Governments Need Some Myth to Act as the Foundation for Their Authority

In an annex to Queen's Park, several rooms are devoted to exhibits illustrating the growth of parliamentary democracy. The display begins with Magna Carta and continues through Upper Canadian times with copies of the Colonial Advocate and other voices of reform. The exhibits give the impression that in the early nineteenth century Ontario escaped from the oppression of Family Compact rule and entered into that best of all possible worlds, liberal democracy. If it is true that governments need some myth to act as the foundation for their authority, then this memorial to responsible government in Queen's Park is a superb manifestation of the prevailing myth.

--Patrick Brode, preface to Sir John Beverley Robinson: Bone and Sinew of the Compact, Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), ix.