Canada's Governors General: Biography and Constitutional Evolution 1847–1878

Extract

Canada's Governors General: Biography and Constitutional Evolution 1847–1878, Barbara J. Messamore, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006, pp. viii, 308.

There is no comprehensive history of the office of governor general, a scholarly lapse that this book goes only part way in repairing. Canada's Governors General covers the period 1847 to 1878, that is, from Lord Elgin's signing of the controversial Rebellion Losses Bill, because his advisers who controlled the colonial legislative assembly advised him to do so, to the receipt of new Letters Patent and Instructions thirty years later from London. The intent of these last was to provide greater certainty about the function and role of the governor general following Lord Dufferin's excitable interventions in the wake of the Pacific Scandal to maintain British Columbia's adhesion to Confederation.