Suchergebnisse

The performance of Nova Scotia's thirty-seven attorneys general in the 234 years between 1749 and 1983 has been influenced by a variety of factors. In part, it has been dependent on the kind of political regime they helped to work: representative government up to 1848; responsible government in a single province between 1848 and 1867; and federal government since 1867. But it has been strongly affected, too, by the training, character, and attitudes of the attorneys general themselves; so, while the office has undoubtedly done much to mould the man, the reverse has been no less true, especially before 1900. Actually the office of attorney general of Nova Scotia still rests on the prerogative instruments issued to its pre-Confederation governors and lieutenant governors, even though those documents do not specifically mention the office by name. The commission to Governor Edward Cornwallis, whose founding of Halifax in 1749 signified the real beginning of English Nova Scotia, authorized him to appoint the "necessary officers and ministers in our said Province for the better administration of Justice and putting the Laws in execution."' Number 67 of his Instructions enjoined him to take care that his appointees "be Men of good Life and well affected to our Government and of good Estates and Abilities and not necessitous Persons. 2 Perhaps Cornwallis did not take sufficient care, for within four years Otis Little, his appointee as king's attorney, was dismissed for misconduct and left the province shortly afterwards as an absconding debtor.

The British North America Act is usually considered to go no further in guaranteeing fundamental rights than to provide some protection for the French Canadians of Quebec with respect to their peculiar property and social institutions, for Protestant and Catholic minorities in the provision of educational facilities, and for English and French minorities in the use of their languages. Yet subsection 26 of section 91, which authorized the Dominion Parliament and not the provincial legislatures to enact laws on divorce, was no less a protective device. For, as Georges Etienne Carrier pointed out in Parliament in 1870, the Protestants of Quebec would have been unable to secure divorces if the granting of them had been left to the legislatures, since the legislature of Quebec would not have established a court for that purpose or permitted them by special bills. According to Carrier, the bishops of his Church had accepted the subsection relating to divorce because Canada was a mixed community; he hoped, however, that, when Catholics petitioned for divorce, Protestant members of Parliament would remember that the provision was intended for Protestants. The inference was that Parliament was to give different treatment to petitioners of different religious faiths.

The Nova Scotian party system was both a product of the struggle for responsible government and a major instrument in determining its outcome. While issues of some magnitude occasionally agitated the House of Assembly prior to 1835, none possessed such a character as to permit a clear-cut and continuing division of its members. In fact, whether the differences of those days were between Loyalist and pre-Loyalist, or between country and town, they usually sprang from no more than the struggle for personal advantage, and great public questions were lost sight of or did not arise. Up to the end of the Napoleonic wars Halifax had lived largely off the expenditures made by the British government. Hence before this flow of easy money dried up there was in Nova Scotia poor ground for the growth of a party in opposition to the oligarchy in which ecclesiastical, commercial, and political power was concentrated. Even when the first attacks upon this clique commenced in the 1820's, they were led for the most part by men of Tory sympathies who, while they felt free to make an occasional display of independence on specific constitutional issues, never carried it to the point where they might be labelled as confirmed critics of government.