In Canada, Mercury Was A Totally Different Brand And These Oddball Cars Prove it

Back in the golden era of classic American cars, each division of Ford basically did what it wanted. We’re talking unique engines, unique styling, and unique gadgets to maintain distinct brand identity. North of the border though, oh boy, did things ever get weird. We’re talking Mercury vehicles that weren’t badged as Mercurys or Fords, non-Mercury vehicles badged as Mercurys, and enough brand confusion to absolutely, well, confound.

See, Mercury dealerships and Ford dealerships were different dealerships, and with Canada’s great distances and light density compared to America, simply popping next door to go look at a different Ford Motor Company brand wasn’t always an option. Therefore, dealers of either marque wanted full lines of vehicles, and for a surprisingly long while, that’s exactly what they got.

Yep, welcome to a special Canadian edition of Mercury Monday, a series that we admittedly dropped the ball on a year ago. Look, we’re only human, life gets busy, new ideas are worth trying, and sometimes old ones get forgotten. Let’s make up for lost time, shall we?

A Smaller Number

Back in the day, each division of most Detroit automakers enjoyed a fair degree of autonomy. We’re talking unique engines, bodies, and platforms typically not shared with any other brand. However, there are always exceptions, and if we want to talk about badge engineering, we’ll need to talk about the Mercury 114. Launched for 1946, this hastily re-styled Ford filled a critical role in Mercury’s Canadian lineup, and Ford’s happy to tell you about it.

Because Ford was in the low-priced field, it was more popular in Canada than the medium-priced Mercury. So that the new Mercury dealers could get a piece of the low-priced action, a smaller lower cost Mercury line emerged. This new Mercury needed a name to set it apart from its larger sibling. So, it bore the title Mercury 114 – a reference to its Ford wheelbase in inches. Therefore, the larger Mercury was known in Canada as the Mercury 118, its wheelbase length.

That all makes perfect sense, and the result was a car that actually sold pretty well. Sales peaked in 1947 with 10,393 sold, and while that doesn’t sound like a lot, Canada’s market is pretty tiny. It was enough that Mercury knew a hit-making recipe, and that recipe would blossom into a full buffet of cars under the Meteor brand. However, since those were rebadged Fords that weren’t sold under the Mercury brand, let’s keep things on topic by talking about Mercury cars that aren’t Mercury cars, but in the other direction.

Meet The Monarch

On March 23, 1946, those shopping at Canadian Ford dealerships would discover a car that looked a bit like a Mercury from a brand new make. Indeed, aside from its trim package, grille treatment, its dashboard, and some of its lighting, it was a 1946 Mercury. However, it wasn’t called that. It was called the Monarch, because pandering. Look, it was 1946. Newfoundland and Labrador wasn’t even a province, Canada’s flag still had a British ensign on it, and the war was still part of recent memory. Who could blame Ford for pulling the motherland card when marketing the steamed hams of Mercurys? Well, guess what — it worked.

Sure, the original Monarch may have been $10 more expensive than a comparable Mercury, and its Mercury V8 may have been slightly de-rated, but this exercise in badge engineering managed to outsell Studebaker in its first year on the market. The experiment was working, and it was working well enough to continue.

A radical redesign for the 1949 model year saw a greater brand identity emerge — the Monarch was still a Mercury, but it had its own grille, its own brightwork, a Mercury dashboard instead of a Ford dashboard, and its own hood ornament. Guess what? It sold even better.

By 1953, Monarch was outselling Mercury, and it looked like a brand that was here to stay. It eventually gained a full range of models, from the base Custom to the loaded Custom Lucerne, a full range of bodystyles including one with a plexiglass top, and looked properly established. Then a little something called the Edsel came along.

Yep, for 1958, Canadian Ford dealers decided to sell the Edsel brand and retire the Monarch nameplate. After all, the two makes were positioned similarly, and the whole Edsel effort felt a little less hasty than simply rebadging another division’s models. However, we all know how the Edsel was received by the public, so Monarch came back from the dead for 1959, sticking around through 1961, at which point Ford decided it could do its own moderately upmarket large cars in Canada.

Truck It

The same postwar zeitgeist that spawned the Mercury 114 and the Monarch also worked to fill a very different sort of gap. See, before Canada was primarily a service economy, it had a whole bunch of rural communities, and those rural communities needed trucks. Ford had trucks, Mercury didn’t, and that was a problem given that many communities didn’t have dealers for both marques. So, screw it, why not just rebadge Ford pickup trucks as Mercury models? Unsurprisingly, that’s exactly what happened.

With production kicking off in 1946, the Mercury M-Series was a rebadged line of Ford F-Series trucks with new grilles, badges, and that was basically it. Even chunks of the model names were recycled, as the numbers after the M (for instance, M-47) were identical to those on a Ford F-Series.

Unsurprisingly, this worked brilliantly, to the point where the lineup became a fixture of Canadian roads. We’re talking heavy duty commercial trucks all the way down to half-ton pickups, and all the way out to vans. You could even get a Mercury-branded Econoline at one point, imaginatively called the Econoline EM-Series.

However, by 1968, the Mercury truck experiment was over. The United States and Canada had signed the Auto Pact back in 1965, a trade deal to tear down tariffs on motor vehicles and their parts between the two countries. As a result, Canada quickly became a huge exporter of vehicles thanks to cheaper labor costs, and it made more sense to expand of reconsolidate dealership franchises and build Ford F-Series trucks in Canada for the world, rather than simply build M-Series pickup trucks for Canada.

Oh, Canada

In the end, these rebadged Fords and oddly badged Mercury models serve as rolling reminders of a time gone by, when the big three truly ruled the North American continent and the right sort of vacuum existed to build proper weirdness.

Some people don’t know what an appendix does, but many of us still have ours. Few people outside of Canada know why M-Series pickup trucks used to roam the plains of Alberta, but a handful of these trucks are still out there, be it weathering in fields or shining in car shows. It’s the same deal for Monarchs, which makes it perhaps all the more critical that we try to preserve, enjoy, and share these vehicles.

(Photo credits: Ford Motor Company, Bring A Trailer, classiccars.com)

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