Municipal institutions in Canada date their origin to the 1837 rebellions in Lower and Upper Canada, the Report of Lord Durham on the causes of the rebellions, and the action of Lord Sydenham in putting through legislation creating municipal institutions. He did this in 1841 while he was, as he called himself, “dictator.” Under Sydenham's system municipal officers were largely nominated by the Crown. This was changed in 1845 in Lower Canada, and in 1849 in Upper Canada, and an elective system was set up. These acts are the foundations of the municipal systems of Ontario and Quebec.

The rebellions in Lower and Upper Canada were the product of identical political systems under which vast areas were governed from provincial capitals remote from the people. There was an accumulation of grievances without a corresponding opportunity for redress by change of local government. Sydenham put the situation in his despatch (no. 160) of September 16, 1840: “The people acquire no habits of self-dependence for the attainment of their own local objects … Whatever little improvement in their respective neighborhoods may appear to be neglected affords grounds for complaint against the Executive. All this is charged directly upon the Government and a host of discontented spirits are ever ready to excite their feelings.” It is not too much to say that the granting of municipal self-government took the word rebellion out of provincial history for one hundred years. This was an achievement of the first order. It is to be ranked in the science of politics with some of the great discoveries in medicine. As there is a cause for the rash which appears on the skin of the child, so there is a cause for those disturbances in the political body which evidence themselves in rebellion.