’s advisory Council doubled as the unelected “upper house” of the Island’s legislature – basically the equivalent of our current federal Senate – making the early legislature a two-house or bicameral institution with the elected Assembly serving as the lower house. This arrangement lasted for over a century.

There being no legislative building at first, the Assembly held its early sessions in private homes and taverns, reportedly including the Crossed Keys Tavern (a plaque marking its former location still hangs in downtown Charlottetown). While that tavern’s role in Island history is often celebrated, historians such as Lorne Callbeck and Isaac L. Stewart cast doubt on whether the very first Assembly sat there since documentation indicates the property may have been a vacant lot in 1773.

One early Assembly story often linked to the Crossed Keys has a firm basis in historical fact, whether it happened in that tavern or not. As noted in Assembly records, Sergeant-at-Arms and doorkeeper Edward Ryan was relieved of his duties for inappropriate language. Legend has it he called the early Assembly “a damned queer parliament.” Whatever his words, he was fined five shillings for his indiscretion.

As Henry Smith wrote in 1910, the original House of Assembly’s members were not statesmen or orators, but they did their best to help develop the Island, making possible the “rare privileges and larger opportunities” enjoyed by later generations. Two hundred and fifty years after that first Assembly and well over a century after Smith’s account, today’s 27-member Legislative Assembly leads a bigger, more prosperous populace in building on the foundation laid by those 18 legislative pioneers so long ago.

Notes

1 The author would like to thank historians Reg Porter and Dr. Ed MacDonald of UPEI, who were consulted during the preparation of this project. Porter’s website (Reg Porter’s Prince Edward Island Heritage Blog): https://regporter.com/pei/ was also consulted.

Sources

Acts of the General Assembly of Prince Edward Island from the Establishment of the Legislature in the Thirteenth Year of the Reign of His Majesty King George the Third, A.D. 1773, to the Fifteenth Year of the Reign of Her Present Majesty Queen Victoria, A.D. 1852, Inclusive Vol. 1 (Prince Edward Island, Royal Gazette Office, 1862).

Beck, Boyde. “Boyde Beck – 1st election.” Mainstreet PEI. CBC, 2014. URL: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2539345387

Bumsted, J. M. Land, Settlement, and Politics on Eighteenth-Century Prince Edward Island. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987.

Campbell, Duncan. History of Prince Edward Island. Bremner Brothers, 1875.

Driscoll, Fred. “History and Politics of Prince Edward Island.” Canadian Parliamentary Review 11, no.2, (Summer 1988): 2-14. URL: http://www.revparl.ca/11/2/11n2_88e_Driscoll.pdf

MacKinnon, Frank. The Government of Prince Edward Island. University of Toronto Press, 1951.

MacKinnon, Wayne. “The Prince Edward Island Legislative Assembly,” Canadian Parliamentary Review 34, no.2, (Summer 2011): 8-18. URL: http://www.revparl.ca/english/issue.asp?param=204&art=1429

“Old Charlottetown (And P.E.I.) – First Legislature.” The Guardian, November 19, 1946.

“Our History and Timeline.” Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island, June 2023. URL: https://www.assembly.pe.ca/about/our

Smith, Henry. “The Legislature of the Island of St. John – A Fragment of Prince Edward Island History.” The Canadian Magazine of Politics, Science, Art and Literature Vol. XXXVI, (Toronto, the Ontario Publishing Company, 1911): 18-24.

Stewart, Isaac L. “A Damned Queer Parliament.” PEI History Guy, March 11, 2016. URL: https://peihistoryguy.com/2016/03/11/a

Stewart, John. An Account of Prince Edward Island in the Gulph of St. Lawrence, North America. W. Winchester and SCN Strand, 1806.