A cartoon from 1911 shows Uncle Sam handing over a bag of money to a bowed, bound Miss Canada. Its caption read “Canada For Sale.” It was drawn for an election fought over a trade deal, and Canadians have been arguing about the same question, in one form or another, ever since.
From tariff wall to the reciprocity election
The Globe and Mail’s Colin Robertson traces the habit back to Confederation. He argues that Confederation itself was partly a defensive move after the Americans abrogated an earlier reciprocity agreement, and that Macdonald’s National Policy answered with a high tariff to shield Canadian manufacturing. The tariff remained a staple election issue for decades.
The quarrel between Liberal free-trade men and Conservative protectionists peaked in 1911. The Liberals under Sir Wilfrid Laurier had negotiated a reciprocal tariff agreement, and the US Congress approved it. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, that left it up to Canadian voters in September. Robert Borden’s Conservatives warned that free trade would hand the Americans economic control and lead step by step to annexation. They won.
The dispute did not vanish. Robertson notes that it helped give rise to Prairie populism and the Progressives of the 1920s, who eventually folded into the Liberals and Conservatives. The Progressives also supplied the antecedent of the Progressive Conservatives’ party name, used from 1942 to 2003.
1988: the roles reverse
By the time trade came back as the main theme of an election, the parties had swapped sides. Brian Mulroney, whose Progressive Conservatives had negotiated the free trade agreement with the United States, had once ridiculed the idea himself. Liberal leader John Turner and the NDP’s Ed Broadbent opposed the deal. Turner dubbed the deal the “Sale of Canada Act” and said it was “a matter of [Canada’s] political and economic and cultural independence,” according to the CFR. Their televised debate with Mulroney, Robertson says, is an election classic.
Mulroney’s party won a majority of seats after weeks of tense campaigning, clearing the way for the agreement. It took effect a year after Reagan and Mulroney signed it, with the aim of removing all tariffs and other barriers, promoting fair competition and setting up a way to settle disputes.
What the numbers did next
The CFR puts US trade with Canada at roughly $167 billion in 1989 and more than $362 billion by 1999. When NAFTA widened the arrangement to include Mexico, trade across the region, approximately $290 billion in 1993, passed $1 trillion by 2016 according to the CFR.
Robertson argues the real payoff was confidence. In 1988 most premiers opposed freer trade; by 2015, he wrote, they were among its most active salesmen. The auto sector shows how fear and result can part ways. Unions warned of job losses after the 1965 Auto Pact and again after the free trade agreement, and in each case, he says, employment later rose. Under the Auto Pact, the Council on Foreign Relations adds, Canada’s slice of the continental car market rose from roughly 7 percent to about 11 percent by 1971.
Sources
- Debating trade during elections is Canadian tradition (The Globe and Mail, Colin Robertson)
- U.S.-Canada Relations timeline: 1911 reciprocity election (Council on Foreign Relations)
- U.S.-Canada Relations timeline: 1965 Auto Pact (Council on Foreign Relations)
- U.S.-Canada Relations timeline: 1988 election, FTA, NAFTA (Council on Foreign Relations)
