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"For a variety of reasons Canada did not duplicate the dynamism which characterized American society in the years 1815-1830. The war had left the Canadians violently anti-American: they saw Americans as wanton aggressors motivated by rapacity, and in 1815 all new land grants to American citizens were prohibited. As a result of this general hostility to American immigrants, Canada did not share in the huge shift to the west. The Saint Lawrence River was the traditional and natural highway to the west, but its appeal was sharply reduced when the great Erie Canal opened in 1825. Canada needed canals and locks too, to eliminate rapids and porterage, but the majority French speakers of Lower Canada opposed spending public money on projects which benefited the majority English speakers of Upper Canada. The race-and-language divide poisoned every aspect of life. In some ways Canada was like what South Africa was to become, with the French analogous to the Boer Afrikaaners, much older in settlement, highly conservative, lacking an entrepreneurial tradition, and bitterly resenting the newer English-speaking arrivals who possessed it.
The British government was not much interested in Canada and did all the wrong things. From 1815 the United States moved toward protectionism to build up its local industries; the British moved toward free trade for their own economical reasons; the Canadians were caught in between. New York port, open all the year round, prospered mightily; Montreal and Quebec, shut for six months and lacking a canal policy, stagnated. In 1822 the British brought forward proposals for union, which would, in time, have welded Canada into one English-speaking nation. But the proposals were dropped in the face of opposition from both communities, for different reasons. Under the Quebec Act (1791), the French speakers of Lower Canada were allowed to retain their basic institutions, which were static and reactionary. The Act was intended to be conciliatory but it failed in its long-term object, for the French saw the English, who were prepared to take risks and invest, grabbing control of everything. They found themselves becoming tenants or laborers on the old seignories, now owned by the English, or lumberjacks in the new English timber firms. Every English effort to charter firms, found townships or exploit Canada's enormous landed resources brought furious French protests. Race and language divisions were deepened by religious ones"
from The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830 by Paul Johnson
The British government was not much interested in Canada and did all the wrong things. From 1815 the United States moved toward protectionism to build up its local industries; the British moved toward free trade for their own economical reasons; the Canadians were caught in between. New York port, open all the year round, prospered mightily; Montreal and Quebec, shut for six months and lacking a canal policy, stagnated. In 1822 the British brought forward proposals for union, which would, in time, have welded Canada into one English-speaking nation. But the proposals were dropped in the face of opposition from both communities, for different reasons. Under the Quebec Act (1791), the French speakers of Lower Canada were allowed to retain their basic institutions, which were static and reactionary. The Act was intended to be conciliatory but it failed in its long-term object, for the French saw the English, who were prepared to take risks and invest, grabbing control of everything. They found themselves becoming tenants or laborers on the old seignories, now owned by the English, or lumberjacks in the new English timber firms. Every English effort to charter firms, found townships or exploit Canada's enormous landed resources brought furious French protests. Race and language divisions were deepened by religious ones"
from The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830 by Paul Johnson