Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies

3. Beginning a Bilateral Relationship, 1903-1918

71 3 Beginning a Bilateral Relationship, 1903–1918 The first two decades of the twentieth century witnessed dramatic changes in the world context of U.S.-Canadian relations. Britain and its European rivals—France, Germany, Austria, and Russia— declined in relation to an emergent America. During the Republican presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, the United States came to terms with its newly won status as a world power, built a battleship navy, and consolidated its political and economic influence in the Caribbean and in Central and South America, and extended it in the Pacific. The upheavals of World War I made the United States an international creditor and a military force able to compete with Britain even at sea, where the Royal Navy had ruled for a century. The temporary eclipse of Germany, the Bolshevik Revolution that reduced Russia’s international influence, the rise of Japan: all tilted the world strategic balance to the advantage of the United States. At home, a diverse range of reform movements grouped under the umbrella of the Progressive Movement—prohibition of alcohol, women’s suffrage, the labor movement, civil rights, consumer protection, social work— attempted to transform U.S. society in response to the massive economic changes of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Virtually all progressives proposed a larger role for government in the activities of the private sector and in foreign trade and overseas investment. Because Canada underwent the same industrial capitalist revolution , albeit at its own pace, the reforms of this “Progressive Age” that shook the Republic had counterparts in the Dominion and (with the notable exception of Prohibition) echoed elsewhere in the British Empire and Western Europe. But no country was more affected than Canada by the global emergence of the United States and the relative decline of Great Britain. Trade relations with the United States contin- 72 canada and the united states ued to preoccupy Canadian domestic politics as well as cross-border relations, as did the growing cultural influence of the United States upon Canadian society. Canadians were much less concerned about the increasing levels of American investment in Canadian resources and manufacturing. In its relations with Canada, however, the United States neither employed the heavy-handed dollar diplomacy nor played the role of international policeman that it did in the Caribbean in the early twentieth century. The many points of friction were smoothed without resort to any force more violent than political rhetoric. On the formal diplomatic front, the Canadian government quietly explored an increasing autonomy from Great Britain in the conduct of its affairs with the United States. The new realities of international economic and military power dictated the growing bilateralism in U.S.-Canadian relations . British strategic planners viewed war with the United States as “a contingency which, however improbable, is not impossible,” but they secretly conceded that a successful defense of Canada was impossible . First Sea Lord Sir John Fisher privately suggested that Britain “not spend one man or one pound in the defence of Canada.” Given this military forecast, maintaining troops and a naval presence in Canada had lost even symbolic value to Britain, or at least a symbolic value that equaled the cost to the exchequer of keeping them there. In 1906 the last British garrisons withdrew from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Esquimalt , British Columbia, and were replaced by infantry from Canada ’s minuscule army. The establishment of a tiny Canadian Department of External Affairs in 1909 was another of the only slightly more than symbolic gestures of growing Canadian autonomy from Great Britain in the international sphere. The department was a small step toward a Canadian foreign policy, even if the real decisions were still made by in London and in the British embassy in Washington. Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier did not look on the creation of the department as the launching of an independent Canadian foreign policy. The impetus came from British ambassador James Bryce in Washington, who complained that Canadian-U.S. relations tied up three-quarters of the embassy’s attention and who demanded “a sort of Foreign Office ” in Ottawa through which Canadian affairs in Washington could 73 Beginning a Bilateral Relationship be coordinated. Britain remained a significant political presence in the Canadian-American relationship, however, and the British Empire remained a potent emotional presence. London gently resisted independent Canadian representation in Washington, which might interfere with imperial designs, but...