WALLBRIDGE, Lewis

Lewis Wallbridge was the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada during the Confederation debates of 1865 — the presiding officer for the three-week sitting that approved the Seventy-Two Quebec Resolutions. He went on to sit in the first two Dominion Parliaments as the Liberal member for Hastings South and finished his career as Chief Justice of Manitoba, an appointment conferred on him by his old political antagonist John A. Macdonald.

Early life

Wallbridge was born in Belleville, Upper Canada, on 27 November 1816, into a family that had settled in the Bay of Quinte district with the Loyalist migration of the 1780s. He read law and took his call to the Upper Canada bar in 1839. Seventeen years later, in 1856, he was made Queen’s Counsel.

Orange Order

His lodge affiliation was with L.O.L. No. 274 in Belleville — the same district jurisdiction that produced Mackenzie Bowell. The two men, Liberal and Conservative respectively, were lifelong political opponents and personal friends.

Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada

Wallbridge won Hastings South in 1857 for the Reform (Liberal) caucus and held the seat through three elections. In the brief Macdonald–Sicotte ministry of 1862–1863 he served as Solicitor General for Canada East, a portfolio that straddled the Ottawa–Montreal political line that characterised Reform governments of that period.

He was elected Speaker of the Legislative Assembly in 1863 and held the chair through the Sandfield Macdonald–Dorion and Taché–Macdonald ministries, including the decisive 1865 session in which the Assembly debated and approved the Quebec Resolutions. The Confederation Debates of 1865, transcribed into Hansard and now digitised at the University of Victoria’s Confederation Debates Project, carry his rulings from the Speaker’s chair throughout.

House of Commons

After Confederation he carried Hastings South into the first Dominion Parliament in the 1867 general election. He represented the riding through 1878, through three general elections and two changes of government.

Chief Justice of Manitoba

Out of the House after the 1878 Conservative restoration, Wallbridge made it known that he wanted a judicial appointment. In 1882 John A. Macdonald appointed him Chief Justice of Manitoba. Macdonald’s own private correspondence from the period — since published — shows the prime minister worried that Wallbridge’s missing teeth would “lower the dignity” of the Manitoba Bench, and that he asked Mackenzie Bowell to broach the subject with their fellow Belleville man. The dental diplomacy, such as it was, came to little; Wallbridge took his seat in Winnipeg as Chief Justice regardless. He held the office for five years.

Death

Wallbridge died in Winnipeg on 20 October 1887, at the age of seventy, while still serving as Chief Justice of Manitoba.