George Emery - Elections in Oxford County, 1837-1875: A Case Study of Democracy in Canada West and Early Ontario

George Emery

Elections in Oxford County, 1837-1875: A Case Study of Democracy in Canada West and Early Ontario

Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2012

Cased. xvii + 235 pp. ISBN 978-1-4426-4404-5.

George Emery demonstrates that studying politics from the bottom up can shake textbook generalisations. Located midway between Hamilton and London, Oxford County was settled by 1861, when 69 percent of the adult male population were immigrants. By 1871, there were 48,000 people, and two towns of around 4,000 – administrative Woodstock and industrial Ingersoll. Oxford was divided into two ridings in 1854, its representation doubling again with the creation of the Ontario provincial legislature in 1867 – enough to generate 38 contests for study. Backed by mathematical analysis supplied by J.C. Herbert Emery, the author demonstrates that ethnicity and religion were the crucial determinants of voting behaviour. Oxford was 'unusual' (131) in regularly electing outsiders, such as Francis Hincks, George Brown, William McDougall and Oliver Mowat. Candidates attempting to run on a local ticket usually performed poorly, probably because the diverse ethnic pattern cut across down-home loyalties: as late as 1874, rivalry between two Ingersoll businessmen opened the way for a Toronto carpetbagger. The 1837 rebellions only briefly impacted on Oxford politics. Emery traces how participation rates mysteriously increased independently of franchise qualifications. He persuasively dismisses social class as an explanatory tool. Paradoxically, because Oxford had few Catholics, the Orange Order exercised little influence: in 1851, one lodge backed the Conservative candidate but gave him a net gain of just eight votes. Particularly striking is unimportance of railway projects as election issues: voters apparently grasped that the Great Western would pass through Oxford anyway because it was heading somewhere else. Few local newspapers survive, but they probably shaped their politics to suit their readers – although with Oxford falling within the circulation of the Toronto Globe, press influence cannot be dismissed. Riding associations were ad hoc, and grassroots political movements were reactive, forming in response to parliamentary coalitions, as with the delayed Hincksite-Conservative fusion in 1858. Nominating conventions, often seen as the basis of the Upper Canada Reform movement, were intermittent phenomena which did not always resolve local splits: in 1857, two Hincksites and three Brownites ran in South Oxford, while Brown ignored an inconvenient nomination to invade the riding in 1863. Dirty tricks abounded. Polling could be slowed by irrelevant cross-examination of hostile voters: one Black elector was asked how much he would fetch in a New Orleans slave auction. Some of Emery's contextual assumptions may be challenged. The Hincks-Morin administration was a continuation, not a replacement of the LaFontaine-Baldwin ministry. Alexander Mackenzie became prime minister in 1873. Emery cautiously discusses his use of 'democracy', a term which perhaps unnecessarily complicates the overall analysis. But the moral of this useful book is that we need more such local studies. Emery has certainly supplied both the methodology and the basic information on the rules of the game upon which others can build.