The Canadian Commonwealth

by Agnes C. Laut

Along the St. Lawrence, south of the St. Lawrence and around the great cities come touches of the modern—elaborate stock farms, great factories, magnificent orchards, huge sawmills. The progress of Montreal and the City of Quebec is so intimately involved with the navigation of the St. Lawrence route and the development of railroads that it must be dealt with separately; but it may be said here that nearly all the old seigneurial tenures—Crown grants of estates to the nobility of New France—have passed to alien hands. The system itself, the last relic of feudal tenure in Canada, was abolished by Canadian law. What, then, is the aim of Quebec as a factor in Canada's destiny? It may be said perfectly frankly that with the exception of such enlightened men as Laurier, Quebec does not concern herself with Canada's destiny. In a war with France, yes, she would give of her sons and her blood; in a war against France, not so sure. "Why are you loyal?" I asked a splendid scholarly churchman of the old régime—a man whose works have been quoted by Parkman. "Because," he answered slowly, "because—you—English—leave us—alone to work out our hopes." "What are those hopes?" I asked. He waved his hand toward the window—church spires and yet more spires far as we could see down the St. Lawrence—another New France conserving the religious ideals that had been crushed by the republicanism of the old land. Let it be stated without a shadow of doubt—Quebec never has had and never will have the faintest idea of secession. Her religious freedom is too well guaranteed under the present régime for her to risk change under an untried order of independence or annexation. The church wants Quebec exactly as she is—to work out her destiny of a new and regenerate France on the banks of the St. Lawrence.

A certain section of the French oppose Canada embroiling herself in European wars. They do this conscientiously and not as a political trick to attract the votes of the ultramontane French. One of the most brilliant supporters Sir Wilfred Laurier ever had flung his chances of a Cabinet place to the winds in opposing Canada's participation in the Boer War. He not only flung his chances to the winds, but he ruined himself financially and was read out of the party. The motive behind this opposition to Canada's participations in the Imperial wars is, perhaps, three-fold. French Canada has never forgotten that she was conquered. True, she is better off, enjoys greater religious liberty, greater material prosperity, greater political freedom than under the old régime; but she remembers that French prestige fell before English prestige on the Plains of Abraham. The second motive is an unconscious feeling of detachment from British Imperial affairs. Why should French Canada embroil herself and give of her blood and means for a race alien to herself in speech and religion? The Monroe Doctrine forever defends Canada from seizure by European power. Why not rest under that defense and build up a purely Canadian power? The third motive is almost subconscious. What if a European war should involve French-Catholic Canada on the side of Protestant England against French-Catholic France, or even Catholic Italy? Quebec feels herself a part of Canada but not of the British Empire; and it is a great question how much Laurier's support of the British in the Boer War had to do with that partial defection of Quebec which ultimately defeated him on Reciprocity; for if there is one thing the devout son of the church fears more than embroilment in European war, it is coming under the republicanizing influence of the United States. Under Canadian law the favored status of the church is guaranteed. Under American law the church would be on the same footing as all other denominations.

IV

When one comes to Ontario, one is dealing with the kitchen garden of the Dominion—in summer a land of placid sky-blue lakes, and amber-colored wooded rivers, and trim, almost garden-like farms, and heavily laden orchards, and thriving cities beginning to smoke under the pall of the increasing and almost universal factory. Under its old boundaries Ontario stood just eighteen thousand square miles larger than France. Under its new boundaries extending to Hudson Bay, Ontario measures almost twice the area of France. France supports a population of nearly forty millions; Ontario, of barely two and a half millions. Both Ontario and France are equally fertile and equally diversified in fertility. Along the lakes and clustered round Niagara is the great fruit region—vineyards and apple orchards that are gardens of perfection. North of the lakes is a mixed farm region. Parallel with the latitude skirting Georgian Bay begins the Great Clay belt, an area of heavily forested lands about seven hundred miles north to south and almost a thousand diagonally east to west. On its southern edge this hinterland, which forms the watershed between Hudson Bay and the St. Lawrence, seems to be rock-bound and iron-capped. For years travelers across the continent must have looked through the car windows across this landscape of windfall and fire as a picture of desolation. Surely, "here was nothing," as some of the first explorers said when they viewed Canada from Labrador; but pause; not so fast! Here lay, if nothing else, an area of timber limits seven hundred by one thousand miles; and as the timber burned off curious mineral outcroppings were observed. When the railroad was graded through what is now known as Sudbury, there was a report of a great find of copper. Expert after expert examined it, and company after company forfeited options and refused to bond it. Finally a shipment was sent out to a smelter across the border. The so-called "copper" was pronounced "nickel"—the greatest deposit of the metal needed for armor plating known in the world. In fact, only one other mine could compete against the Sudbury nickel beds—the French mines of New Caledonia. Here was something, surely, in this rock-bound iron region of desolation, which passing travelers had pronounced worthless.

The discovery of silver at Cobalt came by an almost similar chance. Grading an extension of a North Ontario railroad projected purely for the sake of prospective settlers, workmen came on surface deposits of "rose" silver—almost pure metal, some of it; and there resulted such a mining boom and series of quick fortunes as had made Klondike famous. And Cobalt and Sudbury are at only the southern edge of the unexplored hinterland of Ontario. Old records of the French régime, daily journals of the Hudson's Bay Company fur-traders, repeatedly refer to well-known mines between Lake Superior and James Bay; but fur-traders discouraged mining; and this region is less known to-day than when coureur de bois and voyageur threaded river and lake and leafy wilderness. Ontario, like Quebec, is only on the outer edge of realizing her own wealth.

V

We sometimes speak as though Canada had had her boom and it was all over. She has had her boom, and the boom has exploded, and it is a good thing. When inflation collapses, a country gets down to reality; and the reality is that Canada has barely begun to develop the exhaustless mine of wealth which Heaven has given her. Ontario, complacent with a fringe of prosperity along lake front, is an instance; Quebec, with only a border on each bank of her great rivers peopled, is another instance; and the prairie provinces are still more striking illustrations of the sleeping potentialities of the Dominion. In our dark days we used to call those three prairie provinces between Lake Superior and the Rockies "the granary of the Empire." I am afraid it was more in bravado, hoping against hope, than in any other spirit; for we were raising little grain and exporting less and receiving prices that hardly paid for the labor. That was back in the early nineties. To-day, what? One single year's wheat crop from one only of those provinces equals more gold in value than ever came out of Klondike. If Britain were cut off from every other source of food supply, those three provinces could feed the British Isles with their surplus wheat. To be explicit, credit Great Britain with a population of forty-five millions. Apportion to each six bushels of wheat—the per capita requirement for food, according to scientists. Great Britain requires two hundred and eighty to three hundred million bushels of wheat for bread only—not to be manufactured into cereal products, which is another and enormous demand in itself. Of the wheat required for bread, Great Britain herself raises only fifty to sixty million bushels, leaving a deficit, which must come from outside sources, of two hundred million bushels.

In 1912 Canada raised one hundred and ninety-nine million bushels of wheat. In 1913, of grain products, Canada exported one hundred and ten million bushels; of flour products, almost twenty million dollars' worth. Under stress of need or high prices these totals could easily be trebled. The figures are, indeed, bewildering in their bigness. In the three prairie provinces there were under cultivation in 1912 for all crops only sixteen and one-half million acres.[10] At twenty bushels to the acre this area put under wheat would feed Great Britain. But note—only sixteen and one-half million acres were under cultivation. There have been surveyed as suitable for cultivation one hundred and fifty-eight million acres. The land area of the three prairie provinces is four hundred and sixty-six million acres. If only half the land surveyed as suitable for cultivation were put in wheat—namely seventy-nine million acres; and if it yielded only ten bushels to the acre (it usually yields nearer twenty than ten), the three prairie provinces of Canada would be producing crops equal to the entire spring wheat production of the United States. Grant, then, two bushels for reseeding, or one hundred and fifty-eight million bushels, and six bushels for food, or fifty million bushels, the three prairie provinces would still have for export more than five hundred million bushels. All this presupposes population. Granting each man one hundred and sixty acres, it presupposes 493,750 more farmers than are in the West; but coming to Canada yearly are four hundred thousand settlers; so that counting four out of every five settlers children, in half a decade at the least, Western Canada will have five hundred thousand more farmers—enough to feed Great Britain and still have a surplus of wheat for Europe.

In connection with wheat exports from the West one factor should never be ignored—the influence of the Great Lakes and the Soo Canal in reducing freight to the West. Great Lakes freight tolls are to-day the cheapest in the world, and their influence in minimizing the toll on the all-land haul must never be ignored. Freight can be carried on the Great Lakes one thousand miles for the same rate charged on rail rate for one hundred miles.[11]

And wheat is not the only product of the three prairie provinces. On the borderland between Manitoba and Saskatchewan are enormous deposits of coal which have not yet been explored. Canoeing once through Eastern Saskatchewan and Northern Manitoba, I saw a piece of almost pure copper brought down from the hinterland of Churchill River by an Indian, from an unknown mine, which no white man has yet found. On the borderland between Alberta and British Columbia is a ridge of coal deposits which such conservative experts as the late George Dawson estimated would mine four million tons a year for five thousand years. These coal deposits seem almost nature's special provision for the treeless plains.