Voice of the Vanishing Minority: Robert Sellar and the Huntingdon Gleaner, 1863-1919

The Scottish-born Robert Sellar (1841-1919), editor of the Huntingdon Gleaner, devoted his journalistic career to the cause of the disappearing rural English-speaking Quebec. A nineteenth-century liberal, Sellar was committed to the separation of church and state. He fought to remove the Catholic Church’s state-sanctioned taxing powers from those parts of Quebec granted in English freehold tenure. He believed that the Catholic Church was encouraging French Canadians to buy out English-speaking Protestant farmers in the townships so that the Church could increase its ability to collect tithes. The author points out that Sellar's provocative views were shared by grass-roots supporters in Ontario and the Prairies but were largely dismissed as Anglo-Protestant francophobia and bigotry. Sellar's one-man crusade for English rights in Quebec, a crusade for which he endured obloquy, legal harassment, physical violence, arson, clerical condemnation, loss of family, and the indifferent support of the people he was championing.

Montreal and Kingston

McGill-Queen’s University Press

1998

xii-378p.

en

978-0-7735-6725-2