The Canadian Dominion: A Chronicle of Our Northern Neighbor

by Oscar D. Skelton

Protection, with the attitude of economic warfare which it involved and bred, was then at its height. Much of this hostility was directed against Canada, as the nearest British territory. The Dominion, on its part, while persistently seeking closer trade relations, sometimes sought this end in unwise ways. Many good people in Canada were still fighting the War of 1812. The desire to use the inshore fishery privileges as a lever to force tariff reductions led to a rigid and literal enforcement of Canadian rights and claims which provoked widespread anger in New England. The policy of discrimination in canal tolls in favor of Canadian as against United States ports was none the less irritating because it was a retort in kind. And when United States customs officials levied a tax on the tin cans containing fish free by treaty, Canadian officials had retaliated by taxing the baskets containing duty-free peaches.

The most important specific issue was once more the northeastern fisheries. As a result of notice given by the United States the fisheries clauses of the Treaty of Washington ceased to operate on July 1, 1885. Canada, for the sake of peace, admitted American fishing vessels for the rest of that season, though Canadian fish at once became dutiable. No further grace was given. The Canadian authorities rigidly enforced the rules barring inshore fishing, and in addition denied port privileges to deep-sea fishing vessels and forbade American boats to enter Canadian ports for the purpose of trans-shipping crews, purchasing bait, or shipping fish in bond to the United States. Every time a Canadian fishery cruiser and a Gloucester skipper had a difference of opinion as to the exact whereabouts of the three-mile limit, the press of both countries echoed the conflict. Congress in 1887 empowered the President to retaliate by excluding Canadian vessels and goods from American ports. Happily this power was not used. Cleveland and Secretary of State Bayard were genuinely anxious to have the issue settled. A joint commission drew up a well-considered plan, but in the face of a presidential election the Senate gave it short shrift. Fortunately, however, a modus vivendi was arranged by which American vessels were admitted to port privileges on payment of a license. Healing time, a healthful lack of publicity, changing fishing methods, and Canada's abandonment of her old policy of using fishing privileges as a makeweight, gradually eased the friction.

Yet if it was not the fishing question, there was sure to be some other issue—bonding privileges, Canadian Pacific interloping in western rail hauls, tariff rates, or canal tolls-to disturb the peace. Why not seek a remedy once for all, men now began to ask, by ending the unnatural separation between the halves of the continent which God and geography had joined and history and perverse politicians had kept asunder?

The political union of Canada and the United States has always found advocates. In the United States a large proportion, perhaps a majority, of the people have until recently considered that the absorption of Canada into the Republic was its manifest destiny, though there has been little concerted effort to hasten fate. In Canada such course of action has found much less backing. United Empire Loyalist traditions, the ties with Britain constantly renewed by immigration, the dim stirrings of national sentiment, resentment against the trade policy of the United States, have all helped to turn popular sentiment into other channels. Only at two periods, in 1849, and forty years later, has there been any active movement for annexation.

In the late eighties, as in the late forties, commercial depression and racial strife prepared the soil for the seed of annexation. The chief sower in the later period was a brilliant Oxford don, Goldwin Smith, whose sympathy with the cause of the North had brought him to the United States. In 1871, after a brief residence at Cornell, he made his home in Toronto, with high hopes of stimulating the intellectual life and molding the political future of the colony. He so far forsook the strait "Manchester School" of his upbringing as to support Macdonald's campaign for protection in 1878. But that was the limit of his adaptability. To the end he remained out of touch with Canadian feeling. His campaign for annexation, or for the reunion of the English-speaking peoples on this continent, as he preferred to call it, was able and persistent but moved only a narrow circle of readers. It was in vain that he offered the example of Scotland's prosperity after her union with her southern neighbor, or insisted that Canada was cut into four distinct and unrelated sections each of which could find its natural complement only in the territory to the south. Here and there an editor or a minor politician lent some support to his views, but the great mass of the people strongly condemned the movement. There was to be no going back to the parting of the ways: the continent north of Mexico was henceforth to witness two experiments in democracy, not one unwieldy venture.

Commercial union was a half-way measure which found more favor. A North American customs union had been supported by such public men as Stephen A. Douglas, Horace Greeley, and William H. Seward, by official investigators such as Taylor, Derby, and Larned, and by committees of the House of Representatives in 1862, 1876, 1880, and 1884. In Canada it had been endorsed before Confederation by Isaac Buchanan, the father of the protection movement, and by Luther Holton and John Young. Now for the first time it became a practical question. Erastus Wiman, a Canadian who had found fortune in the United States, began in 1887 a vigorous campaign in its favor both in Congress and among the Canadian public. Goldwin Smith lent his dubious aid, leading Toronto and Montreal newspapers joined the movement, and Ontario farmers' organizations swung to its support. But the agitation proved abortive owing to the triumph of high protection in the presidential election of 1888; and in Canada the red herring of the Jesuits' Estates controversy was drawn across the trail.

Yet the question would not down. The political parties were compelled to define their attitude. The Liberals had been defeated once more in the election of 1887, where the continuance of the National Policy and of aid to the Canadian Pacific had been the issue. Their leader, Edward Blake, had retired disheartened. His place had been taken by a young Quebec lieutenant, Wilfrid Laurier, who had won fame by his courageous resistance to clerical aggression in his own province and by his indictment of the Macdonald Government in the Riel issue. A veteran Ontario Liberal, Sir Richard Cartwright, urged the adoption of commercial union as the party policy. Laurier would not go so far, and the policy of unrestricted reciprocity was made the official programme in 1888. Commercial union had involved not only absolute free trade between Canada and the United States but common excise rates, a common tariff against the rest of the world, and the division of customs and excise revenues in some agreed proportion. Unrestricted reciprocity would mean free trade between the two countries, but with each left free to levy what rates it pleased on the products of other countries.

When in 1891 the time came round once more for a general election, it was apparent that reciprocity in some form would be the dominant issue. Though the Republicans were in power in the United States and though they had more than fulfilled their high tariff pledges in the McKinley Act, which hit Canadian farm products particularly hard, there was some chance of terms being made. Reciprocity, as a form of tariff bargaining, really fits in better with protection than with free trade, and Blaine, Harrison's Secretary of State, was committed to a policy of trade treaties and trade bargaining. In Canada the demand for the United States market had grown with increasing depression. The Liberals, with their policy of unrestricted reciprocity, seemed destined to reap the advantage of this rising tide of feeling. Then suddenly, on the eve of the election, Sir John Macdonald sought to cut the ground from under the feet of his opponents by the announcement that in the course of a discussion of Newfoundland matters the United States had taken the initiative in suggesting to Canada a settlement of all outstanding difficulties, fisheries, coasting trade, and, on the basis of a renewal and extension of the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854. This policy promised to meet all legitimate economic needs of the country and at the same time avoid the political dangers of the more sweeping policy. Its force was somewhat weakened by the denials of Secretary Blaine that he had taken the initiative or made any definite promises. As the election drew near and revelations of the annexationist aims of some supporters of the wider trade policy were made, the Government made the loyalty cry its strong card. "The old man, the old flag, and the old policy," saved the day. In Ontario and Quebec the two parties were evenly divided, but the West and the Maritime Provinces, the "shreds and patches of Confederation," as Sir Richard Cartwright, too ironic and vitriolic in his speech for political success, termed them, gave the Government a working majority, which was increased in by-elections.

Again in power, the Government made a formal attempt to carry out its pledges. Two pilgrimages were made to Washington, but the negotiators were too far apart to come to terms. With the triumph of the Democrats in 1899. and the lowering of the tariff on farm products which followed, there came a temporary improvement in trade relations. But the tariff reaction and the silver issue brought back the Republicans and led to that climax in agricultural protection, the Dingley Act of 1897, which killed among Canadians all reciprocity longings and compelled them to look to themselves for salvation. Although Canadians were anxious for trade relations, they were not willing to be bludgeoned into accepting one-sided terms. The settlement of the Bering Sea dispute in 1898 by a board of arbitration, which ruled against the claims of the United States but suggested a restriction of pelagic sealing by agreement, removed one source of friction. Hardly was that out of the way when Cleveland's Venezuela message brought Great Britain and the United States once more to the verge of war. In such a war Canadians knew they would be the chief sufferers, but in 1895, as in 1862, they did not flinch and stood ready to support the mother country in any outcome. The Venezuela episode stirred Canadian feeling deeply, revived interest in imperialism, and ended the last lingering remnants of any sentiment for annexation. As King Edward I was termed "the hammer of the Scots," so McKinley and Cleveland became "the hammer of the Canadians," welding them into unity.

While most Canadians were ceasing to look to Washington for relief, an increasing number were looking once more to London. The revival of imperial sentiment which began in the early eighties, seemed to promise new and greater possibilities for the colonies overseas. Political union in the form of imperial federation and commercial union through reciprocal tariff preferences were urged in turn as the cure for all Canada's ills. Neither solution was adopted. The movement greatly influenced the actual trend of affairs, but there was to be no mere turning back to the days of the old empire.