parliament met in December 1792, Edward O'Hara was returned for
Gaspe, in Lower Canada, and D'Arcy McGee could boast that
henceforward Lower Canada was never without an Irish representative
in its legislative councils.

When the question of settling Upper Canada with British colonists
came up, Colonel Talbot, a county Dublin man, was the most important
factor. He obtained a large grant of land near what is now London and
attracted settlers into what was at that time a wilderness. The tract
settled under his superintendence now comprises twenty-nine townships
in the most prosperous part of Canada.

The maritime Provinces had been under British rule before the fall of
Quebec and contained a large element of Irish population. In
Newfoundland in 1753 out of a total population of some thirteen
thousand, Davin says that there were nearly five thousand Catholics,
chiefly Irish. In 1784 a great new stimulus to Irish immigration to
Newfoundland was given by Father O'Connell, who in 1796 was made
Catholic bishop of the island. Newfoundland, for its verdure, the
absence of reptiles, and its Irish inhabitants, was called at this
time "Transatlantic Ireland", and Bonnycastle says that more than one
half of the population was Irish.

In 1749 Governor Cornwallis brought some 4,000 disbanded soldiers to
Nova Scotia and founded Halifax. Ten years later it was described as
divided into Halifax proper, Irishtown or the southern, and Dutchtown
or the northern, suburbs. The inhabitants numbered 3,000, one-third
of whom were Irish. They were among the most prominent men of the
city and province. In the Privy Council for 1789 were Thomas Corcoran
and Charles Morris. Morris was president of the Irish Society and
Matthew Cahill the sheriff of Halifax in that year. A large number of
Irish from the north of Ireland settled in Nova Scotia in 1763,
calling their settlement Londonderry. They provided a fortunate
refuge for the large numbers of Irish Presbyterians who were expelled
from New England by the intolerant Puritans the following year. They
also welcomed many loyalists who came from New York and the New
England States after the acknowledgment of the independence of the
American Colonies by Great Britain. Between the more eastern settlers
around Halifax and those in the interior, the greater part of the
population of Nova Scotia was probably Irish in origin.

It was in the Maritime Provinces that the first step in political
emancipation