CALGARY.
I found further on, at Calgary, that that city is also utilising natural gas, but in this case it has to be brought in pipes some 200 miles. I was told that the work of trenching, laying the pipes, and putting on the gas supply had been done within two months—a fact of which Calgary was properly proud. At Calgary, a cattle and horse-raising centre, I saw the month-old University of Calgary, housed in a modest temporary building, with some seventy students. The Dean, Dr. Braithwaite, showed me a syllabus of some seventy subjects, and the plan of a block of University buildings that might well make Oxford or Cambridge “sit up and take notice.” It would take at least $50,000,000 (£10,000,000) to realise the scheme, but the Dean said, “It may take fifty years, but it will be done.” Already a few citizens have subscribed 450 acres of land, in a glorious situation, on high ground a few miles from the centre of the city, with the serrated line of the Rocky Mountains cutting the western horizon seventy miles away, and $500,000 are given as a beginning. There is a strong rivalry between Calgary and Edmonton and Saskatoon, further north in Alberta. The State University is at Saskatoon, but Calgary is going ahead with its University for South Alberta, and will worry the Government for a charter empowering it to confer degrees when its students are ready for the degrees.
Central Alberta, unfortunately, I was unable to see, but I heard much about it even on the Atlantic before I landed in Canada. There were on board two of the leading citizens of Edmonton, Alberta. They told me of the inexhaustible natural resources of the western-most Prairie Province, backing on to the Rocky Mountains—land that yields 36 to 40 bushels of wheat and 50 and more bushels of oats to the acre, and under the surface thousands of square miles of the best coal waiting to be mined. “And there are other things,” said an ex-City Commissioner. “We have a lake—Cold Lake—scarcely noticed on the map, yet I have seen forty teams a day drawing the white fish from that lake for the American market. When the great lakes, such as the Great Slave and the Lesser Slave, are opened up, they will yield inexhaustible supplies of fish, of enormous value. It’s marvellous! I’ve been ten years farming at Edmonton—that is to be an old-timer in a city that has risen in population from 5,000 to 55,000 within the decade—and I never cease to marvel at what both land and water give us.” That “It’s marvellous!” I kept hearing from Canadian lips all the way across.
As to British Columbia, it is destined to be a great holiday resort alike of Canada and of the North-Western American States. We catch sight of the serrated line of the Rockies at Calgary, clearly visible through the transparent atmosphere at a distance of seventy miles. From Calgary over the Rockies, and the descent through British Columbia to Vancouver, is a run of twenty-six hours. The scenery surpasses even that of Switzerland.
Canadians who have spent a holiday at Lake Louise or other centres for mountain climbing and glacier exploration find even their abundant and eloquent vocabulary insufficient to express their ecstatic admiration. I passed through British Columbia and back in the middle of November, but even then the hours of daylight were hours of continuous delight. From the windows or the platform of the observation car rise on either side the shaggy sides of mountains and beyond them peaks and peaks towering above each other over the snow line, until they are lost in the dim distance. Anything more exquisitely lovely than sunrise in the Rocky Mountains it is impossible to imagine. The gilded snow peaks look like cubes and pyramids of glittering gold. The railway itself is a continual wonder. It is a triumph of the mind, the resolute will, the skilful hands, and the Napoleonic organisation of labour and mechanical ingenuity over the forces of Nature, which it would almost seem intended to place the Rockies as an everlasting barrier between the prairie and the Pacific. The railway now tunnels through the living rock, now corkscrews up apparently impossible gradients, now throws itself across terrific chasms, now winds along the edge of precipitous cliffs, now runs through gloomy ravines as it makes its westward journey to the coast.
British Columbia is as confident of its magnificent future as are its sister Provinces. With the opening of the Panama Canal it looks forward to such an outlet for its agricultural and manufacturing products as will draw millions of people to the country and make it not only by its scenic glories a gem of the Imperial crown, but one of the Empire’s richest wealth-producers. As the railway descends to the lower slopes of the Rockies the country opens out. There are large and lovely lakes swarming with fish, a country abounding with valleys that rival Annapolis valley of Nova Scotia and the Niagara country of South Ontario in their fitness for fruit growing, while the humidity of the atmosphere, the soft Pacific breezes, the flood of summer sunshine, and the mildness of the winter give British Columbia enormous advantages over its eastern fruit-producing rivals. Fruit alike of temperate and sub-tropical climates ripens to perfection with marvellous rapidity, yields incredible crops, and is of the richest flavour. In the autumn of 1912 and again in 1913 collections of British Columbia fruit won the gold medal of the Royal Horticultural Society in London. Already British Columbia is sending its apples and other fruit to Australia and New Zealand, having the profitable advantage of producing its fruit during the antipodean winter. Large numbers of British and American farmers are settling in the valleys of British Columbia, and millions of British capital are being invested in the purchase and development of farms.
Then British Columbia is one of the greatest lumber producing countries of the world. Millions of square miles of forests are waiting to be utilised. One of the sights of British Columbia is the freight train, sometimes a hundred waggons long, drawn by two powerful engines, conveying the prepared lumber to the coast for shipment to the States, or climbing the Rockies eastward for the prairie. The country is fabulously rich also in minerals, including gold. Scarcely the surface of the mineral richness has yet been scratched. When the mining resources are fully developed those resources alone would mean that British Columbia will be one of the richest States of the Dominion. The population of a country more than twice the size of Great Britain is as yet only about 600,000, and more than a third of its population is that of Vancouver city and Victoria in Vancouver island. I spent some time in Vancouver city, which, within a dozen years, has grown from 12,000 to over 100,000. Its main streets, such as Hastings Street, with its splendid shops, would do credit to Leeds or Manchester. The “sky scraper” is evident in Vancouver, and will be more evident if land values continue to increase as they are increasing now. During my stay a record in land values was made by the sale of a site on Hastings Street at $7,500 per foot frontage. The site was already occupied by a fine block of buildings, but the block was scarcely considered in the transaction. It was to be torn down in order that a new block of palatial magnificence might be erected upon it. It is clear as the day that with its possibilities British Columbia within fifty years will be the home of a people exceeding the population of Belgium and Holland, and even richer than the people of those two most industrious countries. The Grand Trunk and the Canadian Northern “steels” have already reached, or are about to reach, the coast, opening up huge tracts of country that will be developed after the Canadian fashion, towns being started every other day of the week and becoming within ten years places of importance as centres for the supply of the surrounding country. A great number of these towns will become centres of manufacturing industry, for in British Columbia, as in the other Provinces, the desire for manufacturing industries is almost a fever. The banks, the great insurance companies, and other financial concerns express their faith in the future of British Columbia by their willingness to advance millions for its agricultural and industrial development. The visitor to British Columbia soon discovers that the Province might well be named the Nova Scotia of the Pacific, for, as men of Scottish blood were among the pioneers, discoverers and settlers, so Scotsmen by the thousand, with their keen scent for places where money is to be made, have flocked, and are flocking, into British Columbia. The outstanding names in Vancouver and Victoria are Scottish names. I met one Scotsman in the timber trade just arrived from Glasgow. He had done well in Glasgow, but he told me that Glasgow was nothing compared to British Columbia.
The notes I have given with regard to the industrial development and the industrial prospects of the Provinces of Canada are scanty enough, but I hope that the glimpse given of the conditions and the outlook will prove serviceable alike to those in the Old Country seeking homes and careers in Canada, and to those also with loose money, who cherish a legitimate desire to invest that money in something more remunerative and less precarious than are most of the openings for investment in Great Britain. A Lethbridge man told me that for ten years he had been trying to convince his friends in England that the current rate of 8 per cent. interest on mortgage loans in the Canadian Far West was as safe as 4 or 5 per cent. invested in gilt-edged securities in the Old Country. He had succeeded at last in so persuading them, and several of his friends had commissioned him to take charge of their savings and make fructifying use of them in assisting the agricultural and industrial development of the Far West.
The warning, of course, must be given that land sharks and sharks of other descriptions run in hungry troops in Canada, and that a man in England with money to invest should be quite sure that his agents or friends in Canada are in the know and can be thoroughly relied upon.