Canada-US Trade Reciprocity in Cartoons

Richard S. Lambert.  The Twentieth Century Canada Britain USA.  Toronto:  The House of Grant (Canada) Ltd., 1960. 

Sid Barron.  The (Le) Barron Book with Puddytat Centrefold, Toronto Star, 1972.

Sid Barron.  The (Le) Barron Book with Puddytat Centrefold, Toronto Star, 1972.

Richard Lambert (1894-1981) was a British, Oxford-educated broadcaster and historian who emigrated to Canada to eventually become Supervisor of School Broadcasts with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.  Sid Barron (1917-2006) was a Canadian editorial cartoonist whose worked appeared frequently in several newspapers, particularly the Toronto Star.  The cartoons, sixty years apart, convey the same concerns.

"Trans-nationals" often involved American firms setting up subsidiaries in Canada.  See an earlier post.  The business model also involved American firms buying Canadian firms and eventually shutting them down because they were unprofitable or simply to reduce competition, the most recent example being the closing by  Caterpillar of the locomotive plant in London, Ontario it had bought only three years before.   With  the evolution of "multi-nationals" the same thing has now been happening in the United States, with factories of established American firms being closed down in favour of off-shore production.  Just about everything now says "Made in China."  Sadly, brand names which had earned a reputation for excellence  are now put on items of much poorer quality.