CANADIAN INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT
On the voyage up the St. Lawrence to Montreal a leading citizen of
London, Ontario, discussed with me the question of Protection and Free
Trade. We were passing French Canadian villages and towns on either side
of the river in the Province of Quebec. The French Canadians now, as
ever, are agriculturists, living a quiet rural life, raising their
crops, fattening their cattle, breeding their pigs, which contribute so
largely to their own larders. Said my London friend, “I have been
spending six months in Europe, partly on the Continent, but with
frequent visits to England. I have been amazed at the evidences of the
overpowering prosperity of your British industries under the system of
Free Trade. If I were living in Great Britain I should be a Free Trader
out and out. You have the instinct of manufacturing industry. You had a
long start of all your rivals. Geographically you are marked out to be
the great manufacturing, producing and distributing centre of the world.
You would be most foolish to attempt to overthrow a fiscal system under
which you have done so well. But when I come to Canada I am a
Protectionist out and out. You see those villages and towns. From the
agricultural point of view Quebec is a flourishing Province enough, but
you cannot build up a modern nation out of a race of agriculturists pure
and simple. You must have manufacturing industries, and at present, as a
manufacturing country, Canada is in its infancy. Our people have to
acquire the manufacturing instinct. Until they have acquired it, if we
allowed our country to be flooded with the manufacturing products of the
United States, of the Old Country, and of France, Germany, and other
countries, we should be beaten hands down and our rising manufacturing
industries would be strangled in their cradle. You Britishers do not
understand why we Canadians favour Protection. Protection really means
that we are compelling the United States and yourselves to teach us how
to become a manufacturing nation.” This will not satisfy, perhaps,
English Free Traders, among whom I confess myself to be a convinced
believer in the open market, but it is the view-point from which I found
Canadians throughout the Eastern Provinces generally looked at the
question. When I visited some of the manufacturing cities and saw the
factories, through several of which I was taken, I was forced to think
there was something after all in the views of the Ontario Londoner.
[Illustration: TORONTO. YONGE STREET, LOOKING SOUTH FROM ADELAIDE
STREET.]
Take Hamilton, Ontario, for instance. This flourishing city is one of
the oldest in Canada. It is magnificently situated for trading on the
shores of Hamilton Bay, a land-locked harbour at the head of Lake
Ontario. The manufacturing quarter is well away from the beautiful
residential quarters, where the prosperous Hamiltonians live in
handsomely-built houses, each isolated on its own freehold plot,
surrounded by a border of grass or shrubs with abundance of forest
trees. It rises to the Mountain, as a steep hill is called, from the
summit of which there is a very striking view of the city and a
picturesque outlook over one of the most fruitful parts of the Dominion,
abounding in peach and apple orchards and vineyards. Hamilton is only
forty miles from Niagara Falls, and its interest in the Falls is
utilitarian as well as artistic and sentimental, for it is the electric
power generated at the Falls which drives the works of Hamilton, lights
its streets and houses, and supplies the heating power. On my visit to
the Falls I saw the great power-house in which the mighty rush of the
Rapids is harnessed and tamed by the engineering skill of man and
compelled to serve alike the industrial prosperity, the domestic
comfort, the tram service, and the house and street lighting not only of
Hamilton, but of Toronto and of many other cities. The first thing that
strikes a visitor to Hamilton, if he should arrive after dark, is what
he will consider the scandalous luxury of the brilliant electric
lighting with which the fronts of business houses and places of
entertainment literally blaze, but should the visitor express his
concern at such apparent wicked waste he will be told that electricity
is so cheap that its cost is practically negligible. It is to the
cheapness of natural sources of power, that is given without stint, that
the growing manufacturing prosperity of Canada is largely due.
It was my privilege to be convoyed around Hamilton and to be introduced
to the heads of departments of some of the principal factories by Mr. H.
M. Marsh, Commissioner of Industries. Through him I learned that there
are no less than 400 manufacturing industries in the city, with four
suburban electric railways having a combined mileage of eighty-three.
There are seventy-eight churches, thirty public and four private
schools, not counting a technical school, a college of music, a normal
school, and a collegiate institute. There are six steamship lines
connecting Hamilton with the chain of the Great Lakes and enabling it to
send its products cheaply right into the centre of Canada and far south
and west into the heart of the United States. Seven steam railways also
enable Hamilton to send its manufactures by land transit over the North
American continent and to the principal ports of the Dominion and the
United States. The extent of the turnover of money in the city is shown
by the fact that the bank clearings in 1911 were $125,250,000, an
increase of more than $24,000,000, or nearly £5,000,000, over 1910.
A more significant fact forcibly driven home to me is that some of the
largest and most rapidly advancing factories are branches of American
firms. More than thirty-five American firms have invested an enormous
amount of capital in buildings and plant to produce their specialities
in Hamilton. On the Canadian side at Niagara Falls I found the same
significant fact. The explanation is that given by my London, Ontario,
friend. The Canadians are compelling the Americans to plant their
factories in Canada in order that they may employ Canadian labour and
teach the Canadians how to become a manufacturing nation. At the Falls I
was told that by manufacturing on the Canadian side the American firms
save from 10 to 35 per cent. duty which they would have to pay if their
goods crossed the river. It pays them better to build and manufacture in
Canada than to pay the duty.
The manufacture of agricultural implements of the most modern type for
culture on the wholesale scale plays a very large part in the industrial
life of Hamilton. I went over the Oliver Chilled Plough Works, an
undertaking of the last year or two, but which is already doing business
on an enormous scale. The works, I was told, are more up to date than
even the parent works in the States, for with the ground at their
disposal, and with the experience of the past, it was possible to
eliminate everything that was disadvantageous and so to construct the
factory and to lay down the plant as to meet exactly the requirements of
the business alike in Canada and in other markets. Nothing could be more
ideal than the conditions under which this industry is carried on. The
ploughs produced are power ploughs furnished each with a number of
coulters, from half-a-dozen to nine or more, capable of dealing with the
most refractory surface. The coulters are modified to meet the varying
conditions of heavy or light soil. I saw a vast number of the component
parts, witnessed the processes of manufacture, the dipping of parts into
baths of paint, and complete ploughs ready to be sent out either to
break the virgin prairie or to replough land that had been harvested.
On a still greater scale were the works of the International Harvester
Company, another branch of a famous American firm. More than
three-quarters of a century ago Mr. McCormick, forbear of the present
controlling McCormick—he was a pious Presbyterian with the Scottish
instinct for getting on—invented a reaping machine which answered so
well in a Virginia wheatfield that it led to a revolution in
agricultural machinery. All sorts of machines were produced and have
been continuously improved for all the principal operations of
agriculture on the grand scale. To-day McCormick’s International
Harvester Company is the greatest agricultural machinery industry in the
world. The firm saw the opportunities offered by the development of the
Prairie Provinces and were quick to take advantage of them. I was told
that farmers can get all the machinery they need without paying a cent
down. The firm looks to the future rather than to the present. It knows
that its money is safe and will fructify in the fields of the farmers,
to whom it gives the longest credit. Again I saw the processes of
manufacture of the parts of reapers, binders, tedders, self-dumping and
other rakes, hay lubbers, huskers and shredders, harrows, drills, and
ploughs. I was shown a forty-five horse power plough driven by a
gasolene engine. It is furnished with twelve coulters, each 14 inches
deep. It will plough twenty acres a day of ten hours, and if necessary
can be run throughout the whole twenty-four hours at certain seasons.
Anything more perfect and capable of getting through so much work at
such a small expenditure of human labour it would be impossible to
conceive. It is such machinery as that turned out by the Oliver Chilled
Plough Works and the International Harvester Works that has made the
marvellous wheat production of the Prairie Provinces, increasing
constantly at the rate of millions of bushels a year, possible.
Hamilton is also the scene of enormous works of the Canadian
Westinghouse Brake Company, a branch of the Pittsburg Company, whose
brakes are necessities of existence to every railway company and to most
of the electrical tram systems of the world.
A constant stream of immigrants pours into Hamilton. The demand for
labour is insatiable. I noticed in the International Harvester Works
that warnings and regulations for the guidance of the _employés_ were
printed in seven languages. It was evident that the workmen were a
cosmopolitan mixture of races. They included many men from the Balkan
States, Italians, Russians, and others who in Canada take more kindly to
manufacturing and railway construction employment than to the life of
agriculture. Mr. Marsh informed me that in March 1,200 men could readily
be found employment in the various Hamilton factories.
Ontario, with its four millions of population out of the seven millions
of Canada, is the great manufacturing Province, although there are
growing manufactures in the Eastern Provinces of Nova Scotia, New
Brunswick, and Quebec. A Government publication summarising the
industries of Ontario states that, in addition to Hamilton and in and
around Toronto, at London, further west on its own river Thames; at
Brantford, Chatham, Guelph, Kingston, Ottawa, Peterborough, St.
Catharines, St. Thomas, Stratford, Berlin, Collingwood, Galt, Ingersoll,
Oshawa, Sarnia, Sault Ste. Marie, Woodstock, and scores of other
centres, the mills and factories are busy. They produce vast quantities
of iron and everything that iron makes, from a tin-tack to a locomotive.
The agricultural machinery made in Canada stands so high in reputation
that it finds a market not only in South America and in the sister
realms of Australia and New Zealand and in the Mother Country itself,
but in continental Europe. Several other special lines of manufacture,
including parlour organs, are now well known abroad; but in most
branches the Canadians themselves use all that their manufacturers
produce; and here in the towns of Ontario are produced not only such
wares as we have just mentioned, but cotton, woollen and leather goods
and clothing; waggons and carriages, on wheels or runners; furniture,
paper, and almost everything else that is made of wood; foodstuffs,
plain and fancy—but really there is no end to the list.
These manufacturing towns are spread over the Province in a way rather
strange to Old Country men, whose centres of industry are generally to
be found clustering in a few districts marked out for such a purpose by
particular local advantage. There is no “Black Country” in Ontario.
There is, however, one district where manufacturing towns are
particularly numerous, in the south-west part of the Province. There is
no coal-field here, but the great coal-fields of Pennsylvania lie just
across Lake Erie; and this region has the enormous advantage of lying
within easy reach of Niagara Falls. The glory of the Falls is their
beauty, and it is to be hoped that their beauty and grandeur will be
religiously preserved for ever. The Falls, however, provide an enormous
force, which can be used without destroying or greatly injuring their
appearance. This force is already being developed by the Ontario
Government and private enterprise, and is being conducted through
electric cables to the manufacturing towns, where it will provide motive
power for almost unlimited machinery.
At Sault Ste. Marie, where the water of Lake Superior pours out into
Lake Huron, a gigantic iron and steel industry is being developed. At
the upper end of Lake Superior again are the twin seaports, Fort William
and Port Arthur, where millions of bushels of prairie grain are loaded
yearly in a multitude of steamers and shipped down to ports on the
eastern shores of Lake Huron.
[Illustration: GALA DAY AT WINNIPEG.]
Travelling westward I passed out of Ontario with its lakes and wooded
hills into Manitoba, the first of the Prairie Provinces. Within the
memory of middle-aged men Manitoba and all west of it was practically a
grass-grown wilderness, spangled during the summer months with a
succession of flowers of many varieties that grow magnificently—some of
them such as are the pride of gardens at home. There is a picture of the
Provincial capital, Winnipeg—which is now as large as Bradford—in
1872, showing a tiny market town of about 2,000 population. Among the
figures in the picture is that of the late Lord Strathcona, then the
directing spirit of the Hudson’s Bay Company. To his enterprise is
largely due the subsequent development of the country. The population
to-day exceeds 200,000, and the city, at the fork of the Red River and
the Assiniboine, in addition to being the corn exchange of the West, is
becoming a manufacturing centre of the first importance. Main Street,
Winnipeg, is a scene of surpassing interest to the English visitor. I
was told that, if you knew how to distinguish them, you might meet in a
walk along Main Street people of forty nationalities. At night it
dazzles with the glare of its electric lights. There are hotels to suit
every pocket, great departmental stores employing each their 500 to
2,000 “clerks,” shops fitted up in the most modern American style and
offering the world’s best to the Winnipeg folk and visitors to the city,
who appear to have inexhaustible supplies of dollar bills. The money
turned over in Winnipeg would make a handsome revenue for a fair-sized
kingdom. Its citizens build churches without counting the cost, and the
churches, with such preachers as the Congregational Dr. J. L. Gordon, a
flaming orator, with a rush of rainbow rhetoric, and the Presbyterian
“Sky Pilot,” Dr. C. R. Gordon, draw crowded congregations and often turn
away hundreds from their services. There are no fewer than 115 churches
and five colleges, including the Wesley Training College for ministers.
At St. Boniface, near by, is a large French settlement with a fine
cathedral church, recalling the fact that here was a famous Roman
Catholic mission to the Indians and half-breeds. In the burial ground of
the cathedral I saw the tomb of Louis Riel, the French half-breed who,
at the beginning of the development of the West, raised the Indians and
half-breeds against the Canadian Government and paid for the rebellion
with his life. It is the development of the West with its increasing
population that has been the making of Winnipeg. It does a wholesale
trade of more than £6,000,000 a year, and has more than 400 factories,
employing something like 20,000 workers. A very large number of English
immigrants have settled in Winnipeg, and many of them have rapidly
become rich men, while they have sent for their young relatives and
friends to join with them in taking advantage of the wonderful
opportunities offered to men with grit and business enterprise. For
young men not disposed to go on the land, but desiring a business
career, I should say there is not a better place to make for than
Winnipeg. Such departmental stores as Eaton’s and the Hudson’s Bay
Company’s establishments, with the scores of huge concerns in every
department of trade, with the sixty banks and the offices of
professional men, Real Estate agents and the like, are always on the
look-out for young fellows who are not afraid of work and are willing to
adapt themselves to the conditions of the country. I did not gather from
what I saw of business methods in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg and the
cities farther west that the work is more exacting than it is in the Old
Country. The hours usually are certainly shorter. What is demanded is
the willing heart, a quick intelligence and the ability to do just what
is required. The “slacker” in Canada hangs fire as he does in England. I
heard some comparisons between native Canadians and English new-comers
in business houses, which were rather in favour of the new-comers. It is
said that the young Canadian is much more ready to get time off for a
baseball match or a pool contest than is his English competitor. It may
be that the English competitor is usually a young fellow with ambition
and energy above the average, or he would have stayed in the Old
Country, where the temptations to slacking are so numerous and so
fascinating.
On the journey of 300 miles odd from Winnipeg to Regina, the capital of
the central Prairie Province of Saskatchewan, the traveller sees the
prairie stretching out on either side of the line to the horizon. Early
in the summer it is a sea of green growing wheat; towards harvest time
it is a sea of gold, with the wheat to the height of a man; after
harvest the prairie presents the appearance of a vast encampment with
the wheat stooks waiting for the threshing. The threshing over, the
prairie glows at night with conflagrations as if a hostile army was
marching through the land destroying as it went, but all that is
happening is the burning of waste straw and refuse from the threshing,
the ashes being the only fertiliser that the soil has so far received.
There are brand-new towns and villages at every three or four miles,
each the centre of a rapidly-growing trade with the farmers and other
settlers in the district. What will most strike the English visitor,
however, is the succession of elevators along the line, resembling huge
square or oblong towers with a turret on the top. The elevators are the
receptacles of the corn ready for the market. Each will hold an enormous
quantity, ranging from scores of thousands to millions of bushels. Many
of the elevators belong to the wholesale buyers or to great milling
firms. A large number have been built, however, by the railway companies
to hold the grain until transport is available to convey it to the
markets. So great is the pressure between the harvest and Christmas time
that all the freightage rolling stock of the companies is called into
service, and all the elevators are crammed to bursting point with the
wheat and oats, and even then the farmers complain that wheat has to
remain in the fields week after week because the elevator accommodation
is insufficient. It is a revelation to the travelling visitor of the
inconceivable food-growing capacity of Central Canada, of which as yet
scarcely the half of the cultivable soil has been broken. It is easy to
understand and to believe the boast that Canada, when its cornlands are
fully cultivated, will be able to feed four-hundred-millions of the
world’s population.
This enormous agricultural production means, of course, great and
expanding demands for the products of manufacturing industries. In the
early years of the Prairie Provinces’ development the needs were all
supplied from the East, but the Prairie Provinces, like the Eastern
Provinces, have their own industrial ambitions, and they are setting to
work to become as far as possible manufacturing suppliers of their own
necessities. Let me describe as illustrations what is taking place at
Moose Jaw and Regina, the latter the capital of Saskatchewan Province.
Moose Jaw, as the name of a city, provokes smiles. It derives its name,
according to local belief, from the discovery of the jaw of a moose on
its site before the Canadian Pacific Railway drove its steel across the
prairie. Moose Jaw was an insignificant village, and, but for the
railway, an insignificant village it would have remained, its only
population a few Indians and a handful of half-breeds, with an
occasional visitor in the person of a Hudson’s Bay or Eastern trader or
a mounted police trooper. The railway pioneers, however, saw in Moose
Jaw a strategic position for a railway centre, and immediately the
village began to grow by leaps and bounds. The C.P.R. has spent millions
of dollars in Moose Jaw on its fifty-three miles of trackage, its
stock-yards, its freight sheds and its trains and depots, built
prophetically with a view to the needs of the future great manufacturing
and distributing city. The Grand Trunk and Canadian Northern Railways
are now entering Moose Jaw, and within a year or two fourteen lines will
radiate from the city, linking it up with all Canada and the United
States. Great flour mills have been established, and huge meat-packing
plants, bridge and iron works are among other manufacturing concerns.
The applications for building permits for new factories, mills, banks,
business houses and the like are increasing with a rapidity that makes
the people early on the spot smile their broadest and shake hands with
each other at the stream of gold flowing into their bank accounts. To
the Englishman, accustomed to the harmonious lines of handsomely-built
business streets and macadamised roads, with their hard surface and the
broad pavement, Moose Jaw does not make a particularly favourable first
impression.
Moose Jaw is at present a muddy place, with “side walks” only just
making their appearance. With sewage construction, water and gas supply
and other necessaries in progress, the roads are always “up,” but the
automobile owners who kindly “run us round” care nothing for a foot
depth of mud and ruts such as were never seen in English lanes. They are
“cross country” riders of the most fearless type, and bump English
visitors in and out of the ruts and up and down folds of the prairie in
a fashion that puts British courage to a severe test. Moose Jaw mud,
like all prairie mud, is of the fattest, stickiest kind, but, as a
leading citizen said to me, “Our streets five years ago were just muddy
tracks, but it was prairie mud; it grew our ‘No. 1 Hard,’ the world’s
standard in wheat; it gave us our money, and we cheerfully put up with
it.”
Moose Jaw has boundless confidence in itself. It believes, like all the
cities of the West, that it is the city with a future. Other cities may
be going ahead, but Moose Jaw will always show them the way. The pride
of local patriotism is nowhere so highly developed as in these Western
cities.
“Have you been at Winnipeg lately?” asked a Winnipegian of a man on the
train. “Yes, I was there at the beginning of last week. It’s a growing
city.” “Ah!” said the Winnipegian, “but you should see it now!” And
here, be it said, the people of all these provinces and cities are
consummate masters of the art of “boosting.” They have boundless faith
in their cities and themselves, and they try to infuse their faith into
others. They say, in effect, as a firm that opened a new shop in one of
the cities inscribed across the frontage, “We are It. Watch us Grow.”
Moose Jaw, I am certain, would never dream of yielding the palm to
Winnipeg or any other city of the prairie. Those other cities might have
got the start, but Moose Jaw will catch them up and overtake them. Since
my return it is reported that an inexhaustible supply of natural gas has
been discovered near to the city. If this be so, then the cheapening of
power which the gas will cause will certainly justify Moose Jaw in its
most optimistic anticipations of its future.
As to Regina, it is bound, as the capital city, to go ahead alike as a
business, a manufacturing, and a social centre. It is the commercial
centre—the Railway Junction City—of millions of acres of corn-growing
prairie. At Regina I had an insight into the municipal life of a Western
Canadian city. We are discussing at home town planning, the land
question, the education question and all sorts of social reforms which
to carry out make heavy demands on the rates and taxes. We are a very
ancient country with a most complicated web of vested interests and an
overcrowded population. There is sharp division between class and class,
Church and Church, party and party. Canada, and especially Western
Canada, with its unlimited area of land, originally the property of the
State, is able to deal with all such questions and problems in a way
that is impossible in our own country. “Single tax” and “town planning”
go together in these new cities. The newborn municipal authority decides
what shall be the area of the city. The lines of development are decided
on. The city surveyor draws up a plan of the sections, which are
sub-divided into convenient lots. The plots are then assessed. Those
purchasing a plot must pay the tax on the assessment, whether it is
built on or not. Plots are reserved not only as sites for schools, city
hall, parks, and other public purposes, but to provide by their sale,
when the value has enhanced by natural increment, for the building and
possibly the maintenance of the schools and other public institutions.
Thus, at Regina, I was shown the new City Hall, built at a cost of
£100,000, and was told it had not cost a penny in rates, for the whole
of the cost was met by the sale of municipal reservations of land. In
those cities schools, as soon as families arrive, are among the first
and finest buildings to be erected, but the cities grow so fast that the
school accommodation is soon out-distanced, and temporary schools spring
up, to give way at the earliest possible moment to splendid permanent
buildings. It was good to see the youngsters romping in their playtime,
and to be told that “There’s not a poor person in our city, Sir, and we
don’t mean there to be one. Sure!” Banks are numerous, with very
handsome buildings, but one soon understands why they multiply. The
banks finance the builders of the great hotels, “departmental stores,”
the builders of their own homes on the residential lots secured—for
every householder wants to live in his own detached freehold house on
his own freehold plot—and they also finance the farmers and others
engaged in gathering the “gold of the prairie.”
[Illustration: REGINA.]
Regina is laid out on the best lines with wise prevision of the needs of
the future. In the town planning quarters are reserved for manufacturing
industries, business centres, residential streets and suburbs, schools
and churches. The quarters are being rapidly occupied, but the city, of
course, is still in a very unfinished condition. Like Winnipeg and Moose
Jaw, however, it believes that Regina is “It.” It has a brand-new
Parliament House, a long, spacious building, with a handsome façade
facing a grassy park with a lake fed by the Waskanna rivulet. I had a
chat with Mr. Motherwell, Minister of Agriculture, himself a model
farmer, a prairie Cincinnatus, who is deservedly held in the highest
estimation by his fellow-citizens. Those Ministers of State of the
Prairie Provinces, and even those of the Dominion Government at Ottawa,
are not the awful unapproachable beings that Ministers of State are in
the European Governments. They are men of the people, sprung from the
people, not usually educated in colleges and universities, but educated
practically in the school of the world. They understand thoroughly the
conditions and the needs of their country, and my talks with Mr.
Motherwell and other public men, with the information in the shape of
Government publications which they placed at my disposal, were a
revelation of the practical foresight and wisdom with which the Canadian
Governments are laying the foundations of the vast populations which
within a few years will occupy the Provinces. Nowhere in the world is
the necessity of an educated people more keenly realised, and nowhere is
such generous provision made for the education. The best lots on the
surveyed sites of the town to be laid out by newly-formed municipalities
are reserved for schools—not only the spots on which the schools are to
be built, but spots which by their unearned increment, as the town
develops, shall be sold and the proceeds applied to the maintenance of
the schools. This avoids trouble over the levying of rates for
educational purposes, for it was impressed upon me that the schools and
their maintenance, and other public services, do not cost a penny to the
ratepayer. My Regina cicerone, a migrant from the East, “ran me round”
on an automobile, and continually called my attention to buildings just
finished or in process of construction, such as “Our City
Hall—$500,000; a new bank at that corner, $600,000; a new church,
$70,000; a departmental stores going up there, $1,000,000; a railway
company is to build a million dollars hotel there.” In the early summer
of 1912 a cyclone cut a path through the centre of the city, destroying
three churches, with much private property. At five on the morning
following the cyclone, architects, builders and owners of the destroyed
property were surveying the ruins and planning the buildings to rise on
the cleared site. At a “turkey supper” the Mayor of Regina, Mr. M’Ara,
told how the city has advanced in civilisation since, a very few years
ago, a predecessor in the mayoral chair went to welcome the first
religious convention held in the town. That mayor had been a “Wild
Westerner,” more at home at the poker table than at a gathering of grave
divines, but he did his best to make them feel at ease. “You are very
welcome,” he said, “to our city. I hope you will make yourselves
thoroughly at home. In order that you may feel perfectly free, I have
given orders to lock up the entire police force.” Regina has three daily
papers and a weekly.
Regina’s manufacturing quarter is already a hive of most profitable
industry. As at Hamilton, the workers are a very cosmopolitan company.
There are something like 10,000 people from the Balkan States and other
countries of Eastern Europe, while there is a large and prosperous
German colony. The English and American elements of the Regina
population are somewhat concerned over the growth of the non-Saxon
element. They are taking steps to Canadianise these people by means of
schools, missions, and other educational and moralising forces. There is
no reason why, within half a century, the present population of 50,000
to 60,000 of Regina should not swell to half a million. I must not
forget the Methodist College, opened in 1912 at a cost of something like
£120,000, to give the best possible higher school education to the lads
and girls of prosperous families of the Province. The Presbyterians are
following suit with a proposed college on even a greater scale. A Regina
correspondent tells me that within a month £100,000 was promised towards
the Presbyterian college. Men so keenly alive to the educational needs
of the city and Province may be trusted not to let the grass grow under
their feet in matters of industrial development.
Beyond Saskatchewan is the Province of Alberta. Alberta, Canadian
fashion, firmly believes that it is “It.” Not only is the Province
destined to become one of the richest cornfields and most luscious
ranching grounds of Canada, but it is enormously rich in mineral
resources, which will be the basis of great manufacturing industries in
the future. Already coal-fields covering an area of at least 11,000
square miles have been located. Alike in North and South Alberta, towns
are growing with mushroom rapidity, and new towns are being planted
every week with the rapid pushing of the “steel” of the railway
companies. An American journalist, Mr. W. J. Shunks, of Chicago, has
described in picturesque American fashion how towns are “built while you
wait,” so to speak, in these amazing Western Provinces:—
“Half-way between Lake Superior and the Manitoba prairies, in the heart
of the virgin forest, the Grand Trunk Pacific town-builders put their
pencils on the map and gave orders. Presto! The new town of Graham, with
its divisional railway shops, its roundhouses, its stores and banks,
springs into being. At the edge of the prairie section they decree
another larger railway city, with immense repair shops, car works and
foundries. Transcona is born! As the rails are flung Pacificward, across
the prairies, there spring into being a string of communities, with
important divisional centres of the Melville, Watrous, Wainwright and
Edson type, at regular intervals.
“I don’t know whether these Grand Trunk town-builders deliberately
planned a _de luxe_ edition or not. Certainly, they got one out when
they put Mirror, Alberta, on the map. Mirror is about half-way between
Calgary and Edmonton. It is almost in the geographical centre of the
Province of Alberta—in the heart of one of the richest agricultural
sections. It is to be an important divisional centre, on the Grand Trunk
Pacific’s line connecting Calgary and Southern Alberta with the main
trans-continental line from Winnipeg to Edmonton.
“The town site of Mirror is natural—that is, the railway company did
not have to look for one in that particular location. They found it,
ready made, on the west bank of Buffalo Lake, the largest body of fresh
water in the province, and a natural summer resort. The town site is on
a ridge with gentle slopes—eastward to the lake, and westward to the
railway right of way.
“Mirror—though it borrows its name from an English publication, _The
London Mirror_—will be a typically cosmopolitan town of the Canadian
west. Around it are farming districts of marvellous prosperity. There
are rich and vast coal mines in the immediate vicinity. Scientists say
that this district is in the heart of the gas and oil belts of Alberta.
In natural resources, beauty of location, and future prospects, Mirror
is a blue ribboner among the new municipalities.
“When the town site of Mirror was first placed on the market—July 11
and 12, 1911—there were 577 lots sold at auction in 660 minutes. The
aggregate purchase price of these lots was $250,000. That was the
beginning. Many more lots have been sold since. Before Mirror was a
month old it had two banks, five stores, three lumber yards, one hotel,
three restaurants, two pool rooms, a sash and door factory and a
newspaper. When it reaches the mature age of one year it will be a
wonder.
“The really important feature in all this town building is that
conditions require it. The country is being thickly settled with
prosperous farmers. Merchants, manufacturers, bankers, artisans,
doctors, lawyers, ministers—all the factors in urban population—follow
the trails the farmers blaze. It is their door of opportunity.”
In Southern Alberta is the city of Medicine Hat, whose name is a
constant joke to the Englishman who knows it only as a name. I must
confess to sharing in the ribald joking until I made the acquaintance of
Medicine Hat. Having seen it, how can I describe it? I had chaffed a
London journalist—standing in the front rank of newspaper globe
trotters—until he scowled savagely at the mention of it. I shall joke
about it no longer. Medicine Hat has got to be taken very seriously
indeed.
Locally its name is familiarly shortened to “The Hat.” It gets its name
from its extraordinary location. There is a large circular depression of
the prairie, surrounded by sharply-rising sandy walls. The depression,
with the prairie stretching out above from the rim of the walls, bears a
rough resemblance to an inverted low-crowned hat, with an endless Quaker
brim. Through the depression runs the broad silver belt of the South
Saskatchewan River. The depression suggests a worn-down volcano crater,
and the speciality of Medicine Hat confirms the suggestion. Underneath
is pent up an inexhaustible storage of natural gas. The Indians knew of
the gas, and associated it with magic and devilry, hence the name of
“Medicine Hat.” Rudyard Kipling’s imagination was impressed by Medicine
Hat, and he styled it “City born fortunate, built upon hell.” No wonder
the hollow crown is being filled with huge flour mills and factories,
while the brim is being eagerly snapped up for residential purposes. The
gas is pure and ready for use to supply alike power, light and heat.
There are “gas wells,” from which the gas rushes at a tremendous
pressure, but it is tamed and made to do its work, at a cost to the
consumer of only 7½_d._ per thousand cubic feet. That means to the
householder fuel as well as light. Manufacturers are encouraged to
settle in “The Hat” by the offer of “free power” for five years. As it
costs nothing to generate the power, and the supply is unlimited, it
pays the authorities to make the concession. Last winter four huge flour
mills were to be put up by different companies, and about thirty
factories are already at work, while inquiries are crowding in from
other firms. “The Hat” expects to have a population of half-a-million by
the time its young men are middle-aged. The South Saskatchewan gives it
the purest drinking water, and in the summer the prairie will be making
gold for the farmers, much of which will gravitate into “The Hat.” I
might add that the street lamps burn all day because it is cheaper to
let them burn than to employ labour in putting them out and relighting
them.
[Illustration: CALGARY.]
I found further on, at Calgary, that that city is also utilising natural
gas, but in this case it has to be brought in pipes some 200 miles. I
was told that the work of trenching, laying the pipes, and putting on
the gas supply had been done within two months—a fact of which Calgary
was properly proud. At Calgary, a cattle and horse-raising centre, I saw
the month-old University of Calgary, housed in a modest temporary
building, with some seventy students. The Dean, Dr. Braithwaite, showed
me a syllabus of some seventy subjects, and the plan of a block of
University buildings that might well make Oxford or Cambridge “sit up
and take notice.” It would take at least $50,000,000 (£10,000,000) to
realise the scheme, but the Dean said, “It may take fifty years, but it
will be done.” Already a few citizens have subscribed 450 acres of land,
in a glorious situation, on high ground a few miles from the centre of
the city, with the serrated line of the Rocky Mountains cutting the
western horizon seventy miles away, and $500,000 are given as a
beginning. There is a strong rivalry between Calgary and Edmonton and
Saskatoon, further north in Alberta. The State University is at
Saskatoon, but Calgary is going ahead with its University for South
Alberta, and will worry the Government for a charter empowering it to
confer degrees when its students are ready for the degrees.
Central Alberta, unfortunately, I was unable to see, but I heard much
about it even on the Atlantic before I landed in Canada. There were on
board two of the leading citizens of Edmonton, Alberta. They told me of
the inexhaustible natural resources of the western-most Prairie
Province, backing on to the Rocky Mountains—land that yields 36 to 40
bushels of wheat and 50 and more bushels of oats to the acre, and under
the surface thousands of square miles of the best coal waiting to be
mined. “And there are other things,” said an ex-City Commissioner. “We
have a lake—Cold Lake—scarcely noticed on the map, yet I have seen
forty teams a day drawing the white fish from that lake for the American
market. When the great lakes, such as the Great Slave and the Lesser
Slave, are opened up, they will yield inexhaustible supplies of fish, of
enormous value. It’s marvellous! I’ve been ten years farming at
Edmonton—that is to be an old-timer in a city that has risen in
population from 5,000 to 55,000 within the decade—and I never cease to
marvel at what both land and water give us.” That “It’s marvellous!” I
kept hearing from Canadian lips all the way across.
As to British Columbia, it is destined to be a great holiday resort
alike of Canada and of the North-Western American States. We catch sight
of the serrated line of the Rockies at Calgary, clearly visible through
the transparent atmosphere at a distance of seventy miles. From Calgary
over the Rockies, and the descent through British Columbia to Vancouver,
is a run of twenty-six hours. The scenery surpasses even that of
Switzerland.
Canadians who have spent a holiday at Lake Louise or other centres for
mountain climbing and glacier exploration find even their abundant and
eloquent vocabulary insufficient to express their ecstatic admiration. I
passed through British Columbia and back in the middle of November, but
even then the hours of daylight were hours of continuous delight. From
the windows or the platform of the observation car rise on either side
the shaggy sides of mountains and beyond them peaks and peaks towering
above each other over the snow line, until they are lost in the dim
distance. Anything more exquisitely lovely than sunrise in the Rocky
Mountains it is impossible to imagine. The gilded snow peaks look like
cubes and pyramids of glittering gold. The railway itself is a continual
wonder. It is a triumph of the mind, the resolute will, the skilful
hands, and the Napoleonic organisation of labour and mechanical
ingenuity over the forces of Nature, which it would almost seem intended
to place the Rockies as an everlasting barrier between the prairie and
the Pacific. The railway now tunnels through the living rock, now
corkscrews up apparently impossible gradients, now throws itself across
terrific chasms, now winds along the edge of precipitous cliffs, now
runs through gloomy ravines as it makes its westward journey to the
coast.
British Columbia is as confident of its magnificent future as are its
sister Provinces. With the opening of the Panama Canal it looks forward
to such an outlet for its agricultural and manufacturing products as
will draw millions of people to the country and make it not only by its
scenic glories a gem of the Imperial crown, but one of the Empire’s
richest wealth-producers. As the railway descends to the lower slopes of
the Rockies the country opens out. There are large and lovely lakes
swarming with fish, a country abounding with valleys that rival
Annapolis valley of Nova Scotia and the Niagara country of South Ontario
in their fitness for fruit growing, while the humidity of the
atmosphere, the soft Pacific breezes, the flood of summer sunshine, and
the mildness of the winter give British Columbia enormous advantages
over its eastern fruit-producing rivals. Fruit alike of temperate and
sub-tropical climates ripens to perfection with marvellous rapidity,
yields incredible crops, and is of the richest flavour. In the autumn of
1912 and again in 1913 collections of British Columbia fruit won the
gold medal of the Royal Horticultural Society in London. Already British
Columbia is sending its apples and other fruit to Australia and New
Zealand, having the profitable advantage of producing its fruit during
the antipodean winter. Large numbers of British and American farmers are
settling in the valleys of British Columbia, and millions of British
capital are being invested in the purchase and development of farms.
Then British Columbia is one of the greatest lumber producing countries
of the world. Millions of square miles of forests are waiting to be
utilised. One of the sights of British Columbia is the freight train,
sometimes a hundred waggons long, drawn by two powerful engines,
conveying the prepared lumber to the coast for shipment to the States,
or climbing the Rockies eastward for the prairie. The country is
fabulously rich also in minerals, including gold. Scarcely the surface
of the mineral richness has yet been scratched. When the mining
resources are fully developed those resources alone would mean that
British Columbia will be one of the richest States of the Dominion. The
population of a country more than twice the size of Great Britain is as
yet only about 600,000, and more than a third of its population is that
of Vancouver city and Victoria in Vancouver island. I spent some time in
Vancouver city, which, within a dozen years, has grown from 12,000 to
over 100,000. Its main streets, such as Hastings Street, with its
splendid shops, would do credit to Leeds or Manchester. The “sky
scraper” is evident in Vancouver, and will be more evident if land
values continue to increase as they are increasing now. During my stay a
record in land values was made by the sale of a site on Hastings Street
at $7,500 per foot frontage. The site was already occupied by a fine
block of buildings, but the block was scarcely considered in the
transaction. It was to be torn down in order that a new block of
palatial magnificence might be erected upon it. It is clear as the day
that with its possibilities British Columbia within fifty years will be
the home of a people exceeding the population of Belgium and Holland,
and even richer than the people of those two most industrious countries.
The Grand Trunk and the Canadian Northern “steels” have already reached,
or are about to reach, the coast, opening up huge tracts of country that
will be developed after the Canadian fashion, towns being started every
other day of the week and becoming within ten years places of importance
as centres for the supply of the surrounding country. A great number of
these towns will become centres of manufacturing industry, for in
British Columbia, as in the other Provinces, the desire for
manufacturing industries is almost a fever. The banks, the great
insurance companies, and other financial concerns express their faith in
the future of British Columbia by their willingness to advance millions
for its agricultural and industrial development. The visitor to British
Columbia soon discovers that the Province might well be named the Nova
Scotia of the Pacific, for, as men of Scottish blood were among the
pioneers, discoverers and settlers, so Scotsmen by the thousand, with
their keen scent for places where money is to be made, have flocked, and
are flocking, into British Columbia. The outstanding names in Vancouver
and Victoria are Scottish names. I met one Scotsman in the timber trade
just arrived from Glasgow. He had done well in Glasgow, but he told me
that Glasgow was nothing compared to British Columbia.
The notes I have given with regard to the industrial development and the
industrial prospects of the Provinces of Canada are scanty enough, but I
hope that the glimpse given of the conditions and the outlook will prove
serviceable alike to those in the Old Country seeking homes and careers
in Canada, and to those also with loose money, who cherish a legitimate
desire to invest that money in something more remunerative and less
precarious than are most of the openings for investment in Great
Britain. A Lethbridge man told me that for ten years he had been trying
to convince his friends in England that the current rate of 8 per cent.
interest on mortgage loans in the Canadian Far West was as safe as 4 or
5 per cent. invested in gilt-edged securities in the Old Country. He had
succeeded at last in so persuading them, and several of his friends had
commissioned him to take charge of their savings and make fructifying
use of them in assisting the agricultural and industrial development of
the Far West.
The warning, of course, must be given that land sharks and sharks of
other descriptions run in hungry troops in Canada, and that a man in
England with money to invest should be quite sure that his agents or
friends in Canada are in the know and can be thoroughly relied upon.
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