“The Mother of Combines”: Representations of the United States in Early Canadian Discourse on the Combines Problem and the Formation of Canadian National Identity

Abstract

AbstractIn 1887, Canada was in a fervour over so-called “combines,” a term used to cover price-fixing schemes, pool agreements, trusts, and other cartel arrangements. The public debate led to the passage in 1889 of the Anti-Combines Act, the world’s first modern competition statute, enacted a year prior to the United States’ Sherman Antitrust Act. But while Canada acted before its neighbour to the south, the United States was omnipresent in the Canadian debates in four ways: as a benchmark against which the Canadian economy and the combines problem should be judged; as a model for potential legal action; as a potential economic liberator; and as the very source and propagator of the combines problem. Canadians thus alternately presented the United States as saviour or devil, as paragon or antithesis. The result was a paradox of a sort: Canadians borrowed American ideas in order to avoid becoming American.