The People's Mandate: Referendums and a More Democratic Canada by J. Patrick Boyer

Author:J. Patrick Boyer [Boyer, J. Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: American Government, National, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781550021479
Google: s8O8tjSZfLMC
Goodreads: 7553257
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 1991-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

The General Election of 1911: A Plebiscite on Reciprocity?

On September 21, 1911, Canadians defeated the government led by Liberal Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, which by then had been in office for fifteen years. Fifty-seven years later, the scholar J. Murray Beck, still finding of interest the question of whether this election constituted a plebiscite, wrote, “The election appeared to be a referendum on a specific issue or its implications: in Quebec the naval question and in the rest of Canada reciprocity.”88

A more detailed analysis of the bitter and tumultuous campaign of 1911 shows, however, that like all general elections – even those where one or two seminal issues dominate – much more was moving in the political subterrain. The Laurier government, after one and a half decades in office, had gained many opponents, from those who disagreed with the government’s farm and immigration policies to those who had been overlooked for appointments. The government was labouring under countless charges of maladministration, and the public had begun to find it arrogant. In British Columbia, the Liberal government’s immigration policies provoked strong animosity, especially over the charge that the province’s federal minister William Templeman had relaxed immigration laws in favour of Orientals – a charge that Beck notes was “certain to win votes in British Columbia” for those opposing the government. In other parts of the country, especially the Maritimes, the election results were not what one reasonably would have expected, given correlations between economic interests, patriotic loyalties, and trade reciprocity with the U.S. This surprise could mostly be attributed to “an election of individual contests in which local factors often dominated,”89 including the election of individuals who were personally “strong vote-getters.” Such factors as these were not part of a national referendum, but they were certainly part of the election.

Instead of describing the 1911 general election as a “referendum” (if one takes this position), however, it should more properly be called two referendums. While the reciprocity question on Canada-U.S. trade formed the core of the campaign in the rest of the country, the dominant issue in Quebec was the controversial Naval Bill. Two rather separate worlds were spinning together under the umbrella of a single general election.90

Examination of the 1911 Canadian election, therefore, shows once again why in a multi-dimensional political campaign it is wrong to suggest that people focus on a single issue as they would have to in a referendum. Canada did not have a referendum on reciprocity in 1911.

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