companies and packing interests now universally control subsidiaries in
Canada--why was reciprocity rejected? If it is good for Canada that
American capital establish big paper mills in Quebec, why is it not
good for Canada to have free ingress for her paper-mill products to
American markets? The same of the British Columbia shingle industry,
of copper ores, of wheat and flour products? If it is good for the
Canadian producer to buy in the cheapest market and to sell in the
highest, why was reciprocity rejected? Implements for the farm south
of the border are twenty-five per cent. cheaper than in the Canadian
Northwest. Canadian wheat milled in Minneapolis enjoys a lower freight
rate and consequently a higher market than Canadian wheat milled in
Europe, as sixteen and twenty-two are to forty and fifty cents--the
former being the freight cost to a Minneapolis mill; the latter, the
freight cost to a European mill. Why, then, was reciprocity rejected?

From 1867, Canada had been intermittently seeking reciprocity with the
United States. Now, at last, the offer of it came to her unsolicited.
Why did she reject it by a vote that would have been unanimous but for
the prairie provinces? Though the desire for reciprocity with the
United States was exploited politically more by the Liberals--or
low-tariff party--than by the Conservatives--the high-tariff
party--both had repeatedly sent official and unofficial emissaries to
Washington seeking tariff concessions. Tariff concessions were a plank
in the Liberal platform from the days of Alexander MacKenzie. They
were not a plank in the platform of the Conservative party for the sole
reason that the high tariff on the American side forced a high tariff
in self-defense on the Canadian side. Close readers of Sir John
Macdonald's life must have been amazed to learn that one of his very
first visits to Washington--contemporaneous with the Civil War period,
when the United States were just launching out on a high-tariff