Imagine if, in addition to Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut, all north of 60, Canada also had tropical Overseas Territories in the Caribbean.
It almost happened, once upon a time. Between 1917 and 1919, the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and the Prime Minister of Canada, Sir Robert Borden, discussed transferring the entire British West Indies to Canada. The whole lot.
Jamaica, the Turks and Caicos, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts (St. Christopher) and Nevis, Montserrat, Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago: Had they joined back then as Territories of Canada, any of them could, in time, have become provinces in the federation, with great benefit all round.
What went wrong?
The idea dates back to the 1880s. In 1884, the Barbados Agricultural Society and the Attorney-General of Barbados wrote to Sir Francis Hincks, the West Indies adviser to the Prime Minister of Canada. Hincks had been a cabinet minister before Confederation and co-prime minister of the Province of Canada from 1851 to 1855. Like a few other capable Canadians, Hincks was selected by London to serve as “our man on the spot” overseas. He served as governor of Barbados and the Windward Islands (1855–62) and of British Guiana (1862–69).
Canada had traded goods with the West Indies since early colonial times. Maritimers in particular were no strangers to the idea, and so closer relations with the Caribbean colonies would be the “culmination of a long commercial relationship dating back to the early 18th century,” wrote Brinsley Samaroo, then a history professor at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad campus.
For one thing, shipping goods by sea from Jamaica to Nova Scotia (and vice versa) cost less than shipping by rail from the Prairie provinces to Nova Scotia. And in 1917, shipping between Trinidad and Montreal by sea cost less than between Toronto and Winnipeg by rail.
In 1884, Barbados asked whether Canadians would “favourably entertain an application to be admitted a member of their Confederation.” The following year, the Legislative Council of Jamaica proposed sending a delegation to Ottawa to discuss closer economic and political ties, “either confederation or reciprocity.”
Caribbean expansion was a persistent theme in Canadian history. In 1911 the Bahamas Legislative Council voted to “negotiate with Canada for their admission into the Dominion, by incorporation with one or other of the Maritime Provinces.”
In 1916, T.B. Macaulay of the Canada–West Indian League in Montreal reminded Prime Minister Borden that annexing the West Indies would “add over one hundred thousand square miles of rich tropical territory to our temperate and frigid zones” whose people “with free trade would be enormous consumers of Canadian products.”
In 1917, during wartime, Sir Joseph Pope, the assistant clerk of the Privy Council and under-secretary of state for External Affairs in Ottawa, wrote a secret memo on the question of “Annexation of the West India Islands to the Dominion of Canada.”
He wanted to ensure that Borden was well-prepared for his first meeting with the Imperial War Cabinet in London. At first the Canadian side was the more enthusiastic. The British were not so sure. But later, by 1919, it was the British who were more keen.
Sir Joseph’s argument was that Canada and the West Indies’ shared history, economic interests, “and the sanctity of the Dominion’s sacrifices during the Great War,” all favoured union. Canada was ready for greater “responsibilities,” Pope said, a greater role in the world.
By its performance at war, Canada had earned the right to expand. Australia and New Zealand were getting spoils of war: former German islands in the Pacific were being transferred to their rule. German South-West Africa, the future Namibia, was expected (incorrectly) to be “incorporated into the Union of South Africa.” Therefore Canada should “participate in the advantages which will flow from the triumph of our arms,” Pope wrote.
Annexation of the West Indies was probably Canada’s only opportunity to become a significant player on the world scene, one that is unlikely ever to return.
Geostrategically, expanding into the Caribbean was perhaps the only way that Canada could ever match the growing power of the United States. That is because securing the West Indies would have required Canada to invest in defence like a proper country, rather than a protectorate of the Americans.
Patrolling and keeping the peace in the Caribbean would have required an even larger Navy than was already dictated by our three oceans. As Sir Joseph put it, the “isolated and exposed position” of the Caribbean islands “would render the Dominion more vulnerable to attack.”
However, with greater responsibility and a four-ocean Navy, Canada would be taken seriously by other countries. A four-ocean Navy would have put Canada in the front ranks of powers—because the size of a country’s armed forces plays a significant role in how much influence a country has in the real world.
Rhetoric is cheap, and since the 1960s Canada has leant increasingly on rhetoric.
Putting Canada on track to be a world power failed, in part, owing to the influence of the superficially anti-colonial ideology of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, a man terribly unqualified for world influence.
British PM David Lloyd George regretted Borden’s “little Canada” mentality. “Canada was the only Dominion that sought no accession of tropical territory in any quarter of the globe: in fact, she shrank from the idea,” he wrote. “I had many a talk with Sir Robert Borden on the subject. Canada has no tropical or semitropical territory, and I thought the undertaking might interest the Canadian people. I found that Sir Robert Borden was deeply imbued with the American prejudice against the government of extraneous possessions and peoples which did not form an integral part of their own Union. He therefore gave no encouragement to my suggestion, and I dropped it.”
One thing that rattled Canadian leaders was giving voting rights to a large non-white population. It may be unpleasant to think of today, but in 1919 few Canadians would welcome two million Caribbean voters as their political equals, especially given that Canada’s population was under nine million. As Borden wrote, “The coloured population … would insist upon representation in Parliament,” and “As Canadian negroes are entitled to the franchise, West Indian negroes would consider themselves equally entitled.” Well, such were the political values of the time.
In the end nothing came of the idea. Instead, most of the Caribbean islands became independent of Great Britain between 1962 and 1983. The remaining dependent territories today are Anguilla, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Montserrat, and the Turks and Caicos.
Could union between those territories and Canada occur today?
A legitimate objection to federation today would be the near-certainty that Caribbean entry points to Canada would be deluged with asylum-seekers from neighbouring islands.
In reality, the story of Canada is the story of expansion, and with that, contrary to most academic historians, the betterment of life for its people, including our indigenous people, and immigrants from around the world who have chosen to come here, freely become Canadians, and live our way under our laws.
More likely, the Caribbean opportunity is lost. It is too late to take the advice of Kenneth Grant, a leading Trinidadian plantation owner, who wrote in 1911, “These islands should be politically one with Canada, forming one or more provinces of the great Dominion with their representatives at Ottawa, and all recognizing the Governor General as their chief.”
