The first Canadian red scare came in the 1860s as part of the project to push through Confederation. The Quebec Tories, led by George-Étienne Cartier and allied to John A. Macdonald's Upper Canadian Tories, were strong political allies with the Catholic Church. They waged a war on Les Rouges, a Montreal-centred political movement which carried on the radical democratic and republican politics of the 1837-38 rebellions and 1848 revolutions.
As Confederation was cobbled together by elites from each province against widespread popular opposition in the Maritimes and Quebec, the Conservative Party of Cartier and Macdonald used parliament, the pulpit, and the papers to defeat this increasingly agitational threat in Quebec. Lies, slander, religion, and organized intimidation were directed against the democratic republican movement based out of Montreal's Institut Canadien.