Lower Canada. Executive Council. Land Committee : Procedures by which the Executive Council of Lower Canada carried out its land-related work differed from those of Upper Canada. Submissions, such as petitions for grants of the waste lands of the Crown, were placed before the Executive Council and consigned by it to committee for detailed consideration. A Land Committee had been formed within the Executive Council of Lower Canada in February 1792 for this purpose. From the outset, however, in most cases the recommendations of the Land Committee did not lead directly to a final decision taken by the full Council. Rather, the reports of the Land Committee routinely were referred by the Governor for review first to a committee of the whole Council (often referred to in the records as the "permanent committee of the whole Council on the waste lands of the Crown"). This committee of the whole, unlike the Land Committee, was usually chaired by the Chief Justice and normally included more members of Council than did the Land Committee. It was, most frequently, the reports of this committee of the whole, then, that went before the Governor and Council for a final decision. In many cases, of course, the committee of the whole simply concurred in the findings of the Land Committee. Committee recommendations were presented to the Executive Council in the form of reports, the texts of which were entered into the minutes of the full Executive Council. The decision on a specific petition was frequently inscribed as an endorsement on it. When the decision was extracted from the minutes to serve as authorization for subsequent action, it took the form of an order-in-council.
In addition to its duties of reviewing the Land Committee findings, the committee of the whole also considered land petitions in its own right, i.e., petitions which were not referred initially to the Land Committee but which received the attention only of the committee of the whole before going to the Governor and Council for a final decision. In particular, many of the petitions from groups of associates seeking grants of full townships or similar large tracts were treated in this fashion.
By 1803, the double committee structure had disappeared as a regular feature of the system. Precisely how the procedures came to change is unclear. Two memoranda from 1801 (see Minute Books and Loose Minutes series, vol. 13) hint at the demise of the Land Committee with the failing health of its chairman, Hugh Findlay, and an inability to consistently obtain a quorum for the prosecution of Land Committee business. In any event, no longer does one find references in Executive Council minutes to the Land Committee. Petitions were now routinely referred only to the committee of the whole, and its reports then went before the Governor and Council for final decision. In certain situations, however, a two committee structure was re-introduced as a temporary measure. In 1805, for example, a "Special Committee on Land Affairs" was struck for a brief period to clear up a backlog of petitions. In another example, in 1823, an Auxiliary Land Board was created by Dalhousie to free the Executive Council from "the labours of a first examination of petitions". This Auxiliary Land Board made some 24 reports to Council between April 1823 and October 1825.
As regards the Auxiliary Land Boards, it may be noted that, although offices of the same name also existed in Upper Canada, they operated in a different fashion from these in Lower Canada. In Upper Canada, the Auxiliary Land Boards were created as part of the decentralization of the land disposal function. In Lower Canada, on the other hand, the Auxiliary Land Boards were kept under central control; they reported direct to the Governor in Council (and their reports are found in the Land Minutes of the Executive Council).
