Canada, leading dissenters such as Methodist minister Egerton Ryerson – in due course a minister of education in the government of Upper Canada – agitated against establishment. Following the Upper Canada Rebellion, the creation of the united Province of Canada, and the implementation of responsible government in the 1840s, the unpopularity of the Anglican-dominated Family Compact made establishment a moot point. The Church was disestablished in Nova Scotia in 1850 and Upper Canada in 1854. By the time of Confederation in 1867, the Church of England was disestablished throughout British North America.Curtis Fahey, In His Name: The Anglican Experience in Upper Canada, 1791–1854 (McGill-Queen's Press-MQUP, 1991). Autonomy and interdependence Until the 1830s, the Anglican church in Canada was synonymous with the Church of England: bishops were appointed and priests supplied by the church in England and funding for the church came from the British Parliament. The first Canadian synods were established in the 1850s, giving the Canadian church a degree of self-government. As a result of the UK Privy Council decision of Long v. Gray in 1861, all Anglican churches in colonies of the British Empire became self-governing. Even so, the first General Synod for all of Canada was not held until 1893. That first synod made the Solemn Declaration 1893, which describes how the Church of England in Canada is related to "the Church of England throughout the world" and "the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church". Robert Machray was chosen as the Canadian church's first Primate. Expansion As the new Canadian nation expanded after Confederation in 1867, so too did the Anglican Church. After the establishment of the first ecclesiastical province – that of Canada in 1860 – others followed. The first was the Ecclesiastical Province of Rupert's Land, created in 1875 to encompass Anglican dioceses outside what were then the boundaries of Canada: present-day Northern Ontario and Northern Quebec, the western provinces, and the Territories. In the forty years between self-government in 1861 and 1900, sixteen of the currently existing dioceses were created, as numbers blossomed with accelerating immigration from England, Scotland, and Ireland. The far-flung nature of settlement in the North-West together with a shortage of resources to pay stipendiary clergy early led to a significant reliance on women lay workers, deemed "deaconesses", for missionary outreach, a phenomenon which made the eventual ordination of women to the priesthood in 1976 relatively uncontroversial. During this time, the