This enormous agricultural production means, of course, great and expanding demands for the products of manufacturing industries. In the early years of the Prairie Provinces’ development the needs were all supplied from the East, but the Prairie Provinces, like the Eastern Provinces, have their own industrial ambitions, and they are setting to work to become as far as possible manufacturing suppliers of their own necessities. Let me describe as illustrations what is taking place at Moose Jaw and Regina, the latter the capital of Saskatchewan Province.
Moose Jaw, as the name of a city, provokes smiles. It derives its name, according to local belief, from the discovery of the jaw of a moose on its site before the Canadian Pacific Railway drove its steel across the prairie. Moose Jaw was an insignificant village, and, but for the railway, an insignificant village it would have remained, its only population a few Indians and a handful of half-breeds, with an occasional visitor in the person of a Hudson’s Bay or Eastern trader or a mounted police trooper. The railway pioneers, however, saw in Moose Jaw a strategic position for a railway centre, and immediately the village began to grow by leaps and bounds. The C.P.R. has spent millions of dollars in Moose Jaw on its fifty-three miles of trackage, its stock-yards, its freight sheds and its trains and depots, built prophetically with a view to the needs of the future great manufacturing and distributing city. The Grand Trunk and Canadian Northern Railways are now entering Moose Jaw, and within a year or two fourteen lines will radiate from the city, linking it up with all Canada and the United States. Great flour mills have been established, and huge meat-packing plants, bridge and iron works are among other manufacturing concerns. The applications for building permits for new factories, mills, banks, business houses and the like are increasing with a rapidity that makes the people early on the spot smile their broadest and shake hands with each other at the stream of gold flowing into their bank accounts. To the Englishman, accustomed to the harmonious lines of handsomely-built business streets and macadamised roads, with their hard surface and the broad pavement, Moose Jaw does not make a particularly favourable first impression.
Moose Jaw is at present a muddy place, with “side walks” only just making their appearance. With sewage construction, water and gas supply and other necessaries in progress, the roads are always “up,” but the automobile owners who kindly “run us round” care nothing for a foot depth of mud and ruts such as were never seen in English lanes. They are “cross country” riders of the most fearless type, and bump English visitors in and out of the ruts and up and down folds of the prairie in a fashion that puts British courage to a severe test. Moose Jaw mud, like all prairie mud, is of the fattest, stickiest kind, but, as a leading citizen said to me, “Our streets five years ago were just muddy tracks, but it was prairie mud; it grew our ‘No. 1 Hard,’ the world’s standard in wheat; it gave us our money, and we cheerfully put up with it.”
Moose Jaw has boundless confidence in itself. It believes, like all the cities of the West, that it is the city with a future. Other cities may be going ahead, but Moose Jaw will always show them the way. The pride of local patriotism is nowhere so highly developed as in these Western cities.
“Have you been at Winnipeg lately?” asked a Winnipegian of a man on the train. “Yes, I was there at the beginning of last week. It’s a growing city.” “Ah!” said the Winnipegian, “but you should see it now!” And here, be it said, the people of all these provinces and cities are consummate masters of the art of “boosting.” They have boundless faith in their cities and themselves, and they try to infuse their faith into others. They say, in effect, as a firm that opened a new shop in one of the cities inscribed across the frontage, “We are It. Watch us Grow.”
Moose Jaw, I am certain, would never dream of yielding the palm to Winnipeg or any other city of the prairie. Those other cities might have got the start, but Moose Jaw will catch them up and overtake them. Since my return it is reported that an inexhaustible supply of natural gas has been discovered near to the city. If this be so, then the cheapening of power which the gas will cause will certainly justify Moose Jaw in its most optimistic anticipations of its future.
As to Regina, it is bound, as the capital city, to go ahead alike as a business, a manufacturing, and a social centre. It is the commercial centre—the Railway Junction City—of millions of acres of corn-growing prairie. At Regina I had an insight into the municipal life of a Western Canadian city. We are discussing at home town planning, the land question, the education question and all sorts of social reforms which to carry out make heavy demands on the rates and taxes. We are a very ancient country with a most complicated web of vested interests and an overcrowded population. There is sharp division between class and class, Church and Church, party and party. Canada, and especially Western Canada, with its unlimited area of land, originally the property of the State, is able to deal with all such questions and problems in a way that is impossible in our own country. “Single tax” and “town planning” go together in these new cities. The newborn municipal authority decides what shall be the area of the city. The lines of development are decided on. The city surveyor draws up a plan of the sections, which are sub-divided into convenient lots. The plots are then assessed. Those purchasing a plot must pay the tax on the assessment, whether it is built on or not. Plots are reserved not only as sites for schools, city hall, parks, and other public purposes, but to provide by their sale, when the value has enhanced by natural increment, for the building and possibly the maintenance of the schools and other public institutions. Thus, at Regina, I was shown the new City Hall, built at a cost of £100,000, and was told it had not cost a penny in rates, for the whole of the cost was met by the sale of municipal reservations of land. In those cities schools, as soon as families arrive, are among the first and finest buildings to be erected, but the cities grow so fast that the school accommodation is soon out-distanced, and temporary schools spring up, to give way at the earliest possible moment to splendid permanent buildings. It was good to see the youngsters romping in their playtime, and to be told that “There’s not a poor person in our city, Sir, and we don’t mean there to be one. Sure!” Banks are numerous, with very handsome buildings, but one soon understands why they multiply. The banks finance the builders of the great hotels, “departmental stores,” the builders of their own homes on the residential lots secured—for every householder wants to live in his own detached freehold house on his own freehold plot—and they also finance the farmers and others engaged in gathering the “gold of the prairie.”
REGINA.
Regina is laid out on the best lines with wise prevision of the needs of the future. In the town planning quarters are reserved for manufacturing industries, business centres, residential streets and suburbs, schools and churches. The quarters are being rapidly occupied, but the city, of course, is still in a very unfinished condition. Like Winnipeg and Moose Jaw, however, it believes that Regina is “It.” It has a brand-new Parliament House, a long, spacious building, with a handsome façade facing a grassy park with a lake fed by the Waskanna rivulet. I had a chat with Mr. Motherwell, Minister of Agriculture, himself a model farmer, a prairie Cincinnatus, who is deservedly held in the highest estimation by his fellow-citizens. Those Ministers of State of the Prairie Provinces, and even those of the Dominion Government at Ottawa, are not the awful unapproachable beings that Ministers of State are in the European Governments. They are men of the people, sprung from the people, not usually educated in colleges and universities, but educated practically in the school of the world. They understand thoroughly the conditions and the needs of their country, and my talks with Mr. Motherwell and other public men, with the information in the shape of Government publications which they placed at my disposal, were a revelation of the practical foresight and wisdom with which the Canadian Governments are laying the foundations of the vast populations which within a few years will occupy the Provinces. Nowhere in the world is the necessity of an educated people more keenly realised, and nowhere is such generous provision made for the education. The best lots on the surveyed sites of the town to be laid out by newly-formed municipalities are reserved for schools—not only the spots on which the schools are to be built, but spots which by their unearned increment, as the town develops, shall be sold and the proceeds applied to the maintenance of the schools. This avoids trouble over the levying of rates for educational purposes, for it was impressed upon me that the schools and their maintenance, and other public services, do not cost a penny to the ratepayer. My Regina cicerone, a migrant from the East, “ran me round” on an automobile, and continually called my attention to buildings just finished or in process of construction, such as “Our City Hall—$500,000; a new bank at that corner, $600,000; a new church, $70,000; a departmental stores going up there, $1,000,000; a railway company is to build a million dollars hotel there.” In the early summer of 1912 a cyclone cut a path through the centre of the city, destroying three churches, with much private property. At five on the morning following the cyclone, architects, builders and owners of the destroyed property were surveying the ruins and planning the buildings to rise on the cleared site. At a “turkey supper” the Mayor of Regina, Mr. M’Ara, told how the city has advanced in civilisation since, a very few years ago, a predecessor in the mayoral chair went to welcome the first religious convention held in the town. That mayor had been a “Wild Westerner,” more at home at the poker table than at a gathering of grave divines, but he did his best to make them feel at ease. “You are very welcome,” he said, “to our city. I hope you will make yourselves thoroughly at home. In order that you may feel perfectly free, I have given orders to lock up the entire police force.” Regina has three daily papers and a weekly.