From the front page of the Huron Expositor
Friday, 30 October 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 6 The Maitland Harbour Affair

The site of Goderich had not long been occupied before it was discovered that the harbour formed by the mouth of the Maitland possessed one marked disadvantage in that it frequently became blocked with a bar of silt from the action of the river and northwest wind; a condition which still persists and necessitates constant dredging if the harbour is to be kept open. This contingency the Company had not foreseen and had not taken into consideration in their financial estimates. But when their commissioners at Goderich saw four schooners swamped while trying to cross the bar in the summer of 1834, they decided that they must take some action and cast about for ways and means of raising additional revenue for the purpose of removing the bar. Finally, they agreed that the best method would be to charge a toll on all vessels entering the harbour; and, as the Company's charter gave it no right to make such a charge, they made application to the Legislative Assembly in a petition entrusted to Thomas William Luard of “Langford” in Colborne Township. Mr. Luard appears to have taken the petition to the Assembly and to have endeavoured to convince the members of the justice of the Company's request. Probably he expected a grant of the necessary permission as a matter of course, subject only to limitation of the charge imposed on the vessels.

But opposition arose at once. For Colonel Van Egmond, alert to embarrass the Company and prevent an extension of its powers, approached the Reform Party then dominant in the Assembly with a view to defeating the request; and he or his friends discovered a strong constitutional argument, that no toll could legally be charged for entrance to a navigable river. The Reform Journal Correspondent and Advocate in its issue of December 29, 1834, devoted an editorial to the case, denounced the company for its “avarice, and capacity,” its supposed profit of $2,400,000 out of the Huron Tract, its character as a “justly detested monopoly” and concluded in a strangely minor key that improvement of the river was not desirable at present. The editor went on to cite a case in a court of requests “not 100 miles from Goderich” where “the sapient commissioners, green European ones, newly baked” had heard the evidence and concluded the affair by granting a verdict against one of the witnesses, instead of following the more usual and devious course of non-suiting the plaintiff and giving him time to bring a new action against the person who had served as witness. Seeing this unorthodox procedure, Mr Michael Fisher, of Goderich, Dutchman and owner of the Fisher Hotel, who was also a witness, immediately exclaimed, “Py Gott, I will take care never to be a witness again, for fear they would tuck a verdict upon me!” The supposed judicial incompetence of the commissioners was, of course, irrelevant to the Goderich Harbour Bill, but a good brick for the Reform editor to throw at the Canada Company. Perhaps it was to this occasion that William Lyon Mackenzie referred in the Constitution of June 7, 1837. “Years ago, we joined Colonel Van Egmond, Fisher and others in uncloaking the villainies of that cruel and unfeeling nest of mercenary adventurers the Canada Company has practiced in the Huron Tract.” In any case, the whole Reform Party joined in the hue and cry against the Goderich Harbour Bill; and as they were in the majority of the Legislature of 1834, they succeeded in throwing out the Company's proposals. Colonel Van Egmond had won one round from the Company.

The commissioners of the Company however, found a method of revenge easy to hand; they allowed the mouth of the river to continue silting up so that the principal vessel lay idle in the harbour all summer of 1835, commerce by water almost ceased, the price of flour rose to eight or nine dollars a barrel, and the settlers suffered - though probably not the Colonel, who grew his own wheat. Eventually the commissioners discovered an alternative to the toll in a wharfage charge for the use of the landing space, all of which was in control of the Company. Such a charge was obviously within their legal powers and probably capable of yielding as much revenue as a harbour toll. In fact, then, if not in theory, the Company came off victorious. Opinion among the settlers seems to have been divided. Later, Mr. Luard made the defeat of the Harbour Bill a matter of accusation against Van Egmond, which would lead us to infer that some at least of the Colborne men had prepared to accept the toll as a less evil than an indefinitely silted harbour and were returning the Colonel no thanks for his successful lobbying. In any case, the matter was closed and the Company continued to draw revenue from the wharfage charge.

The affair had brought the Colonel into contact with political struggles in Upper Canada and in particular into association with the Reform Party. He had already acquired Liberal opinions, probably during his period of service with the Frenchmen of revolutionary and Napoleonic times and was thus predisposed toward sympathy with the Upper Canadian Reformers, who appeared to hold the same views as himself. Now, stimulated by his antagonism to the Company, he threw in his lot heart and soul with the Reform Party in its war on the Family Compact. From 1834 he was a Reformer - a participant in the province-wide political contest of the time.