Confederation and the Rule of Property

The leading architects of Confederation distrusted democracy and sought to entrench the rule of property. John A. Macdonald, George-Étienne Cartier, A.T. Galt, John Sandfield Macdonald, Charles Tupper, Joseph Howe, to name a few, saw in democracy an American-style demagoguery. Cartier described property as the element that must govern the world. All believed that the political weight of the propertied classes had to be specially protected.

--E.A. Heaman, Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017), 32.