ABSTRACT
The Pacific Scandal of 1873, not trade policy, proved Macdonald's undoing. Canada's farmers lived and died by foreign markets, and anything that impeded their trade smacked of inefficiency and special interest. Rumors indicated that the Americans might be interested in a twenty-one year pact invoking free trade in natural resources. The history of Canada's two centrist parties has thus been periodically punctuated by astonishing role reversals, "flip-flops" in contemporary political parlance. Our political history has been mile-posted by federal elections in which trade policy has monopolized the agenda: 1878, 1891, 1911, 1921, 1925, 1930 and, like a grand finale, 1988. Straightforward political opportunism offers an expedient explanation, at first sight, for the meanderings of the Tories and Grits on trade policy. Canadians had a strong predilection for close bilateral trade ties since long before Confederation. During the 1896 election, Laurier obfuscated the trade issue for fear of alienating support in all-important Montreal and Ontario's rural ridings.
