T HE EDITORS GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE the generous assistance of the Donner Canadian Foundation in support of their research and in the preparation of the manuscript for publication. We thank Jeffrey L. McNairn for his invaluable help in assembling the Confederation documents of the Atlantic and western provinces and for his advice on crucial aspects of the project. Mistakes are ours alone. We gratefully acknowledge the help of archivists and librarians in Ottawa, Toronto, Hamilton, and the

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... cial archives of the Maritime provinces and British Columbia. And we thank the students, spouses, and colleagues who traced historical references on the Internet and in libraries and searched the picture archives. To Don Bastian and to Rosemary Shipton we owe a special debt for the tact and skill they brought to the task of editing and designing this book. Canada's Founding Debates is a William D. Gairdner production. The conception, choice of researchers, and the energy behind the project are entirely his. In the winter of 1996-97 he read excerpts from the debates of 1865 in the legislature of the Province of Canada, and the idea blossomed. He wrote the Donner Canadian Foundation: "There is a book of passionate, interesting material to be assembled by scholars who know how to tease out the spirits of Montesquieu, Rousseau, Burke, Locke, and others who haunt these pages and point to the fascinating conflicts of political, constitutional, economic, and social opinion that were common fare in our founders' day and that echo still." From the beginning he envisaged the commentary as a "conversation with