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

Augustin-Norbert Morin

Morin, Augustin Norbert (1803-1865), politician and judge, was born at St. Michel, Lower Canada, on October 12, 1803. He was educated at the Quebec seminary; and in 1828 he was called to the bar of Lower Canada. In 1830 he was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada for the county of Bellechasse, and became a supporter of Louis Joseph Papineau. He was reputed to have been, in part, the author of the Ninety-Two Resolutions of 1834; and the same year he was deputed, with Denis Benjamin Viger, to lay before the British parliament the views of the Lower Canadian Assembly. Though not actually under arms during the rebellion of 1837, a warrant was issued for his arrest on the charge of high treason; and he spent the winter of 1837-8 in hiding. In 1841 he was returned to the Legislative Assembly of Canada for Nicolet, and he continued to sit in the Assembly, first for Nicolet (1841-4), secondly for Bellechasse (1844-51), then for Terrebonne (1851-4), and finally for Chicoutimi and Tadoussac (1854-5), until his elevation to the bench. In 1842-3 he was commissioner of crown lands in the first Baldwin-Lafontaine administration; from 1848 to 1851 he was speaker of the Assembly; and in1851 he became the chief colleague of Francis Hincks in the Hincks-Morin administration, holding the portfolio of provincial secretary. On the collapse of this government in 1854 he became the chief colleague of Sir Allan MacNab in the MacNab-Morin administration, with the portfolio of crown lands. But in 1855 he resigned from the government, and was appointed a judge of the Superior Court of Lower Canada. He died at St. Hyacinthe, Lower Canada, on July 27, 1865. See A. Béchard, L'honorable A. N. Morin (Quebec, 1885); L. O. David, L'hon. A. N. Morin (Montreal, 1872) and Biographies et portraits (Montreal, 1876).