Title: Gender and the Law of Husband and Wife in Nineteenth Century Ontario: A Case Study

Date: Monday, January 12, 2026 

Description: We were pleased to have Professor Jim Phillips, one of Canada's, and the world's, leading legal historians visit us. Professor Phillips provided general remarks on the field of legal history before exploring the subjects addressed by his recent book: the law governing married women in the later nineteenth century as well as the operation of the civil courts, the forensic skills of leading members of the Ontario legal profession, constitutional law, and parliamentary divorce during this time.

Speakers:

• Jim Phillips - Professor Emeritus, Law and History, University of Toronto

Podcast:

Transcript:  

00:00:00 Speaker 1
Great.
00:00:01 Speaker 1
So thank you everyone for joining us today, both in person and those of you online.
00:00:09 Speaker 1
It's my great privilege to introduce Professor Jim Phillips from the University of Toronto.
00:00:17 Speaker 1
Jim is, I won't mince words, he's a true scholar, real friend, and an all-round decent human being.
00:00:29 Speaker 2
Wow.
00:00:31 Speaker 2
Okay.
00:00:31 Speaker 1
And one of the world's leading legal historians.
00:00:38 Speaker 1
He studied law at Dalhousie.
00:00:40 Speaker 1
Before that, he studied history at the University of Edinburgh.
00:00:45 Speaker 1
And he's been at U of T for...
00:00:48 Speaker 2
37.
00:00:49 Speaker 1
37.
00:00:50 Speaker 1
Thank you.
00:00:51 Speaker 2
Before I retired, so 38 now.
00:00:58 Speaker 1
As I say, he is one of the world's leading legal historians.
00:01:03 Speaker 1
I don't know how many book chapters, et cetera.
00:01:06 Speaker 1
He's produced dozens and dozens.
00:01:10 Speaker 1
But there are a number of contributions that I wanted to highlight for you.
00:01:16 Speaker 1
One is one of the co-editors and a contributing author to a series of books on Canadian legal history.
00:01:25 Speaker 1
I think you're about volume 4.
00:01:29 Speaker 2
We're going to finish volume 3 next year and there will not be a volume 4.
00:01:36 Speaker 1
A tremendous contribution to legal scholarship.
00:01:41 Speaker 1
And also he has made a significant contribution through his editorship of the Osgoode Society for Legal History book series.
00:01:56 Speaker 1
And I think Jim's going to speak a little bit about the society in a few moments.
00:02:03 Speaker 1
But that series of books has profoundly changed legal scholarship in Canada.
00:02:13 Speaker 1
I encourage you, if you are not a member of the society, to join.
00:02:18 Speaker 1
I brought a few books just as examples.
00:02:22 Speaker 1
This is one of my favorites from a few years ago.
00:02:25 Speaker 1
called Dodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance Through Alliance.
00:02:30 Speaker 1
It's a fabulous book by Heidi Boliker.
00:02:36 Speaker 1
I'm a fan of biography, and this biography of Bertha Wilson is another one in the series.
00:02:45 Speaker 1
And I brought this one because Jim clerked for Bertha Wilson at the Supreme Court in Canada.
00:02:54 Speaker 1
There was one year when I realized I was using biographies to illustrate points in class frequently.
00:03:03 Speaker 1
And I thought, can I carry it on throughout the term, every class referring to a biography in order to illustrate a point.
00:03:12 Speaker 1
And I did it.
00:03:14 Speaker 1
I don't think I could have done it without your book series, so thank you.
00:03:20 Speaker 1
I'm going to let him speak now, but I did want to mention a few things.
00:03:23 Speaker 1
He's been honored in a number of ways in recent years.
00:03:29 Speaker 1
He's been elected as a fellow to the Royal Society of Canada.
00:03:33 Speaker 1
He's been awarded the Mundell Medal by the Attorney General of Ontario for excellence in legal writing.
00:03:41 Speaker 1
He's an honorary fellow of the American Society for Legal History.
00:03:45 Speaker 1
And just last year, he was awarded the Law Society Medal by the Law Society of Ontario.
00:03:53 Speaker 1
for services to the legal profession.
00:03:56 Speaker 1
He's over his life been a true volunteer.
00:04:02 Speaker 1
He's a cyclist and he has cycled, I think, with visually impaired cyclists on tandem bikes.
00:04:14 Speaker 1
That's one of the volunteer things that he's done and cycled to raise funds for fighting cancer.
00:04:24 Speaker 1
Finally, Jim is known for his attire.
00:04:27 Speaker 1
He wears black.
00:04:32 Speaker 1
I'm told that this is because of some issues regarding patterns and colours and making decisions relating there too.
00:04:42 Speaker 1
And I just wanted to say I have dressed in all black today.
00:04:48 Speaker 1
Over to you, John.
00:04:49 Speaker 2
Okay.
00:04:50 Speaker 2
Well, thank you, Mark.
00:04:52 Speaker 2
I can't think of a greater tribute than you turned up in black.
00:04:57 Speaker 2
And that is in fact one of the principal reason why I always wear black, because if you have to worry about going up to your closet and oh, what shirt shall I wear and does this go with that?
00:05:07 Speaker 2
And you don't have to worry about that at all.
00:05:09 Speaker 2
So conversely, in my cycling days, a vast array of brightly colored
00:05:16 Speaker 2
differently colored cycling shirts in particular.
00:05:19 Speaker 2
And I carefully would choose which one to wear on a particular day, but you don't have to do that for teaching.
00:05:25 Speaker 2
So anyway, thank you very much for the invite.
00:05:27 Speaker 2
It's great to be here.
00:05:29 Speaker 2
It's always great because any author of any book will tell you it's a great always to
00:05:34 Speaker 2
come somewhere and talk about your book, because that's almost as good, almost as good as talking about yourself, which we all enjoy.
00:05:41 Speaker 2
I'm particularly pleased that in the audience today are a number of people I know and some former students, Jacob, and there may be others as well.
00:05:52 Speaker 2
And so let me just start off with saying a tiny bit about the Oscar Society for Canadian Lead History.
00:05:59 Speaker 2
As Mark said, it is an organization devoted to the
00:06:05 Speaker 2
preservation and propagation of information and solarship about Canadian legal history.
00:06:11 Speaker 2
It actually has nothing to do with Osgood Hall Law School.
00:06:14 Speaker 2
It was given that name by its founder, Roy McMurtry, who was then Attorney General for Ontario.
00:06:21 Speaker 2
And it is, of course, one of a number of institutions and organizations named Osgoode in Toronto.
00:06:28 Speaker 2
This is the Osgoode Society.
00:06:29 Speaker 2
There's Osgoode Hall Law School, which there's Osgoode Hall itself on Queen Street, which is where Osgoode Hall used to be.
00:06:37 Speaker 2
And all of these places and things are named after William Osgoode, who was the first Chief Justice of Canada from 1791 until
00:06:46 Speaker 2
somewhere in 1792 when he decided that he should decamp to the much more pleasant place to live of Lower Canada, which had two major cities, Montreal and Quebec City, been there obviously for a long time under the French.
00:07:01 Speaker 2
Whereas Upper Canada at that time had muddy York, which was a tiny village later called Toronto, and the government started Newark, now Niagara on the lake.
00:07:13 Speaker 2
So he didn't like to be there at all.
00:07:15 Speaker 2
So he got out as fast as he could, which means that he holds the world record for the most number of places and institutions named after him for the least amount of time actually spent in the place.
00:07:27 Speaker 2
So that's William Osgood for you, William Osgood for you.
00:07:31 Speaker 2
Now, the important thing about the Osgood Society for Canadian Legal History is that it's an independent organization, not affiliated to any law school, and a combination, which I like very much,
00:07:44 Speaker 2
of the academics, practicing lawyers, and the judiciary, all of whom think legal history is important and are prepared to support it materially, and in other words, and read its products, et cetera.
00:07:59 Speaker 2
Our directors, long-standing, include the current Chief Justice of Ontario, Mike Tullock.
00:08:07 Speaker 2
He joined the Oscar Society when he was a student at Oscar Hall Law School, and that was a long time ago.
00:08:12 Speaker 2
We also have as one of our directors, Mahmoud Jabal, who joined the Oscar Society as a director while he was still a practicing lawyer.
00:08:21 Speaker 2
And I could go on.
00:08:22 Speaker 2
So it's a fairly eminent group of people, plus academics and others not so eminent as those.
00:08:30 Speaker 2
That's why I always mentioned those two in particular.
00:08:34 Speaker 2
Let's say what we are, I think, joins us is a belief that legal history is important, that it's
00:08:42 Speaker 2
It's an important way of understanding our legal past, and in that sense, also understanding our legal present.
00:08:49 Speaker 2
That is to say, if you really want to understand what the law is, then there's no better way of seeing in practice how, in fact, it emerges from a combination of doctrine, philosophy, but also socioeconomic context, political beliefs,
00:09:09 Speaker 2
responses to changing in economies and politics in various jurisdictions over time.
00:09:15 Speaker 2
So legal history, I always insist, will never, ever give you the answer, will never, ever act in a prospective way, in a normative way going forward.
00:09:27 Speaker 2
But it is necessary, I believe, before you in fact, you can act normatively going forward to properly understand why you were here and what choices were made
00:09:39 Speaker 2
as to get us here.
00:09:41 Speaker 2
And it's also in that sense liberating because it enables you to realize, well, if what we've got is a product of historical choice and contingency over many generations, then there's nothing to bind us to keep it.
00:09:55 Speaker 2
We keep the good and don't keep the less good.
00:09:57 Speaker 2
So that's why I think legal history is important.
00:10:01 Speaker 2
And that's a little speech I always give to my first year property students.
00:10:04 Speaker 2
So to you, probably only Jacob, in fact, will have heard that.
00:10:08 Speaker 2
So sometime in the past.
00:10:10 Speaker 2
Okay.
00:10:11 Speaker 2
So what I want to talk about now is my recent book, came out in October, which is, I think, an illustration of the fact that if you want to understand the way in which a variety of things, in particular women's status in law, has evolved over time and you understand its past and see as
00:10:33 Speaker 2
Constance Backhouse, who's written a nice little spiel on the back of the back cover, talks about how much, thank God, how much better things there are now, but how much you want to complain about them than they were at a certain time in the past.
00:10:49 Speaker 2
So what I've written is a species of legal history, which is often referred to as legal archaeology or a case study.
00:10:57 Speaker 2
That is to say, it takes one particular case or one particular incident or set of incidents
00:11:03 Speaker 2
and tries to put them in their legal and their social, economic, and political context in order to illustrate the operation of the law on the ground at a particular time and in a particular context.
00:11:19 Speaker 2
So it's the law in practice, law in action, I should say, to use the famous distinction, as opposed to the law on the books.
00:11:27 Speaker 2
So today I want to do is to
00:11:31 Speaker 2
divide my remarks into three.
00:11:33 Speaker 2
I will firstly spend a few minutes talking about the two main characters involved, where they came from, their marriage, what happened, et cetera.
00:11:43 Speaker 2
And then secondly, talk about three court cases, which my characters, which the husband and wife were involved in.
00:11:53 Speaker 2
And thirdly, talk about the parliamentary proceedings.
00:11:56 Speaker 2
The third part of the saga, if you like, is that in fact the
00:12:01 Speaker 2
The husband, Robert Campbell, decided that he wanted to get divorced.
00:12:05 Speaker 2
And in the 1870s in Ontario, the only way you could get divorced was by getting a private act of parliament to divorce the couple.
00:12:14 Speaker 2
This was the case until 1930, if you know anything about your 20th century Canadian legal history.
00:12:21 Speaker 2
And indeed, it was the case until 1968 in Quebec, not until the 1968 Divorce Act was every
00:12:28 Speaker 2
person in the country able to go to court to get divorced as opposed to use some other method.
00:12:36 Speaker 2
So it's an important part, although little studied by Canadian historians, of the history of family law.
00:12:45 Speaker 2
Now, I say it's the history of family law, although of course nobody in the 1870s called it family law, right?
00:12:51 Speaker 2
It was the law of husband and wife, the law of marital relations, the law of domestic relations,
00:12:56 Speaker 2
et cetera.
00:12:57 Speaker 2
Family law is a, I don't think the first significant piece of writing in Canadian law on with a title called Family Law was until the late 60s or early, early 70s.
00:13:09 Speaker 2
So it was always something else before that.
00:13:11 Speaker 2
Okay.
00:13:12 Speaker 2
So let me talk about the, first about the Campbells.
00:13:20 Speaker 2
All right.
00:13:22 Speaker 2
I should be able to move this on.
00:13:25 Speaker 2
book title.
00:13:25 Speaker 2
There's a picture of Robert Campbell.
00:13:27 Speaker 2
Unfortunately, I could not find any picture of Eliza Campbell, which is very much to my disappointment.
00:13:34 Speaker 2
So Robert and Eliza Campbell were married in 1863 at Whitby, in Whitby, married by her father, who was the local Congregationalist minister.
00:13:45 Speaker 2
She was 19 and he was 29 at the time of the marriage.
00:13:52 Speaker 2
He was a
00:13:55 Speaker 2
from a family of Scottish immigrants who came to Canada around, came to what was then Canada West around mid-century.
00:14:04 Speaker 2
And he was in business with his brother.
00:14:06 Speaker 2
He was a major retailer of a whole variety of dry goods, clothing, et cetera, with his brother, James Campbell.
00:14:16 Speaker 2
So the firm of R&J Campbell, that's from the Whitby newspaper.
00:14:21 Speaker 2
And he was one of the wealthiest, best, most successful businessmen in Ontario County.
00:14:28 Speaker 2
That's the county to the east of Ontario where Whidbey is and Pickering and places like that now, if you know that area of Ontario.
00:14:41 Speaker 2
She, as I say, was 19.
00:14:43 Speaker 2
She was the daughter of the Reverend
00:14:48 Speaker 2
James Byrne, her unmarried name was Byrne, and he was a local congregationalist minister.
00:14:58 Speaker 2
The Byrne family were also relatively recent immigrants, having come from England, and he actually came to Canada at the behest under the sponsorship of the London Missionary Society, a Church of England organization.
00:15:15 Speaker 2
So I suppose the idea was that missionaries were needed even in the British North American colonies, because of course the British North American colonies had a lot of people who were those terrible things, Catholics.
00:15:30 Speaker 2
So they had to be converted as much as people from more distant lands.
00:15:36 Speaker 2
So the Campbells had three children in the 1860s.
00:15:41 Speaker 2
born in 1864, 1865, and 1867, and in the fall of 1873, which is our sort of magic moment for the story, Eliza was pregnant with their fourth child.
00:15:56 Speaker 2
The Campbells lived in one of Whitby's larger houses with a live-in servant.
00:16:02 Speaker 2
However, all was not perfect with their marriage.
00:16:05 Speaker 2
The 10-year age difference didn't help, but more of a problem
00:16:10 Speaker 2
was the fact that they had very different personalities, excuse me, and interests.
00:16:16 Speaker 2
And here I can do this, that's James Campbell, Robert's business partner and brother.
00:16:21 Speaker 2
I don't know how well that reads, but here I can do no better than to provide a summary, which was actually written by Samuel Hume Blake, one of the Blakey legal family.
00:16:35 Speaker 2
who was the vice chancellor of the Court of Chancery.
00:16:38 Speaker 2
And this is in the process of giving judgment in the case of Campbell versus Campbell, in which Eliza had sued Robert Campbell for alimony.
00:16:48 Speaker 2
Let's see what he says.
00:16:49 Speaker 2
He says, the lady, the daughter of a clergyman, seems to have received a good education and to have been not without accomplishments.
00:16:56 Speaker 2
She's described as a good musician, very fond of playing and singing.
00:17:01 Speaker 2
But the husband
00:17:02 Speaker 2
was not such a person.
00:17:03 Speaker 2
He was a man of good business habits, but he took little, if any, interest in that which pleased his wife.
00:17:10 Speaker 2
The marriage was not, in this respect, a well-assorted one.
00:17:13 Speaker 2
Neither party sought to accommodate these differences.
00:17:16 Speaker 2
The husband obtained pleasure from his chief source of enjoyment to business, which had resolved so much of his time and attention, and neglected his wife.
00:17:27 Speaker 2
And she, and this last sentence is important, I think,
00:17:30 Speaker 2
And she looked for and obtained in the society of others the enjoyment and admiration which she vainly sought at the hands of her husband.
00:17:41 Speaker 2
Gradually, that which amounted almost to estrangement grew up between them.
00:17:50 Speaker 2
So what turned an unhappy marriage into a notorious and tragic one was, as Blake put it,
00:17:56 Speaker 2
the fact that Eliza looked for and obtained in the society of others the enjoyment and admiration which she vainly sought at the hands of her husband.
00:18:06 Speaker 2
In late 1872, she became friendly with a young Englishman, Godfrey Parkes, who had recently emigrated to Canada West and was looking for work.
00:18:18 Speaker 2
Strabbles took him to Whitby.
00:18:19 Speaker 2
He stayed there a number of months looking for work, including applying for a job as a bookkeeper with R&J Campbell, but he was rejected.
00:18:29 Speaker 2
But while he was in Whitby, he became friendly with Eliza, meeting her in church.
00:18:36 Speaker 2
And as you know, beware of church attendance, it can lead to walking home afterwards and then going to drives while the husband was at work.
00:18:46 Speaker 2
But I'm sure nothing more than that, unless you think theological discussions about the distinction between mainstream Anglicans and Congregationalists is something more than that.
00:18:57 Speaker 2
In any event, although he'd become friendly with Eliza, Parkes left Whitby in the spring of 1873.
00:19:04 Speaker 2
He found a job in Concord, and he and Eliza corresponded thereafter intermittently, but they never saw each other again.
00:19:13 Speaker 2
There's a little footnote to the story.
00:19:16 Speaker 2
Parks has a minor place in a much more important aspect of Canadian history.
00:19:22 Speaker 2
When he was not able to find suitable employment in the Whitby, like a number of other young men from Ontario in 1874, he gave up trying and joined the Northwest Mounted Police, established by MacDonald to plant the flag and maintain law and order in the recently acquired Northwest Territories.
00:19:44 Speaker 2
Parks was part of a very well-known event in Canadian history, the quote, Great March West, in which some 300 men traveled on horseback from Emerson, Manitoba to southern Alberta to assert Canadian sovereignty in the area.
00:20:00 Speaker 2
Now, the Great March West was a fiasco, much lauded in older books, but in fact, it was a fiasco.
00:20:08 Speaker 2
It was planned and executed by men in equal parts
00:20:11 Speaker 2
ignorant of the country they were traveling through and incompetent.
00:20:15 Speaker 2
Many men suffered from the privations of the march.
00:20:17 Speaker 2
Many animals died, but only one man died, and that was Jeffrey Parks.
00:20:22 Speaker 2
He died from typhoid in October 1875 or at Fort McLeod of Alberta.
00:20:31 Speaker 2
Anyway, so he doesn't feature in this story anymore, although he's referred to.
00:20:37 Speaker 2
So back to the Campbells.
00:20:38 Speaker 2
Robert knew nothing of Parks, and in June 1873, he went on his annual trip to the UK to buy goods for his business.
00:20:48 Speaker 2
When he came back, he discovered some writing by Eliza on scraps of paper when he broke into one of her drawers.
00:20:57 Speaker 2
Some were quite worrying, although in fact they turned out to be things she'd copied out of novels, including novels by George Sand.
00:21:05 Speaker 2
and they were not addressed to anybody.
00:21:06 Speaker 2
They were simply kept in her drawers.
00:21:09 Speaker 2
Now, and they made reference to my mind is raffed with bliss and kind of stuff like this, but it was all from novels, songbooks, devotional works, et cetera.
00:21:23 Speaker 2
There were two letters to and from, one letter from Eliza to Parks and one letter from Parks to Eliza, which didn't have that same kind of flowery language, although they showed
00:21:33 Speaker 2
some friendly correspondence.
00:21:36 Speaker 2
But Robert, as he later put it in various court proceedings, he immediately decided that Eliza was, quote, not a proper guardian for my children.
00:21:46 Speaker 2
This phrase he used quite a lot.
00:21:48 Speaker 2
He didn't say she was a bad wife.
00:21:50 Speaker 2
He didn't say she was a bad mother.
00:21:54 Speaker 2
She was not a proper guardian for his children.
00:21:57 Speaker 2
As if, in fact,
00:21:59 Speaker 2
As the mother of the three children, she was, in fact, simply that, the guardian.
00:22:04 Speaker 2
They were his children.
00:22:05 Speaker 2
And that's not untypical of the way in which, in fact, patriarchal relations in law, as well as in society, in fact, were seen and did operate in the 1870s.
00:22:17 Speaker 2
In any event, he decided to legalize her.
00:22:21 Speaker 2
He did not ask for an explanation.
00:22:24 Speaker 2
He did not tell her immediately that he was going to leave her.
00:22:28 Speaker 2
But instead he took the children away to take, so that they would not witness, quote, what he called the trouble that was coming.
00:22:36 Speaker 2
He took them to the Sorgeen, which is where his parents lived, told Eliza he was taking them there for a holiday, and he was also going for a holiday.
00:22:47 Speaker 2
But in fact, what he did was just take the children, leave them there and come back so that they weren't around in Whitby.
00:22:55 Speaker 2
This took two or three days to organize.
00:22:58 Speaker 2
And in the meantime, he heard local gossip about Eliza spending evenings, not with Parks, because she didn't, but about another young man called George Gordon, son of a prominent local farmer who lived just outside Whitby.
00:23:16 Speaker 2
Now he had two people to worry about.
00:23:18 Speaker 2
And when he left Whitby, after a few days after returning from the UK, he told his brother James,
00:23:26 Speaker 2
fellow with a large bushy beard, I showed a bit earlier, to quote, watch the house while he was away.
00:23:35 Speaker 2
James Campbell and a brother-in-law of the Campbell brothers, a man called John Anderson, who had married Catherine Campbell, their younger sister, did indeed dutifully carry out Robert's wishes.
00:23:50 Speaker 2
They spent on the evening of August the 26th, 1863,
00:23:55 Speaker 2
They spent six hours in the garden around the house.
00:23:59 Speaker 2
Now, they never went into the house.
00:24:01 Speaker 2
They could not see anything that went on in the house because the blinds were drawn.
00:24:06 Speaker 2
They spent a lot of time sort of kneeling down outside one of the parlor windows to stay below the sill of the window while they listened to what was happening, et cetera.
00:24:23 Speaker 2
And
00:24:24 Speaker 2
They came back with a story which was in fact that during those six hours, firstly, George Gordon had turned up at the house at 9 o'clock at night.
00:24:34 Speaker 2
George Gordon had not left the house until 3 o'clock in the morning.
00:24:38 Speaker 2
And during those time after midnight, between 12 and 3 in the morning, he and Eliza Campbell had sex twice.
00:24:48 Speaker 2
And they described noises, described snippets of conversation,
00:24:54 Speaker 2
the sofa moving around, et cetera.
00:24:58 Speaker 2
One of the funniest moments in the parliamentary proceeding was when this was said before the Senate Divorce Committee, one senator, and he's not named, who's on the committee, blurted out twice.
00:25:17 Speaker 2
Any event, at the end of that evening,
00:25:21 Speaker 2
Robert, so James Campbell telegraphed Robert to them home.
00:25:25 Speaker 2
He did so.
00:25:26 Speaker 2
He refused to speak to Eliza.
00:25:27 Speaker 2
He didn't ask for an explanation.
00:25:29 Speaker 2
He conveyed messages to her through her family.
00:25:33 Speaker 2
That's her father and her brother, who was a local druggist, accusing her of having
00:25:41 Speaker 2
committed adultery with George Gordon and telling her that was it.
00:25:45 Speaker 2
She no longer wished to speak to her.
00:25:47 Speaker 2
He told her father at one point to just to take her away, take her back.
00:25:52 Speaker 2
So again, census, she really belongs to somebody else.
00:25:56 Speaker 2
It's nothing to do with me, et cetera.
00:26:00 Speaker 2
Now she denied it all, of course.
00:26:01 Speaker 2
They had, she, both she and George Gordon had a completely different version of the evening, denied anything improper taking place.
00:26:09 Speaker 2
They were in fact,
00:26:12 Speaker 2
Schoolmates, they were roughly the same age.
00:26:15 Speaker 2
They'd grown up in a town together.
00:26:17 Speaker 2
Their families were friends, had been friends for decades.
00:26:20 Speaker 2
And all that happened was that she was seeing a friend, et cetera.
00:26:27 Speaker 2
She was singing for him.
00:26:29 Speaker 2
She was reading to him.
00:26:30 Speaker 2
They played checkers, things like that.
00:26:34 Speaker 2
They just had a normal social evening.
00:26:36 Speaker 2
She admitted it really was a bit late.
00:26:40 Speaker 2
some in the early hours of the morning to be doing this when you were a married woman and your husband was not in the house, but you're just having such a good time talking about books, et cetera, and her singing to him, she was a very accomplished singer, that time had just passed them by.
00:26:59 Speaker 2
Okay.
00:27:01 Speaker 2
Okay, so marriage breakdown.
00:27:06 Speaker 2
Of course, it's the talk of the town.
00:27:08 Speaker 2
Nobody quite can understand what's going on, right?
00:27:11 Speaker 2
Or decide who they initially, who they believe.
00:27:16 Speaker 2
And it seems so improbable.
00:27:18 Speaker 2
On the one hand, it's the daughter of a clergyman, a very respected young mother in the community, goes to church all the time, life and soul of church parties and socials and things like this, all the rest of it.
00:27:34 Speaker 2
How could she possibly
00:27:36 Speaker 2
have done this while her husband was away in her own house with her brother-in-law, prowling around the house because she knew that he was in the garden.
00:27:49 Speaker 2
So how and why would she possibly, on the other hand, why would these two respectable members of the community, one of the lead town's leading merchants, make up such a story?
00:28:01 Speaker 2
such a wild story.
00:28:03 Speaker 2
This is not a story that you could in any way find some common grounds based on some misunderstanding, right?
00:28:11 Speaker 2
This was, these were two starkly different stories.
00:28:15 Speaker 2
Anyway, the important point is that Robert Campbell's believed his brother and his brother-in-law and never gave his wife a chance to explain.
00:28:28 Speaker 2
or to deny or to do anything else.
00:28:31 Speaker 2
And Nenon was an inveterate pursuer of her in a variety of ways.
00:28:40 Speaker 2
So one thing that happened was that after he told her to get out of the family house, which is of course his, and she refused.
00:28:50 Speaker 2
And after about a month or so of refusing his demands, he simply got a couple of local constables
00:28:58 Speaker 2
went around one night.
00:29:00 Speaker 2
She was there with her mother and her sister-in-law.
00:29:04 Speaker 2
But despite that, Robert Campbell and the two constables literally dragged her from the bed upstairs, frog-marched, half-carried her down the steps, through the hallway, opened the front door, and more or less
00:29:20 Speaker 2
She deposited her at the bottom of the veranda steps.
00:29:22 Speaker 2
She was at this point five months pregnant.
00:29:25 Speaker 2
Remember, she was pregnant with her, with the panel's fourth child.
00:29:30 Speaker 2
And then she was forced to go away and live with her parents and her brother.
00:29:36 Speaker 2
He also, and I can move this on a bit, yeah.
00:29:40 Speaker 2
So he also, I'm just beautiful for o'clock, I'm gonna time myself, but I can't see one.
00:29:48 Speaker 2
I always need clocks.
00:29:50 Speaker 2
So note, note to quit, note to Queen's Law Administration.
00:29:57 Speaker 2
Put clocks on.
00:29:58 Speaker 2
OK, so I'll get to this a bit.
00:30:01 Speaker 2
OK, yes.
00:30:05 Speaker 2
You're not doing a great job, Colleen, obviously.
00:30:08 Speaker 2
So quickly, they're involved in three court cases over the next two years.
00:30:13 Speaker 2
I've got briefly noted up there.
00:30:19 Speaker 2
The first one was an action for criminal conversation taken by Robert Campbell against George Gordon.
00:30:27 Speaker 2
Criminal conversation was a longstanding common law tort.
00:30:31 Speaker 2
Despite its name, it was a civil action.
00:30:34 Speaker 2
It was abolished judicially in the 1970s by Charles Stubbin in a case, but it was used for the rest of Ontario's legal history up to that point.
00:30:46 Speaker 2
And essentially it enabled a husband to sue a man who had sex with his wife for damages based mostly on sort of lack of consortium.
00:31:01 Speaker 2
Robert Campbell won that and won $3,000 worth of damages.
00:31:06 Speaker 2
It was not a difficult case to win for anybody who has been a litigator because there was no evidence whatsoever on the defendant's side.
00:31:15 Speaker 2
as a result of two traditional common law evidentiary exclusions, neither George Gordon could testify because he was a party to the action.
00:31:32 Speaker 2
Parties couldn't testify.
00:31:34 Speaker 2
And nor could Eliza Campbell testify because she was the spouse of Robert Campbell.
00:31:41 Speaker 2
Now, both of these
00:31:42 Speaker 2
common law disabilities had actually been statutorily reformed in Ontario, as they were in most other common law jurisdictions, a few years earlier, but the Ontario reforming statute had contained one exception, except for cases involving accusations of adultery.
00:32:02 Speaker 2
So neither Eliza nor George Gordon could give their side of the story, and it wasn't a difficult case, therefore, for
00:32:11 Speaker 2
Robert Campbell to win.
00:32:14 Speaker 2
I should say that Campbell was represented by two of Ontario's leading lawyers.
00:32:19 Speaker 2
Robert Campbell was represented by Robert Harrison, who was one of Toronto's principal litigators and was appointed to the Court of King's Bench from the bar in 1875.
00:32:35 Speaker 2
Matthew Crooks Cameron was another one of the sort of lions of the
00:32:41 Speaker 2
Ontario Bar.
00:32:43 Speaker 2
He was also the leader of the Provincial Conservative Party, but that was quite common for people who were leading politicians and lawyers to also practice their profession while they were sitting in the Legislative Assembly.
00:32:57 Speaker 2
So these are really fine lawyers, but they must do.
00:33:00 Speaker 2
So that was one case.
00:33:02 Speaker 2
The second case, which we started at about the same time, was an action by Eliza Campbell for defamation
00:33:09 Speaker 2
against James Campbell.
00:33:12 Speaker 2
How did that come about?
00:33:14 Speaker 2
Well, do you know about somebody called Donald Trump and Eugene Carroll?
00:33:22 Speaker 2
This is exactly what Eugene Carroll did.
00:33:25 Speaker 2
So she wanted to say, Donald Trump had sexually assaulted me.
00:33:31 Speaker 2
She was limitations law prevented her from taking an action against Donald Trump for assaulting her.
00:33:37 Speaker 2
So he simply, so she simply stated in public that he had sexually assaulted her.
00:33:43 Speaker 2
She, he then denied that, effectively calling her a liar.
00:33:49 Speaker 2
She then sued him for defamation, right?
00:33:53 Speaker 2
But the essence of the thing was, had Donald Trump sexually assaulted her, because the answer to a defamation is action is always that what I said was the truth.
00:34:03 Speaker 2
So if he could prove it was true.
00:34:05 Speaker 2
Anyway, how it went.
00:34:07 Speaker 2
But they did the same thing here.
00:34:10 Speaker 2
James Campbell had, immediately after the events of August 1873, had gone around as part of Robert Campbell's campaign to harm his wife as much as possible, had gone around the local shopkeepers and told them not to serve her.
00:34:29 Speaker 2
Now, in this time, married women didn't have access to their own property, didn't have any earnings, right?
00:34:34 Speaker 2
So the normal expectation was that the women who did the shopping, et cetera, and looked after the household could get credit from all the stores and the husbands would then pay the bill, right?
00:34:46 Speaker 2
So if you were a husband and you wanted not to do this, it was important.
00:34:51 Speaker 2
You needed to, in fact, tell people that you were no longer responsible for your wife's debts.
00:34:57 Speaker 2
So that's what James Campbell did on Robert's behalf.
00:35:01 Speaker 2
And he said the reason was that she had committed adultery.
00:35:06 Speaker 2
So she sued him for defamation on the grounds that she had not committed adultery and therefore, and he had to defend it by trying to claim that it was true.
00:35:18 Speaker 2
Now, this was both these cases, the criminal conversation action and the defamation action,
00:35:26 Speaker 2
were heard in Toronto before a Toronto jury, two different juries, obviously, and they were heard a few months apart.
00:35:35 Speaker 2
And whereas Robert Campbell had won the criminal compensation case, then got Eliza Campbell won the defamation case a few months later.
00:35:47 Speaker 2
So the second jury came to exactly the opposite conclusion as the first jury had on the crucial factual question, which was
00:35:56 Speaker 2
common factual question to each of these actions was whether, in fact, adultery had been committed on that particular night.
00:36:02 Speaker 2
And there were two reasons why, Eliza Campbell won.
00:36:06 Speaker 2
One was that the exception to the reform of evidence law didn't apply in the defamation case because it was not a case instituted in consequence of adultery.
00:36:18 Speaker 2
It was a case instituted in consequence of defamation.
00:36:23 Speaker 2
So that meant Eliza and George Gordon could give their accounts of the story.
00:36:28 Speaker 2
So jury had two versions to choose from.
00:36:32 Speaker 2
More importantly, the criminal convocation case, criminal convocation and all these cases, in fact, were extensively reported in the local newspapers.
00:36:44 Speaker 2
And then, of course, those reports were read by many, many people in Whitby, because, of course, this was the talk of the town, right?
00:36:52 Speaker 2
And a few people in Whitby started to say after the criminal conversation case, oh, the newspaper report said that James Campbell said X.
00:37:01 Speaker 2
But that's not true.
00:37:04 Speaker 2
I remember it differently.
00:37:05 Speaker 2
And the thing in particular I remember differently was not anything that went on in the Campbell house, but the fact that after that night, James Campbell and Robert Campbell walked home and ran into George Gordon, who was also walking home,
00:37:19 Speaker 2
the sort of small hours of the morning in Whitby High Street and had an enormous, loud argument.
00:37:26 Speaker 2
And without going into the details, the main difference is that James Campbell's evidence in the beginning was that in that argument, he had said, you seduced my sister-in-law.
00:37:39 Speaker 2
And Gordon had replied, yes, but I couldn't help it.
00:37:44 Speaker 2
Whereas Gordon's evidence was, and what was heard by other people,
00:37:49 Speaker 2
who'd heard the conversations, they shouted at each other, was that James Campbell had said, you attempted to seduce my sister-in-law.
00:37:57 Speaker 2
And George Gordon had said, no, I didn't, right?
00:38:02 Speaker 2
So completely different versions.
00:38:05 Speaker 2
And there were enough people who'd heard the second version that the old story, even though none of this conversation was about actually whether they had sex together, but
00:38:19 Speaker 2
If you lie about subsidiary or collateral issues, are you telling the truth about the central issue?
00:38:24 Speaker 2
So public opinion would be swung very much on her side when these stories came out.
00:38:33 Speaker 2
And enough of this story gotten by and got to some of the jurors in Toronto.
00:38:37 Speaker 2
So the fact that these other witnesses could then turn up in the Court of Common Pleas in Toronto and say,
00:38:47 Speaker 2
that James Campbell's account was wrong, meant there was significant evidence for Eliza Campbell that was other than Eliza Campbell simply denying what had happened.
00:38:59 Speaker 2
Okay.
00:39:01 Speaker 2
The third case was an action in the Court of Chancery.
00:39:06 Speaker 2
Deserted wives were entitled to alimony, which was adjudicated in Chancery.
00:39:14 Speaker 2
A deserted wife who had committed adultery
00:39:17 Speaker 2
was not, in other words, there was good reason for her husband deserting her, was not allowed alimony.
00:39:26 Speaker 2
And Eliza had gotten interim alimony while the case was being prepared.
00:39:34 Speaker 2
And eventually it was tried with evidence taken in Whitby and the judgment, arguments made and judgment given in Toronto because Chancery operated
00:39:47 Speaker 2
differently the finder of fact and law was the chancellor rejudge.
00:39:53 Speaker 2
Okay.
00:39:55 Speaker 2
So Robert won that one.
00:39:57 Speaker 2
So at this point, he's two to one ahead.
00:39:59 Speaker 2
Okay.
00:40:00 Speaker 2
Now we go to Parliament and ends up as 2-2.
00:40:06 Speaker 2
I'll be as quick as I can with this.
00:40:08 Speaker 2
Okay.
00:40:10 Speaker 2
So as I already mentioned, if you wanted to get divorced,
00:40:14 Speaker 2
you had to go to parliament for a private act of parliament.
00:40:16 Speaker 2
In 1875 and 1876, again, Robert petitioned parliament for a divorce.
00:40:23 Speaker 2
What this means is you had to present a petition to parliament and then draw up a draft bill.
00:40:29 Speaker 2
Divorce bills were very simple and short.
00:40:32 Speaker 2
What they did was to say as a preamble, which said, whereas so-and-so and so, were married on such a day, whereas they lived together as man and wife, blah, blah.
00:40:40 Speaker 2
And then whereas on such a time,
00:40:43 Speaker 2
One of them committed adultery.
00:40:44 Speaker 2
Adultery was the only ground for divorce.
00:40:48 Speaker 2
One of them committed adultery on this day and that day with this person or that person or both people or whatever.
00:40:54 Speaker 2
So long preamble.
00:40:56 Speaker 2
And then there were only two operative clauses.
00:40:59 Speaker 2
One, the parties, the marriage is dissolved.
00:41:03 Speaker 2
Two, they can remarry, okay?
00:41:06 Speaker 2
So what you had to do in a divorce case was to what was called prove the preamble, you had to prove the facts alleged
00:41:13 Speaker 2
in that long preamble, i.e., prove that adultery had taken place.
00:41:19 Speaker 2
And if you could prove that, that bill passed, but it had to pass in a normal way like any other act of parliament.
00:41:26 Speaker 2
It had to pass three readings in the Senate, three readings in the Commons, Royal Assent, et cetera.
00:41:35 Speaker 2
But before it got to that point, before it passed, it, like, again, any other bill, it went through committee.
00:41:42 Speaker 2
All right.
00:41:43 Speaker 2
And in this case, divorce bills always started in the Senate.
00:41:47 Speaker 2
So second reading was always a hearing before a committee.
00:41:51 Speaker 2
Now, it was not a committee on a particular bill.
00:41:54 Speaker 2
It was a divorce committee struck just for this different divorce committee struck for each bills.
00:42:01 Speaker 2
Each bill, 9 senators,
00:42:07 Speaker 2
were on the divorce committee, they tended to choose, the divorce committees were always somewhat skewed from the general composition of the Senate because they tended to choose a number of lawyers.
00:42:17 Speaker 2
There were four on Eliza Campbell's case.
00:42:20 Speaker 2
There was never, no Catholic senator ever sat on the divorce committee, which actually ticked off the other senators because it's a lot of work.
00:42:30 Speaker 2
Catholics would avoid this work, shirking the duties, exactly.
00:42:35 Speaker 2
And depending upon the complexity of the case, the Laws Committee had to assess whether or not the preamble could be proved.
00:42:42 Speaker 2
How did you prove the preamble?
00:42:44 Speaker 2
Witnesses on both sides, counsel on both sides, right?
00:42:52 Speaker 2
All held in the committee room in Ottawa.
00:42:55 Speaker 2
The parties had to travel to Ottawa, had to stay in Ottawa, had to bring their own, had to pay for their own witnesses.
00:43:02 Speaker 2
It was an extremely elaborate proceeding.
00:43:05 Speaker 2
The Campbell divorce proceeding took about 25 days in total of committee hearings and, of course, many other days of debates on the bill, on the bills themselves.
00:43:21 Speaker 2
So the Eliza was defended by
00:43:29 Speaker 2
turned out to be a very good lawyer, although a man who's been generally excoriated as a politician in Canadian history, a man called William McDoodle, who was in John A.
00:43:41 Speaker 2
McDonald's first cabinet.
00:43:42 Speaker 2
John A.
00:43:43 Speaker 2
McDonald gave him the job of going to Red River to settle things down and sort things out after Canada had acquired the Red River region in the purchase from the Hudson's Bay Company.
00:43:58 Speaker 2
Of course, as we know, what happened instead of a peaceful transition absorbed into Canada was that the Red River Metis led by Louis Riel resisted Canadian intrusion and were able to negotiate their way into confederation as a province as opposed to be incorporated, which is what McDonald want.
00:44:19 Speaker 2
But the point is,
00:44:22 Speaker 2
MacDougall was a blunderer rather than negotiate with Riel, rather than I understand that he actually had the support of the community and he had power, et cetera, et cetera.
00:44:31 Speaker 2
He simply demanded Riel kind of kowtow to him, et cetera, and was a dismal failure and never again held government offense.
00:44:40 Speaker 2
But he turned, so he was a lawyer by training, and so he kind of, political career had been messed around.
00:44:46 Speaker 2
He went into practice as a lawyer and
00:44:52 Speaker 2
practiced in parliament at the parliamentary bar and defended Eliza brilliantly.
00:45:01 Speaker 2
And Robert's and the Senate Divorce Committee voted six to two that Robert had not proved to the preamble.
00:45:10 Speaker 2
Therefore, end of story, no divorce.
00:45:14 Speaker 2
Robert could have tried again the next year with a definitely constituted committee or with better evidence or whatever, but
00:45:21 Speaker 2
He failed in 1876.
00:45:24 Speaker 2
And probably what should have happened was he would have tried again, maybe he or something.
00:45:29 Speaker 2
But instead, almost immediately, MacDillough presented a petition from Eliza, in which she asked for a divorce.
00:45:40 Speaker 2
Now, what kind of divorce could she?
00:45:44 Speaker 2
So this is Robert's petition to Parliament for a divorce from Eliza.
00:45:50 Speaker 2
You had to advertise your intention for six months in local newspapers, et cetera.
00:45:58 Speaker 2
And here is Eliza's eventual petition for divorce.
00:46:03 Speaker 2
But notice it says she wants a divorce from her husband, Robert Campbell, for a bill of divorce mensa et thorough.
00:46:12 Speaker 2
So in English law,
00:46:18 Speaker 2
There were two kinds of divorce, a divorce avinculo matrimonia, divorce from the bonds of matrimony.
00:46:23 Speaker 2
What we think of as being divorced, your marriage is dissolved.
00:46:26 Speaker 2
But in English law until 1857, that could only be granted by the House of Lords.
00:46:34 Speaker 2
You could get something that was less than that.
00:46:37 Speaker 2
Divorce a menso or thorough, sorry, divorce from bed and board or separation, actually.
00:46:43 Speaker 2
Marriage is not dissolved, but it's a legal
00:46:47 Speaker 2
structure that allows you to no longer have to live together and provides for custody and for the husband's duty to support the wife, et cetera, et cetera.
00:47:01 Speaker 2
So this is what William McDougall asked for, because he had no evidence whatsoever that Robert had committed adultery, so he couldn't sue for a divorce of Inghillow in Parliament, but he asked them for this.
00:47:15 Speaker 2
And
00:47:16 Speaker 2
He did this in 1866, 18, sorry, 1876.
00:47:19 Speaker 2
It was debated in 1876, 1877, 1878, and finally passed in 1879.
00:47:26 Speaker 2
So it was a long-standing debate.
00:47:29 Speaker 2
And what passed was an act in favor of Eliza giving her this divorce from bed and board.
00:47:41 Speaker 2
Now,
00:47:42 Speaker 2
A lot of the argument, I'm just, I'm trying to go quickly here so I can get some questions and comments.
00:47:48 Speaker 2
A lot of the argument that took place in Parliament in both the Senate and the Commons was whether or not Parliament could pass this bill.
00:48:00 Speaker 2
And there were two major problems with this bill.
00:48:04 Speaker 2
One is it awarded Eliza support.
00:48:09 Speaker 2
Eliza had been denied support in their court of chancery.
00:48:14 Speaker 2
So what this looked like was the fact an attempt to appeal one individual judgment from a court to parliament.
00:48:25 Speaker 2
That's a kind of a separation of powers problem, although people didn't actually use the term separation of powers at that time.
00:48:30 Speaker 2
But nonetheless, you can see what's going on.
00:48:34 Speaker 2
But the more important disagreement was that
00:48:42 Speaker 2
A separation was a civil action that you could not apply for in a common law court in any province, because the common law didn't have an action for separation.
00:48:57 Speaker 2
Common law court would enforce a separation agreement made by the parties, agreed to,
00:49:06 Speaker 2
But there was no mechanism by which you could go and say, I don't wanna leave my husband, please give us a court order requiring him to pay me this, or allowing that to happen, et cetera.
00:49:16 Speaker 2
But you could do that in the civil law.
00:49:19 Speaker 2
The civil law did not allow divorce.
00:49:22 Speaker 2
The civil code says the only thing that dissolves a marriage is the death of one of the parties.
00:49:29 Speaker 2
But civil law was actually, we think it was being less good.
00:49:35 Speaker 2
towards women's rights.
00:49:37 Speaker 2
Civil law was actually much better in allowing women to go to the Superior Court of Quebec and get an order for separation and require the husband to live up to it, pay support, do this, do that, do the next.
00:49:49 Speaker 2
That was quite a common action.
00:49:54 Speaker 2
So the objection that people raised to the Campbell bill was that it was legislating
00:50:04 Speaker 2
in the area of Section 9213, property and civil rights, the essence, and this particularly important objection or particularly pointed objection, when you were dealing with the civil law aspect of civil rights and that part of the civil law, which defined relations between individuals, marriage, family, all of which were very much
00:50:33 Speaker 2
something which the church was heavily involved in.
00:50:35 Speaker 2
And so you were effectively attacking the very essence of Quebec society by saying the federal parliament could legislate in respect of separation.
00:50:46 Speaker 2
On the other side, people in favor of Eliza's bill said, no, this is a valid exercise of federal jurisdiction because section 9126 says,
00:51:02 Speaker 2
Federal parliament has jurisdiction over marriage and divorce.
00:51:09 Speaker 2
And what the word divorce in Section 91-26 means, they said, both divorce a vinculo matrimoni and divorce a menso authoro, right?
00:51:23 Speaker 2
So there were quite valid arguments on both sides in a sense, and it was quite bitterly
00:51:31 Speaker 2
and tested, as I say, particularly because it wasn't just about this.
00:51:35 Speaker 2
It was also, it was very strongly about Quebec in a period which Quebec has done almost from 1867, been very strong in defending its jurisdiction, particularly in relation to 9213 and particularly in relation to any matters to do with religion and this is the essence of Quebec.
00:52:00 Speaker 2
language and culture, which is the civil code and the Catholic Church and these kinds of things.
00:52:05 Speaker 2
So a very heated debate.
00:52:11 Speaker 2
But what also, and that's why, at one point there was a 31-31 tie in the Senate and et cetera, and all kinds of procedural things were resorted to try and prevent it.
00:52:24 Speaker 2
But to my mind,
00:52:27 Speaker 2
This is all very important, but it was not what it was really all about.
00:52:31 Speaker 2
And this is what the legal history and context becomes.
00:52:35 Speaker 2
This was not about the division of powers or the separation of powers.
00:52:40 Speaker 2
This was about whether or not these two people had lived up to their duties and responsibilities under the law of matrimonial relations writ large,
00:52:56 Speaker 2
How were they to be characterized, right?
00:52:59 Speaker 2
And that's what people argued.
00:53:00 Speaker 2
They argued over the character of these people and their behavior as married individuals, right?
00:53:10 Speaker 2
Not so much over the necessities and the legalities.
00:53:16 Speaker 2
And the arguments became very vituperative.
00:53:19 Speaker 2
I'm going to finish by just giving you 2 examples, one from
00:53:24 Speaker 2
and a supporter of Eliza and one from an opponent of the bill.
00:53:29 Speaker 2
So the supporter is Senator Robert Carroll, a British Columbia senator, known because he was the person who championed for a number of years and finally put through the bill that made July 1st Dominion Day.
00:53:48 Speaker 2
Never married, a BC physician, said marriage was a waste of time, he would never marry.
00:53:53 Speaker 2
But he had a strong view on this case.
00:53:56 Speaker 2
And see what he says.
00:53:57 Speaker 2
Well, he had not heard or read the evidence, right?
00:54:00 Speaker 2
So I was in the Senate, had a debate.
00:54:04 Speaker 2
The evidence was there for me to read, by the way, that committee hearing I referred to, well, it lasted all that time.
00:54:10 Speaker 2
The evidence was transcribed and published as an appendix to the journals of the Senate for 1876, which is 275 pages long, right?
00:54:20 Speaker 2
Great source, right?
00:54:23 Speaker 2
So he could have read it.
00:54:24 Speaker 2
He didn't need to.
00:54:25 Speaker 2
He didn't know the parties.
00:54:27 Speaker 2
But he'd heard enough.
00:54:29 Speaker 2
He'd heard enough in the halls of the Senate or the streets of Ottawa, or wherever else he'd heard it, to know that his sympathies were with the lady.
00:54:38 Speaker 2
And he would vote for her in the face and teeth of the lawyers who would shut the courts in her face.
00:54:43 Speaker 2
She had come to this Senate who looked upon as the fathers of the country and asked for her dress for her little ones,
00:54:50 Speaker 2
and herself, right?
00:54:52 Speaker 2
He could not argue with those lawyers, but he knew that senators would do what was right.
00:54:56 Speaker 2
So the theme here is, there's law and there's justice.
00:55:01 Speaker 2
And I'm doing justice, no matter what other people think the law should require them to do.
00:55:07 Speaker 2
There was no vote he would give with more zeal and earnestness, not only in justice to the lady, but against the man.
00:55:15 Speaker 2
So it's not just, you know,
00:55:17 Speaker 2
We prefer Eliza's version.
00:55:19 Speaker 2
But if Eliza was right, if Eliza had not committed adultery, then what was Robert Campbell, right?
00:55:26 Speaker 2
He had suborned and actually been guilty of perjury.
00:55:36 Speaker 2
He had pursued his wife.
00:55:40 Speaker 2
He had literally physically thrown her out of the house.
00:55:43 Speaker 2
He'd refused to give her money so that she could have food.
00:55:47 Speaker 2
et cetera, et cetera.
00:55:49 Speaker 2
He had taken such scandalous means of obtaining evidence to defame the character of an English lady, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:55:56 Speaker 2
Lots of that, right?
00:55:57 Speaker 2
Let me go on the other side.
00:56:00 Speaker 2
This is another Carol quote.
00:56:02 Speaker 2
On the other side, the principal person who was against the bill was a man called Henry Callback, who was a Crown prosecutor, a Nova Scotia senator.
00:56:15 Speaker 2
and an extremely vituperative, bad-tempered, irascible, it all really does come out of the Senate debates individual who insulted both Eliza, but every other senator who had supported Eliza as well, which didn't help his case, right?
00:56:36 Speaker 2
And he said every senator when appealed to
00:56:42 Speaker 2
will not reject the petition.
00:56:44 Speaker 2
Hang on a second.
00:56:46 Speaker 2
No, wait, sorry.
00:56:48 Speaker 2
I'm reading from Carol still.
00:56:49 Speaker 2
Okay, second one.
00:56:50 Speaker 2
The Senate was engaged, he said, in a mockery and a farce.
00:56:54 Speaker 2
Sympathy for this woman had taken control of and perverted the good judgment.
00:56:59 Speaker 2
So he was calling his fellow senators idiots who believed that the dials, blandishments of a pretty woman,
00:57:12 Speaker 2
Instead, she was somebody who had been so totally reckless of the decencies of the married life.
00:57:21 Speaker 2
And now she came to the Senate to ask the House to whitewash her skirts.
00:57:26 Speaker 2
So he was very much, and this is typical of the content and the form of the debates that took place on each side.
00:57:40 Speaker 2
As I say, it took until
00:57:42 Speaker 2
1879 to get resolved.
00:57:45 Speaker 2
At the end of the day, both the Senate and the Commons passed the bill, not by large margins, but by substantial margins.
00:57:55 Speaker 2
I think the Commons was 56 to 38.
00:57:58 Speaker 2
The Senate was something like 34 to 27.
00:58:02 Speaker 2
So there was always opposition, but they did pass, given royal assent, despite the fact
00:58:09 Speaker 2
that Robert Campbell actually wrote to John A.
00:58:11 Speaker 2
MacDonald and said, tell the Governor General not to give royal assent.
00:58:17 Speaker 2
And then when he was turned down, he actually wrote to London and told the Secretary for the Colonies.
00:58:24 Speaker 2
So he tried hard, but he failed at everything.
00:58:29 Speaker 2
So I'm going to stop there and happy to receive any comments or questions that you may have.