Date Published:
March 2005

L’Encyclopédie de l’histoire du Québec / The Quebec History Encyclopedia

Robert Christie

Christie, Robert (1788-1856), politician and historian, was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1788. He was educated in Nova Scotia, but before the war of 1812 came to Canada, settled in Quebec, and was called to the bar of Lower Canada. He was elected in 1827 a member of the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada for Gaspé, but was in 1829 expelled for having, as chairman of the quarter sessions of the district of Quebec, advised the omission of the names of certain Reformers from the commission of the peace. Between 1829 and 1834 he was five times re-elected by his constituents and five times expelled by the Assembly. He then retired from the contest; but in 1841 he was again elected to represent Gaspé in the first parliament of united Canada. He continued to represent this constituency in parliament until the general election of 1854; but he did not play an important park in the House. His reputation rests, not on his parliamentary career, but on the historical researches to which he devoted himself for many years. As early as 1818, he had published Memoirs of the administration of the colonial government of Lower Canada by Sir James Henry Craig and Sir George Prevost (Quebec). This was followed by Memoirs of the administration of the government of Lower Canada by Sir Gordon Drummond, Sir John Coape Sherbrooke, the late Duke of Richmond, James Monk, Esquire (Quebec, 1820), Memoirs of the administrations of Lower Canada by the Right Honorable the Earl of Dalhousie (Quebec, 1829), and Administration of the Honorable Sir Francis Burton (Quebec, n.d.). All these were later incorporated in his History of the late province of Lower Canada (vols. i-v, Quebec, 1848-54; vol. vi, Montreal, 1855), a work without literary pretensions, but scrupulously impartial, and containing a great many documents of cardinal importance. The work was hardly completed when its author died in Quebec, on October 13, 1856. He married Olivette Doucet; she died at Quebec on January 18, 1865.

Source  : W. Stewart WALLACE, ed., The Encyclopedia of Canada, Vol. II, Toronto, University Associates of Canada, 1948, 411p., p. 60.