2 Wilfrid Laurier and the Failure of Compromise

Wilfrid Laurier is often considered by historians to be one of Canada’s greatest prime ministers,^[1] as it can be argued that no other prime minister has had such a decisive impact on shaping Canada into what it would later become. Laurier had to contend with a variety of controversial issues, and he did so with an even hand and an eye to compromise, continually seeking out the middle ground between the extremes that other factions and politicians offered. For fifteen years, from 1896 to 1911, Prime Minister Laurier managed to navigate the many divisions between French- and English-speaking Canada. He oversaw a massive wave of immigration that, during his tenure, increased the nation’s population by 40 percent and helped grow the Canadian economy.^[2] Some of what Laurier had to deal with, such as disputes among Canadians over their nation’s participation in foreign conflicts (e.g., the Boer War, 1899–1902), would continue to challenge the country for decades, while others have receded into the past and no longer apply, like Canada’s obligations to its (then) imperial master, Great Britain. But nothing hat Laurier had to wrestle with proved as timeless and ever-present as Canada’s troubled relationship with the United States of America, involving contentious problems such as the impact of the United States on Canada’s sovereignty, boundary disputes, and that most lasting and recurring conundrum: Canada–US free trade (reciprocity). In this essay, I argue that Wilfrid Laurier approached the Canada–US relationship with the same hope for compromise that he had for most issues, the difference being that with the United States there was no middle ground on which a solution could be found. The issue proved too polarized. Even the accommodating Laurier could not find a workable compromise when it came to Canada–US issues. Many Canadians so feared the economic power and imperialist tendencies of their southern neighbor that Laurier was ultimately crushed by a wave of Canadian nationalism.

Bending Without Breaking

Wilfrid Laurier (1841–1919) already had become a fixture of Canadian politics by the time he first became prime minister. He was an outspoken Rouge Liberal in the days before Confederation, which he vehemently and vocally opposed.^[3] Like many French-speaking Canadians, he feared assimilation were British North America to coalesce into a single nation. Laurier lost that battle, of course, and when confronted with the option of continuing to resist what had already taken place or working within the new order, he chose the latter course. This was an early sign of Laurier’s willingness to compromise in search of the best outcome. As the historian Réal Bélanger puts it, Confederation was a “fait accompli,” and Laurier understood that it would be more useful to pivot and help Quebec in the new political and constitutional reality than to carry on fighting lost battles.

Pivoting away from his hardline roots, Laurier embarked on a decades’ long career in Canadian politics as a liberal and a centrist. Slowly working his way through a variety of positions, he helped build the Liberal Party of Canada from its early humiliation and repeated losses to John A. Macdonald’s Conservatives.^[4] He inherited a desire for reciprocity with the United States from Alexander Mackenzie, the first leader of the Liberal Party, prime minister of Canada from 1873 to 1878, and largely responsible for elevating Laurier’s position in the Party. Laurier was a member of Parliament (MP) from 1874 until he became prime minister in 1896, serving as leader of the Official Opposition from 1887. His spirit of compromise and willingness to bend without breaking eventually made him the country’s seventh prime minister. Typically, the Liberals were opposed to John A. Macdonald’s National Policy, a policy that stood for Canadian protectionism, prioritizing trade with Great Britain while placing heavy tariffs on American goods. Laurier, however, eventually embraced this Conservative policy and that led his Party’s victory in the general election held on 23 June 1896. He continued to embrace the National Policy throughout his time as prime minister, using it to support Canada’s economic development even as he made minor adjustments in the tariff policy as a way of appealing to constituencies that continued to desire reciprocity with the United States.^[5] Laurier’s prime ministership would be marked by the same kind of deft negotiation and compromise that took him to Ottawa after Confederation.

The Middle Ground Between Two Canadas

Wilfrid Laurier is perhaps best remembered for finding and managing a middle ground between English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians in the early decades of Confederation when the two sides were continuously and deeply at odds with one another. Protestant, Imperialist, English Canada and Catholic, Nationalist, French Canada were frequently in conflict over a variety of political issues ranging from religious schools to language to immigration. Laurier, himself a French Canadian, and a one-time radical Liberal opposed to Confederation, might have been expected to prioritize the interests of French Canada; time and again, however, he was able to successfully navigated the middle ground between English- and French-speaking interests, which enabled him to win four consecutive general elections: in 1896, 1900, 1904, and 1908. Frequently attacked by French-Canadian nationalists, such as Henri Bourassa, as well as by his Conservative successor and British hardliner Robert Borden, Laurier managed to maintain Quebec as a Liberal stronghold while winning considerable numbers of Ontario seats as well.

Defined by his search for a middle ground and his efforts to find compromise on every issue where he deemed it necessary to do so does not warrant calling Wilfrid Laurier soft, lacking in principle, or without backbone. Laurier sought compromises that consistently provided the kinds of things he felt Canada needed in the moment. He fully recognized the deep cleavages within Canada, the fault lines between English and French Canada, as well as the clashing regional interests across the country. He realized that the only way such a massive and fractious nation could remain unified was through perpetual compromise.

Laurier was consistently able to find compromise between French and English Canada in the area of foreign policy. While French Canadians held a begrudging respect for the British Empire and its treatment of them after 1763,^[6] they wanted Britain involved as little as possible in the internal affairs of Canada, and they wanted Canada involved as little as possible in the foreign affairs of Britain. Meanwhile, many English-speaking Canadians were infamously jingoistic on behalf of the Empire, and this, unsurprisingly, caused considerable friction between the two sides. One very clear instance of this was the case of the Boer War, sometimes called the South African War, which broke out in October 1899.

When tensions between British gold miners and Dutch Afrikaners erupted into full-scale conflict, Canada, as a Dominion of the British Empire, was called upon for military support. Laurier was reluctant to commit to the “secondary conflicts” of the British, an attitude he shared with much of Quebec. The rabidly pro-Imperialist faction of English Canada, however, demanded a full commitment to the war. Laurier created a compromise by arranging a volunteer force of Canadian soldiers to operate under British command, thereby minimizing Canada’s economic and military commitment, while appeasing those who saw it as Canada’s duty to come to the aid of the British.

The Need for the “Right” (White) Immigrants

One of the great contradictions of Laurier’s prime ministership is rooted in perhaps his greatest contribution to the long-term health of Canada: it is his encouragement of immigration. While he was prime minister, Laurier saw a population increase of around 40 percent across Canada, an incredible growth that gave the country a sorely needed economic boom and positioned Canada as an emerging power on the world stage, one that was able to contribute incredible amounts of soldiers and equipment to the First World War (1914–1918), which broke out only three years after Laurier’s tenure ended.

The contradiction lies in the fact that both Laurier and the greater part of the Canadian population was intensely against non-white immigration. Even as boatloads of Anglo-Saxons and Eastern Europeans were arriving in Canada, Prime Minister Laurier increased restrictions on non-white immigrants. This in itself is a strange kind of racial compromise, a compromise between the economic needs of Canada, which demanded huge numbers of people to extract its resources and raise its population in both the short and long term, and the fact that Laurier and most Canadians feared and opposed non-white immigration. This resulted in many efforts to curb Asian immigration, as well as efforts (towards the very end of Laurier’s term) to halt Black migration from the United States for a period of time. We can see, therefore, how Laurier was willing to compromise on his mission of promoting population growth for Canada, in return for getting only immigrants of the “quality” thought necessary.

In British Columbia, which saw a large number of Asian immigrants, labour unions, particularly, led the charge against immigration over fears of wages being depressed, while wealthier capitalists sought the cheaper labour that Chinese immigrants had historically provided them.^[7] These anxieties reached their zenith in September 1907, when anti-Chinese race riots broke out in Vancouver and resulted in the destruction of much Asian property.^[8] Laurier had already raised the Chinese Head Tax twice, once in 1900 and again in 1903,^[9] but this had done little to actually halt Chinese immigration, and in spite of the ever-rising Head Tax, the capitalists in British Columbia still relied on and continued to import Chinese labour.^[10]

To assuage the anti-Asian fears that had caused the Vancouver riots, Laurier turned his attention to two other Asian countries from which immigrants were arriving: Japan and India. Both presented even thornier issues than did China; nevertheless, Laurier managed to find compromises and weak spots to limit entry from these two countries. Whereas China was largely seen as a backwater, Japan was the rising power in East Asia, and an official ally of the British Empire, of which Canada was still a Dominion. This meant that directly banning or taxing immigration from Japan would not be viable, since it would mean contradicting the officially friendly foreign policy laid out by the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, signed in 1902.^[11] When it came down to it, Laurier’s foreign-policy powers ended wherever they crossed the official positions taken by the British Empire. Once again, the solution was compromise. Laurier made no law and passed no tax on his side of the Pacific. Instead, he sought an official diplomatic arrangement with Japan directly. This was the so-called Gentleman’s Agreement, laid out in 1908, according to which the Japanese government committed to limiting Japanese immigration to 400 male labourers per year.^[12] This compromise massively lowered the immediate rates of Japanese immigration to Canada, helping to mitigate the fears of the white workers in British Columbia. This was not, however, a flawless victory for the anti-Asian agitators, because the wives of Japanese men already in Canada were permitted entry, which led to a continuous increase in Canada’s Japanese population.^[13]

India was an even more thorny problem, because in theory, it was not a foreign country at all. India was part of the British Empire, as was Canada, and its citizens shared the same right to freely travel and work throughout the entire British Empire. Laurier required another pseudo-compromise, a sleight of hand trick that would hamper Japanese immigration, both illegal and legal, as well as the widely unpopular Indian immigration. This was called the Continuous Journey Policy, brainchild of Laurier’s protégé, William Lyon Mackenzie King. It was introduced in 1908 and, accordingly, required any Asian immigrants to Canada to travel via non-stop steamship from their country of origin all the way to Canada.^[14] This put a top to immigration from Hawaii, a common way for Japanese immigrants outside of the allotted 400 to reach Canada. The Continuous Journey Policy had an even more significant impact on Indian immigration, because immediately after putting the policy into law, as an amendment to Canada’s Immigration Act,  Laurier ordered the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company to stop offering direct passage between India and Canada.^[15] Once again, when domestic and foreign demands clashed, Laurier tended to find a pragmatic compromise that avoided offending allies while still delivering what Canadians wanted.

Although he took measure in response to the unrest on Canada’s west coast, Laurier himself was very openly opposed to Asian migration, as demonstrated by the official policies described above, but especially by how strictly he divided the Japanese from the Chinese. After the race riots, Laurier promised restitution to the Japanese living in Vancouver, which he did not offer the Chinese – on the sole ground that the Japanese were British allies.^[16] For all his massive efforts to bring in huge numbers of workers from Europe to help build up the Canadian economy as quickly as possible, Wilfrid Laurier considered Asians contemptible and incompatible with Canadian society. Laurier chose the paths he did not simply because they were paths of least resistance but because they served his aims, both personal and political, very well. When he is referred to here as a compromiser, it is not to indicate that he routinely abandoned his positions, but rather that, time and again, Laurier had real skill in finding and securing a middle ground that gave him everything he wanted in reality without, on paper, offending or breaking with the parties he was negotiating with..

No Compromise Between Giants

Wilfrid Laurier dealt less with the United States than one might expect, given the length of his tenure as prime minister of Canada. This is largely because Laurier led Canada at a time when the American policy of non-interventionism was in full swing, which is, however, almost a misnomer, given that the United States was eager to interfere in all kinds of matters at this time (see, e.g., the 1898 Spanish-American War). Nevertheless, non-interventionism did mean that the United States made a concerted effort to avoid entangling itself in the alliances of Europe and the greater affairs of the world outside the Americas. As prime minister, Laurier continued to desire a reciprocity agreement, a wish still held to earnestly even as he took ownership of the National Policy. But he would not get a chance to act on this until the last days of his term, as the United States was unresponsive to such a proposal for the vast majority of Laurier’s time in office. Reciprocity would be the final and most devastating issue of Laurier’s time as prime minister, but before that there was one other great moment of American non-interventionist intervention that Laurier had to face, one that ultimately exposed how little power the prime minister truly held over the governance of the Dominion of Canada.

There is a simple and inescapable fact that haunts Canada’s position on the Alaska Boundary Dispute, which was brought to a conclusion in 1903. Simply put, Laurier essentially had no power over his own country’s foreign policy. That statement is, of course, massively hyperbolic, but it is also largely true. While Laurier obviously, repeatedly exercised such authority as he had over Canada’s external affairs, as has been demonstrated in this essay, Canada at the time was nevertheless ultimately beholden to any whim of the British Empire. The Alaska Boundary Dispute merely casts this in the starkest light. Long unsettled border disputes stemming back to negotiations between Great Britain and the Russian Empire, going as far back as to 1821, meant that the border between Alaska and Canada’s Yukon Territory had never been truly decided, and it was during Laurier’s term that the mistakes of a cartographer a century prior would come back to haunt the continent.^[17]

The full details of the dispute are complex, with debates and disagreements stemming from the maps on which the original British–Russian treaty was based. A laughably inaccurately depicted mountain range meant that the very logic by which the territory was split was flawed and unworkable; to determine ownership, the maps relied on landmarks that did not, in fact, exist.

Canada had been seeking to settle the disputed border with the United States for a long time, with frequent overtures to arrange a set of survey teams to lay out where the boundary should be, after it became clear that the original treaty between Britain and Russia was based on totally inaccurate maps and, therefore, was practically unenforceable.^[18] The US President had been intermittently willing to agree to settle the manner, but the US Congress repeatedly refused to authorize the funds required to cover the necessary surveying missions. The general perception among US government officials was that the area was of sufficiently little importance that it could not possibly be worth the money required to survey it.^[19]

Although Canada was far more eager than the United States to settle the dispute, owing to a desire for a saltwater port in the area, British Columbia rejected the offer of a permanently leased port, and the matter went unresolved. This status quo was shattered by two linked events. First, gold was found in the Yukon, and second, the accompanying huge influx of miners during what became the Klondike Gold Rush, enormously swelled both the value and population of the area. This shifted the Canada–US boundary matter from a minor irritant to an urgent issue, as the two nations now became heavily invested in securing as much control over the region as they possibly could.

Again, Laurier attempted to negotiate. Part of the reason he and previous governments had pushed for an actual survey of the territory rather than a simple judicial interpretation of the British–Russian treaty was that, as pointed out, the treaty was based on maps so totally divorced from reality that the terms it had been settled on bordered on nonsensical, and a renegotiation in the interests of the two nations seemed the most practical solution. The US President was Theodore Roosevelt, and although there were certain concessions offered by him and his administration, he was no more amenable to a survey than Congress had been in prior decades. The Canadians and Americans repeatedly failed to negotiate a settlement.^[20]

At this point, the British Empire intervened. Relations between the two had been improving over the past few decades, and it was now British policy to shrink the Anglo-American divide. The British offered the Americans an opportunity to settle the matter by way of a judicial decision, not an independent international court, but instead in a meeting of six representatives, three chosen by the Americans and three by the British. The American members were Senator Henry Lodge, George Turner, a former senator, and Secretary of War Elihu Root; the British selected two Canadians, Sir Louis Jette, the lieutenant governor of Quebec, and Allen Aylesworth, a King’s Counsel from Toronto, together with Baron Alverstone, a British barrister.

The proceedings went almost entirely in favour of the Americans. Although minor concessions were made, and they were not awarded the whole of the territory they had claimed, Alverstone sided at the last moment with the Americans, something that outraged both the Canadians present and those back at home.^[21] As a part of the Great Rapprochement, the British Empire had ceded a piece of its territory to the United States in a bid for friendship. While perhaps a logical move for the great powers – trading small pieces of hinterland – this was perceived as a bitter backstabbing by the Canadians who had just lost a piece of their territory after decades of disagreement.

It is perhaps worth briefly noting that owing to the unclear original agreement and the nature of the claims made, there is almost no other way this could have gone. A “fair” judicial ruling bordered on the impossible, because of the inaccurate maps on which the original British–Russian treaty had been based, hence the Canadian desire for new surveys. Scholars generally agree that the American claim was legally stronger,^[22] and it is likely that any international court would have come to substantially similar conclusions. Furthermore, Roosevelt was famously belligerent in foreign policy and had proven almost totally unyielding on the matter. Had the confrontation progressed to its logical conclusion, there is a real chance that the United States would have deployed soldiers and forced Canada and Britain to either war for the territory or back down in shame, either of which options would have been massively worse for Canada.^[23] This was not what really upset the Canadians. The British barrister had sided with the Americans after he had signalled that he was on Canada’s side and had surrendered territory it was widely felt he had no right to so surrender.^[24] Ultimately, of course, the British Empire had every right to trade its territory but that did little to assuage the sting to Canadian pride.

Canadians, including Prime Minister Laurier, saw the outcome as a betrayal of Canada by Great Britain. The country’s borders had been shrunk without their approval as part of the British Empire’s efforts to warm relations with the United States. Although the blame for these actions fell most heavily upon the British government for circumventing the voice of Canadians, the event also added fuel to the fire for those who feared American influence and the possibility of eventual annexation. This particular fear would certainly not lead to immediate revolt. Minimal blame fell upon Laurier at the time owing to his lack of influence on the outcome, as well as his deft political maneuvering to counter Robert Borden’s accusations against him.^[25] Nevertheless,  it can be argued that this sowed seeds that would lead to Laurier’s eventual downfall in 1911. The Americans had stolen land from Canada, the British Empire had let them do it, and so, three years later, when Laurier and President William Howard Taft attempted to negotiate lowered tariffs and a reciprocity (free trade) deal, all those ghosts would come back to haunt Laurier.

Laurier Breaks on the Middle Ground

Reciprocity was the final defining issue of Wilfrid Laurier’s prime ministership. Above and beyond anything else, Laurier was undone by his openness to free trade with the United States. The 1911 election is typically referred to as the Reciprocity Election, and it was on these grounds that Conservative Party Leader Robert Borden attacked and beat Laurier for supposedly exposing Canada to American interference and even annexation.

In January 1911, for the first time since Laurier became prime minister, reciprocity was on the table. As the historian Asa McKercher illustrates, during the economic boom Canada experienced between 1896 and 1914, far more of the country was willing to attempt to compete with the American firms, especially the Prairie farmers who wanted access to American markets. At the same time, President Taft was facing similar pressures to bring down tariffs, and a deal was created between Laurier and Taft. It passed through both houses of Congress very swiftly, which created tremendous suspicion among Canadians.

This worry was not unfounded. While Laurier battled with Parliament and eventually called an election on the reciprocity issue, Speaker of the US House of Representatives James “Champ” Clark commented about the agreement, “I hope to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British North American possessions clear to the North Pole.”^[26] It is, therefore, hard to argue that Borden was conjuring up specters out of nowhere when he accused Laurier of putting Canada at risk of annexation, especially with the loss of the Alaska Boundary Dispute still in recent memory.

Whether a reciprocity agreement at the time truly would have led to a United States of North America is impossible to determine, because no such agreement became manifest. Laurier did not win the general election held on 21 September 1911, having lost too much support in the core provinces of Quebec and Ontario, where annexation fears were strongest. In a very real way, foreign policy, particularly Canada’s relations with the United States, were Laurier’s undoing. He was impotent in the Alaska Boundary Dispute, and his inability to sidestep that loss rendered him suspicious when engaging in negotiations on reciprocity. It should be obvious to any current readers that American politicians openly discussing a desire for Canadian annexation can have an impact on Canadian elections, and Laurier was seen as lacking the kind of credibility needed to resist the United States. It was too easy to paint Laurier as at best impotent and at worst a traitor, something further worsened by his often compromisingly pro-British stance. Laurier’s “tea-pot navy” (see below), his middle-ground approach to the Boer War, all of it spoke to the image of a leader who might be a well-regarded politician at home, but lacked the kind of bite or spine to truly commit on the world stage or to resist pressures from as fierce a force as the United States.

Ultimately, Wilfrid Laurier failed to find the kinds of compromises he sold himself on whenever he had to deal with the United States. Whereas he successfully navigated other foreign-policy issues, when it came to the United States both times he meaningfully engaged, he lost badly. His efforts at compromise in Alaska fell apart, and he was exposed as ultimately powerless in the face of the interests of Great Britain and the United States of America. Later, the reciprocity deal that was available to him, in many ways itself a compromise as it was an agreement only to freely trade certain goods, ruined him. Between his perceived failure to protect Canada in the boundary dispute, and the general air of suspicion towards the United States, alongside the open declaration by portions of the US government to use the reciprocity negotiations as a means of beginning the annexation of Canada, Laurier was defeated in the 1911 election, losing too much of the Ontario base he needed, where the fears around American annexation were at their highest and interest in reciprocity was at its lowest.

Towards the end of Laurier’s term as prime minister, these failed compromises became a pattern. While his earlier political career had been marked by all manner of compromise that generally left all sides satisfied, his efforts to do the same with affairs involving the British Empire were seen as lacking. When the matter of whether Canada should contribute to the British Royal Navy by providing money for warships was raised, and English-speaking Canada largely demanded commitments to the military of the British Empire while French-speaking Canada argued against investing in war, Laurier’s middle ground amounted to the acquisition of two outdated warships as a new Canadian navy, a token effort ridiculed as a “tin-pot navy” by his opponent Robert Borden. Worsening the situation was that these two cruisers, the HMS Rainbow and the HMS Niobe were old cruisers that the British gave over to them. Far from a new Canadian navy that could serve the British Empire in times of war, Laurier had just taken two vessels from the Royal Navy that Britain no longer had a use for, making the whole act seem something of a farce. While Laurier had also committed to the construction of a fleet of ships for Canada, something that would have supported Canadian industry and been a real military commitment, the short-term optics were terrible, with the compromise failing to satisfy neither Henri Bourassa’s French nationalists nor Robert Borden’s English Imperialists.

On the French side, Henri Bourassa, who had opposed any financial contributions to the Royal Navy, saw this as an even worse outcome. A Canadian navy whose command could be taken over by the British at any time seemed an even worse situation than donating money to the common naval fund, as this meant Canada could be dragged directly into war and even opened up the possibility of conscription to man the new ships–a worst-case scenario in the eyes of Quebeckers.

Laurier lost the 1911 election to Conservative leader Robert Borden, mostly on the reciprocity issue. He still secured many votes in Quebec, but lost seats there and almost completely lost Ontario, winning only 13 seats in that province. He would remain as Opposition leader for a time, but the outbreak of the First World War shifted the priorities of the nation wholesale, and he would never make it back into the prime minister’s office.

By all accounts Wilfrid Laurier was a quick-witted and canny politician. He deftly balanced the needs and interests of Canada throughout his fifteen years as Canada’s prime minister, and he presided over years of incredible growth. He steered a middle ground between French- and English-speaking Canada, negotiating between the pulls of Quebec and the pulls of the British Empire. But for all his skill at compromise and deal-making, for all the levers he pulled to limit Asian migration and encourage European immigration, for all his domestic deal making and Imperial military demands, there was in the end a beast that Wilfrid Laurier could never manage to truly subdue. The United States, led by an expansionist and isolationist President and Congress, easily walked all over Laurier, with the tacit support of the British Empire. When President Taft was finally willing to discuss reciprocity, that long-desired deal Laurier had sought, a boisterous comment from the Speaker of the House doomed him to an election loss. Each time Laurier dealt with the United States, he lost, most notably in the free trade election of 1911. Canada would not revisit reciprocity for seventy years, and the party of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who negotiated that free trade deal in 1988. would at the hands of Jean Chrétien’s Liberals, in November 1993, suffer an even more crushing defeat than did Laurier in 1911. There is perhaps no safe way to deal with an entity the size of the United States, one that threatens to break Canada no matter how far its leaders bend.