Robert Borden - Conservative Party in Opposition

Conservative Party in Opposition

Borden was a Liberal until he broke with the party in 1891 over the issue of Reciprocity.

He was elected to Parliament in the 1896 federal election as a Conservative and in 1901 was selected by the Conservative caucus to succeed Sir Charles Tupper as leader of the Conservative Party. He was defeated in his Halifax seat in the 1904 federal election and re-entered the House of Commons the next year via a by-election in Carleton. Over the next decade he worked to rebuild the party and establish a reform policy, the Halifax Platform of 1907 which he described as "the most advanced and progressive policy ever put forward in Federal affairs". It called for reform of the Senate and the civil service, a more selective immigration policy, free rural mail delivery, and government regulation of telegraphs, telephones, and railways and eventually national ownership of telegraphs and telephones. Despite his efforts, his party lost the 1908 federal election to Wilfrid Laurier's Liberals. His party's fortunes turned around in the 1911 federal election, however, when the Conservatives successfully campaigned against Laurier's proposals for a Reciprocity (free trade) agreement with the United States. Borden countered with a revised version of John A. Macdonald's National Policy and appeals of loyalty to the British Empire and ran on the slogan "Canadianism or Continentalism". In British Columbia, the party ran on the slogan "A White Canada," playing to the fears of British Columbians that resented the increasing presence of cheap Asian labour and the resulting depression in wages. In Quebec, concurrently, Henri Bourassa led a campaign against what he saw as Laurier's capitulation to British imperialism, playing a part in the defeat of Laurier's government and the election of Borden's Tories.