Jacksonian Influences on the Upper Canada Rebellion

But after an extensive trip in the United States during the first year of Andrew Jackson's administration, his outlook perceptibly changed. Here was democracy at work, and he liked it. In particular, he was enthusiastic about the Jacksonian practice of rotation in office (a polite term for the spoils system). What a wonderful way to get rid of the impudent "puppies and underlings of office" who so abounded in Upper Canada! Presently he was serializing the biography of his new hero, Andrew Jackson, in the pages of the Colonial Advocate.... he was more convinced than ever of the feasibility of a "federative union" of the British North American colonies that would do away with "slavish dependence" on England, and he now regarded it as proved that "the representative system of government" worked, and worked well.

--Gerald M. Craig, Upper Canada: The Formative Years, 1784-1841, Wynford Project (Don Mills: Oxford University Press Canada, 2013), 211.