Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier felt confident during the winter of 1911. His government had reached a reciprocity agreement with the United States to create freer trade between the two countries. He was convinced that the deal, which had support among rural Canadians, would rejuvenate the Liberals after 15 years in power and lead to an easy fifth consecutive victory if he called an early election.
But, as J. Murray Beck noted in his history of Canadian federal elections Pendulum of Power, Laurier’s government became “infected with the idea that it enjoyed a permanent lease on office; and it had forgotten that the public never likes to have its support taken for granted.”
Laurier miscalculated how reciprocity would alienate the Canadian business community, or how successfully his opponents would use fearmongering and careless talk from south of the border about annexation to kill free trade as a political issue for decades to come. These miscalculations would haunt him in the 1911 federal election.
Free trade had been an on-again, off-again political issue since the pre-Confederation era. The Canadian-American Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 promoted free trade of raw materials between British North America and the United States. The Americans declined to renew it following its expiration in 1866 and rejected occasional proposals to revive it. Higher tariffs to protect manufacturers helped John A. Macdonald win the 1878 federal election, leading to the creation of the National Policy, which remained in effect for decades. Liberal support for a new reciprocity treaty led to the party’s defeat in 1891 and eventually to protectionist policies that helped it win the 1896 election.
(Front page, Montreal Star, September 22, 1911)
There was potential for a trade war when the Americans introduced the Payne-Aldrich tariff in 1909, which imposed a 25 per cent tariff on any trading partners whose actions were deemed discriminatory against the United States. Canada fell afoul of it thanks to trade deals made with countries such as France, Italy, and Japan and would have to comply by March 1910 or face the penalties.
Many elected American officials, including President William Howard Taft, were reluctant to impose penalties on Canada, which led to trade negotiations between the countries. Americans desired Canadian raw materials, including grain, lumber, and wood pulp, while Canadians wanted cheaper manufactured goods such as farm supplies. Agricultural organizations in Canada lobbied the federal government to support reciprocity, feeling it would allow Canadian farmers better access to the American market and lower their operating costs through cheaper equipment.
By 1910, there was substantial trade between the two countries: around 37.5 per cent of Canadian exports and 59.4 per cent of Canadian imports. The Americans feared that without a closer relationship, whether it was freer trade or increased economic integration, Canada might become an industrial powerhouse within the British Empire and become, as Taft put it, part of “an imperial commercial band” with a system of preferential tariffs.
Editorial cartoon comparing reciprocity to Bill Sikes from Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. Montreal Star, September 18, 1911
A reciprocity agreement was signed on January 21, 1911, and introduced in the House of Commons five days later. It proposed drastically reducing duties on agricultural, fishing, forestry, and mining products and a limited number of manufactured items.
As Liberals celebrated the agreement, Conservative opposition leader Robert Borden despaired. “Many of our members were confident that the government’s proposals would appeal to the country and would give it another term of office,” he later recalled in his memoirs. The party was split between MPs, especially from the west, who felt they couldn’t vote against it to avoid alienating their rural base, and others who believed it signalled a shift in Canada’s orientation from the British to the Americans.
Instead of signing a treaty, both countries introduced legislation to implement reciprocity. Taft urged Congress to pass it. During a February 14 speech, Speaker of the House Champ Clark said he supported the deal because 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 continue to debate whether Clark (a Democrat) was serious or meant this as a joke to make Taft (a Republican) look bad. If it was the latter, it fell flat. Some American newspapers felt Clark’s comments were tasteless. “Remarks about the absorption of one country by another grate harshly on the ears of the people of the smaller,” the Chicago Tribune observed.
Anti-Laurier/anti-Taft cartoon, the Toronto World, September 20, 1911
In Canada, the deal faced scrutiny from prominent Liberal backers within the business community. Laurier was warned repeatedly by Ontario manufacturers that reciprocity was politically dangerous and would harm their businesses, but he believed any seat losses in Ontario would be offset by the rest of the country.
On February 20, a manifesto was signed by a group of prominent businessmen with ties to the party who became known as the “Toronto 18.” Among the signatories were Canadian Bank of Commerce president Sir Edmund Walker, department store tycoon John Craig Eaton, cookie maker R.J. Christie, lawyer Zebulon Lash, and financier Edward Rogers Wood. The document outlined 10 points opposing reciprocity, including no public demand for it, losing the investment in east-west trade across Canada, potential harm to Canada’s ties with the British Empire, harm to developing our natural resources, and fear of political union with the United States.
As a result, it argued, “Canadian nationality is now threatened with a more serious blow than any it has heretofore met with.”
Ad featuring the manifesto issued by the Toronto 18. Berlin News Record, September 16, 1911.
The rebels were soon joined by two prominent Liberal MPs: Lloyd Harris, who had family ties to the Massey-Harris farm equipment empire, and Clifford Sifton, who had once been a powerful cabinet minister. In a speech to the Canadian Club, Sifton urged that “the best way of continuing good relations between Canada and the United States is that each should do its own business independently and have no entanglements, nothing in the world to quarrel about.” On March 1, Borden, Harris, Lash, Sifton, and Toronto News editor John Willison met to create an alliance between the Conservatives and the Liberal dissidents, which placed conditions on Borden as to who might hold cabinet posts if he won the next federal election.
While the legislation passed both houses in the United States, it was held up in Canada by weeks of Conservative filibustering. The situation was not helped by Laurier’s absence from Parliament for two months to attend an imperial conference in England, nor his indecisiveness over when to call an election.
The situation gave the Conservatives and their Liberal anti-reciprocity allies time to plan their strategy. Borden also built an alliance with Henri Bourassa’s Nationaliste movement in Quebec, whose issues included Laurier’s controversial attempt to build a larger Canadian navy to serve British needs.
Shortly after returning from England that summer, Laurier finally called an election for September 21. It didn’t take long for the Conservatives to successfully depict Laurier as both disloyal to the British Empire in English Canada for promoting closer trade ties with the Americans, and as a British toady (over the naval issue) in Quebec. During an early campaign stop in Trois-Rivieres, Laurier declared he was neither, stating that “I am a Canadian.” During the campaign, Laurier argued that talk of annexation was “beneath the contempt and beneath the attention of a serious people.” He declared that free trade in natural products would mutually benefit both countries and improve overall relations between the countries
Cartoon, Chicago Inter Ocean, September 23, 1911
Borden launched his campaign with a manifesto outlining his opposition to reciprocity, which included weakening interprovincial ties, the potential interlocking of American and Canadian financial systems, and exposing farmers to global competition. Borden asked voters: “Shall we continue in the course which has led us to our present enviable position of prosperity and national development, or shall we at the moment of greatest success and achievement lose heart and abandon the fight for national existence?”
Opponents of reciprocity questioned if supplying more raw materials more easily to the United States would slow the building of American branch plants in Canada. They also questioned why so much had been spent on building east-west transportation systems across Canada if the axis of trade would shift to a north-south direction. They warned of domestic manufacturing grinding to a halt.
In Ontario, the Liberal party organization was crumbling. Its nomination process was slow. It lacked newspaper support in the southwest end of the province. Laurier’s Ontario lieutenant, Minister of Justice Allen Aylesworth, showed little interest in party organization and made unpopular decisions. Increasingly deaf, he decided not to run again in 1911.
Cartoon, Chicago Tribune, September 23, 1911
By contrast, the Conservatives were backed by provincial counterparts under Premier James Whitney, who made numerous appearances on the campaign trail. Former Liberals assisted with canvassing. The Tories also capitalized on a longing among some Protestant and rural voters who no longer wished to see the country’s politics dominants by Catholics and French Canadians, and general fatigue with 15 years of Liberal rule. Tory-friendly papers ran front-page stories urging the public to “Vote Against National Suicide.”
There was evidence that the Conservatives planted fake stories to support their cause, such as the Montreal Star claiming that American businessmen hoping to enter the Canadian market financed the Liberal campaign, or other papers that printed stories fabricating pro-annexation statements from American press tycoon William Randolph Hearst.
Among the desperate attempts to boost reciprocity was a window display in the Toronto Star’s office comparing meat prices in Buffalo and Toronto, noting how much cheaper they were south of the border. The Toronto News responded by setting up its own window display of cooked hams and higher quality cuts of meat, while the Toronto World claimed that local meatpacking giant William Davies Company (which opposed reciprocity) provided higher quality meat than was available in Buffalo and that much of the local meat supply was not as expensive as the Star claimed.
Cartoon, Toronto Star Weekly, September 9, 1911
The Conservatives won by a landslide, capturing 132 seats to the Liberals’ 85. Ontario played a decisive role, as the Conservatives won 72 seats while the Liberals only claimed 13.
The American press lamented the results of the vote, with many blaming Ontario, especially those of old United Empire Loyalist stock. “It is not fear of annexation so much as a petty hatred of Yankees and anything the want,” declared the Boston Evening Transcript. The New York Times lamented that “prejudice and delusion have triumphed in Canada,” while the St. Louis Post-Dispatch mused that “popular stupidity has rarely won a more decisive victory.” In an editorial that sounded as if could have emerged from the current American administration, the Buffalo Enquirer yelled in all caps “LET IT BE REMEMBERED THAT WHEN THE UNITED STATES REALLY WANTS CANADA IT KNOWS WHERE TO GET IT AND HOW.”
Photo of the meat on display in the Toronto Star's office window.. Toronto Star, September 19, 1911.
Back in Canada, Saturday Night felt “the wonder still remains why a government with a considerable part of its term unexpired should have felt itself obliged to try and force reciprocity upon a people who had given not the slightest intimation that it desired such a measure.”
Rural anger over the defeat of reciprocity helped decrease trust in the two traditional political parties. This was among the factors leading to the creation of agrarian movements that would, in the aftermath of the First World War, lead to the political success of groups like the Progressive Party federally and the United Farmers of Ontario provincially.
Laurier spent much of election night at the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City. By 9:30 p.m. it was clear he would be defeated, so he met with his local supporters. “We have fallen in a high and honourable cause. We have received a check, but we shall come back again to the ring,” he declared. “We have lost, but our cause shall prevail.”
Laurier remained Liberal leader until his death in 1919. Not until the 1980s— and under the direction of the Progressive Conservatives — would free trade with the United States be realized.
Sources: Bomb Canada by Chantal Allan (Edmonton: AU Press, 2009); Pendulum of Power by J. Murray Beck (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1968); Canada 1896-1921: A Nation Transformed by Robert Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974); Fights of Our Lives by John Duffy (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2002); Canada 1911 by Patrice Dutil and David MacKenzie (Toronto: Dundurn, 2011); Blue Thunder by Bob Plamondon (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2009); William Howard Taft by Jeffrey Rosen (New York: Times Books, 2018); the September 22, 1911 edition of the Boston Evening Transcript; the September 22, 1911 edition of the Buffalo Enquirer; the August 15, 1911 edition of the London Free Press; the February 20, 1911 edition of the Mail and Empire; the September 22, 1911 edition of the New York Times; the February 1973 edition of the Pacific Historical Review; the September 22, 1911 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; the September 30, 1911 edition of Saturday Night; the September 19, 1911 edition of the Toronto News; the August 16, 1911 and September 16, 1911 editions of the Toronto Star; and the September 16, 1911 edition of the Toronto World.