in New Brunswick affairs with the goal of supporting the cause of religious schooling. Bourget, who had had a key role in developing Lower Canada's system of religious schooling, accepted the invitation. The act prevented the teaching of Catholicism, regarded by the Roman Catholic Church as one of its key duties. On May 19, Bourget and Bishop Louis-François Laflèche co-authored and released a statement opposing the Common Schools Act, with the effect that several Conservative MPs of New Brunswick hailing from Quebec threatened to break ranks and support a motion of no-confidence against the government. The New Brunswick government responded by offering to pay the church's costs in the ongoing legal action over the act if the no-confidence motion was not passed - a deal which the church accepted. The legal challenge made its way to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in England, at that time Canada's highest court of appeal, where the Privy Council rejected the church's case, effectively endorsing the government. However, discontent with the Common Schools Act continued to grow, culminating in 1875 when a protest at the town of Caraquet, New Brunswick devolved into a riot and two people were shot. Following the riots, amendments to the Act were made and the common schools system was eventually abandoned, replaced with a predominantly public schooling system but retaining government-subsidised religious schools. Although New Brunswick ended up with a primarily secular schooling system, the civil unrest caused by the passage of the Common Schools Act and Bourget's public interference may have deterred the parliament of Quebec from following New Brunswick's lead, as Quebec had no Ministry of Education from 1875 to 1964. Guibord case On November 18, 1869, Joseph Guibord, a professed Catholic and member of the Institut Canadien, died. His widow, Henrietta Brown, applied to have Guibord buried in Notre Dame des Neiges, a Catholic cemetery. Due to Bourget's earlier excommunication of the Institut, reinforced by a letter written by Bourget that year, Brown was told that Guibord could not be buried in the sanctified area of the cemetery reserved for Roman Catholics, although the cemetery curate offered to bury Guibord without religious rites in the section used for non-Roman Catholics and unbaptised infants, and without religious rites. Brown did not accept this offer, and Guibord's remains were therefore temporarily deposited in the vault of the local Protestant cemetery. Prominent lawyers Rodolphe Laflamme and Joseph