George Brown on Wealth Transfers from Upper Canada to Lower Canada

George Brown complained long, loudly, and often of the demographic disparity and of a parallel disparity of wealth. According to Brown, a prospering Upper Canadian population and economy was not just yoked to a primitive Lower Canadian peasantry: it was transferring its hard-earned wealth to that peasantry.... Brown's fiscal complaints came to the forefront in 1859. That year, Macdonald's finance minister, Alexander Tilloch Galt, introduced a tariff that went beyond mere revenue towards something approaching protection for Canadian manufactures. The tariff was necessitated by a debt crisis.... George Brown was by political inclination a free trader and "country" politician. He believed Adam Smith's arguments that economic meddling by politicians made for economic inefficiency and corrupt politics.

--E.A. Heaman, Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017), 22-23.