Political Freedom did not calm discontent, in fact strengthened it - in Old Canada

While Proportional Representation is said to calm public disorder, in Canada of the 1830s the opposite was seen.

It seems clear that the political temperature went down in Switzerland, Belgium, Ireland and many other places once PR was adopted.

But according to 1915 book The colonization of Australia (1829-42); the Wakefield experiment in empire building, by Richard Charles Mills, having more freedom merely inflamed the situation.

I am not sure I agree, but here is what he says:

Striking fact that in the colonies with the freest institutions, there was most complaint and least content.

This "essentially arbitrary government" bore [harshly] on both classes of colonies, but only in those with representative institutions was there any recognized popular body to give utterances to the general feeling of dissatisfaction.

As Charles Buller afterwards put it, "Power without representation is not so great an evil as representation without executive responsibility. It is better to be without a fire, than to have a fire without a chimney." (Buller, Responsible Government for Colonies (1840), p. 2)

The inevitable evils of government from a distance were accentuated by the indifferent ability and doubtful character of some of the men sent out to take office in the colonies. When all the executive officers of a colony were appointed by the governor or by the Colonial Office, there was unlimited scope for patronage. it was a source of complaint that men of broken fortunes were sometimes shipped off by their friends to lucrative positions in the colonies.

Charles Buller could write as late as 1840 that the patronage of the Colonial Office is the prey of every hungry department of our Government. On it, the Horse Guards quarters its worn-out general officers as governors; the Admiralty cribs its share; and jobs that even Parliamentary rapacity would blush to ask from the Treasury are perpetrated with impunity...." (Mills, page 14-15)

see Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Art of Colonization, p. 207

Edward Gibbon Wakefield came to Canada to assist Durham in his investigation into the causes of the 18387 Rebellions.

Wakefield contributed Appendix B to Durham's report, and also described colonial rule and how he thought it should work in his 1849 book A View of the Art of Colonization: With Present Reference to the British Empire: in Letters Between a Statesman and a Colonist.

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see

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015028731126&seq=39&q1=canada