Volume 2 - ElectricCanadian.com

CHAPTER I.THE CHARTER.The genesis and early development of The Canadian Bankof Commerce are coincident with the birth and infancy of theDominion of Canada. The amended charter under which thebank was founded was granted in the period of unrest whichimmediately preceded Confederation, and its doors wereopened only a few weeks before the Dominion came intoexistence on July 1, 1867. The bank was one of the new institutionsfor which the way was cleared by the retirement fromthe field of the two largest and most prominent of the bankschartered by the province of Upper Canada prior to Confederation,the Bank of Upper Canada and the CommercialBank of Canada, and was, as has been narrated in the firstvolume of this work, shortly after its commencement tobecome the heir of the third and only remaining one of thesebanks, the Gore. Furthermore, its founders were prominentin their unswerving advocacy of the principles adopted whenthe banking policy of the new Dominion was finallydecidedon in 1870 and 1871.The birth-throes of the Dominion, as reflected in theevents of the pre-Confederation era, were severe. The rapidincrease of population in Upper Canada from 1840 onward,while producing manifold benefits, gave rise to politicalcontroversies of the bitterest nature. The Act of Union of1841 had placed Upper and Lower Canada on a parity, so faras political representation was concerned, each province beingallotted sixty-five seats in the joint legislature. Upper Canada,which had in 1849 begun to overbalance its copartner eastof the Ottawa River, not merely in agricultural production,but also in population, writhed under the political deadlock