Calgary & Southern Alberta

St. Georges Cross: The Flag John Cabot flew in 1497	The Fleur-de-lis: The flag Jacques Cartier flew in 1534	The Royal Union Flag: 1759	Canadian Red Ensign: 1870 - 1965	The Maple Leaf Flag: 1965

In the decade that followed Confederation, the dominion government had to establish a viable trade policy. The Conservatives tried in vain to obtain free trade with The United States. Liberal efforts between 1874 and 1878 were equally unsuccessful. When the Conservatives were reelected in 1878, they abandoned this trade objective, proposing instead the institution of a high protective tariff. In 1879, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald introduced the so-called National Policy. Strictly speaking, the National Policy was a group of tariffs designed to protect and promote Canadian manufacturing, and advance Canada's status as an industrial power. The government considered high tariffs necessary to replace existing north-south trade relationships with newly created east-west ones. Ottawa expected the tariffs to create a national market, support sustainable growth, and achieve a truly east-west transcontinental union.

Prime Minister John A. Macdonald Courtesy of the National Archives of Canada

The term "national policy" most often refers to the government's broader policies through which the western territories would be transformed into a cohesive political and economic unit. A transcontinental railway and western settlement were integral to the national policy in this larger context. For the east-west economic alliance to be successful, the railway was needed to transport manufactured goods from the East, and to route food from the West. The plan, of course, required the West to be sufficiently settled to support such commerce. To carry out this national policy successfully, moreover, certain other requirements had to be in place. Historians have referred to these requirements as the three pillars of the national policy. In additional to the construction of a transcontinental railway, the pillars included the signing of land treaties with the aboriginal people of the West, and the establishment of the Mounted Police force.

Historians have generally agreed that the signing of the Treaties, the creation of the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP), and the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) were central features of the federal national policy. For over a century, however, historians have disagreed sharply about how these three "pillars" of the more general national policy affected western development. They have also debated the impact on the West of the more narrowly defined National Policy that imposed high protective tariffs.

Initial historical interpretations claimed the Treaties, the NWMP, and the CPR were beneficial to western economic development. V. C. Fowke's The National Policy and the Wheat Economy (1957) challenged this interpretation. Fowke characterised the various elements of the national policy as instruments employed by eastern Canadian interests to exploit the western hinterland.

More recently, historians have suggested that the national policy either had no positive effect on western settlement, or contributed less to its rate and timing than did other broad factors. The new assessments of the national policy have engendered scholarly interest in various aspects of the settlement process itself. While historians once saw federal policies as the major, if not the only, significant factor in settlement, recent works have portrayed these policies as part of a more complex process. Debate over the rate and timing of settlement has included a reevaluation of why people immigrated to and settled in particular places. Historians have addressed the roles of capitalism, ethnicity, class, gender and labour with new vigour.

A Scottish Family riding the CPR to settle out West.
Courtesy of the National Archives of Canada

Historical debate has focused as well on other regional consequences of the national policy. Historians have, for example, investigated issues relating specifically to the federal tariff policies and freight rate structure, which were sources of regional political and agricultural protest campaigns. They have also examined the broader impact of national policy on the way in which the West views itself and its relation to the East.

Some scholars have argued that the national policy played a seminal role in generating the vague but potent concept of "western alienation", which has been a continuing theme in western prairie history. For Alberta, the theme spans many timeframes. It incorporates issues surrounding land use and the ranching industry at the turn of the century, the agrarian concerns of the United Farmers of Alberta in the 1920s, and the distribution of natural resources and the National Energy Programme in the 1980s.