Jacob Mountain

Jacob Mountain (1 December 1749 – 16 June 1825) was an English priest who was appointed the first Anglican Bishop of Quebec. He served also on both the Legislative Council of Lower Canada and the Legislative Council of Upper Canada.

Mountain is recognized in his epitaph following his death as the "Founder of the Church of England in the Canadas." Mountain would find success in some of his goals (like the erection of some 35 new missions) and failure in others (like the forceful Anglicization of the Roman Catholics in Quebec through indoctrinating educationally), but he was the man who would ultimately be responsible with setting up the lasting institution of the Anglican Church in Canada, and subsequently the varying methods of education in Canada the Anglican Church was responsible with creating, like Sunday Schools in Ontario (with finances coming from Bible Societies, responsible - the schools "providing the ignorant British Protestants in Ontario with the blessings of British rule") and what would later become McGill University in the early 1st to 2nd decade of the 1800s.

Mountain is remembered as being efficient in his career to educate the Canadians (at this time essentially being used to refer to dual French/British people over just people born in Canada, though they still applied) under the rule of the British following the conquest of New France through religious education as well as expanding new missions and parishes, but also highly opinionated on his religion and being more inclined to forceful teaching that bordered cultural assimilation over any sort of actual compromise in education for the Roman Catholics, what Mountain attempted to do was to "transplant to Lower and Upper Canada ecclesiastical traditions developed in England"; it was Mountain's goal to "bring the colonies up to date on the way things worked in England" so to speak over to "educate the Canadian-born colonists on religious freedom and opportunity that British (and European) education and ruling could have brought at that time" as Mountain was proclaiming and espousing as the entirety of the situation. This is a direct connection with the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning (Mountain being the principal) changing its policies, image, and operations when it became McGill University some 20 to 30 year after the Institution's initial inception, as the tide had drifted from more assimilation and proselytism based education to education based around an idea of almost "ignorant liberality" which would cause one to appear "extremely bigoted" if they did anything other than please the whims of the other denominations educationally in order to "rush Conciliation" with those who had been perceivably wronged because there could be no education with social privileges achieved based on the varying traditions and customs of the differing Catholic and Protestant denominations - only the Anglican faith.