The Canadian Northern, then, had the elements of a great permanent success, given enough tributary population creating traffic to earn expenses and fixed charges during the earlier operating years. That there was calamitous overbuilding of Canadian railways nobody will deny. To attempt to fix responsibility for it might invite a certain degree of political controversy which no lover of a quiet life desires. This is a strictly moral tale, and a few facts will point out their own moral.
In 1904, when a general election solidified the Grand Trunk Pacific legislation, the Canadian Northern had already in existence 2,500 miles beyond Port Arthur, all aiding the Western development which was absolutely vital to Canada’s future. This railway was altogether a native growth, the executive force in which had been concerned with Western railway construction since before the first locomotive entered Winnipeg. There was no imposition from without—no grandiose scheme intended to dazzle an electorate, or fill a Parliament with swelling pride. The Canadian Northern grew in Time’s own fruitful womb; and struck its roots deep and wide all over the Western land.
From the point of view of the prairie provinces’ development, the nicer problem of the wisdom of hastening the Superior and Mountain sections may be put aside momentarily by this question: “What would be the relative positions of the two junior railways if their revenues depended solely on traffic originating between the Great Lakes and the Great Mountains?”
In different terms, the question is: “How do the old Canadian Northern and the old Grand Trunk Pacific compare, twenty years after the Grand Trunk Pacific was launched, as servants of the country, which is the only reason for their existence?”
Every commercial traveller who knows the West, and every superficial observer of the flow of grain to the Lakes’ head, is aware that years and years before the G.T.P. hauled its first car of wheat into Fort William, the Canadian Northern avalanche of grain converged upon Port Arthur from branches which appeared upon the map like the fingers of a hand.
In the year of the first G.T.P. car’s arrival at Fort William the Canadian Northern earned nearly twenty-one million dollars. If the Canadian Northern had remained a prairie road, doing business only between the Lakes and Mountains, it would never have been in Queer Street, but would have more than paid for operating costs, fixed charges and betterment requirements out of revenue, because it was the West’s own product to meet the West’s own needs.
Neither as a prairie road, nor as a prairie-and-mountain road has the Grand Trunk Pacific ever earned its operating expenses. The only section which has shown more earnings than operating expenses, is the line between Winnipeg and Fort William, which was built as the National Transcontinental. That result has only been possible to this piece of line because Canadian Northern traffic is handed to it at Winnipeg, under the co-ordinating arrangements without which for many years to come the Grand Trunk Pacific, which was built at unprecedented expense per mile for a pioneer road, would resemble nothing so much as the seven lean kine of Joseph’s immortal dream. To a large extent the former National Transcontinental is being used as the old Canadian Northern harvesters’ second track between Winnipeg and Lake Superior.
Why, then, did the Canadian Northern fall, and two great builders with it? The obvious but misleading guess is that the prosperous middle was bankrupted by the lean and voracious Montreal-Port Arthur and Edmonton-Vancouver ends. Ambition o’er-leaped itself and met the fate excessive leaping invites. The man who is a better biter than chewer will always choke. The guess and comment are plausible—much more plausible than what I believe is the true explanation of the debacle of Mackenzie and Mann, which was, finally, the war. There were other contributing causes, of course, but the real overwhelmer was Armageddon.
Few men seemed to realize in 1911 and 1912 that the period of swift expansion which had given prosperity to all sorts of businesses in Canada was about to conclude. Hindsight is proverbially better than foresight. It is easy, even for statesmen, to realize now, that there had been too little increase in the basic productions of agriculture, and too much addition to manufacturing and other plants which could only flourish permanently on a constantly expanding fruition of the soil, along with steady development of forest and mining industries.
Sir George Paish, editor of “The Statist”, after a tour of Canada before the war, said that we had furnished ourselves with plants capable of taking care of three times our then production from natural resources. Immigration was flowing too much to cities and towns. Free land was becoming comparatively scarce, and even in the prairie country sixty-five per cent. of the immigration was keeping off the farms. Early in 1912 the Government was warned in its Special Commissioner’s Report on Immigration that the basis of its immigration policy should be changed so as to deflect public money into scientific land settlement.