Canada Goes to the Polls

...Rightly or wrongly, but more probably rightly, Quebec believes that unjust and repressive regulations aimed at Saskatchewan Catholics by a Conservative government there, have been fashioned and enforced at the dictation of the Ku Klux Klan...

...For Conservatives, however, there is one cloud on the Quebec horizon...

...Rudy Vallee, his dominant political creed is that he will never, never sing The Star Spangled Banner...

...In the elections of 1921, 1925 and 1926, French-Canadians voted not on political or economic issues, but to avenge conscription...

...In this campaign, curiously enough, the Liberal party, following the precedent of the Democrats under Governor Smith, has seemingly abandoned its old tariff policy, and is appealing to the country on a combined platform of protection and empire preferences...

...That program is regarded by most Canadians as hopelessly impracticable, just as thirty years ago the tariff reform crusade of Joseph Chamberlain received little sanction from even Canadian imperialists...

...In any small town in Ontario, a carbon copy of towns across the border, one will find perfect prototypes of the average American citizen...

...Whether history will repeat in the coming election, time alone can tell...

...For while the ultra-Loyalist of Ontario will tune in on and hum the croonings of Mr...

...When the Canadian national policy of protection was enunciated in 1878 its chief motive was to resist commercial absorption by the United States...

...That imperialistic creed, imposed upon the rest of Canada for generations, is the touchstone of Canada's fiscal policy...

...A Conservative government was in office when the war came and when conscription was enforced, and neither the war nor conscription was popular in Quebec...

...With the policies of the Liberal party as practised since confederation, her people have little sympathy...

...The ordinary urban or rural dweller in Ontario transacts his business on strictly American lines...

...It is just possible, therefore, that this religious issue, one of the first introduced into Canadian politics for many years, will be a factor in returning the administration of the present Premier to power...

...One thing, however, is perfectly plain...

...The war brought a change...

...Dunning, Mr...

...This, perhaps inevitable under any circumstances, has been hastened and made more certain by the Hawley-Smoot bill...

...We believe the paper here presented is also very interesting for its comment upon the attitude of various Canadian provinces—Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan—toward the United States.—The Editors...

...It is not, for the moment, that Canadian Liberalism, Conservatism either, has been brought into line or July 9, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 277 for the empire free-trade policy of the Canadian-born peer, Lord Beaverbrook...

...The historic and existing truth is that for a large part of Canada, and for Ontario in particular, protection means much more than mere development of industries...

...The political consequences of this fiscal strategy are more than likely to improve the chances of Mr...

...Certainly the main issue," says Mr...

...Heretofore, Ontario, centre of British and protectionist sentiment, has been the backbone of the Conservative party...

...It is that no matter which party wins, the next decade in Canada is bound to see more of tariff aggression against the United States...

...Polling will be held toward the end of July or in the first week of August...

...Quebec was sneered at for cowardice...

...Bennett, the dominion Conservative leader, is in any way responsible for what has happened in Saskatchewan...

...They voted against the leader and the party associated with war policy, and contrary to their own economic needs sent a solid bloc of sixty members to Ottawa to support the Liberal party...

...Whether it will be good for Canada or for the United States is another matter...

...and it may be that the old appeals against a phantom imperialism and the old war-cries against conscription have lost much of their old potency...

...Mackenzie King, the Liberal Prime Minister, announced that his government would appeal to the nation...

...His policy, in short, is the protection of Canadian industries against all the world, the rest of the empire included...

...After having held office for nine years, mainly through the support of agrarian low tariffists from the prairie provinces, Mr...

...By increasing the British preference, Mr...

...but that, unfortunately, does not prevent French-Canadians blaming federal Conservatives for the sins of their brethren in a provincial field...

...By a device known as countervailing duties, the Canadian tariff on a number of specified commodities, principally foodstuffs, is made automatically to conform to whatever duties Congress may impose upon similar goods imported into the United States from Canada...

...Made up largely of descendants of United Empire Loyalists and of Scottish immigrants, it presents the curious paradox of being socially and intellectually Americanized while remaining passionately British, politically...

...will win support among the British-born on the prairies...

...But the United States conquest ends there...

...Sir Robert Borden, who was Prime Minister, exercised tact and conciliation, but some of his colleagues were less gifted...

...discontent that may be engendered among western low tariff groups by the frank abandonment of the Liberal party's old free-trade tendencies, while the gesture toward protection, and especially toward protection against the United States, is bound to have potent and far-reaching effect in the frankly anti-American secultra-British and almost tions of Ontario...

...King, an adroit politician, has deemed it politically expedient to yield to two pronounced and increasing tendencies among the Canadian people: a desire to retaliate against growing fiscal aggression from Washington, and a determination to divert some of the trade now going to the republic into British and imperial channels...

...King's government being returned to power...

...other things were said and done that were either malignant or stupid...

...Mackenzie King's new policy, therefore, while it may alienate from his support some of the old orthodox free traders, is bound to win him strength in sections that have been hostile for years to his record and his policies...

...Liberals have abandoned part of their free-trade platform for reasons which must be sought, in large measure, in recent congressional legislation...

...Anything would be preferable to the party which conscripted their sons and sneered at their courage: Quebec would show that she remembered...

...For years after the federation of the provinces, French Canada varied its support between Liberals and Conservatives, and even in the days when Wilfrid Laurier, French-Canadian and Catholic, was leader of the Liberal party, Conservatives in Quebec were considerable...

...It will not be a contest between protection and free trade, but rather a struggle between Liberals who have become recent converts to protection and empire trade, and Conservatives demanding even more stern measures against the United States, but with a more cautious policy, having regard to the interests of Canadian producers, in the granting of preferences to the rest of the empire...

...personally, he is entirely free of anything that might be termed religious bigotry...

...What the outcome will be, it is impossible at this time of writing, to tell...

...Not even industrial Ontario is more protectionist at heart...

...But while Canadians refused to become entangled in the fiscal controversies of British parties, they have unquestionably become convinced that some sort of empire economic union is desirable, and that at all events a great proportion of the $800,000,000 of annual imports from the United States could be diverted to the "Old Land," which has been so hard-pressed by unemployment and taxation, so bled by the dole...

...and substantial preferences on the same products have been extended to the British dominions and dependencies and to the British Isles...

...King undoubtedly appeals to a strong British sentiment throughout the dominion, a sentiment strong enough to neutralize any feeling of The Canadian political campaign, now on, is of unusual importance from the point of view of the United States...

...It was the story of the British War Office and Ireland over again, though on a lesser scale...

...No evidence exists that Mr...

...And when in 1911 reciprocity with the United States was rejected, it was fear of American annexation that largely motivated the rejection...

...Bennett, indeed, although leader of the historic party of imperialism in Canada, has on this occasion come out as a Canadian economic nationalist, putting the empire before the United States and other countries, but putting Canada before the empire...

...will make inroads in the Conservative stronghold of Ontario...

...O'Leary in the following paper, "will be the old traditional one of the tariff...

...The position of Quebec, the great French-Canadian Catholic province, differs from the other units in confederation...

...R. B. Bennett, the Conservative leader, Mr...

...The issue of the campaign, certainly the main issue, will be the old traditional one of the tariff...

...The main struggle, however, will be on lines of fiscal policy...

...He rides in his good American model, worships and copies American efficiency, reads the Saturday Evening Post and the Literary Digest and wears a frock coat and top hat to church on Sunday like the best of American onehundred-percenters...

...Liberalism, under Mr...

...It will appeal to fruit and vegetable growers in British Columbia, injured by United States competition...

...and will gain disciples in the Maritimes...

...By instinct, temperament and tradition, Quebec is Conservative...

...King's Finance Minister, was skilfully desgned...

...The wounds then opened have been slow to heal...

...It is the dominant economic policy of Canadians, and has been adopted by the low tariff Liberal party now because it is regarded as a bulwark against the constant thought of absorption, both financially and politically, by the United States...

...For some years past, indeed, Quebec has been to Canadian Liberalism what the South has been to American democracy...

...Canadian Liberals have, in their tariff policy, approximated the record of United States Democrats, while Conservatives have been almost the perfect equivalents of protectionist Republicans...

...When the great project of the C. P. R. was launched, Sir Charles Tupper justified it as a project to keep Canada within the empire...

...In addition to this, duties have been heightened upon a number of articles which Canada has been importing in considerable quantities from the United States, something like $235,000,000 of trade being affected...

...To meet and satisfy these demands, the budget brought to parliament this year by Mr...

...Sir Sam Hughes, jingo, imperialist and militarist, was prone to treat French-Canadians as an inferior people...

...It is, indeed, one of the tragedies of Canadian politics, as well as the evil fate of the Conservative party, that although allied to Ontario by common economic interests, and undoubtedly loyal to British connection, Quebec stands solidly as Ontario's political enemy...

...Mackenzie King, might adhere to principles they detested—no matter...

...His right to represent the country at the coming Empire Economic Conference in London challenged by Mr...

...It is the resentment among French-Canadian Catholics over an alleged harsh treatment of their compatriots by a Conservative provincial government in Saskatchewan in the matter of separate schools...