Forgotten Partnership Redux: Canada-U.S. Relations in the 21st C ...

Although the empire was concerned with pacifying the United States, it was also interested in pacifying Canada, a feat that required encouraging Canadian-American trade. A prosperous Canada would be a contented Canada, and a contented Canada, British officials reasoned, would be British. Thus enhanced Canadian connections with the United States would help preserve Canada in and for the British Empire. The Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 was the visible fruit of this policy, negotiated on Canada’s behalf by its British governor general, Lord Elgin.

Not everyone saw congruence between transatlantic loyalty and transborder trade and investment, however. Agitation for a rebirth of reciprocity later in the century sometimes had, especially on the American side, a subtext of annexation. Prominent Americans supported “commercial union,” but when commercial union perished in Canada’s 1891 election, it slipped easily from the American political agenda. Instead of fulfilling a North American dream of union, relations with Canada returned to their normal somnolence as part of the U.S. connection to England (culturally) and the British Empire (strategically, but also culturally).

It is true that the projection of British power to North America became more improbable and implausible as the 19th century wore on. The United States matched and surpassed Britain in population and industrial output. Canada, despite the frequently expressed hopes of its politicians and visionaries, maintained a population ratio of 1:10 with the United States, and in terms of standard of living, remained about 25 percent poorer, a fact that propelled hundreds of thousands of Canadians south across the American boundary. The memory of the War of 1812 was superseded by that of the very different American Civil War, which revealed a much more formidable American neighbor.

Americans did not generally consider Canada in the late 19th century, and those who did tended to see the place with an indulgent, if condescending, eye. Canada’s separation from the United States was a historical accident, but not a very serious one. “The American,” Theodore Roosevelt claimed in 1896, “regards the Canadian with the good-natured condescension always felt by the free man for the man who is not free” (Hannigan, 2002, p. 144). Such an attitude helps explain why people of