The Christian Guardian was a Wesleyan Methodist journal founded in Upper Canada in 1829. The first editor was Egerton Ryerson. It ceased publication in 1925 when the Methodist Church of Canada merged with the Presbyterians and Congregationalists to form the United Church of Canada, and merged their journals to create The New Outlook, later renamed the United Church Observer.

The Province of Upper Canada was a part of British Canada established in 1791 by the Kingdom of Great Britain, to govern the central third of the lands in British North America, formerly part of the Province of Quebec since 1763. Upper Canada included all of modern-day Southern Ontario and all those areas of Northern Ontario in the Pays d'en Haut which had formed part of New France, essentially the watersheds of the Ottawa River or Lakes Huron and Superior, excluding any lands within the watershed of Hudson Bay. The "upper" prefix in the name reflects its geographic position along the Great Lakes, mostly above the headwaters of the Saint Lawrence River, contrasted with Lower Canada to the northeast.