Manitoba Council Building, meeting place of the Manitoba Council.
The Manitoba Council is the legislature of the Confederation of Manitoba. It was established in 1782 under the Britannic Design creating the Confederation of North America. Under the Design, the Manitoba Council was originally limited to 20 members, but this limit was later lifted. Under the Quebec Act of 1774 Roman Catholics were granted full civil rights, and since the future confederation of Manitoba was included in the Quebec Act, Catholics would have had the right to stand for and vote for seats in the Manitoba Council. Sobel states that for most of the nineteenth century, the people of Manitoba were largely apolitical, so presumably the Manitoba Council suffered from little partisan drama. In spite of the confederation's lack of politics, both the Manitoba Council and Manitoba's representatives to the Grand Council were at least nominally members of the C.N.A.'s main political parties.
The founding of the People's Coalition in the early 1870s brought an unaccustomed surge of political activity to both the confederation and the Manitoba Council as radical intellectuals, many of whom had fled from the Northern Confederation during the Rocky Mountain War, created the Manitoba wing of the new party. By 1878, the Coalitionists had elected nine members to the Council, against 25 from the Liberal Party and 15 from the Conservative Party. However, as the P.C. became identified with urbanization, the Liberals were able to maintain control of the still-agrarian confederation. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Liberals were able to elect Douglas Sizer as Governor of Manitoba, and under his leadership the Liberals responded to the Mexican conquest of Russian Alaska by calling for the first time for an increase in the C.N.A.'s military budget.
The population of Manitoba rose quickly during the Diffusion Era of the 1920s, and the confederation became the cultural center of the C.N.A. as well as a major political power. After the death of Governor-General Henderson Dewey in 1929, Governor Foster McCabe narrowly lost a contest in the Grand Council's Liberal caucus to succeed him, due to the fact that ten Manitoban Councilmen were still in transit when the caucus achieved a quorum and voted for a new Liberal Party leader. Despite McCabe's loss, Manitoba remained the most important part of the Liberal Party, and in the 1968 Grand Council elections the Liberals again chose a Manitoban governor, Jason Winters, as its party leader and nominee for governor-general.