3 Tariffs and Taxes and Boredom, Oh My! Using A Role-Playing Game to Teach About
3 Tariffs and Taxes and Boredom, Oh My! Using A Role-Playing Game to Teach About the Debates Over the Tariffs in Canadian History
Mark Leier
If there is anything more boring than the history of Canadian tariffs, I would chew my own leg off in an attempt to escape from it. Yet from Confederation to the National Policy to Prairie populism to the Maritimes Rights movement to the Auto Pact to NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, fights over tariffs have been at the centre of Canadian politics and economics. Is there a way to help students appreciate this part of Canadian history?
Probably not. But “The Great Canadian Tariff Game” can help them understand tariffs and why they have framed some of the most divisive moments in Canadian history.
I devised the game for the first-year post-Confederation survey course. At Simon Fraser University, this is taught as a large (200+) lecture with tutorials of 10-18 led by teaching assistants. The basic outline is simple. The students in the tutorials are divided into four groups, each group representing a different sector of the Canadian economy with a different view on tariffs. Each group is asked to develop its own position on the tariff to present to Wilfrid Laurier, played by the instructor, to influence him and the Liberal party as it designs its platform for an upcoming election.
The teaching assistants are given broad instructions, the scenario, and all of the roles, laid out below. All of the students are given the Scenario and the members of each group are given the role for their group (included at the end of this post). The instructor goes over the rules briefly, then lets them hammer out their positions and strategies. While playing the game, the actual numbers and figures don’t much matter. The point is to help students understand that the debates over tariffs are much more than arcane disputes: they are crucial to basic economic issues for people and companies. Fights over tariffs reflect the unequal development of capitalist economies, the tendency of capital to centralize and concentrate, competing interests and the role of the state in capitalist economies.
Teaching assistants and students report that they find the game lively and informative. Students quickly understand and take up their roles with enthusiasm and are great at devising arguments, incentives, and threats to deliver to Wilfrid Laurier. The small group work encourages students to talk and the different viewpoints help them learn about conflict in history, and in the classroom.
The game needs fine-tuning and refinement, but even in this stage, it’s been useful to get students to understand why tariffs mattered. It connects them with the current debates over free trade that many students are concerned about and gives them some sense of the political economy of the 19th and 20th centuries in ways rather different from the standard economic discourse of today.
And it beats lecturing about the Reciprocity Treaty.
Game Materials
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