The Price of Patriotism Alberta Cattlemen and the Loss of the American Market, 1942-48

Authors

Max Foran, University of CalgaryFollow

Date of this Version

Winter 2001

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 21, No. 1, Winter 2001, pp. 17-28.

Comments

Copyright 2001 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

One of the most controversial episodes in the history of the western Canadian cattle industry occurred during the years 1942-48 when the Canadian government imposed an embargo on Canadian cattle entering the United States. This unprecedented measure was a reaction to the extraordinary demands of the national war effort, and was accepted conditionally by the cattle industry as a necessary patriotic gesture. However, official wartime policies respecting this embargo, and its retention beyond the war until late 1948 were neither anticipated nor appreciated by western Canadian stockmen. Their efforts to restore a market deemed crucial to their industry's survival, and the government's seeming failure to appreciate the stockmen's position, clearly showed that the "price of patriotism" went beyond merely fighting a war.

Since its inception in the early 1880s, the western Canadian cattle industry depended on export markets. Although home consumption accounted for about ninety percent of Canadian cattle marketings, it was the exportable ten percent that determined domestic prices and defined the quality standard for Canadian beef.! Over the years only two markets absorbed this annual surplus of between 15Q,000 and 200,000 head. The first was in Great Britain where demand for Canadian cattle helped nurture the western Canadian ranching industry up to 1907. This market was eclipsed after 1914 when relaxation of the American tariff encouraged the southward movement of Canadian cattle. This new American outlet for both fat stock and feeder cattle was so profitable that by 1920 it had become axiomatic among Canadian cattlemen that their industry's survival depended upon its availability.² As such, much of the Canadian stockmen's economic travail between 1921 and 1935 was blamed on the renewed American tariffs of 1921-22 and 1930, that imposed daunting levies of between two and three cents per pound and which, especially during the years 1921-25 and 1930-34, made it virtually impossible to ship cattle profitably to United States points.³

Despite its popularity among western Canadian cattlemen, the American market did not figure highly in the emerging Canadian agricultural policies of the period. It was perceived as unstable and subject to tariff volatility. More important, however, was the Canadian federal government's commitment to the British market as the most dependable and permanent outlet for its agricultural products. Especially after the Imperial Conference of 1932, when Britain formally abandoned her century-old commitment to free trade in favor of a system of imperial preference, Canadian policymakers became convinced that they had at last secured a market to absorb the nation's growing agricultural surpluses. That these agricultural policies were built around the British need for wheat and pork, and not cattle, mattered little in the new scheme of things. Cattle exports emerged as an add-on entity, one not really needed nor even wanted by Great Britain and certainly not a factor to the Canadian beef producer who realized that the British market was simply not viable in normal circumstances, and was but a pale replacement for the country's natural market in the United States.