The Clear Grit Party and Agrarian Radicalism in Canada West

It is well established in Canadian tradition that the Toronto Globe of the Confederation era spoke above all for the farmers of Canada West.... scholarship has strengthened tradition by demonstrating that the Globe under George Brown, like the Clear Grit party under his leadership, was largely an expression of the forces of agrarian radicalism that were at work in Canada West in the years prior to Confederation. “For the essential thing,” one authority has said, “about the Globe and the movement it led is that it represented the aspirations and general outlook on life of the pioneer Upper Canada farmer. The ‘Clear Grit’ party was an expression of the ‘frontier’ in our Canadian politics just as Jacksonian Democracy or Lincoln Republicanism was in the politics of the United States.”

--J.M.S. Careless, "The Toronto Globe and Agrarian Radicalism, 1850-67," in Careless at Work: Selected Canadian Historical Studies (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1990), 17.