The views of Charles SIMONDS dominated New Brunswick’s politics from the late 1820s to the early 1840s. He argued forcefully for the rights of the assembly against the prerogatives of the executive and advocated using the lower house’s powers to seize the political initiative:

“Simonds’s unorthodox constitutional position was genuinely radical. He argued that the crown and its representatives did not have privileged rights, that they were dependent on the House of Assembly, and that the central issue was the question of arbitrary taxation without the consent of the governed. No lawyer, Simonds rejected with disdain the objections to his theories raised by Chandler, Crane, and William Boyd Kinnear*. Regardless of the constitutional correctness of his rhetoric, Simonds’s stance became immensely popular as the crisis developed in 1833 and 1834....

“The next two years were a period of vicious sniping as relations between the assembly and the lieutenant governor collapsed completely. For the first time in the province’s history the assembly’s animosity was directed not only against the lieutenant governor’s advisers, but against the lieutenant governor himself.”

To learn more about reform politics in New Brunswick, consult the following biographies.