1838 in Canada
Open-knowledge reference entry

Events from the year 1838 in Canada.
Incumbents
Monarch: Victoria
Federal government
Parliament of Lower Canada: 15th (until March 27)
Parliament of Upper Canada: 13th
Governors
Governor of the Canadas: Robert Milnes
Governor of New Brunswick: George Stracey Smyth
Governor of Nova Scotia: John Coape Sherbrooke
Commodore-Governor of Newfoundland: Richard Goodwin Keats
Governor of Prince Edward Island: Charles Douglass Smith
Events
January to June
January – Samuel Lount captured.
January 13 – Navy Island evacuated.
January 13 – Lord Eldon, Lord Chancellor under three kings, dies.
January 14 – The rebels, under Mackenzie, evacuate Navy Island.
January 17 – Lord John Russell introduces a bill to suspend the Constitution of Canada. Lord Brougham says, "You propose to punish a whole Province, because it contains a few malcontent parishes; thus, by your indiscriminating prescriptions, you chastise those, even, who have helped you to stifle the insurrection.
February – Border raids begin: Lake Champlain, Hickory, Fighting and Pelee Islands.
April 12 – Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews hanged in Toronto.
May to July – Guerrilla actions: roasting of the Sir Robert Peel.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2810072. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1838.
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This entry incorporates text from “1838 in Canada” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.