Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

The increasing demands of our printing presses are pushing Canada’s lumberjacks farther and farther into the forests to cut the spruce logs with which the paper mills are fed.

Some of the money voted the Toronto Harbour Commission to prepare the port for the shipping of the future has been spent in providing the people with a great beach playground at Sunnyside.

Although Ontario leads all other provinces in its industries, it is essentially an agricultural region, well adapted to mixed farming. The farmers have many coöperative organizations that also go in for politics.

The wet pulp passes through various mixing and bleaching processes, until it becomes a gray-white mush that looks like chewed paper. It is then ready for the paper machines. It flows first on to a broad belt of woven copper wire screening, many times finer than anything you use in your windows. As it passes over this moving belt, some of the water is sucked out, and a thin coating of pulp remains. This passes on to a cloth belting that carries it over and under a series of huge cylinders, heated by steam. These take out the rest of the water, and the pulp has become a sheet of hot, moist paper. Shiny steel rollers give the paper a smooth, dry finish. It is then wound on great spindles, and made into the huge rolls that every one has seen unloaded at newspaper offices.

In making paper, it is necessary to mix with the ground pulp a certain proportion of sulphite pulp, made by a chemical instead of a grinding process. For the sulphite the logs are cut into chips and put into great vats, where they are steam cooked with sulphurous acid. The acid disintegrates the wood, just as the stomach digests food, but it does not destroy the fibre. The result is that sulphite pulp has a longer, tougher fibre than the pulp obtained by grinding, and for this reason it is mixed with the ground pulp to give the paper greater toughness and strength.

Though it has not been very long since Canada discovered that her pulpwood forests are worth more than her gold mines, she is far from satisfied with the present situation. There is a growing movement in favour of stopping the export of pulpwood to the United States and insisting that it shall be manufactured into paper within the Dominion. It is claimed that this will not only check depletion of the forests, but will bring more paper mills to Canada. Those who support the plan have calculated that Canada now gets ten dollars out of every cord of pulpwood exported, half of which goes to the railroads. If all the wood were milled before leaving the country, they say, Canada would get five times as much, or fifty dollars instead of ten out of each cord. The government has authority to enforce the prohibition demanded, but the proposal meets with considerable opposition. The small farmers especially say that they can now get better prices for the spruce cut on their wood lots than if their market was confined to Canada only.

At the present time the total investment in Canadian paper and pulp mills is about four hundred million dollars, and the wages and salaries paid amount to over forty millions a year. To manufacture all the pulpwood now cut every twelve months would require one hundred and fifty million dollars additional capital, the erection of more than thirty new mills with a capacity of one hundred tons a day each, and eight thousand employees earning in excess of eleven million dollars a year.