Elzéar Bédard
Canadian politician

Elzéar Bédard (24 July 1799 – 11 August 1849) was a lawyer and a member of the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada. He later became a judge.
He was born at Quebec City in 1799, the son of Pierre-Stanislas Bédard. Bédard received a typical education for the time which he completed in 1818. He then pursued a career in the priesthood but abandoned this and in 1819 articled to become a lawyer which took place in 1824. By 1830, he was involved in provincial politics and ran unsuccessfully in Kamouraska. He won a by-election in 1832 for Montmorency, a riding left vacant by Philippe Panet. He aligned himself with Louis-Joseph Papineau's Patriote party program and in 1834 was the member who introduced the Ninety-Two Resolutions, although likely he did not have a significant role in the preparation.
He was the first mayor of Quebec City, (1833–1834), but lost the next election to René-Édouard Caron. A close friend and supporter of Archibald Acheson, he was appointed a judge of the Court of King's Bench in 1836, an appointment that was called bribery by his radical adversaries in the Patriote party.
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This entry incorporates text from “Elzéar Bédard” 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.