No Canadian political and economic issue is as contentious, persistent, and long-running as the struggle between free trade and protection. A concise account of that issue from 1840 to the 1988 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement provides essential historical background to the impending high-stakes renegotiation of NAFTA with the erratic Trump administration. The record clearly confirms […]
Category: Politics
More papers than people in 1836
Almost 430,000 copies of newspapers were circulated in Upper Canada in 1836 among a population of 370,000, of whom it was claimed perhaps one in 50 could read, according to Anna Brownell Jameson in her celebrated travel book, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. Despite their shortcomings, Jameson found the Upper Canada newspapers […]
Fatal blast dampens Compact meeting
A reform newspaper unleashes its most vitriolic prose in a report of a meeting by supporters of Upper Canada’s Family Compact. The meeting, however, comes to a shattering end. From the Hamilton Free Press, April 12, 1832, reprinted in the Brockville Recorder, April 26. We understand a meeting was called at the Village of Victoria, […]
Drunk Macdonald or reporter?
Booze 1829 — 1920 Newspapers still provided the only published reports of debates in the House of Commons when the Toronto Globe opposed a proposed Hansard, in which the words of members of Parliament would be published after officially recorded in shorthand by Parliamentary reporters. The Globe argued that politicians would be too inclined to […]