Editing Family Compact (section)

===Government position===

==== Executive and Legislative councils ====
The Executive Council was composed of local advisers who provided the colonially appointed lieutenant governor with advice on the daily workings of government, and especially with appointments to the administration. Members of the Executive Council were not necessarily members of the Legislative Assembly but were usually members of the [[Legislative Council of Upper Canada|Legislative Council]]. The longest serving members were James Baby (1792–1833), John Strachan (1815–1836), George Markland (1822–1836), and Peter Robinson (1823–1836).

The Legislative Council of Upper Canada was the [[upper house]] governing the province of [[Upper Canada]]. It was modelled after the British [[House of Lords]]. Members were appointed, often for life. The longest serving members were Baby (1792–1833), [[Jacob Mountain]], Anglican Bishop of Quebec (1794–1825), Strachan (1820–1841), Markland (1822–1836), Peter Robinson (1823–1836), Thomas Talbot (1809–1841), Thomas Clark (1815–1841), William Dickson (1815–1841), John Henry Dunn (1822–1841), and William Allan (1825–1841).

====Magistracy and courts of Quarter Sessions====
Justices of the peace were appointed by the lieutenant governor. Any two justices meeting together could form the lowest level of the justice system, the Courts of Request. A [[Quarter Sessions|Court of Quarter Sessions]] was held four times a year in each district composed of all the resident justices. The Quarter Sessions met to oversee the administration of the district and deal with legal cases. They formed, in effect, the municipal government ''and'' judiciary until an area was incorporated as either a police board or a city after 1834.<ref>{{cite book |last=Craig |first=Gerald |title=Upper Canada: The Formative Years 1784–1841 |year=1963 |publisher=McClelland & Stewart |location=Toronto |pages=30–31}}</ref> The men appointed to the magistracy tended to be United Empire Loyalists or "[[half-pay]]" military officers who were placed in semi-retirement after the Napoleonic Wars.

====Law Society and Juvenile Advocate's Society====
The Law Society was created in 1797 to regulate the legal profession in the province. The society was headed by a treasurer. Every treasurer of the society before 1841 was a member of the Family Compact with the exception of [[William Warren Baldwin]].

The control that the Family Compact exerted over the legal profession and the corruption that resulted was most clearly demonstrated in the "Types Riot" in 1826, in which the printing press of William Lyon Mackenzie was destroyed by the young lawyers of the Juvenile Advocate's Society with the complicity of the attorney general, the solicitor general and the magistrates of [[Toronto]].

Mackenzie had published a series of satires under the pseudonym of "Patrick Swift, nephew of [[Jonathan Swift]]" in an attempt to humiliate the members of the Family Compact running for the board of the Bank of Upper Canada, and Henry John Boulton, the solicitor general, in particular. Mackenzie's articles worked, and they lost control. In revenge they sacked Mackenzie's press, throwing the type into the lake. The "juvenile advocates" were the students of the attorney general and the solicitor general, and the act was performed in broad daylight in front of William Allan, bank president and magistrate. They were never charged, and it was left to Mackenzie to launch a civil lawsuit instead.

There are three implications of the Types Riot according to historian Paul Romney.  First, he argues the riot illustrates how the elite's self-justifications regularly skirted the rule of law they held out as their Loyalist mission. Second, he demonstrated that the significant damages Mackenzie received in his civil lawsuit against the vandals did not reflect the soundness of the criminal administration of justice in Upper Canada. And lastly, he sees in the Types Riot "the seed of the Rebellion" in a deeper sense than those earlier writers who viewed it simply as the start of a highly personal feud between Mackenzie and the Family Compact. Romney emphasizes that Mackenzie's personal harassment, the "outrage", served as a lightning rod of discontent because so many Upper Canadians had faced similar endemic abuses and hence identified their political fortunes with his.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Romney |first=Paul |title=From the Types Riot to the Rebellion: Elite Ideology, Anti-legal Sentiment, Political Violence, and the Rule of Law in Upper Canada |journal=Ontario History |year=1987 |volume=LXXIX |issue=2 |pages=114}}</ref>