CHAPTER VI
CANADIAN INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT
On the voyage up the St. Lawrence to Montreal a leading citizen of London, Ontario, discussed with me the question of Protection and Free Trade. We were passing French Canadian villages and towns on either side of the river in the Province of Quebec. The French Canadians now, as ever, are agriculturists, living a quiet rural life, raising their crops, fattening their cattle, breeding their pigs, which contribute so largely to their own larders. Said my London friend, “I have been spending six months in Europe, partly on the Continent, but with frequent visits to England. I have been amazed at the evidences of the overpowering prosperity of your British industries under the system of Free Trade. If I were living in Great Britain I should be a Free Trader out and out. You have the instinct of manufacturing industry. You had a long start of all your rivals. Geographically you are marked out to be the great manufacturing, producing and distributing centre of the world. You would be most foolish to attempt to overthrow a fiscal system under which you have done so well. But when I come to Canada I am a Protectionist out and out. You see those villages and towns. From the agricultural point of view Quebec is a flourishing Province enough, but you cannot build up a modern nation out of a race of agriculturists pure and simple. You must have manufacturing industries, and at present, as a manufacturing country, Canada is in its infancy. Our people have to acquire the manufacturing instinct. Until they have acquired it, if we allowed our country to be flooded with the manufacturing products of the United States, of the Old Country, and of France, Germany, and other countries, we should be beaten hands down and our rising manufacturing industries would be strangled in their cradle. You Britishers do not understand why we Canadians favour Protection. Protection really means that we are compelling the United States and yourselves to teach us how to become a manufacturing nation.” This will not satisfy, perhaps, English Free Traders, among whom I confess myself to be a convinced believer in the open market, but it is the view-point from which I found Canadians throughout the Eastern Provinces generally looked at the question. When I visited some of the manufacturing cities and saw the factories, through several of which I was taken, I was forced to think there was something after all in the views of the Ontario Londoner.
TORONTO. YONGE STREET, LOOKING SOUTH FROM ADELAIDE STREET.
Take Hamilton, Ontario, for instance. This flourishing city is one of the oldest in Canada. It is magnificently situated for trading on the shores of Hamilton Bay, a land-locked harbour at the head of Lake Ontario. The manufacturing quarter is well away from the beautiful residential quarters, where the prosperous Hamiltonians live in handsomely-built houses, each isolated on its own freehold plot, surrounded by a border of grass or shrubs with abundance of forest trees. It rises to the Mountain, as a steep hill is called, from the summit of which there is a very striking view of the city and a picturesque outlook over one of the most fruitful parts of the Dominion, abounding in peach and apple orchards and vineyards. Hamilton is only forty miles from Niagara Falls, and its interest in the Falls is utilitarian as well as artistic and sentimental, for it is the electric power generated at the Falls which drives the works of Hamilton, lights its streets and houses, and supplies the heating power. On my visit to the Falls I saw the great power-house in which the mighty rush of the Rapids is harnessed and tamed by the engineering skill of man and compelled to serve alike the industrial prosperity, the domestic comfort, the tram service, and the house and street lighting not only of Hamilton, but of Toronto and of many other cities. The first thing that strikes a visitor to Hamilton, if he should arrive after dark, is what he will consider the scandalous luxury of the brilliant electric lighting with which the fronts of business houses and places of entertainment literally blaze, but should the visitor express his concern at such apparent wicked waste he will be told that electricity is so cheap that its cost is practically negligible. It is to the cheapness of natural sources of power, that is given without stint, that the growing manufacturing prosperity of Canada is largely due.
It was my privilege to be convoyed around Hamilton and to be introduced to the heads of departments of some of the principal factories by Mr. H. M. Marsh, Commissioner of Industries. Through him I learned that there are no less than 400 manufacturing industries in the city, with four suburban electric railways having a combined mileage of eighty-three. There are seventy-eight churches, thirty public and four private schools, not counting a technical school, a college of music, a normal school, and a collegiate institute. There are six steamship lines connecting Hamilton with the chain of the Great Lakes and enabling it to send its products cheaply right into the centre of Canada and far south and west into the heart of the United States. Seven steam railways also enable Hamilton to send its manufactures by land transit over the North American continent and to the principal ports of the Dominion and the United States. The extent of the turnover of money in the city is shown by the fact that the bank clearings in 1911 were $125,250,000, an increase of more than $24,000,000, or nearly £5,000,000, over 1910.
A more significant fact forcibly driven home to me is that some of the largest and most rapidly advancing factories are branches of American firms. More than thirty-five American firms have invested an enormous amount of capital in buildings and plant to produce their specialities in Hamilton. On the Canadian side at Niagara Falls I found the same significant fact. The explanation is that given by my London, Ontario, friend. The Canadians are compelling the Americans to plant their factories in Canada in order that they may employ Canadian labour and teach the Canadians how to become a manufacturing nation. At the Falls I was told that by manufacturing on the Canadian side the American firms save from 10 to 35 per cent. duty which they would have to pay if their goods crossed the river. It pays them better to build and manufacture in Canada than to pay the duty.
The manufacture of agricultural implements of the most modern type for culture on the wholesale scale plays a very large part in the industrial life of Hamilton. I went over the Oliver Chilled Plough Works, an undertaking of the last year or two, but which is already doing business on an enormous scale. The works, I was told, are more up to date than even the parent works in the States, for with the ground at their disposal, and with the experience of the past, it was possible to eliminate everything that was disadvantageous and so to construct the factory and to lay down the plant as to meet exactly the requirements of the business alike in Canada and in other markets. Nothing could be more ideal than the conditions under which this industry is carried on. The ploughs produced are power ploughs furnished each with a number of coulters, from half-a-dozen to nine or more, capable of dealing with the most refractory surface. The coulters are modified to meet the varying conditions of heavy or light soil. I saw a vast number of the component parts, witnessed the processes of manufacture, the dipping of parts into baths of paint, and complete ploughs ready to be sent out either to break the virgin prairie or to replough land that had been harvested.