On an early-fall afternoon in 1890, Sir John A. Macdonald stood before a large crowd at a picnic in Halifax and delivered an impassioned speech that sounds eerily familiar in 2025.
The topic? Tariffs. The threat? Annexation.
“The fact is that the United States covet Canada,” Macdonald said.
The prime minister’s blunt words were prompted by the McKinley Tariff Act, a new U.S. law that would deliver crippling tariffs of up to 50 per cent on Canadian exports to the
United States. The law was sponsored by Ohio congressman and future U.S. president William McKinley, so notorious a proponent of steep tariffs that he was nicknamed “the Napoleon of Protection.” The tariffs were ostensibly designed to protect U.S. manufacturers; Macdonald believed there was a more sinister motivation.
He warned that our neighbours were turning up the
tariff screws to force Canada to accept not merely a commercial union with the United States, but a political union. The United States wanted what Canada had, he said, and was angling to remove the border to take it.
If history doesn’t exactly repeat itself, it certainly echoes, even across a 135-year canyon. Macdonald faced an economic and political threat that was, in many ways, remarkably similar to our current national predicament.
And like the current federal Liberals, Macdonald’s Conservatives entered their tariff crisis as a long-entrenched government that appeared to have outlived its usefulness.
Macdonald was 75 when he delivered his
Halifax speech; his health in 1890 hadn’t been great. He was nearing the end of his fifth mandate, having governed for 18 of the 23 years since Confederation. In his private correspondence, Macdonald himself wondered whether he and his government had long passed their best-before date.
But the tariff fight reinvigorated the prime minister and turned his party’s fortunes. The Conservatives won the 1891 election, in which they campaigned as the country’s defender against the tariffs and the threat of annexation. On his campaign posters, Macdonald appeared waving the flag.
Mind you, the Canada of 1890 was quite different from the Canada of today. The country was just a generation old; while unquestionably rich with natural resources, its manufacturing industries were in their infancy. The country still relied on a kind of maternal protection from Britain, and constantly looked over its shoulder at its rapidly growing and endlessly ambitious neighbour to the south. The U.S. Civil War a quarter-century earlier had, despite its horrors, catapulted that country into a major industrial power; now, the U.S. was increasingly interested in expanding its global footprint as a political power, too. In this climate, a young Canada could never get too comfortable about its future.
While U.S. president Benjamin Harrison (unlike the current resident of the White House) never publicly threatened Canada with annexation, other senior U.S. government officials did little to hide their designs on Canada. Harrison’s secretary of state, James Blaine – who co-authored the tariff bill with McKinley – openly talked about his desire to unite Canada with the United States. Privately, he told the president that in the face of high tariffs, Canada would “ultimately, I believe, seek admission to the Union.”
Egging Harrison and Blaine on was Andrew Carnegie, the ultrarich U.S. industrialist who had the president’s ear on tariff matters (among other things). “If Canada wants the advantage of the American market, it must become American,” Carnegie wrote in a letter to William Gladstone, the past and future British prime minister.
But Macdonald wasn’t any more attracted to the prospect of being absorbed into the U.S. zeitgeist than the Canadian leadership of today. In his Halifax speech, he said that Canadians would prefer to “enjoy the magnificent country that God has given us, and look with philosophic eyes at the struggles of a fierce and discordant democracy” – setting off a prolonged round of applause.
Of course, the McKinley tariffs neither forced an economic union or annexation, nor did they destroy the Canadian economy.
In the five years after the imposition of the tariffs, Canada’s goods exports to the U.S. fell nearly 50 per cent compared with the five years prior; at the same time, exports to Britain more than doubled. Trade with other markets – chiefly the Caribbean – also doubled.
During those five years, Canadian exports overall grew more than 20 per cent. The U.S. tariffs hadn’t dissuaded Canadian trade; they had only rerouted it.
Meanwhile, the protectionist pursuits of Harrison’s Republicans had given the party scant cover politically. The Democrats steamrollered the Republicans in the midterm congressional election of November, 1890, winning 72 per cent of the contested seats. Two years later, a deeply unpopular Harrison lost the White House to Grover Cleveland, who had nearly double the incumbent’s electoral college votes.
In the second half of the 1890s, the Republicans led by Mr. McKinley – who succeeded Mr. Cleveland as president in 1896 – grew increasingly dissatisfied with the economic efficacy of tariffs. By 1901, the former great champion of tariffs had become an advocate of “reciprocity” – what we talk about now as bilateral free trade. He had come to believe that the United States could not expect to expand its industry into foreign markets unless it granted trading partners fair access to its own market.
“We must not repose in fancied security that we can forever sell everything and buy little or nothing,” the president said in a speech at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in September, 1901.
The next day, McKinley was shot twice in the abdomen during a public meet-and-greet. Eight days later, he was dead.
