The figures of Canadian progress tell a story of wonderful energy, and in one particular they are especially interesting and significant. The population of Canada has not increased as might be expected, in view of her great industrial expansion. In fact, it has barely doubled in forty years. In the last four decades the population of the United States has grown about twenty-five per cent. in each succeeding ten years, while that of Canada has increased by thirty, eleven, twelve, and seventeen per cent. in the same periods. That is to say, while the population of Canada was doubling itself, that of the United States increased to two and a half times the number in 1871. In that same forty years, however, the productive and absorptive energies of the Canadian unit have increased enormously, until in these respects a point has been reached without parallel in any other country.
While, as stated, the population has about doubled in forty years, deposits in the post-office savings-banks have risen from $2,500,000 to $43,000,000; total bank deposits from $67,000,000 to $1,000,000,000; the national revenue from $20,000,000 to $118,000,000; expenditure for life-insurance from $1,800,000 to $20,000,000; the amount paid for mail and steamship subventions from $286,000 to nearly $2,000,000; the number of letters and post-cards handled by the post-office from 27,000,000 to 550,000,000; passengers on railways from 5,000,000 to 37,000,000; tons of freight hauled on railways from 5,000,000 to 80,000,000, and on canals from 3,000,000 to 43,000,000.
In that same time the national debt has increased from $77,000,000 to $508,338,592. The total mineral production has grown in value from the figure of 1886, when it was $10,000,000, to $107,000,000 in 1911. Coal production has increased in value from $3,000,000 to $30,000,000, and total foreign trade from $162,000,000 to $771,000,000.
There are in Canada to-day about 1,500,000 families, and only about 75,000 of these are without a dwelling to themselves—a great record of a home-building nation. There is now nearly a billion dollars invested in Canadian manufactures. Nearly 400,000 wage-earners have a payroll of about $150,000,000, and the product of their labor brings nearly the same amount of revenue to the nation as is invested in the productive plants. These figures are all the more extraordinary in that the figures of increase of population bear little relation thereto. It is the story of a great industrial awakening, following the discovery of latent natural resources which applied industry and intelligence have transmuted into wealth and profitable occupation for labor.
In the last ten years the population of Prince Edward Island, the Northwest Territories, and the Yukon, has decreased by 9, 14, and 69 per cent., respectively. Some of this decrease has been caused by changes of political boundary-lines. Of the total increase in population nearly sixty per cent. has taken place in the four western provinces of Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, and Manitoba, the relative expansion of these provinces in number of inhabitants being 439 per cent., 413 per cent., 119 per cent., and 73 per cent., respectively. The total increase of population in the last decade was 1,834,000, and it was distributed as follows: 1,117,000 in the four western or agricultural provinces; 354,000 in Quebec; 340,000 in Ontario; and 54,000 in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. To the western provinces have gone the people seeking homes on the new lands, and to the lively towns and cities, which have become the centers of these great productive areas, have thronged laborers, purveyors to the wants of the settlers, those who offer facilities for the exchange of commodities, and the usual large percentage who, in a new country, live off the industry of others by taking advantage of the eagerness of would-be buyers and sellers to make quick bargains.
As in the history of every newly opened reserve of the world, fortunes have been made from a shoe-string by those shrewd enough to step in between the seller and the buyer in time to take a part of the profit to themselves. The man who buys acreage and sells town lots is the speculator who has made money the world over. The purchaser of the latter may in turn make profit for himself, but the cream has been taken by the prophet who can materialize the vision of the paved street across the plowed field or the prairie sod. All new or rapidly developing countries pass through this stage of swift encroachment of town upon country, and up to a certain point it remains legitimate and normal—that is to say, so long as it fills the measure of need. The momentum thus gained, however, has seldom failed to carry the movement beyond the legitimate, and numberless acres have been in turn sold for taxes, and the farmer’s plow has turned up the stakes which were to mark the lines of pretentious boulevards.
The time of reaction is one of danger and often of disaster. Western Canada has already passed through several periods of stress and trial of this character, and the early story of the now thriving city of Winnipeg is full of tragedy to those who were caught in the reactionary period of many years ago. After a certain time, however, these places find themselves, possibilities and impossibilities are recognized, and values assume true levels, which in many cases constantly but sanely keep pace in their rise with the development of tributary territory. It seems to be a truism that the prices of Broadway or the Strand could not be legitimately duplicated in Prairieville or Rocky Pass, but men surely sane and successful elsewhere apparently become intoxicated as they breathe the stimulating air of the Northwest, and blinded by the vision of the future, they buy or loan in haste not only their own money, but that of others, only to lose, and curse their temporary aberration in the calmness of second thought or the depressing incident of a “busted boom.” Optimism is the key-note of life in a new community, and the true story of the poor man who stumbled over a wheelbarrow-load of gold nuggets is the constant incentive to the weary prospector who is measuring his daily dole from his last sack of flour. It is a thankless task to measure real values in the Northwest at the moment, for no matter how high they may be placed, such measure meets with the approval of no one, neither of the man who has something to sell, nor of the man inclined to buy. The spirit of the gambler is in all human nature, and in none more than the frontiersman; and there is no check to its development in the high-strung, optimistic, and get-rich-quick communities living in the electric atmosphere of our far-flung Northwestern horizons.
Genuine opportunity abounds, and the keen, restless minds of those who blaze the way for the more conservative are impatient of suggested limitations. Perhaps it is just as well it is so, for in the end, while some are trampled under the car, the final adjustment yields no higher death-rate in hopes than in older communities, and in the younger aspirant for civic greatness there is real opportunity for all; whereas in the older settlements there is often opportunity for those alone who already have the power and the means to create it.
An increase of 354,000 in the population of Quebec during the last ten years means a large natural increase characteristic of the French-Canadian inhabitants, and a development of lumbering, mining, and fishing industries natural to any section of the world so easy of access and so rich in such resources. The population of Ontario, that stronghold of the British in Canada, has increased by 340,000. This is due to the development of manufacturing. Cheap power, raw material, and favorable natural location, with protection and bounty advantages, are being made use of by foreign capital. The recent decision of the United States Steel Corporation to build a $20,000,000 plant in Canada is no part of a boom; it is only the maturing of plans made long ago in view of future possibilities, and a realization that the time was now ripe to move. The building of this plant bears no relation to the bounty now given on Canadian manufactured iron, for that is too uncertain, too political, too subject to the popular whim, to base a great and permanent industrial enterprise upon. It is based entirely upon an economic situation deemed favorable to the establishment of an extensive and profitable industry.