As a matter of fact, our own paper business has already moved to Canada to a far greater extent than is commonly realized. Many of our largest newspapers have not only their own mills in Canada, but they own also the timber on thousands of square miles of forest lands. One estimate says sixty per cent. of the timber resources of Canada are now owned or controlled by Americans. The other day, while I was in Halifax, a group of Americans bought the timber on a seven-thousand-acre tract in Nova Scotia. There are many similar American holdings.
Canada’s water-power and her paper and pulp industry have been developed together, and each is essential to the other. It takes practically one hundred horse-power to produce a ton of paper a day, and this means that the mills must locate near available water-power or pay big bills for fuel. One of the water-power experts at Ottawa tells me that on a recent date the paper and pulp mills were using more than six hundred and thirty-seven thousand hydro-electric horse-power every twenty-four hours, in contrast with only sixty-two thousand horse-power in the form of steam. Some of the mills get their power for only one tenth of a cent per kilowatt hour or one one-hundredth of what residents of Washington, D. C, pay for their electric light.
CHAPTER XIII
TORONTO—THE CITY OF PUBLIC OWNERSHIP
Said an American whom I met in Toronto the other day:
“I don’t care for this place; it’s too much like home. When I travel I want to see something different.”
I don’t know just what this man hoped to find here in the second largest city in Canada. I fear that he expected to find Toronto so inferior that he would be able to indulge in some boasting at the expense of the Canadians. If so, he came to the wrong place, for, judged by American standards, Toronto is thoroughly alive, first class, and up-to-date.
Located on the north shore of Lake Ontario, and the political and commercial capital of Ontario province, Toronto is the “Chicago of Canada.” It is larger than Buffalo or San Francisco, and nearly as big as Los Angeles. It is the greatest live-stock market of all Canada, and the chief butcher shop of the Dominion. Like Chicago, it is on the route of the transcontinental railroad lines. It is the centre of tourist travel to Niagara Falls, the Thousand Islands, and the vacation lands of the North. It supplies the mines, the mills, and the farms of a region rich in natural resources, and fast becoming as highly industrialized as New England. Ontario does more than half of the manufacturing of Canada, and one third of the factories of the province are located in Toronto. Seven of the great chartered banks of the Dominion have their home offices here, and the city is second only to Montreal in its financial strength.
In Toronto, I find myself again in a city of twenty-story skyscrapers, big department stores, and American “hustle.” It is, I suppose, because it does not seem “foreign” that visitors from the States find this city disappointing. The people are mostly of British extraction, and, unlike Montreal, there are but few French, and comparatively few Catholics.
The city was founded by Tories from New York just after our Revolutionary War, and it soon became the capital of Upper Canada. Our soldiers burned it once and captured it twice during the War of 1812. Its name Toronto, an Indian word meaning “place of meeting,” was chosen about a century ago. Since then the city has doubled in population and wealth every fifteen years.
In the residential districts, I saw scores of magnificent homes that compare favourably with those of any of our large cities. The town is built entirely of brick, and sixty-seven per cent. of the homes are occupied by their owners. The residents, all of whom seem to belong to a boosters’ club, tell me that they have the lowest death rate but one of any city of five hundred thousand population in North America, and that they have fewer deaths from tuberculosis than anywhere else on the hemisphere.