Province House (Scottish Gaelic: Taigh na Roinne) in Halifax is where the Nova Scotia legislative assembly, known officially as the Nova Scotia House of Assembly, has met every year since 1819, making it the longest serving legislative building in Canada. The building is Canada's oldest house of government. Standing three storeys tall, the structure is considered one of the finest examples of Palladian architecture in North America.
Province House was built on the same location as the previous Governor's House, erected by Edward Cornwallis in 1749. (Cornwallis' table remains in the bedroom of Province House.) Province House was opened for the first time on February 11, 1819. One of the smallest functioning legislatures in North America, Province House originally housed the executive, legislative and judicial functions of the colony, all in one building.[1]
The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia held its sessions in Province House (in what is today the legislative library). Most notably, Joseph Howe, a journalist and later Premier of Nova Scotia, was put on trial on a charge of criminal libel on March 2, 1835, at Province House. Howe had published an anonymous letter accusing Halifax politicians and police of pocketing £30,000 over a thirty-year period, and outraged civic politicians had subsequently seen to it that Howe was charged with seditious libel. The presiding judge called for Howe's conviction, but Howe's passionate speech in his own defence swayed the jury and the jurors acquitted him in what is considered a landmark case in the struggle for a free press in Canada.[2][3]
On January 20, 1842, English author Charles Dickens attended the opening of the Nova Scotia Legislature. He said that it was like looking at Westminster through the wrong end of a telescope.
Led by the efforts of Joseph Howe, the Anti-Confederation Party won a resounding majority in the first election held after Nova Scotia joined the Confederation of Canada on July 1, 1867.
Province House was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1996, in recognition of its status as the longest serving legislative building in Canada, and the role it played in the development of responsible government and freedom of the press in the country.[4] It is also a Provincially Registered Property under provincial heritage legislation.[5]
Province House is the home of the House of Assembly, Nova Scotia's elected legislative assembly.[1] In 1908 and 2008, there were significant official celebrations in Nova Scotia and Canada to mark the 150th and 250th anniversary of the birth of parliamentary democracy (i.e., representative government) in Canada, which started in Nova Scotia. The first event was marked by the creation of the Dingle Tower and the second by a year-long celebration the birth of parliamentary democracy in Canada. The celebration was entitled Democracy 250.
On October 2, 1758, the Nova Scotia House of Assembly met for the first time in a modest wooden building at the corner of Argyle and Buckingham streets in Halifax. It was an assembly of twenty-two men, who came together to deliberate as a parliament on questions affecting the colony. With voting limited to Protestant, free-land holding males, it was a modest beginning, and their influence with the British-appointed Governor was questionable. It was the first elected assembly of its kind in what eventually became Canada.
On January 31, 1837, Simon d'Entremont and Frederick A. Robicheau became the first Acadians elected to the House of Assembly (Joseph Winniett, whose mother was Acadian, was elected to the assembly in 1761). (Two months later, on March 24, 1837, black men in Canada were given the right to vote.[6]) in 1893, Edith Archibald and others made the first official attempt to have a suffrage bill for women property holders passed in Nova Scotia, which was passed by the legislature but quashed by Attorney General James Wilberforce Longley (who opposed unions and female emancipation for the twenty years he was in office).[7][8]
On April 26, 1918, as a result of the Local Council of Women of Halifax (LCWH), the House of Assembly passed The Nova Scotia Franchise Act, which gave women the right to vote in Nova Scotia's provincial elections, the first province to do so in Atlantic Canada. (A month later Nova Scotian and Prime Minister of CanadaRobert Borden – whose wife Laura Bond was former president of the LCWH – used his majority to pass women's suffrage for the whole country.) Almost forty-three years later, on February 1, 1961, Gladys Porter was the first woman elected to the assembly. In 1993, Wayne Adams was elected as the first Black member of the assembly. The Nova Scotia legislature was the third in Canada to pass human rights legislation (1963).
The Legislative Library, located on the second floor between the Red Chamber and Legislative Assembly, was originally the home of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, until the court outgrew the space. The first important trial in the court was against Richard John Uniacke Jr. for killing William Bowie in the last lethal duel in Nova Scotia (1819).[9]
The Red Chamber was formerly the meeting place of the Nova Scotia Council and later the Legislative Council, the upper house of Nova Scotia's legislature. The Legislative Council was appointed by the governor and was abolished in 1928.[11] Now the room is used for receptions and other meetings.
^Nova Scotia House of Assembly, "Parliamentary Democracy in Nova Scotia". Communications Nova Scotia, 2009.
^According to Thomas Akins, this portrait hung in the legislature in 1847 (See History of Halifax, p. 189). It now hangs in the Nova Scotia Law Courts. There is another portrait of Strange by Benjamin West that is in the National Gallery of Scotland.
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![Thomas Andrew Lumisden Strange by Benjamin West[12]](File:Thomas_Andrew_Lumisden_Strange,_Nova_Scotia_Law_Court,_Room_-5,_Halifax,_Nova_Scotia,_Canada.jpg)
