Like many Westerners, I was never enamoured with that policy as it tended to make the Prairie provinces a colony of Ontario and Quebec. Nevertheless, it was an essential step that prevented Western Canada from being taken over by the United States.
The long government of William Lyon Mackenzie King – basically from 1921 to 1930 and from 1935 to 1948 – was an era of Canada developing closer ties with the U.S. King found a friend in American President Franklin Roosevelt, imitating Roosevelt’s New Deal social-economic policies and assuming an important role in the waging of the Second World War.
The Liberals ruled Canada from 1935 to 1957 when the Progressive Conservatives’ John Diefenbaker became prime minister. Diefenbaker is widely considered to be one of Canada’s worst prime ministers. One of his accomplishments was to drive my mother into the arms of the Liberal party.
Diefenbaker wanted to protect and even increase Canada’s ties with Britain, especially the monarchy, as a bulwark against the Americans. He is remembered largely for his fulminations over symbolic issues, such as the development of a Canadian flag and opposition to perceived snubs of the monarchy. However, Diefenbaker rejected a strong American push to station nuclear weapons and missiles on Canadian soil, a stance that led to his defeat in the 1963 election.
George Grant, a conservative nationalist academic, wrote in his landmark book, Lament for a Nation, that Diefenbaker’s government “was a bewildered attempt to find policies that were adequate to its noble cause. The 1957 election was the Canadian people's last gasp of nationalism. Diefenbaker's government was the strident swansong of that hope.”
It's not that later leaders didn’t try. Liberal Finance Minister Walter Gordon introduced a budget with strains of economic nationalism in 1963, a budget that provoked howls of outrage from the Canadian financial elite and was withdrawn. Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Policy was another attempt at nationalism that incensed the Alberta oil patch and was eventually dismantled.
The final death knell of economic nationalism was the free trade election of 1988 in which Canadians gave Brian Mulroney a majority to negotiate a trade deal with the United States. The subsequent era of prosperity was attributed to free trade.
Today, one must wonder whether the cries of the nationalists that free trade left Canada vulnerable to upheavals in the American economy and politics were more well founded than Canadians of the Mulroney era believed. Our country must now deal with an incoming U.S. president whose decision-making is erratic and often founded on something less than compelling evidence.
Donald Trump has threatened on spurious grounds to impose a 25 per cent tariff on Canadian imports, an action which could throw our economy into a tailspin. Our national leaders have no strategy and little leverage to deal with this threat. It is no overstatement to say that Canada’s three main political parties have less than ideal leadership in this time of crisis.
The question is still pertinent: Would Canada be better prepared to deal with Trump if we had remained faithful to MacDonald’s national vision? Would we be better positioned if, for example, Eastern Canada had relied less on petroleum imports from faraway and Canada sought more trade with overseas nations? Is this too late a date to build a more Canadian-owned economy? Do we have the national will to move in such a direction? Or is this utterly unrealistic? Is Trump’s vision of Canada as the 51st state inevitable?
I have lived in four provinces and my allegiances are pan-Canadian rather than to a pathetic independent Alberta. But is this mere sentiment which refuses to face the world’s hard realities?
Reality is what we choose to make it. Every decision has trade-offs where some good is abandoned to choose a different good. Trump’s upcoming term as president may force Canadians to make such a choice, either through indifference or through positive action. Where do you stand?