On the twenty-first of September 1911, Canadians threw out a government that had given them fifteen years of prosperity, and did it over a trade agreement with the United States.
Wilfrid Laurier had been prime minister since 1896. He went into that election holding 133 seats in a House of 221. He came out of it with 85, and Robert Borden formed a majority. The issue was reciprocity, and the arithmetic of the reversal is the most direct statement Canadians have ever made about what they will trade away and what they will not.
The agreement itself was modest by any modern reading. Negotiated in early 1911 with the Taft administration, it provided for free trade in natural products — grain, livestock, fish, lumber — with reduced duties on a schedule of manufactured goods. It was not a customs union. It did not touch the tariff on most manufactures. On the economics, it was close to an unmixed gain for Canadian farmers, which is why the Liberals assumed the West was safe.
What beat it was not an economic argument.
The Conservative campaign ran on six words: "No truck or trade with the Yankees."
As an economic proposition it is nonsense, and Laurier's people treated it as nonsense, which was the error. Behind the slogan sat a straightforward claim, that economic integration with a much larger neighbour ends in political integration with it, and that the question on the ballot was therefore not about the price of oats.
It was not sentiment. It was the thing that is now being tested.
They were handed their evidence by the Americans. In February of 1911 Champ Clark, shortly to be Speaker of the US House of Representatives, rose in that chamber and said he hoped "to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British North American possessions clear to the North Pole."
Historians still argue about whether Clark meant it or was needling a Republican president from across the aisle. The honest answer is that we do not know. It also did not matter in the slightest. The sentence was printed in Canadian newspapers, read from Canadian platforms, and it did more damage to reciprocity than any Canadian manufacturer managed.
Laurier's reply was the correct one and it lost. He pointed out that a trade agreement is a trade agreement, that Canada's constitutional position was untouched by it, and that the Conservatives were frightening people with a prospect nobody was proposing. All of that was true. It did not meet the objection, because the objection was never about the text.
A century on, this is the piece of the record most worth having in front of us.
The 1911 result is usually filed under anti-Americanism, and that is a lazy reading. Canadians in 1911 were not hostile to Americans. They traded with them, they had relatives among them, and a great many of them had worked there. What they declined to do was increase their dependence on a market whose politicians were openly speculating about absorbing them. The vote was a judgement about leverage: that being the smaller party to a deep economic relationship is a position you should enter carefully, because the terms get rewritten by whoever has more room to walk away.
That judgement has been tested since, repeatedly, and it has not aged badly.
Canada eventually did sign — the Auto Pact, then the Free Trade Agreement in 1988 after an election fought on much the same ground, then NAFTA, then its replacement. Each time the economic case was strong and each time it was substantially correct. And each time the political risk the voters of 1911 identified turned out to be real. An economy wired into a single partner is one whose terms that partner can reopen at will. In the last several years they have been, repeatedly, by a government that treats the agreement as a starting bid.
None of which argues for the 1911 answer. Refusing the deal cost Canadian farmers a market they wanted and delayed a continental integration that arrived anyway. The country is richer for the trade it eventually did. The point is narrower and it is about method: the voters of 1911 asked the right question — what does this do to our room to decide? — and the governments that followed often did not ask it at all, because the economic case was so clear that the other case seemed like sentiment.
It was not sentiment. It was the thing that is now being tested.
Laurier lost that election and he is on the five-dollar bill. Both of those are correct. He was right about the agreement, the people who beat him were right about the risk, and the country has spent the hundred and fifteen years since working out that those two things were never in contradiction.
This is the first in a continuing series on the Canadian record and what it still decides.
