From the front page of the Huron Expositor
Friday, 20 November 1931

Reprinted with the permission of the Huron Expositor
Copyright: the Huron Expositor
“Your Community Newspaper Since 1860”
P. O. Box 69
11 Main Street
Seaforth, Ontario N0K 1W0

Chapter 9 The Defence of the Canada Company

As we have seen, dissatisfaction with the Company's regime had been felt at least as early as Patrick Sherriff's visit in 1833; but it had been expressed only by abandonment of their holdings by the poor settlers who had come in. Discontent voiced thus the Company could safely ignore as far as the public were concerned. But from 1834 the men of Colborne, well-to-do and educated, where airing loud complaints in the press, and the Grievance Committee of the Legislature had by investigating the subject given the Company a good deal of the less desirable form of publicity. In these new circumstances Dr Dunlop felt obliged to draw up a statement of the Company's case for the benefit of the public. He composed a pamphlet under date of April 1, 1836, in which he endeavoured to meet in order a series of charges against the organization of which he was resident agent in Goderich.

To the complaint that the Company had obtained their lands too cheaply, he replied that the price of 3s 6d was set as the mean value of the land per acre in Upper Canada in 1824 and that residents of the Province, with every opportunity to know whether the Company was obtaining a bargain, had purchased no more than twenty-five shares out of the 10,000 of capital stock, which twenty-five were abandoned when the third instalment of payment was due. In 1826, when 13 pounds ten shillings had been paid on each share, the owners were selling them for a pound or a pound ten shillings each, or even giving them away to avoid calls for more instalments. From March 1824 to 1836, twenty-five pounds a share had been paid on each of the 9000 shares which, with an allowance of 20 percent for difference of currency and exchange, made a total of 271,000 pounds. All of this, declared the doctor, and all the money obtained from the sale of lands in ten years had been spent on the Company's lands, not one farthing having been sent to England.

This statement seems at variance with the doctor's admission to the Committee on Grievances in 1835 that four percent was being paid to the holder of each share out of the capital, an amount which perhaps the doctor did not consider it necessary to mention as a mere detail of the financing.

The Correspondent and Advocate of May 22, 1835, reports a meeting of the Company in London, April 1st, at which the Governor stated that the profits remitted from Upper Canada to England in 1835 had been 25,530 pounds after expenses; in 1833, 44,815 pounds. Perhaps Galt did not inform the doctor fully of the Company's financial transactions. As for the accusation that the Company was making exorbitant profits, he recalled that the Company's payments to the government for the land were to be completed in 1842 at a probable total of 361,000 pounds, a sum which if repaid with interest at the rate of 25,000 pounds a year would not be recovered by the holders until the completion of fourteen and a half years, so that there would be no genuine profits until 1856. Hence to charge the Company with exorbitant gain was absurd. Nor had the Company been lax in its efforts to improve conditions; it had constructed the Huron Road, a highway better than Yonge Street, and three times as long, and it had built up two flourishing villages, Goderich now superior to the 14 years founded Toronto of 1816, and Guelph, now equal to the Toronto of 1827.

More, the Company were active in promoting immigration; from 1829 to 1832 they had published advertisements, maps and pamphlets in every city, market town, village and hamlet in the three kingdoms, and had secured not only working men but men of capital, intelligence and education. In consequence the value of land, cattle and produce in the Tract had risen from fifty to eighty percent, so that there was not a settler in the Tract of one year’s standing who would part with his farm at less than a fifty percent advance on his purchase price. In fact one, two, three and four hundred percent had been given for lands not in the hands of the owners of a corresponding number of years. This sufficed to show what the Company had done for the Tract.

As to the charge of monopoly, every merchant, shopkeeper and lawyer throughout the Province had lands for sale; was that not competition enough?

Such was Dunlop's defence, prepared in 1836, and apparently printed, but for some unexplained reason not circulated at all widely.

If we except the doubtful detail of financing, not an important matter, at best his claims are quite accurate, that the Company was not making great profits and that it had done much towards the settlement of the Tract. If the people had purchased lands directly from the Crown, there would have been less discontent but much slower settlement, so that from the standpoint of our present Ontario, the Company system was not without its virtues.