“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.” The speaker was Champ Clark, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, and he said it in 1911 while backing a trade deal with Canada. It is hard to imagine a worse gift to the other side. Canadian Conservatives seized on it.
That deal is where the long argument over open trade across the border really took shape. Wilfrid Laurier, then 69 and fifteen years into his premiership, had gambled on a trade pact with Washington. The Liberals had favoured freer trade for a long time, and Laurier, facing a probable loss of seats in Quebec, hoped farmers would reward him. He and President William Howard Taft agreed to skip a treaty and move through matching laws in each country. Free trade, Laurier argued, would help Canada’s resource industries and farmers, with larger export markets and less costly tools and equipment.
The 1911 verdict
Protected manufacturers opposed it. Robert Borden’s Conservatives raised fears of American continental ambitions, and Taft’s talk of a “parting of the ways” did not help. The Liberals were painted as traitors. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes violent nationalistic opposition, and the charge that the pact would be a step toward merging the two countries politically.
On 21 September 1911 the Conservatives won 134 seats to the Liberals’ 87, according to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. A Liberal majority of 50 became a Conservative majority of 47, though the popular vote moved by only 4.2%. Quebec’s navy dispute also hurt Laurier, and historians still argue about which factor counted most.
A second try
The idea came back after 1984. Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives took power in 1984 promising to repair a relationship bruised by disputes under Trudeau. He and Ronald Reagan set out to negotiate a broad free trade pact. Sixteen months of talks produced nothing. Then cabinet-level negotiators stepped in and struck an outline deal on 3 October 1987, with only minutes left before a US Congress cutoff. Published that December, the text phased out all tariffs between the two countries over 10 years.
Canadians were divided. Business favoured it, organized labour did not, and Ontario’s government was hostile. The 1988 election turned on the deal. Polls showed that most Canadians opposed the deal, but opponents spread their votes across the Liberals and the NDP, and Mulroney won decisively. In 1993, just before he left office, the agreement was widened into NAFTA by bringing in Mexico.
The scale today
The US Trade Representative estimates that US goods and services trade with Canada came to an estimated $872.3 billion for 2025. That is a fall from 2024 of $42.1 billion, or 4.6 percent. Goods accounted for $715.5 billion and services for $156.8 billion.
Sources
- 1911 Election – Reciprocity (A City Goes to War)
- Federal election of 1911 (Dictionary of Canadian Biography)
- Canadian Foreign Relations (The Canadian Encyclopedia)
- Canada (USTR country page)
