Across the Border
ACROSS THE BORDER ' IAHE Canadians have voted and surprised every¦*¦ body. Although signs and portents of a Conservative victory were seen plainly months before the election, it was a bold...
...Bennett proudly announced (with more success than attended a similar promise by Lloyd George in England) that he would see that Parliament devoted the major part of its attention during a coming session to unemployment...
...Beyond all this, the drinking done in Canada by citizens arriving in dusty automobiles has helped matters very little indeed...
...On the other hand, Canada has always felt that its destiny lay very considerably in reproducing the contours of the social order exemplified south of Niagara, barring of course the Volsteadian solution of the liquor problem...
...Anything remotely suggesting "annexation" is stoutly opposed from one end of the dominion to the other...
...The event presents an interesting opportunity for diagnosis and forecast...
...Tourist parties seldom get beyond a noisy invasion of taverns...
...This opinion must be earnestly doubted, and business figures for the next years will be watched with unusual care...
...The practicability of this hope may be challenged...
...The culture of Canada, notable for sound academic training and genuine breadth of thought, fails to sink into our consciousness, still flattered when it comes upon a little French village the natives of which may be suspected of wearing homespun...
...Nevertheless the remedy inevitably suggested itself, the more naturally because Canada has always been much more deeply impressed by the theory and example of the United States than by the free-trade doctrine and industrial methods of Great Britain...
...That at least would be some common bond...
...Dunning produced, with the possible elimination of favors for the mother country...
...Years ago we were at least talking about reciprocity...
...Politically speaking, the border is an impasse...
...The returns indicate, however, not only that Mr...
...How steadily our relationships with Canada have changed for the worse is a matter worth thinking about...
...Climate, which interferes with distribution of the population, appears to preclude the establishment of a complex productive network capable of rivaling the industrial districts of Europe and more particularly of the United States...
...It is not a mere detail that the Canadian border is now a customs wall higher than anything built up in postwar Europe and scoffed at by economists universally...
...For instance, ever since the conscription excitement of the war years, the province of Quebec has voted Liberal...
...Catholics in the two countries may be accused of drifting apart rather than of coming together...
...Bennett has already firmly declared: "Any policy would be disastrous that sends abroad raw materials which can be economically utilized in our own industries, and which sends abroad good Canadian money to pay for articles that can be economically and usefully produced by the labor of our own people...
...Meanwhile the Liberals had done what they could to placate disgruntled industrialists and workers by offering the Dunning budget, which was primarily a retaliatory tariff upon imports from the United States with preference features calculated to benefit empire trade...
...When a distinguished Canadian scholar joins the faculty of an enterprising university here, the government promptly goes to work tripping him up with a query as to his martial instincts...
...To spectators in the United States it even seems a momentous addendum to political and economic difficulties...
...Although signs and portents of a Conservative victory were seen plainly months before the election, it was a bold prophet who ventured to predict anything beyond a close fight...
...Who knows...
...It is for us to examine anew the reasoning which led to erecting steeper barriers than ever between Canadian trade and our own enterprise...
...One is justified in doubting that the dominion can become a country in which the economic emphasis is laid upon manufactured products rather than raw materials...
...If both countries build tariff walls sufficiently high, both may discover the immensity of their folly...
...One may be reasonably sure that the Dunning plan will be abandoned by the Conservatives, who must devise something else if they hope to impress the public...
...Declining prosperity was the chief issue with which the campaign oratory was concerned...
...It is not clear that even these several tablespoonsful of protection will solve current economic problems...
...But half of Catholic Canada is so dead set against the English language, and half of the Catholic United States is so intractably opposed to everything that smacks of Britain, that contacts which bear fruit are limited to sporadic encounters between intellectual representatives of the two countries...
...today we proceed to cut throats mutually without even a relatively sizable qualm...
...now more than one-third of its representatives are Conservative—a change quite as radical and more surprising than the recent southern bow to Herbert Hoover...
...Complaints were general enough to enable Communists to muster eight candidates and appeal for support, and Mr...
...However all this may be, the issue is one which Canadians themselves must decide...
...Bennett will have an easy majority of all seats in the coming parliament but also that political alignments of long standing have been abandoned...
...This sounds like a more nationalistic tariff than Mr...
...It is true that many Canadians read our publications and listen to our radio programs...
...and this fear, either real or cooked up, is largely responsible for past failures to develop a saner view of possible relationships than now exists...
...and they are usually so much more interested in the quantity of their beverage than in its quality that even conservation with the innkeeper is impossible...
...The ultimate effect upon the foreign trade of the United States is feared by economists and business men...
...People are declaring already that there will be no great change— that the balance will remain pretty nearly what it has been, and that Canada will recoup on the vastly expanded tourist business created by thirst...
Vol. 12 • August 1930 • No. 15
