Upper Canada Considers a Policy of Indian Removal and Indian Extinction in the 1830s

In the Lake Simcoe region the experiments at Coldwater and the Narrows (Orillia) were frustrated, in large part because the surrounding white settlers demanded that the government remove the Indians to some distant northern location.

Indeed, British Indian policy in Upper Canada suffered an aberration in the 1830s by actually entertaining for a time the idea of removal. The moving spirit behind this concept was Sir Francis Bond Head, who arrived in the province in 1836 as lieutenant-governor. He reckoned that as far as the Indians were concerned, "we have only to bear patiently with them for a short time, and with a few exceptions, principally half-castes, their unhappy race beyond our power of redemption, will be extinct."

--Robert S. Allen, His Majesty's Indian Allies: British Indian Policy in the Defence of Canada, 1774-1815 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1992), 182.