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The Party System in Nova Scotia*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
Extract
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.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , November 1954 , pp. 514 - 530
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1954
Footnotes
*
This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in Winnipeg, June 4, 1954.
References
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3 Acadian Recorder, Jan. 20, 1855.
4 Their conduct in this respect had been exemplary from 1848 to 1855.
5 Sun, April 17, 1861.
6 Mulgrave to Newcastle, April 3, 1862, Journals of the House of Assembly, 1863, App. 11, Civil List, 6.
7 Morning Chronicle, July 8, 1872.
8 Ibid., Jan. 8, 1872.
9 Ibid., July 8, 1872.
10 Ibid., July 15, 1872.
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20
21 C. H. Cahan to Thompson, March 28, 1890, Public Archives of Canada, Thompson Papers, item 12017. Charles Hibbert Tupper was the federal Minister of Marine and Fisheries in 1890.
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24 Assembly Debates, 1906, p. 114.
25 Excerpt from the Conservative manifesto of 1906 quoted in the Halifax Herald, May 25, 1906.
26 See excerpt from the Liberal manifesto of 1937 quoted in the Halifax Chronicle, June 15, 1937.
27 Acadian Recorder, June 15, 1916.
28 Halifax Chronicle, Feb. 22, 1946.
29 See Acadian Recorder, March 5, 1897.
30 Halifax Chronicle-Herald, March 25, 1950.
31 Halifax Chronicle, Oct. 2, 1930.
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36 See, for example, Halifax Herald, May 21, 1937.
37 See “Secret History of the Week,” ibid., Oct. 30, 1937.
38 See the open letter of Tanner to Premier Murray, ibid., Jan. 13, 1910.
39 See manifesto of Tanner in Morning Chronicle, June 12, 1916.
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