Sunday in Canada: The Rise and Fall of the Lord's Day

Christopher English is a professor of history at Memorial University of
Newfoundland. He is the author of A Cautious Beginning: The Emergence of
Newfoundland’s Supreme Court of Judicature in 1791–92.

Readers old enough to have experienced the long, slow decline of
sabbatarianism in Canada, particularly in Ontario and Nova Scotia
(provinces especially marked by the values of home-grown Scottish
Presbyterianism), will experience frissons of recognition in this
entertaining and insightful study.

To impatient youth in the 1940s, it seemed that the heavy hand of
Sunday observance (in the Toronto Beaches we complained that even the
sidewalks had been rolled up) had been with us always. Then mayor of
Toronto Allan Lamport’s crusade in favour of Sunday baseball, a Trojan
horse for the opening of cocktail bars, public transport, and Sunday
newspapers, seemed at the time quixotic, doomed to failure even at the
moment of its success. With the historical hindsight presented in this
study, we see that the success of a minority Christian cult (spokesmen
and leading proponents were all men) was of brief duration: four decades
from roughly 1900. Even from the moment of their greatest success (the
passing of the federal Lord’s Day Act in 1906), the movement was in
decline, unable to grow and concentrated in the Hamilton–Toronto
littoral and in Nova Scotia (today embroiled in a debate over the
legitimacy and legality of Sunday shopping). British Columbia, the West,
and Quebec were cool or resistant. Postwar immigration spelled the end
of upper-class Christian Protestant dominance in the movement’s
strongholds, and the Act remained a political football tossed back and
forth in the constitutional wars over the federal–provincial division
of powers. Always an uneasy coalition of isolated minorities,
sabbatarianism tried to perpetuate its inflexible view of the Bible’s
injunctions on the Sabbath as a day of rest, but withered before the
emergence of a multicultural Canada, which few at the time foresaw.