Free trade, said Brian Mulroney in a previous life, was settled once and for all by the 1911 election. His opponents today also cite that famous vote as a precedent in their campaign. But whether 1911 is really a parallel to 1988 is an open question.

Though the two parties have since exchanged positions, the two constants are that the Canadian Manufacturers' Association in that election supported the Tories, and the Toronto Star supported the Grits.

But beyond that, the lessons for today to be drawn from 1911 are unclear. The popular view is that the free traders lost, and the protectionists won. The people made a clear and historic choice to hold fast to the National Policy, as every schoolboy knows.

Every schoolboy is, as usual, dead wrong. Free trade was not the only issue in the 1911 election. The Liberals, under Sir Wilfrid Laurier, were not the fervent free traders, nor were the Conservatives, under Sir Robert Borden, the avowed protectionists of popular imagination. The results of the election were far from decisive. And they weren't talking about free trade, really.

The closest thing to a true free trade battle had come 20 years before, in 1891, when the Liberals campaigned on a platform of ''unrestricted reciprocity'' and were defeated by Sir John A. Macdonald with the vow: ''A British subject I was born, a British subject I will die.''

But even then, most of the Liberal caucus was lukewarm at best in its support of unrestricted reciprocity, while Macdonald's case was not against reciprocity per se, but against the Liberals as its negotiators.

Trade arrangements with the U.S. had already been a key concern of Canadian governments for more than 40 years before that, ever since 1846, when the Repeal of the Corn Laws ended the system of preferential access to Mother Britain's markets on which colonial exporters had relied.

But in most cases, no one on either side meant across-the-board free trade. ''Reciprocity'' was envisaged in terms of agriculture and resources. The 1854 Elgin-Marcy Reciprocity Treaty, covering such primary products as fish, butter, grain, coal and timber, was the model.

The differences between the parties were usually more rhetorical than real. No government had any compunction about raising tariffs when it suited its purposes. And after the Republican North, triumphant in the Civil War, annulled the Reciprocity Treaty in 1866, prime ministers from both parties made repeated attempts to revive it.

Macdonald's high-tariff National Policy of 1879 was instituted only after both he and the Grits had failed to persuade the U.S. to renew reciprocity in the decade before. Even after the policy was in place, Macdonald kept trying, always meeting indifference.

The Liberals, meanwhile, chastened by the electoral debacle of 1891, had in succeeding years evolved a trade stance not much different from that of the Tories: protectionist for the present, but ready to strike a deal any time the Americans were. But after years of rejection, Canada was no longer willing to be the supplicant. The U.S. would be the one to take the initiative - unlike today.

Then as now, however, it was American concern over foreign trade practices that was the catalyst. Canada had lately added a lower level to its general tariff structure, available only by reciprocal treaty. The U.S., meanwhile, had passed legislation in 1909 setting an extra 25% tariff on countries held to be discriminating against U.S. exports.

The two policies were on collision course: unless Canada granted favored tariff status to the U.S., the American government warned, it would slap on the penalty.

It was an outrageous bluff, both because it had no foundation in logic, and because the Americans were hardly in a position of dominance. Two thirds of Canada's exports to the U.S. were wood and wood products: the tariff, along with threatened Canadian export taxes, could be calculated to upset Eastern newspaper publishers no end.

Laurier could not possibly accede to such bullying; equally, the Taft administration had no stomach to go through with its threat. With anti-tariff sentiment rising in Congress, Taft was looking for a face-saving way out.

This was the opening Laurier had been looking for. To protect Taft's position, Canada agreed to apply the lower tariff rate to an insignificant list of items. In return, the U.S. offered to open more wide-ranging trade discussions in late 1910, culminating in the Taft-Fielding Agreement of January, 1911.

This, like the 1854 agreement, comprised mainly primary products, at Canada's insistence. While the U.S. also lowered tariffs on a long list of manufactured products, Canada did not reciprocate. While the scope of the pact took the opposition by surprise, it was nonetheless a very limited reciprocity, designed to please all the right interest groups. Small wonder that Borden's Tories at first feared the Liberals had a sure electoral winner.

In the previous two decades, moreover, much of the electoral arithmetic had changed. The substantial immigration of the period had been funneled into the Prairies, whose economic interests were hurt by the high tariffs of the National Policy. Agitation among Western farmers against the tariff in the summer and fall of 1910 was a useful prop for Laurier in taking the risk of alienating Eastern Canadian interests.

In the event, however, Canadian industry, despite having gained asymmetrical access to the U.S. market, turned against the deal, fearing it presaged free trade in manufactured goods. Like today, it was not so much the agreement before us, as the agreement foretold to follow, that excited fears.

The same concerns over the threat to east-west transportation links, the same arguments that we were doing very well without it, the same pretense of devotion to wider trading arrangements, the same accusations that the government had not mentioned such a treaty before the last election figured also as prominently then as today.

The opposition blocked the legislation in Parliament. ''Let the People Decide'' was an opposition rallying cry. A few souls called for a referendum. In the end, Laurier was forced to call a fall election.

The campaign was marked by emotional appeals to nationalism, in that day usually equated with loyalty to Britain. Laurier, the most unswerving subject of the King imaginable, was painted in the hues of a treacherous annexationist, while a vote for Borden, declared a Toronto HD: on the eve of election day, was ''a vote for King and Flag and Canada.''

Laurier faced other difficulties, however, not present today. Without the support he expected from the business community, beset by defections from within Liberal ranks and some indiscreet public remarks by annexationists in Congress, the Liberals went down to defeat. But was reciprocity defeated, too?

While the Conservatives won a substantial majority of the seats in the House, 134 to 87, the popular vote was much closer, 51.2% to 47.8% - hardly suggestive of a nation rising against reciprocity.

The results, moreover, were substantially affected by Liberal losses to Henri Bourassa's Nationalists in Quebec, over the quite separate issue of the Naval Service bill, creating a Canadian navy - one, Bourassa claimed, that would be called on to fight ''England's wars.'' Bourassa as often spoke in favor of reciprocity as against; his provocative dalliance with the Conservatives was pure expedience.

The final irony is that the defeat of the government did not in the end matter much for Canada's access to the U.S. market. The Democrat-controlled Congress unilaterally lowered tariffs substantially in 1913. The real tragedy of Laurier's defeat in 1911 lay in the retention of Canadian trade barriers. If the Conservatives, in 1988, lose as well, this may prove the most enduring parallel.