Edward Blake

Blake was born in 1833, in Adelaide Township, Middlesex County, Upper Canada, the son of William Hume Blake and Catherine Honoria Hume, and was educated at Upper Canada College.[3]

In 1856, after Blake was called to the bar, he entered into partnership with Stephen M. Jarvis in Toronto to practice law. When his brother Samuel Hume Blake joined soon thereafter, it was Blake & Blake and today the firm is known as Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP.[4]

As a consequence of the ruling of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Long v The Bishop of Cape Town,[5] Blake offered a legal opinion to Benjamin Cronyn (then Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Huron) on the legality of the convening of a Provincial Synod of the various Dioceses of the Ecclesiastical Province of Canada by Francis Fulford (then Bishop of Montreal and Metropolitan of Canada). He determined that the concurrence of all of the Dioceses of the Ecclesiastical Province would be required prior to the creation of the Provincial Synod, and therefore no such Synod could legally be convened until the entity first existed. This opinion was read into the Minutes of the seventh session of the Synod of the Diocese of Huron which convened in June 1864.[6]

He is perhaps best remembered for the arguments he made to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in favour of the Provinces in interpreting the British North America Act. In 1888 he argued the case of St. Catherines Milling v. The Queen, where the federal government was claiming the right to issue timber licenses. This speech was quoted in its entirety in the 1960 report of the Quebec Royal Commission of Inquiry on Constitutional Problems, which influenced many Quebecers including René Lévesque:

The word federal is the key which unlocks the clauses and reveals their contents. It is the glass that enables us to discern what is written. By its light the Act must be construed ... What then was the general scheme of this Act? First of all, as I suggest, it was to create a federal as distinguished from a legislative union, but a union composed of several existing and continuing entities. It was not the intention of Parliament to mutilate, confound and destroy the provinces mentioned in the preamble, and having from their mangled remains stewed in some legislative cauldron, to evoke by some legislative incantation absolutely new provinces into an absolutely new existence ... it was the design, I say, ... by gentle and considerate terms to preserve the vital breath and continue the political existence of the old provinces. However this may be, they were being made, as has been well said, not fractions of a unit but units of a multiple. The Dominion is the multiple and each province is a unit of that multiple ...[8]

He won the case and the Privy Council consistently afterwards took the side of the provinces.

Mrs Margaret Blake wife of Edward Blake

Edward Blake married Margaret Cronyn, the daughter of Benjamin Cronyn and Margaret Ann (Bickerstaff), in 1856. She was born in 1835 and was educated at London, Ontario and in Toronto. Mrs. Blake practiced benevolent and other useful work. She was a member of the Toronto Ladies' Educational Association and served as the Honorary President of the Canadian Branch of the McAll Association in Toronto. She also frequently accompanied her husband on his political tours. The couple had seven children, four of whom survived them.[9] Their daughter Sophia Hume Blake married George M. Wrong and was the mother of Hume Wrong.

The personal and family papers of Edward Blake [10] can be found at the Archives of Ontario, and the majority of these records were received on indefinite loan from the University of Toronto Library in June 1952. There are also Edward Blake archives at the University of Toronto[11] and Library and Archives Canada.[12]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Edward Blake.

• Forster, Ben; Swainger, Jonathan (1998). "Blake, Edward". In Cook, Ramsay; Hamelin, Jean (eds.). Dictionary of Canadian Biography. XIV (1911–1920) (online ed.). University of Toronto Press.
• Edward Blake – Ontario Legislative Assembly parliamentary history (archive)
• Edward Blake family fonds, Archives of Ontario
• Edward Blake – Parliament of Canada biography
• Ronan O'Brien, "An Irishman's Diary", Irish Times, 13 August 2007 (subscription required)
• Ontario's Historical Plaques
• Edward Blake archival papers held at the University of Toronto Archives and Record Management Services
• Macdonald, Neil (1900). "Blake, William Hume" . Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. pp. 285–286.