Toryism, classical liberalism, and capitalism: the politics of taxation and the struggle for Canadian confederation

• Main Author: Smith, A.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Toronto Press 2008
• Subjects: history; Canadian history; ideology; constitutional history; political economy; taxation; British North America Act; 1867; Canadian confederation; Canada; Newfoundland
• Online Access: http://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/items/a9025693-2981-6bef-fbfe-57edacf50608/1

Within the four original Canadian provinces, the politics of taxation were a central issue in the struggle to form Confederation, as they were in Newfoundland, the tax-adverse colony that rejected it. For many participants in the Confederation debate, the key issue was the optimal size of the state as a proportion of total economic activity. Janet Ajzenstat, Peter J. Smith, and Ian McKay have argued that Confederation represented a victory for the ideology of liberal individualism that underpins capitalism. The position taken here is that these scholars are mistaken about the ideological nature of Confederation, and that Confederation, instead, was supported by many colonists who were sympathetic to a relatively interventionist, or statist, approach to capitalist development. The anti-confederate camp of the time, by contrast, included the strongest supporters of classical liberal values such as free trade and low taxes. The struggle over Confederation involved a battle between a staunchly individualist economic philosophy and a comparatively collectivist view of the state’s proper role in the economy. Consequently, it is far more accurate to describe 1867 as the birth of a Tory-interventionist economic order in Canada, rather than of a liberal one.