The Class Politics of the National Policy, 1872–1933

The Class Politics ofthe National Policy, 1872-1933 PAUL CRAVEN AND TOM TRAVES For more than half a century, from the mid1870s to the Great Depression, the prominence·of the National Policy tariff in Canadian political debate was matched by one other issue alone, the relations of French and English Canada. In the protracted battles about economic policy that marked all but a small minority of federal election campaigns during the period, the tariff schedule stood by common consent at the parting of the ways: it was alternatively the principal guardian of prosperity or the ruling demon of blight. With each new current in the debate, be it the shift of half a point ad valorem or a sweeping declaration of Cobdenite faith, parties and politicians were made and undone, alliances were cemented and shattered, the nation's future was seen to brighten and to dim. The rhetoric of the tariff debates encompassed most, if not all, of the issues and ideals that lay at the centre of politics and social life. Patriotism and treason, progress and penury, equity and iniquity, science and irrationality: so ran the currents beneath the Manichaean struggle of free trade and protection. The tariff question, in short, was one among the very small number of persisting causes that served to define the visible centre of Canadian politics, and it did so because , like the schools question or conscription, it reflected a fundamental source of tension in the society. In federal politics, the tariff question stood for class conflict. Analysis of the expressed and imputed interests of social classes has not fared well in Canadian historiography. While the literature contains the occasional programmatic appeal or explicit demonstration, their common fate has been studied indifference. The assumption of classlessness, or at least of the transcendence of class, has been an insistently twanging string to liberalism's bow. Reading Canadian historians with an ear for the 14 silences, one hears E.M. Macdonald assuring Parliament at the turn of the century that Canada has been "free from all the entanglements that are to be found in the older lands, clustering around the differences between the classes and the masses....Such terms as the classes and the masses, the lower, middle or upper class are misnomers in Canada.''t This is not to suggest that the historians have pictured Canada as a seamless web of harmonious homogeneity. But they have for the most part viewed social conflict as being rooted not in class, but in linguistic, cultural and regional diversity. Liberal historiography cannot claim that it has tried class analysis and found it wanting : it has been silent, resting, it would seem, on Macdonald's assumption that even to speak of class is to misconstrue the Canadian experience. It is implicit throughout this paper that to make this assumption is to misconstrue the Canadian experience or, to phrase it more positively, that analysis of the expressed and imputed interests of social ('.lasses is necessary to Canadian historical explanation. But the object of this paper is not to engage in methodological polemic, still less methodological apology. Its intent is to make intelligible the claim that in federal politics the tariff question stood for class conflict, by demonstrating the manner in which debate over the tariff was shaped by perceptions of class interest, by the intervention of class organizations and, not least, by attempts to forge interest-based alliances that cut across class lines. The transcendence of class may be an article of faith to liberal historians: to the participants in the tariff battles it was a significant strategic possibility. Social classes, as we understand them in this paper, are defined by their relations to the means of production and define themselves in their relations to one another. A concept of class which invokes these two criteria is necessarily a complex one, and implicit within it is the notion of class formation as a continuing process incapable of rigid determination. For the purposes of this paper, it will be sufficient to make use of a rather crude and unsophisticated model of the Canadian class structure from 1870 to 1930, identifying three principal classes: industrialists, workers and farmers. Moreover, we take the...