What is the significance of the national policy

The building of the CPR would assure the sovereignty of Canada over the territory and eastern industry would have access to the resources and the customers of the West. The immigration policy was designed to maximize the investment in such an expensive railway and to provide customers to eastern industry.

The high tariffs would ensure the development of a Canadian industry and assure a better standard of living and jobs for Canadians. At first glance, the policy seems a remarkable one but upon closer examination one has to recognize many difficulties and consequences for the future.

The first thing to note is that the national policy was not a "national" policy in some important respects. In an age of mounting imperialism, it was an imperialist policy. The heart of Macdonald's country was essentially Ontario and, to a lesser extent, Quebec where the important Montreal financial interests were found. The Montreal-Windsor axis was to be the heart of the country, its pole of development, and the policy was specifically designed to benefit its population.

The Maritimes, and much of Quebec, would not benefit greatly from the policy. Their contribution would be largely to export men and resources to the center of Canada while importing its expensive industrial products. Railways would cross their territories but they would not be particularly designed to develop them.

They would be called to pay taxes to buy the West and to subsidize heavily the building of the CPR, but would receive very little benefit from such undertakings. It was hoped that immigrants by the hundreds of thousands would be attracted to the West. For that purpose, Canada eventually had hundreds of immigration officers, although nearly all of them were to be found in Great Britain, Ireland and in the United States.

It was plain for everyone to see that the federal government did not care sufficiently for the fate of the Quebecois and made too little effort to repatriate them. Macdonald's purpose was not to develop viable, autonomous communities in the West. This had to be avoided at all cost: industries were not to locate in the West, they would compete with eastern ones; railways were not to be established unless they were controlled by the CPR and they were not to link the West to the USA.

Macdonald feared that Western farmers might buy their products there. Provinces were not to be created because the federal government would lose control of the whole operation. Nevertheless, provinces had to be created eventually and the federal government lost part of its control over the territory; natural resources were withdrawn until from the control of the provincial governments in the West and the federal right to reservation and disallowance was used heavily to support the National Policy.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access. Import-Export Zierikzee The Netherlands. Personalised recommendations. Cite chapter How to cite? ENW EndNote. Buy options. This practice led to a rapid expansion of staked and claimed farmland across the Plains. It was with regard to settling the West that the National Policy struggled most.

It was wrongly assumed at the outset that Ontarians and Canadians from further east would flood the Prairies. Instead, they continued heading south. Immigrant recruitment was slow to make gains and many newcomers turned into Canadian emigrants, joining the exodus of Dominion citizens leaving for the United States.

Through to , Canada continued to be a net loser of population. The Canadian West was growing in population numbers, but nothing like as fast as the American West. Ironically, it was under the Liberal administration of Wilfrid Laurier Prime Minister from that things suddenly accelerated. Thereafter, from to the Great War, the rate of Canadian population growth outstripped that of the United States, and the Dominion experienced net population growth for the first time since Confederation.

Only a fraction of the landscape encountered by pre-War settlers had ever encountered the plough before their arrival. The fact that the CPR — an infrastructure built on steel rails and wheels and carriages with the ability to move very heavy freight easily — coincides with the spread of the chilled steel plough in North America, is not a coincidence.

Wooden ploughs sometimes called mouldboards were far less effective in breaking the soil for the first time, particularly the densely packed stuff of which the Prairies is made. The agricultural machinery industry in Ontario was already well advanced by this stage. The links between steel production, agricultural equipment, and railway development are central to the CPR story.

The CPR had a stake in the growth of manufacturing capacity in the East and in the shipment of manufactured goods — and, thus, in the success of the tariff.

The tariff placed cheap imports from the United States at a disadvantage to protect embryonic Canadian industries. This approach was tried and tested in many countries. Until the mids, there was sufficient demand in the North American economy that Canadian tariffs could be kept at a moderate level.

By the late s, however, competition from American producers was on the upswing. Canadian manufacturers were calling for protection for their products, and there were more of these manufacturers than ever before. The tariff policy was unpopular in the Maritimes and with those Canadians — many of them Liberals — who looked forward to a return to reciprocity.

Beginning in , the Macdonald administration assembled a suite of tariffs that ranged from These were predominantly assessed on the products of heavy industry and mining. The tariff may have been necessary, but it was unpopular, even with Conservatives. Every Canadian government from the s held out the prospect of a return to reciprocity with the United States.

Having a good trading relationship with the large economy next door only made sense, but it proved to be unappealing to American and Canadian manufacturers alike. The Liberal Party — with much of its base in rural Canada — was more aggressive in calling for free trade with the United States. After 15 years in office, Laurier went back to the electorate with a free trade agreement in hand, already approved by the US government. By the end of the pre-War era, however, the National Policy had done its work.

There were competing railways, Canada had a healthy manufacturing sector, the economy had diversified in ways that would sustain further industrial growth, prairie settlement was well advanced, and the wheat boom was with a few interruptions underway.

The National Policy had done one other thing that had a sustained consequence for Canada: it created a wall over which products might not pass, but through which capital investment moved as though a barrier were not there. American investment in Canadian productive capacity accelerated with the National Policy.

The irony of the tariff, then, is that it protected industry against competition while opening up the Canadian economy to international influences through investment.

Tariff walls could not, therefore, isolate the Canadian economy. The Canadian-American border was utterly porous with regard to people and money, regardless of how much of a barrier it was to manufactured goods. The Canadian-American border was also wide open with regard to ideas. These influences can still be seen in commercial and residential architectural styles from the Victorian and Edwardian eras but, at the time, they were most clearly evident in working-class affairs.

No area of historical research attracts debate quite like economic history.