The Canadian Commonwealth eBook

If American capital and American enterprise dominate
Canadian mines, Canadian timber interests, Canadian
fisheries; if American elevators are strung across
the grain provinces and American flour mills have
branches established from Winnipeg to Calgary; if American
implement companies and packing interests now universally
control subsidiaries in Canada—­why was
reciprocity rejected? If it is good for Canada
that American capital establish big paper mills in
Quebec, why is it not good for Canada to have free
ingress for her paper-mill products to American markets?
The same of the British Columbia shingle industry,
of copper ores, of wheat and flour products?
If it is good for the Canadian producer to buy in
the cheapest market and to sell in the highest, why
was reciprocity rejected? Implements for the
farm south of the border are twenty-five per cent.
cheaper than in the Canadian Northwest. Canadian
wheat milled in Minneapolis enjoys a lower freight
rate and consequently a higher market than Canadian
wheat milled in Europe, as sixteen and twenty-two
are to forty and fifty cents—­the former
being the freight cost to a Minneapolis mill; the latter,
the freight cost to a European mill. Why, then,
was reciprocity rejected?

From 1867, Canada had been intermittently seeking
reciprocity with the United States. Now, at
last, the offer of it came to her unsolicited.
Why did she reject it by a vote that would have been
unanimous but for the prairie provinces? Though
the desire for reciprocity with the United States
was exploited politically more by the Liberals—­or
low-tariff party—­than by the Conservatives—­the
high-tariff party—­both had repeatedly sent
official and unofficial emissaries to Washington seeking
tariff concessions. Tariff concessions were a
plank in the Liberal platform from the days of Alexander
MacKenzie. They were not a plank in the platform
of the Conservative party for the sole reason that
the high tariff on the American side forced a high
tariff in self-defense on the Canadian side.
Close readers of Sir John Macdonald’s life
must have been amazed to learn that one of his very
first visits to Washington—­contemporaneous
with the Civil War period, when the United States
were just launching out on a high-tariff policy—­was
for the purpose of seeking tariff favors for Canada.
Failing to obtain even a favorable hearing, he observed
the high-tariff trend at Washington, took a leaf out
of his rival’s book and returned to Canada to
launch the high-tariff policy that dominated the Dominion
for thirty years. Alexander MacKenzie, Blake,
Mowat, George Brown, Laurier, Cartwright, Fielding—­all
the dyed-in-the-wool ultra Whigs of the Liberal party—­practically
held their party together for the thirty lean years
out-of-office by promises and repeated promises of
reciprocity with the United States the instant they
came into office. They never seemed to doubt
that the instant they did come into office and proffered