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Canadian Pacific Railway Magnates and Government Officials Celebrating the CPR Monopoly
Archives of Manitoba, Transportation, Railway, 82.
Before the turn of the century, prairie farmers began taking action against the Canadian Pacific Railway monopoly, freight rates and the tariff. The tariff, a customs duty levied on imported goods, favoured central Canadian manufacturers and raised the cost of consumer and capital goods. In the 1870s the tariff, at 15 percent of the value of goods, generated 60 percent of Ottawa’s revenue. In addition to protecting central Canadian manufacturers from U.S. competition, the tariff was calculated to increase the volume of east-west freight by inhibiting trade between Western Canada and the U.S. In thus increasing railway traffic, it would help pay for the costs of the railway.
Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History, (University of Toronto Press, Toronto and London, 1984), p. 189.
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Anti-Monopoly
Archives of Manitoba, Transportation, Railway, 84.
The CPR’s powerful influence on the economic fate of people and municipalities in Manitoba, combined with its extraordinary privileges, rendered it often both the lifeblood of a community and a hated symbol of Eastern domination.
This cartoon, showing the Western farmer's perspective, depicts the end of the Canadian Pacific Railway monopoly as the end of all the farmers' problems - high rates, grain blockades and hard times.
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