It is imperative that any historian
of political ideas and political movements be aware that different groups may
support the same political cause for very different reasons, and based on very
different political ideologies. This is the case when we consider widespread
political support for free-trade politics in Alberta in the 1911 federal
election and the 1921 federal election respectively. In both elections, the majority of voters from
Alberta chose the parties that promised them freer trade policies between
Canada and the United States, these being Laurier’s Liberals in 1911 and the
Progressives/United Farmers of Alberta in 1921. However, the freer trade
policies promised were couched in notably different ideological contexts and
terms in the two elections. To illustrate this point and its implications, we
will begin by laying out the results of the two elections, and then we will go
on to compare the different ideological contexts in which freer trade policies
were situated in the two elections, by examining the ideological/rhetorical
strategies of the Laurier Liberals’ 1911 campaign and the Progressives’ 1921
campaign respectively.
The
1911 election, pitting the incumbent Laurier, Liberal government against the
challenging Borden, Conservative opposition, was contested mainly on the issue
of reciprocity with the United States. If the reciprocity agreement was
ratified as Laurier wanted to do and which Borden opposed, this would have
meant producing something closer to free-trade between the two countries,
especially in agricultural products. Though Laurier’s Liberals were defeated
nationally, in Alberta the Liberals won 6 of 7 seats, losing only Calgary to
the Conservatives[1].
As O.D. Skelton, an academic observer writing shortly after the 1911 election
said, in Alberta (and Saskatchewan) the economic benefits expected from
reciprocity tended to outweigh, in the minds of many voters, the kinds of
nationalistic sentiments that the Conservatives had been able to capitalize on
elsewhere in Canada[2].
In the 1921 election, a new, third, party, the Progressives, which
had been founded in 1920 by disillusioned former Liberals and backed by
representatives of a rapidly-growing agrarian political movement, with T.A.
Crerar chosen as leader, became a political force[3]. Freer
trade with the United States was an important plank of the Progressive/agrarian
platform. In the 1921 federal election in Alberta, agrarian candidates
(Progressive and United Farmer of Alberta members) won every seat except for
the two Calgary seats, which were won by Labour Party representatives[4]. The
Labour Party was at that point a political ally of the agrarian movement and
thus these seats were not contested by agrarian candidates[5]. No
Liberal or Conservative candidates won a seat in Alberta.
It might seem as if we could explain
these two election results by arguing that free-trade/reciprocity was a very
important issue to Albertan voters, and hence most of them voted in favour of
whichever political grouping promised them freer trade with the United States.
In 1911 this was Laurier’s Liberals; in 1921 this was the Progressive/agrarian
candidates (henceforth to be designated just as ‘Progressives’). There is some
truth to this argument, but it is not complete and obscures some important
distinctions between the political dynamics of the two elections.
This
is because free-trade/reciprocity was supported by the Liberals in 1911 and the
Progressives in 1921 respectively for different reasons, and coming from two
very different political-ideological traditions. As we will see, Laurier’s
Liberals generally worked within a classical liberal ideological tradition
which tended to shun interest-group politics and favor a smaller government,
while the Progressives leaned towards a social democratic ideological tradition
which tended to embrace interest-group politics and favor a larger government.
The two parties’ espousal of free-trade was justified for different reasons in their
respective ideologies, and the two cannot be considered as part of the same political-ideological
movement.
Classical liberalism is a political
ideology that became popular especially in Britain, France, and the United
States, in the late 18th century and throughout most of the 19th
century. It was strongly influenced by the free-market views of classical
economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John-Baptiste Say, and Frederic Bastiat.
Classical liberals tended to favour individual liberty, in personal and
economic spheres, and a small, limited government.
In
The Law, an essay originally
published in 1850 by the French classical economist and classical liberal,
Frederic Bastiat, Bastiat calls it a “fatal principle” if: “under pretense of
organization, regulation, protection, or encouragement, the law may take from
one party in order to give to another, help itself to the wealth acquired by
all the classes that it may increase that of one class, whether that of the
agriculturists, the manufacturers, the ship owners, or artists and comedians”[6]. Similarly, Ludwig von Mises, an economist and
classical liberal from Austria-Hungary, wrote in his book on classical liberal
ideas, originally published in 1927: “Liberalism addresses itself to all and
proposes a program acceptable to all alike. It promises no one privileges.”
Mises contrasts this with “the parties of special interests” who: “address
themselves only to a part of society. To this part, for which alone they intend
to work, they promise special advantages at the expense of the rest of society”[7].
Whether
one believes the arguments to be true or not, a popular rhetorical strategy of
classical liberal ideologists was to try to convince the reader/listener that
freedom and limited government results in a situation where no one group in
society may benefit at the expense of another through political privileges.
This state of affairs will then, according to classical liberal ideology,
result in a maximization of the peacefulness and prosperity of a given society.
Wilfrid Laurier, in his speech to
the House of Commons on March 7, 1911, defending the reciprocity agreement he
had negotiated with the US and wanted to have ratified, shows that he employed
important aspects of classical liberal ideology in his defense of reciprocity. Near
the very beginning of the speech, Laurier says:
“If, Sir, I were
to state to my hon. friends on the other side that amongst civilized mankind,
all those who work, work with the object of disposing of the product of their
labour, I should be told, this is a truism that is running in the street. If I
were to add that the man who works had the legitimate ambition of getting the
greatest possible remuneration for his labour, I should be told, this is a mere
truism. If I were to say that the man who works, will be better remunerated the
more clients he has, seeking the products of his labour, I should be told, this
is a truism. And yet, this is the very thing, this very truism, which is
embodied in the proposition now before you. All that we ask under these
resolutions is to obtain for the man who works in the fields, the best possible
remuneration for his labour”[8].
Here,
Laurier is defending, in universal and general terms, the right of every
individual man to try to make the greatest economic profit he can, and arguing
that tariff barriers stand in the way of this right. The “man who works in the
fields”, the farmer, should have the same rights in this regard as everyone
else, no more and no less. Laurier frames it not as a ‘farmer’s issue’, but as
an issue of simply extending the individual rights of man that classical
liberals believe all men should be entitled to, to the farmers, who have been
unreasonably deprived of it by the tariff.
Of
course, despite him generally working within the classical liberal ideological
tradition on this issue, Laurier was not primarily a classical liberal
ideologist, but an expert at practical politics. In the middle of his speech,
Laurier comments on why the reciprocity agreement did not include reciprocity
for all manufactured products or full free-trade for agricultural implements:
“I know that we have not gone as far as certain sections of the community
wanted us to go. A certain section wanted free [agricultural] implements
altogether, but we did not think it prudent or advisable to go that far”[9]. Though
full free-trade would have been the only policy in accordance with strict
classical liberal ideology, Laurier does not think it politically “prudent” to
go this far.
Nevertheless,
even in his explanation of the reasons for this compromise, Laurier betrays his
classical liberal sympathies. He says: “It is obvious that if you raise the
customs duty or impose a protective duty you create at once a fictitious
economical atmosphere; and if the industries established under that tariff and
under that temperature and condition, have to face suddenly a removal of the
duty, you might annihilate in the course of one night millions of capital and
reduce to non-employment thousands of operatives”[10].
Laurier’s use of the term “fictitious economical atmosphere” to describe
conditions under a protective tariff implies that there was something unnatural
and wrong about establishing the tariff in the first place. Regrettably, the
protective tariff was established in the past, and Laurier’s argument to
maintain part of it in force is solely based on the difficulties that the
manufacturers who had gotten used to a protectionist atmosphere would
experience if they were forced to rapidly adjust to a free-trade atmosphere.
Another
interesting invocation of classical liberal ideology in the 1911 Liberal
campaign is found in a letter that W.S. Fielding, Laurier’s Minister of
Finance, wrote to George Graham, a fellow Liberal MP, on May 30, 1911. In the
letter, Fielding suggests ways that Liberal propaganda could be set up to
vilify the Conservatives. One of his suggestions is to get a cartoonist to draw
Robert Borden as the “character of Mr. Facing Both Ways”. The cartoon should
make fun of the Conservatives because: “with one voice the conservatives are
telling the farmers that under reciprocity they will suffer competition and
have to sell at lower prices. At the same time, their agents are going into the
factories of Montreal getting anti-reciprocity petitions signed upon
representations that the cost of food will be made higher”[11]. Fielding
suggests that the Conservatives be mocked for their duplicitous behavior of
supporting a policy (protectionism) that, according to classical liberalism,
must favor one group at the expense of another, but trying to make it
universally appealing by telling different groups why reciprocity would hurt
their interests, even if the explanations given to different groups contradict one
another. Fielding implies that the only way that the Conservatives can appeal
to different interest-groups is by lying, maintaining, impossibly, that every
group will get a special political privilege from protectionism, whereas the
Liberals simply maintain that no one should, by right, have any political
privileges, which must come at the expense of their fellow citizens.
Thus,
such was the ideological framing of the Laurier Liberals’ championing of
reciprocity, or freer trade. We cannot know for sure what general political
ideology, if any, every Albertan voter in 1911 held, but suffice it to say that
many generally favored freer trade and reciprocity, and sympathized enough with
the more general ideology used by the Laurier Liberals to frame and
contextualize that issue, to vote for that party.
We
are presented with a very different political/ideological climate in Alberta
leading up to the 1921 Federal election. An agrarian movement had been building
up in Alberta since at least 1909, which became especially politicized from
1919-1921, leading up to the victory of the United Farmers of Alberta in the
July 1921 Alberta provincial general election[12].
A
revised ‘Farmers’ Platform’, issued in late 1918 by the Canadian Council of
Agriculture, the agrarian organization representative of the Canadian farmer’s
movement that was active in federal politics, called the ‘New National Policy’,
helped politicize the movement by setting out an explicit, federal political
platform that many in the agrarian movement felt they could get behind[13]. This
is a very important document for our purposes, which we will turn to now, as it
shows how ideologically, the agrarian movement differed significantly from the
classical liberal-bearing of the Laurier Liberals of 1911.
Right off the bat, the authors of the ‘New
National Policy’ accuse the government of being unfairly dominated by an
economic class of people: “It is becoming more apparent each year that our
parliament is becoming more and more under the direct influence of industrial,
financial and transportation interests, represented by men of wealth in
financial and industrial centres”[14].
The authors attribute the popularity of protectionism to this domination and
make a clear stand in favor of freer trade: “whereas the Protective Tariff has
been and is a chief corrupting influence in our national life because the
protected interests, in order to maintain their unjust privileges, have
contributed lavishly to political and campaign funds, thus encouraging both
political parties to look to them for support, thereby lowering the standard of
public morality”[15].
This emphasis on economic class-based political conflict from the beginning
already suggests that this document is not a classical liberal one. Classical
liberal rhetoric tended to be directed, in general and universal terms, against
any individual or group seeking any political privileges, rather than singling
out a specific economic class, seen to be benefitting unfairly from political
privileges, to attack as this document does.
Interestingly,
the authors borrow several arguments from free-market economics in favour of
international trade and against protectionism in order to make their case[16].
They even evoke some straight classical liberal arguments, such as when they
write: “For the tariff, in a word, means fundamentally, preferential treatment
– preference to certain classes of producers at the expense of others, as well
as of the whole body of consumers”[17].
We
must not be fooled by these passages into thinking that the ‘New National Policy’
is a classical liberal manifesto for free-trade though. There are some distinct
social democratic ideological elements mixed in which cannot be ignored. For
example, the authors recognize that sharply reducing the tariff would result in
a fall in government revenue. This would not bother most classical liberals, as
they see only a very limited role for government in a society. The authors of
the platform, by contrast though, suggest the following ways of maintaining or
increasing government revenue: “1. By a direct tax on unimproved land values,
including all natural resources. 2. By a sharply graduated personal income tax.
3. By a heavy graduated inheritance tax on large estates. 4. By a graduated
income tax on the profits of corporations”[18].
They also call for “the nationalization of all railway, telegraph and express
companies” and demand “that no more natural resources be alienated from the
Crown”[19].
The
authors justify the graduated personal income tax “because, perhaps more than
any other tax, it measures faculty or ability to pay”[20].
This ‘ability to pay’ doctrine fits in with the Marxist/social democratic idea
of: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’.
The
heavy graduated inheritance tax is justified because there is allegedly: “a
sort of co-partnership existing between captains of industry and the
government, under which the people at large should share in the wealth thereby
created. From this standpoint the state merely takes by legal action from the
estate of the deceased, what it is entitled to in equity”[21].
A strict classical liberal would see such co-partnerships, if they existed, as
cases of a political privilege that should be abolished, the government being
made smaller in the process. They would not, as the authors do, implicitly accept
this state of affairs but call for the government to collect what it is ‘owed’,
for the ‘benefit of the people at large’, the government being made bigger in
the process.
The
authors espouse economic egalitarianism explicitly, writing: “Moreover, it is
impossible to conceive of a truly democratic state where great wealth and
poverty exist side by side. It is in the interests of a real commonwealth to diffuse
great fortunes, to break them up, to smooth out class distinctions based on
wealth, and to place the whole people on the footing of equal opportunity”[22].
Calling for political steps to be taken towards establishing equality of
incomes, wealth, and ‘opportunity’, rather than just equality before the law,
is perhaps the most important feature that distinguishes a social democratic
ideology from a classical liberal ideology.
Finally,
calls for the nationalization of railroads and the continued public ownership
of natural resources is not something that aligns with the classical liberal
ideal of full private ownership of the means of production.
Thus,
the Canadian Council of Agriculture’s (CCA’s) ‘New National Policy’ was a
political platform that featured certain classical liberal arguments, but also
arguments from social democratic ideology. The CCA was closely intertwined with
the Alberta agrarian movement, not least because Henry Wise Wood, the president
of the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA), was also the president of the CCA
throughout the important period 1917-1921[23].
Nevertheless, as Gerald Friesen notes, there was a discernible ideological
divide within the Progressive movement, between the more ‘moderate’ reform
ideology of those like Progressive Party Leader T.A. Crerar that was more
popular in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and the more ‘radical’ reform ideology of
Henry Wise Wood, which was strongest in Alberta[24].
It is likely that the CCA’s ‘New National Policy’ represented an acceptable
compromise/baseline position linking these two ideological camps. To get a
sense of the agrarian political ideology popular in Alberta though, we have to
turn to a speech of Henry Wise Wood himself.
Wood
delivered a speech on June 25th 1921 at Medicine Hat, as part of a
campaign to get UFA candidate Robert Gardiner elected as a federal MP in a
by-election that was to be held on June 27th (which Gardiner
proceeded to win). In the speech, Wood unveils his rationale for why the
farmers have to organize into a political force. He sees history as a long
struggle between two basic laws, or principles, of social organization: the
principle of competition and the principle of cooperation. Wood argues that the
manufacturers had already learned to cooperate with each other through
manufacturers’ associations and that by doing so; they have taken a big step
“towards the establishment of a true civilization”. However, by cooperating among
themselves, they are consequently able to compete very effectively against
other, un-organized, economic classes of people. Wood does not see the
possibility or desirability of forcing the manufacturers to stop cooperating
with each other, so he thinks that the only thing to do is for the farmers, and
other hitherto un-organized economic classes such as labour, to organize and
“build a counter force”, organized on the strong basis of economic class
interests[25].
When they do so, “the Plutocrats”, the already-organized rich manufacturers,
will try to maintain “the false law of competition”, while “the Democrats”, who
are “the unsuccessful competitors”, can “only hope to serve their best
interests by the operation of the true law of co-operation”[26].
Thus,
Wood’s implied criticism of classical liberal ideology is twofold. Firstly, he
thinks that economic class warfare and political privileges are here to stay,
thus to hope, as the classical liberals do, that people will stop pursuing them
is idealistic. Rather, what one must do is join the class warfare with an
organized group of your own economic class. Secondly, he thinks that universal
‘cooperation’, probably designating some kind of social democratic political
arrangement, is better than the universal ‘competition’ that would exist in a
free-market, classical liberal system anyway. Thus, a return to the classical
liberal ideal is, according to Wood, both impossible and overly idealistic and,
even if it were possible, would not be desirable anyway.
The
speech of Robert Gardiner, the Federal MP Candidate himself, three days earlier
on June 22nd 1921, was not as philosophical as Wood’s. He
essentially endorsed the ‘New National Policy’ wholesale and re-used a lot of
the economic arguments against the tariff contained within that platform[27].
Also, he insisted that the platform he endorsed was “not a class platform”,
arguing that it “embraces all classes except one – except that class which has been
unmercifully exploiting us”[28].
Thus,
the arguments contained in the ‘New National Policy’, as well as the more
radical, philosophical arguments of Henry Wise Wood, were both used in Alberta
to drum up support for the UFA/Progressive candidates in the 1921 Federal
Election. The free-trade issue was not framed, as it was in 1911 by the Laurier
Liberals, in the context of classical liberal ideology. Rather, it was framed
more in the context of social democratic ideology, where it was presented as a
way to advance the class interests of the hitherto disadvantaged and
disorganized classes of people, rather than presented as a way to achieve the
classical liberal ideal of the absence of special political privileges. Also,
it was not associated with classical liberal calls for smaller government, but
with social democratic calls for bigger government and economic egalitarianism,
as seen in the ‘New National Policy’.
Thus,
in conclusion, while support for free-trade policies remained a constant in
most Albertans’ federal political stances, most other political variables were
in flux, including the very political ideologies that calls for freer trade
were grounded in. By recognizing this, historians of political ideas and
movements can escape the temptation to oversimplify and just interpret the 1911
and 1921 elections as two similar instances of a free-trade oriented Alberta
opposing itself to protectionism. Instead, we should recognize the complexities
of Alberta’s political/ideological development between these two periods and not
neglect the differences between the two elections in the popular, general political/ideological
background of support for free-trade.
[1] Parliament of Canada, “12th
Parliament (1911 Election),” History of
Federal Ridings Since 1867,
http://www.parl.gc.ca/About/Parliament/FederalRidingsHistory/hfer.asp?Language=E&Search=Gres&genElection=12&ridProvince=1&submit1=Search
[2] O.D. Skelton, “Canada’s
Rejection of Reciprocity,” Journal of
Political Economy, Vol. 19, No. 9 (Nov. 1911), 728.
[3] Bradford James Rennie, The rise of Agrarian Democracy: the United
Farmers and Farm Women of Alberta, 1909-1921 (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2000), 205.
[4] Parliament of Canada, “14th
Parliament (1921 Election),” History of
Federal Ridings Since 1867. http://www.parl.gc.ca/About/Parliament/FederalRidingsHistory/hfer.asp?Language=E&Search=Gres&genElection=14&ridProvince=1&submit1=Search
[5] Henry Wise Wood, “Report of
Speech Made by Mr. H.W.Wood, President, U.F.A., At the Empress Theatre.
Medicine Hat. On Saturday, June 25th 1921,” in Medicine Hat by-election speeches, from the Glenbow Archives,
digitized by the Archives Society of Alberta, accessed February 19, 2013, p.
11.
http://asalive.archivesalberta.org:8080/?proc=page&sess=ASALIVE-644-O_Ff5&dbase=documents_alberta&item=GLEN-257&page=8
In
the speech, Wood, United Farmers of Alberta president says: “Labours’ interests
are just as democratic as ours”, and hence they can be considered as political
allies, but because farmers and labour have “a different view-point” due to their
different economic positions, they should not be organized into one
comprehensive group.
[6] Frederic Bastiat, The Law (Auburn, Alabama : Ludwig
von Mises Institute, 2007), 11.
[7] Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism In The Classical Tradition, 3rd
edition (Irvington-on-Hudson, New York: Foundation for Economic Education,
1985), 160.
[8] Wilfrid Laurier, “The Summation
of the Defence,” in The 1911 General
Election: A Study in Canadian Politics, ed. Paul Stevens (Toronto: The Copp
Clark Publishing Company, 1970), 50.
[9] Laurier, 59.
[10] Laurier, 59.
[11] W.S. Fielding, “Election
Propaganda,” in The 1911 General
Election: A Study in Canadian Politics, ed. Paul Stevens (Toronto: The Copp
Clark Publishing Company, 1970), 178.
[12] Rennie, 3-4.
[13] Rennie, 189-190.
[14] Canadian Council of Agriculture,
The farmers’ platform: A new national
policy for Canada as adopted by the Canadian Council of Agriculture at
Winnipeg, on November 29, 1918 (Winnipeg: Canadian Council of Agriculture,
1918), accessed February 26, 2013, p. 3.
http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/bibliography/4377/3.html
[15] Canadian Council of Agriculture,
4.
[16] Canadian Council of Agriculture,
6-13.
[17] Canadian Council of Agriculture,
14.
[18] Canadian Council of Agriculture,
4.
[19] Canadian Council of Agriculture,
5.
[20] Canadian Council of Agriculture,
33.
[21] Canadian Council of Agriculture,
36.
[22] Canadian Council of Agriculture,
36.
[23] Rennie, 206.
[24] Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1987), 371-372.
[25] Wood, 11.
[26] Wood, 12-13.
[27] Robert Gardiner, “Report of Speech
Made by Mr Gardiner, At the Empress Theatre. Medicine Hat. Wednesday June 22nd
1921,” in Medicine Hat by-election
speeches, from the Glenbow Archives, digitized by the Archives Society of
Alberta, accessed February 19, 2013, p. 2-4.
http://asalive.archivesalberta.org:8080/?proc=page&sess=ASALIVE-644-O_Ff5&dbase=documents_alberta&item=GLEN-257&page=1
[28] Gardiner, 1.
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