The Jesuit Estates Act, 1888–1889

The Jesuit Estates Act of Quebec, passed in 1888 and assented to by the federal Governor General in early 1889, was one of the defining public controversies of late-19th-century Canada. It produced the famous “Noble Thirteen” vote in the House of Commons in March 1889, fuelled the rise of the Equal Rights Association, and indirectly delivered the Loyal Orange Association its long-sought federal act of incorporation in 1890.

The legal background

The estates at issue had belonged to the Society of Jesus from the French régime. The Society itself was suppressed by Pope Clement XIV in 1773. When the last Canadian Jesuit died in 1800, the British Crown assumed administration of the lands. With the 1814 restoration of the Society by Pope Pius VII and the return of Jesuits to Canada in 1842, the question of what to do with the confiscated estates re-emerged as a live political problem. The Roman Catholic Church argued that on the 1773 suppression the property had fallen to the diocesan bishops of Montreal and Quebec. The British Crown’s long administration of the estates — effectively as secular provincial assets — complicated the claim.

The Mercier act

Honoré Mercier, the Premier of Quebec, was a former Jesuit student. His government secured the incorporation of the restored Society of Jesus under a Quebec statute in 1887. The following year the Legislature passed the Act respecting the settlement of the Jesuits’ Estates, S.Q. 1888, c. 13, which set aside $400,000 as compensation and, critically, left the distribution of that sum to whichever beneficiary the Pope might name — Rome, the Archdiocese of Quebec, the restored Society of Jesus, or any other Catholic party the Holy See might choose.

Why Orange Canada took offence

Orange anger at the 1888 Quebec act operated on three levels. First, the Order had been petitioning for its own federal incorporation for decades and had repeatedly been refused; the easy incorporation of a Catholic body was felt as discriminatory. Second, the $400,000 transfer was a direct payment of public money toward what Orangemen argued was an essentially religious purpose. Third — and most damagingly to the standing of the John A. Macdonald federal government — the statute placed a foreign head of religion, the Pope, in the position of arbiter over the distribution of Canadian public funds.

The Grand Master of the Loyal Orange Association of Canada, Nathaniel Clarke Wallace, M.P. for York West, delivered a blistering speech against the Quebec act at the Grand Lodge’s 1888 session in Winnipeg. His core constitutional argument — that a foreign power ought not to exercise a final say in Canadian public policy — carried quickly through the Order’s papers and lodge meetings.

The federal disallowance motion and the Noble Thirteen

On 26 March 1889, Lieutenant-Colonel William Edward O’Brien — an Orangeman and Conservative MP for Muskoka — moved in the House of Commons that the House humbly request the Governor General to disallow the Quebec Jesuit Estates Act under the federal power of disallowance. O’Brien’s amendment was supported by twelve other members, giving a total vote of thirteen in favour and one hundred and eighty-eight against. The thirteen became known from that night on as the Noble Thirteen. They were overwhelmingly English-speaking Protestant Conservatives who had broken with their own party’s leadership.

The Globe newspaper (Toronto) struck a commemorative medal for the Noble Thirteen. The Orange Lodge at Niagara Falls, Noble Thirteen L.O.L., takes its name from this vote and is still so known.

Consequences inside the Conservative caucus

The larger Orange membership of the Conservative caucus had largely voted with the government and against disallowance. Several of them — William McCulla, M.P. for Peel, among them — were formally censured by their home lodges for placing party loyalty above what the Order’s own resolutions called “the sacred principles of the order”. McCulla lost his Peel County seat in the 1891 general election to an insurgent anti-Jesuit Estates campaign. The federal Conservative majority in the new Parliament was sharply reduced from the 1887 margin.

Consequences inside the Order

Two things followed directly. First, the federal Conservative leadership — chastened by the loss of Orange votes in 1891 — sponsored a Loyal Orange Association of British America Incorporation Bill. It cleared the Commons, passed the Senate, and had Queen Victoria’s assent on 24 April 1890. Fifty years after the Order’s first attempts at legal incorporation in Canada, the effort finally succeeded — directly because of the political leverage generated by the Jesuit Estates controversy.

Second, the Equal Rights Association was founded in 1889, drawing on Orange and evangelical Protestant constituencies that had mobilised against the Quebec act. D’Alton McCarthy, the Conservative MP for Simcoe North who would later carry the Equal Rights banner into Manitoba and into the 1890 Manitoba Schools crisis, was among its leading figures.

Long-term significance

J. R. Miller’s Equal Rights: The Jesuits’ Estates Act Controversy (McGill-Queen’s, 1979) argues that the 1888–1889 controversy was the moment at which mid-Victorian Canadian Protestant political mobilisation crystallised into a distinct political phenomenon — still tied to the Conservative Party, but no longer reliably controllable by it. The Manitoba Schools Question of 1890–1896, which brought down the Mackenzie Bowell government, can be read as the direct sequel: a fresh confrontation between Orange-backed English-Canadian Protestant opinion and a federal Conservative government that was now permanently squeezed between its Quebec Catholic and its English Protestant bases.