The 1830s saw rebellions break in all of the neighbors of the United States of America. In the British Colonies, the spark was the Slavery Abolition Act of 1834. While the British had been moving incrementally towards restrictions of slavery for decades, the act was still jarring for the Southern Colonies of British North America. The linchpin of their whole economy was based on slavery in the form of the cotton trade. While the colonies had pled with Parliament to exempt them from the act and preserve their 'peculiar institution', they failed. Thus did rebellion spark anew in North America.
The heart of the rebellion was South Carolina, the only province of the Southern Colonies that had been forced to remain in the British Empire. However, the cry for revolution spread far and wide, and soon all the Southern Colonies were in armed revolt.
While slavery was a non-issue in Upper and Lower Canada, there were many grievances against the mishandling of colonial rule by the British government, and with the South rising, a militant minority was inspired to take up arms as well, first in Lower Canada but quickly spreading to Upper Canada.
Coincidentally, only a year later in 1835, a series of rebellions broke out in the United States of Mexico, especially in Texas. Texas had a disproportionate amount of English speaking settlers from the United States and the British Southern Colonies, and when several other states of Mexico rose up in protest to the Federalization of Mexico being forced from the government in Mexico City, they too joined the fray.