When Wolfe captured Quebec and Canada came under British rule, some of the best known of his officers and several of his men were Irish.  After the Peace was signed many of them settled in Canada, not a few of them marrying French wives, and as a consequence there are numerous Irish, Scotch, and English names among the French speaking inhabitants of Lower Canada.  Two of Wolfe’s officers, Colonel Guy Carleton, born at Strabane in the county Tyrone, and General Richard Montgomery, born only seven miles away at Convoy, in the same county, were destined to play an important role in the future history of Canada.  Montgomery was in command of the Revolutionary Army from the Colonies, when it attempted to take Quebec, and Carleton, who had been a trusted friend of General Wolfe, was in command of the Canadian forces.  The two men were the lives of their respective commands, and with the death of Montgomery Carleton’s victory was assured.  Carleton was made Governor-in-Chief of Canada, and during the trying years of the early British rule of New France and the American Revolution, his tact did more than anything else to save Canada for the British.  Bibaud, the French historian, says, “the man to whom the administration of the government was entrusted had known how to make the Canadians love him, and this contributed not a little to retain at least within the bounds of neutrality those among them who might have been able, or who believed themselves able, to ameliorate their lot by making common cause with the insurgent colonies.”  Shortly after being made governor, Carleton went to England and secured the passage of the Quebec Act through the English parliament, which gave the Canadian French assurance that they were to be ruled without oppression by the British Government.  Subsequently, in 1786, Carleton, as Lord Dorchester, became the first governor-general of Canada, being given jurisdiction over Nova Scotia and New Brunswick as well as Upper and Lower Canada, and to him more than to any other is due the early loyalty to the British crown in the Dominion.

After the army the next important source of Irish population in Canada were the loyalists who after the Revolution removed from the United States to the British Dominions in America.  There were probably many thousands of them, more than enough to make up for the French who left Canada for France when the territory passed over to England.  Among the Irish loyalists who went to Canada was the Rev. John Stuart, who had become very well known as a missionary in the Mohawk Valley before the Revolution, and who, though born a Presbyterian, was destined to win the title of the “Father of the Church of England in Upper Canada.”  When the first Canadian 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.