In British Columbia, and to a less extent throughout Canada, are to be found numbers of quiet, industrious Chinamen, working on the railways, in the hotels of the West, in the canning factories of the Pacific Coast, and in laundries from Victoria to Halifax. Despite the heavy head tax of $500 (£100) on each newcomer, no less than 6,083 Chinamen came to Canada in a recent year. Amongst them are very few women; but a number of young boys have recently been brought out by their relatives to attend the public schools, with a view to their learning English and the “Western learning” that goes with it.
The records of the British and Foreign Bible Society are suggestive in connection with the influx of foreigners into the Dominion. In 1912 sales were made of the Bible, or portions of it, in 44 languages in Toronto alone; and of 110 languages in all Canada. The earliest foreign version of the Scriptures issued by the Bible Society in its first year—1804—was, by the way, that intended for the Mohawk Indians in Canada. Many organizations, such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations and the Salvation Army are doing their useful work all over Canada. There is indeed great scope for such organizations, for the Dominion is full of young people and friendless strangers, who in their loneliness are in great need of a helping hand.
But constantly fresh districts open beyond the reach of the churches and philanthropic agencies, and here the need is for individuals whose Christianity is deep enough to stand the hard test of isolation. Many immigrants (so-called Christian), when deprived of church services and the influences of old days, seem to forget their faith. But to those who hold fast their religion under the new trials may come the reward of giving an uplift to, and stamping a Christian character upon, a whole community. Indeed, a neighbourhood often reflects for years the type of its earlier settlers.
V
INDUSTRIES AND TRANSPORT
THE most important industry of Canada is, of course, agriculture, which employs nearly twice as many people as any other class of industries, and has a greater annual product. With comparatively few exceptions, the farmers of Canada own their own land. Considered from the point of view of its returns, the greatest crop is wheat. Saskatchewan ranks first as a wheat-growing province; Manitoba and Alberta coming respectively second and third. In the older provinces the farmers are going in to a great extent for mixed farming, and for the raising of apples and other fruit. British Columbia is also giving much attention to the fruit industry. At present many of the prairie farms are devoted solely to the growing of grain; but already the leaders of the agricultural world of the Dominion are urging the extension of “mixed farming,” for the sake of saving the fertile soil from exhaustion and for the simplification of the labour problem, which is aggravated by the crowding of all the work of the farms into a few brief weeks of summer.
The second great industry of those depending directly on natural resources is lumbering. When the French settled on the St. Lawrence, they perceived at once the value of the forest wealth of the land, reporting to the home government that the colony would prove a rich source for the supply of masts and spars for the royal navy; and soon “stringent regulations were issued for the preservation of the standing oak.” The early British governors were also instructed to take measures for the preservation of lumber likely to be useful for the navy.
The export of Canada’s forest products began, it is said, in 1667, when the first shipload of lumber was sent to Europe. For years forest products came first in value on the list of exports. During the earlier part of the nineteenth century, Canada’s lumber went chiefly to Great Britain; but during the last forty years much has been exported to the United States. This has, however, been offset in part by considerable imports of American lumber into Canada.
In Canada there is, of course, an immense domestic demand for wood. Over half the people live in wooden houses, immense quantities of wood are still used as fuel, our thousands of miles of railway tracks are laid on wooden ties or “sleepers;” fleets of wooden ships and boats still ply on our coast and inland waters—in fact, it has been said that “our civilization is built on wood. From the cradle to the coffin in some shape or other it surrounds us as a convenience or necessity.” Our childhood’s toys, our furniture, the very paper on which the news of the day is printed, are forest products strangely transmuted. No sane person would dispute the value of the forests, and Canada is richly endowed in this respect; though, perhaps, hardly so richly as some estimates would lead us to believe.
In time past there has been most reckless waste of the Dominion’s forest wealth. In early pioneering days, perhaps it was unavoidable that the immigrants, far from markets, and hemmed in by great woods, should treat the trees as natural enemies, and clear them off the face of the earth as rapidly and as thoroughly as they could. So, in Ontario, were destroyed millions of magnificent trees; in many instances of kinds that would now be of immense value for the making of the better kinds of furniture; but black walnut trees were used to make fences of, and beeches and maples, too heavy to raft down the lakes to the seaports, as was done with the pine, were drawn together and burned in great heaps so that the settler could plant his first little crops of corn and vegetables amongst their stumps, and could turn an honest penny by selling the potash he made from their ashes.
Not only the pioneers, however, have been responsible for the destruction of trees. The Indians and hunters of game in the woods, the lumbermen, leaving their great heaps of dry brush and other inflammable refuse, only needing a chance spark from the lighting of a pipe, or a camp fire carelessly left burning, to turn it into kindling, ready laid for a great conflagration; the railways with the unguarded smoke stacks of their engines, have all had their share in the destruction of the forests; and it has been estimated that more timber has been destroyed in the Dominion by fire than by the axe. The nation is, however, awakening to the seriousness of the situation. For the last fourteen years the Canadian Forestry Association, with branches all over the Dominion, has been doing excellent work in disseminating information and rousing public interest concerning the preservation of the forests, and a new governmental policy has been inaugurated. Large areas of land have been set apart in Ontario and other provinces and by the Dominion government, where it has direct control, as “Forest Reserves.”
In 1909 there was established the non-partizan “Conservation Commission,” upon which each province is represented in the person of the cabinet minister most definitely connected with the administration of natural resources. Ontario’s representative, for instance, is the Minister of Lands and Mines. The several universities of Canada are also represented. The functions of the Commission are advisory and educational, and its members are carefully studying the various natural resources. But it is recognized that the people are the greatest asset the country possesses; and while the Commission endeavours to devise plans for avoiding wasteful methods in lumbering and mining, to prevent the depletion of the fish in the waters and the game in the woods, it is concerned above all to discover means of stopping the fearful waste of human life by industrial accidents, unhealthy conditions, preventable diseases, and the ignorant treatment of infants and young children, which last results in such appalling mortality in the first five years of life.
It must not, however, be inferred from this reference to infant mortality that the climate of Canada is by any means unhealthy. The experience of immigrants from the British Isles and from all European countries shows that it is well fitted for Europeans; and, as a general rule, the children especially enjoy the cold months, finding delight in the sports that winter brings. Often the snow is too firm and powdery for that favourite sport of British youngsters—snowballing! But little ones who have not long learned to toddle alone can find amusement with their small sleighs, and for bigger children and young boys and girls there are the endless delights of “coasting” and toboganning and skating and snow-shoeing and ski-ing.
Of course, here the country children have the best of it. But if one wants to realize the delights offered by a brisk winter’s day, he cannot do better than visit some open hilly spot within the limits of one of Canada’s cities—especially on a Saturday afternoon when the fathers have time to join in the fun. Then the white hillside is fairly alive with children in gay blanket-coats (often of scarlet) and knitted French-Canadian “tuques” ending in saucy bobs on the top, or long bag-like arrangements finished with dangling tassels; but it is the eagerness of the children and their quaint attitudes which give the picture its chief interest. A favourite way of making the descent is prone on the little sleighs, head foremost, legs stuck stiffly up from the knees, or trailing out behind, as an excellent rudder. Sometimes two “bob-sleighs,” connected by a long board, form a more ambitious vehicle for half a dozen boys and girls at once, and loud are the shrieks and the laughter, as the “bobs” jolt over some rough bit of the track or shoot their passengers off at last into some heap of snow. As a rule, the mothers see that the youngsters are warmly clad in woollen garments from head to heel, and then no one is hurt by a roll in the soft snow.
But all this is, I am afraid, a long digression from the serious subject of industries. Canada’s mineral products come next after those of the forest, and make a various list. It includes gold and silver, copper, nickel and lead; coal and iron; petroleum, natural gas, cement, clay products and building stones. These are widely distributed, and every day fresh discoveries are being made of deposits of useful minerals. In several instances the cutting of railways has led accidentally to such discoveries. This was the case with the copper ores at Sudbury and the silver at Cobalt; but scientists sent out by government and prospectors are always busily searching for new mineral fields. The central provinces of Canada import immense quantities of coal; though both in Nova Scotia to the east, and Alberta and British Columbia to the west, there are immense coal beds, which are being worked at the present time.
Government has made great efforts by the giving of bounties and by protective legislation to stimulate the manufacture of iron in this country. The result is that Canada, which in 1883 had only three or four small blast furnaces, had in 1913 eighteen furnaces, many of them large and of an up-to-date type, employing 1,778 men.
The fisheries of Canada are one of her greatest assets. In fact, it has been claimed that they are the most extensive in the world. But here, as with lumber, untold recklessness has reigned for generations, with the result that in some of the great lakes the fisheries are of much less value than they used to be. It is so with Lake Ontario, in which case the Americans must share the responsibility of depletion with the Canadians. Accounts of the catches of salmon and white fish made in the lake in the pioneer days read now like fables.
But the coast waters of the Maritime Provinces and British Columbia, and hundreds of the lakes in the interior, still abound with fish, and for a number of years “conservation” of the fisheries has been receiving careful attention. There are close seasons in fishing, regulated by act of parliament, to prevent reckless destruction, and there are now forty-one fish-breeding hatcheries.
Government has endeavoured to stimulate the fishing industry by a system of bounties; by establishing intelligence bureaux, with reporting stations along the coasts of the Maritime Provinces, which give “timely warning to the fishermen of a strike in of fish, of the weather and of other facts, early information about which is important to success.” Cold storage establishments at different places for the keeping of supplies of bait have also been helpful to the fishing industry.
In the year 1911-12 the value of the fish taken and of fish exported was greater than ever before, but the figures of the returns do not by any means represent the whole value, for fish is used extensively as food, wherever it is caught. In order of value, salmon, caught chiefly on the Pacific Coast, comes first on the list of Canadian food fishes, the worth of the catch last year amounting to $10,333,000 or about £2,067,000. Next in order come cod, lobsters (of which fifty millions were caught in the year), herring, halibut, and oysters. In addition to fish, 1,244 whales were taken in Canadian waters. Canada’s inland sea—Hudson Bay—is said to be one of “the richest whaling grounds in the world.” It is also believed to be richly supplied with valuable fish of many kinds, but its fisheries are yet inaccessible to markets and are undeveloped. The great northern lakes are full of valuable freshwater fish. Nearly a hundred thousand men, including those who work on shore, find employment in the fisheries.
From the fisheries the next step is naturally to the shipping interests. 1912 was a year of great expansion in the industry, and Canada moved from the tenth to the ninth place in the list of shipping nations; but she was fifth in the year 1874, at which period many ships were built in her yards. The reason for the falling off was the change from wooden to iron and steel ships. But the shipbuilding industry is beginning to revive, and at seven different points on the Atlantic, the Pacific, the St. Lawrence, and the Great Lakes, there are large dry docks for the construction and repair of vessels. In this connection it may be of interest to remark that the first vessel to cross the Atlantic under steam the whole way was the “Royal William,” built at Wolfe’s Cove, near Quebec, in the winter of 1830-31. Her historic voyage was made in 1833 from Pictou, in Nova Scotia, to London.
If the tonnage of vessels owned in Canada shows a decrease from the figures of forty years ago, it is hardly necessary to say that this is by no means the case with the tonnage of vessels required for the transportation of freight and Canadian passengers. In fact, little over one-tenth of Canada’s exports is carried in Canadian vessels. The shipping employed is divided (so far as statistics are concerned) into three branches, according to whether it is employed in the overseas carrying trade between Canada and other countries; the inland lakes and rivers transport service; and the coasting trade, which, oddly enough, includes the activities of vessels voyaging from a Canadian port on the Atlantic, round Cape Horn to another Canadian port on the Pacific. The opening of the Panama Canal will enable these “coasters” to shorten their journey from Montreal to Vancouver (for example) by 7,221 miles.
Perhaps no nation is more favoured than Canada in the possession of inland waterways—though to take advantage of them to the present extent (and great expansion is possible) has required the construction of numerous canals and locks, to overcome differences of level; and, in some instances, to connect natural systems of navigable water. There is one great inland waterway in Canada, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the head of Lake Superior, by which large steamers can make a voyage equal to that from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to Liverpool. In this distance of two thousand two hundred miles there are only seventy-three miles of canals, with forty-eight locks overcoming five hundred and fifty-one feet of height.
Already, it is stated, the tonnage passing through the Sault Ste. Marie canals to avoid the rapids between Lake Superior and Huron is in amount three times that which passes through the Suez canal. By this route immense quantities of grain are brought to the ocean ports; and it is anticipated that within a short time when the deeper Welland canal is completed, ocean-going steamers will be able to carry their cargoes, without transhipment, all the way from the Lake Superior ports to those of Great Britain.
What this will mean to the Canadian West is evident, when one considers the cheapness of water-carriage compared with railway transport. The advantage of the former is indeed so great that, when time is not a primary consideration, freight from Liverpool for Vancouver or Victoria is carried all the way round by Cape Horn in preference to sending it by the more direct route to St. John or Montreal, and thence by rail across the continent to its destination. The first attempt to improve artificially the inland navigation was made in 1779, when canals were begun to overcome the rapids immediately above the Lachine rapids. But there are miles upon miles of navigable lakes and rivers in the Dominion which have needed no improvement.
Nevertheless, though the importance of the inland waterways can hardly be over-estimated, it is perhaps not too much to say that the Dominion of Canada has been made by her railways, for it was these which made possible a real union between the widely separated provinces of her earlier years; and the American description of “the Canadian Pacific Railway” as the “Dominion on wheels” expressed a most interesting fact. The building of railways began in 1836—with a sixteen-mile line (on which horses instead of locomotives were first used) between Laprairie, near Montreal, and St. John’s on the Richelieu. Three years later another short line of six miles was made in Nova Scotia, upon which a steam-engine was used to draw coal from the Albion mines to New Glasgow.
It was not till the fifties that railway building in Canada was begun in earnest; but before that decade had half gone by, there were five hundred and sixty-three miles of railway, and by 1867 this length was multiplied by four. Since Confederation Canada’s miles of railway have been multiplied almost by twelve, exclusive of sidings. Piling up figures, however, is a tiresome way to tell what is really a very interesting chapter in the history of Canada.
The railways linking Canada together have, indeed, cost the people and the Dominion and the provincial governments millions of money; and in early days, many municipalities, for the sake of having railways, seriously embarrassed themselves with debt. But the need seemed great. Lord Durham advised the building of the “Intercolonial Railway”—the line owned and operated by the Dominion government—to knit together the Maritime Provinces with the Canadas; but the difficulties and delays over this railway were endless, and it was not completed till 1876. For many years it was operated at a loss, but it has developed the country through which it passes and has greatly increased the trade between the several eastern provinces.
Before the era of railways, dwellers in New Brunswick who wished to go to Quebec used not infrequently to go on foot through the intervening wilderness in the winter time. So the first Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick once tramped through the snowy woods to visit his brother the Governor-General, Lord Dorchester; and so in 1813, when the war with the United States was raging, some companies of New Brunswick troops marched on snowshoes to the aid of their hard-pressed brethren in Canada. Much later, if a traveller wished to go from Nova Scotia to Toronto, it was the easiest way to take ship to Boston, and go thence through the “States” by rail to “Canada”—as the Nova Scotians continued to call the provinces touching on the St. Lawrence for long after the name was extended to the whole Dominion. This journey to “Canada” was quite an adventure to an untravelled person who had been born and brought up almost within sound of the sea. But the long-delayed construction of the “Intercolonial” gradually changed that condition of affairs.
The Grand Trunk is the pioneer of the several great company-owned railway systems, having absorbed many of the smaller railways begun in the fifties. For years it was not a profitable undertaking to its shareholders; but now its lines make a regular network in the older portions of Canada; and the Grand Trunk Pacific is being rapidly pushed to completion north of its older competitor in the West, the Canadian Pacific Railway. It is expected that when this “National Transcontinental Line” is finished it will shorten the trip round the globe by a week.
It is helping, moreover, to give Canada breadth from south to north. Already settlers are going into the so-called “Great Clay Belt” of good agricultural land in Northern Ontario. Already a string of little towns has sprung up along the Grand Trunk Pacific in the western provinces. Already its new seaport—“Prince Rupert”—five hundred and fifty miles north-west of Vancouver, and five hundred miles nearer to the east than any other Pacific Coast port, is an accomplished fact, where a population of four or five thousand is impatiently awaiting the uniting of the two portions of the railway which are being built westward and eastward, to meet in the mountains. Prince Rupert is close to some of the best fishing grounds in the world; and when the Grand Trunk Pacific line is completed it will put the fisheries of the North Pacific Coast in touch with a host of new markets.
It is difficult for people who have lived always in small well-settled countries to imagine what the opening of a great new railway means to the Dominion.
Over seventy years ago the people who see visions and dream dreams were prophesying a new trade route between east and west, by which the teas and silks of China and Japan would be brought by steam power along rivers, canals and railways across what is now the Dominion of Canada. In 1846 Sir Richard Bonnycastle, lieutenant-colonel of the Royal Engineers, predicted “We shall yet place an iron belt from the Atlantic to the Pacific—a railway from Halifax to Nootka Sound—and thus reach China in a pleasant voyage.” Three years later another officer of the Royal Engineers, Major Carmichael Smith, published a pamphlet urging the construction of an “Inter-oceanic railway from Halifax to the mouth of the Fraser river,” with a map upon which he traced a line almost identical with the routes ultimately adopted for the Intercolonial and Canadian Pacific Railways. But it was not until 1870, when British Columbia agreed to come into Confederation on condition that the inter-oceanic railway should be built, that any definite step was taken towards the construction of Canada’s first “transcontinental line.”
In the following year surveys for the line were begun under Mr. (afterwards Sir) Sandford Fleming. But the end was not yet in sight. The construction of the line was an immense task to be undertaken by a country so young and so sparsely settled as Canada, and fourteen strenuous years of political strife and struggle against all kinds of difficulty were to pass before the last spike of the railway was driven by Lord Strathcona (then Sir Donald Smith) at Craigellachie in the Eagle pass.
To the company, which finally built the line, the government gave $25,000,000 (£5,130,000) in cash, an even greater value in portions of the road already constructed, and twenty-five million acres of land, scattered through the prairie provinces, and the Canadian Pacific Railway is now a very wealthy corporation, which carries on numerous enterprises outside the actual business of railway transportation. For instance, there is a fleet of seventy-three Canadian Pacific Railway steamships, most of which are large vessels sailing the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Great Lakes. These ships carry annually over half a million passengers and give employment to over twelve thousand men. The company also owns a number of luxurious hotels, including the happily-named “Château Frontenac,” which the new arrival from Europe, coming up the St. Lawrence, can scarcely fail to notice, crowning the rock of Quebec, near to the spot where old Count Frontenac, from his little “Château St. Louis,” lorded it over the rough bushrangers and determined churchmen of New France.
The company still owns some ten or eleven million acres of land in the four western provinces; and during recent years has inaugurated a policy of irrigating some naturally rather arid lands in Alberta and preparing there what are known as “ready-made farms,” for suitable immigrants. This experiment has inspired the governments of some of the provinces to make similar preparation for immigrant farmers. The preparation of the farms for their future owners is, of course, a business enterprize; none the less it has smoothed the way for many newcomers.
Looking at the map of the country served by the Canadian Pacific, we see no longer a line but a network of lines (even in the West) where fifty years ago it was generally supposed that nothing would grow. It is Canada’s vast wheat fields, which have made possible her huge railway systems, and while new lands are year by year being brought under cultivation, the railways will continue to add to their mileage. On the other hand, every year the new lines of railway open fresh lands to settlers.
Another Canadian railway that has a remarkable record is the Canadian Northern, which claims to have grown at the rate of a mile a day for the last sixteen years. This railway also has obtained most liberal government assistance and is a transcontinental system in the making. In fact, contracts are let for the completion of the whole distance between the city of Quebec and Port Mann in British Columbia; but it has gone on the plan of building short lines in different districts, to be afterwards combined and connected to form the whole system. Already it has run many branch lines from Winnipeg—westward and northward and southward—into the great grain-growing districts, and in 1912 it hauled no less than sixty million bushels of wheat.
There are as well a number of smaller railways, and also a number of lines (1,308 miles in length in 1912) in which electricity is the motive power. Many of these are, of course, the street railways of cities and towns.
There is much of human interest connected with a great railway, dissipater of romance, destroyer of the picturesque, as it is generally asserted to be. Consider it from the large point of view of its inception, its planning, its organization; the political fight to gain for it a legalized existence and the support of public funds and grants of land. It may be that Canada has time and again been recklessly generous in the price she has given for her transportation schemes, and that she has paid too highly for the services of the forceful men able to overcome the difficulties of such enterprises—but railways and yet more railways is still her cry; and the Napoleon of finance who can organize the company to build them is counted worthy of a reward so rich that he and his associates may be tempted to grasp at more than their share of the good things that their line opens to the world, and to use their power not always for the public good. Canada needs the great organizers of industry and more of them; but she needs, too, statesmen ever watchful of the public interests, who shall know how to economize as well as how to spend, and shall be strong enough to keep control over, and use for the good of all the people, the different human forces which are engaged, blindly or wisely, selfishly or nobly, in making out of several comparatively weak provinces a big nation, which patriots hope and trust may be also a great nation.
From the other point of view, the subject of railways—as it touches the life and well-being of individuals in Canada—is also intensely interesting. Not long ago I talked with a man who had done well in the West, but had gone into a district ahead of the railway, expecting it to be made in a year. With this hope he had settled forty miles from his next neighbour, seventy-five miles from a post office, and fifty miles from the point where he had to market his grain; but instead of one year he had to wait ten for the promised line. No wonder that the dweller in the country places loves to see the train pass by. It means in illness, possibility of getting skilled help of doctor and nurse, in health, opportunity of intercourse with friends and neighbours; for the young and old, a fuller social life; for the farmer, access to markets and oftentimes prosperity instead of failure. In one word, it means opportunity in a thousand ways.
Of course, the railways employ a great army of men upon their construction on the one hand, and their operation on the other. In 1912 the C.P.R. alone had 85,000 employees on its pay rolls. The numbers finding employment in connection with the transportation systems in this “country of magnificent distances” as it has been called, would be vastly increased if those engaged in the subsidiary trades were taken into account, such as the making of iron rails, the construction of cars and engines, the cutting of railway ties and so forth.
A great change has taken place in Canada recently in the occupations of the people. Sixty years ago there were only twenty-eight or thirty different kinds of manufactures carried on in the country, and of the manufacturing establishments the chief were—shipyards, saw, grist, carding, and woollen mills; distilleries, tanneries, breweries and foundries, several of which are very closely connected with agriculture. The great woollen mills and the tanneries, for instance, are all closely dependent on farm products, as the saw mills are on the natural crop of wood, and all these with distilleries, in addition, were very early established on a small scale in the several districts to supply local demands.