Читать книгу The Canadian Commonwealth - Agnes Christina Laut - Страница 12

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We sometimes speak as though Canada had had her boom and it was all over. She has had her boom, and the boom has exploded, and it is a good thing. When inflation collapses, a country gets down to reality; and the reality is that Canada has barely begun to develop the exhaustless mine of wealth which Heaven has given her. Ontario, complacent with a fringe of prosperity along lake front, is an instance; Quebec, with only a border on each bank of her great rivers peopled, is another instance; and the prairie provinces are still more striking illustrations of the sleeping potentialities of the Dominion. In our dark days we used to call those three prairie provinces between Lake Superior and the Rockies “the granary of the Empire.” I am afraid it was more in bravado, hoping against hope, than in any other spirit; for we were raising little grain and exporting less and receiving prices that hardly paid for the labor. That was back in the early nineties. To-day, what? One single year’s wheat crop from one only of those provinces equals more gold in value than ever came out of Klondike. If Britain were cut off from every other source of food supply, those three provinces could feed the British Isles with their surplus wheat. To be explicit, credit Great Britain with a population of forty-five millions. Apportion to each six bushels of wheat—the per capita requirement for food, according to scientists. Great Britain requires two hundred and eighty to three hundred million bushels of wheat for bread only—not to be manufactured into cereal products, which is another and enormous demand in itself. Of the wheat required for bread, Great Britain herself raises only fifty to sixty million bushels, leaving a deficit, which must come from outside sources, of two hundred million bushels.

In 1912 Canada raised one hundred and ninety-nine million bushels of wheat. In 1913, of grain products, Canada exported one hundred and ten million bushels; of flour products, almost twenty million dollars’ worth. Under stress of need or high prices these totals could easily be trebled. The figures are, indeed, bewildering in their bigness. In the three prairie provinces there were under cultivation in 1912 for all crops only sixteen and one-half million acres.[10] At twenty bushels to the acre this area put under wheat would feed Great Britain. But note—only sixteen and one-half million acres were under cultivation. There have been surveyed as suitable for cultivation one hundred and fifty-eight million acres. The land area of the three prairie provinces is four hundred and sixty-six million acres. If only half the land surveyed as suitable for cultivation were put in wheat—namely seventy-nine million acres; and if it yielded only ten bushels to the acre (it usually yields nearer twenty than ten), the three prairie provinces of Canada would be producing crops equal to the entire spring wheat production of the United States. Grant, then, two bushels for reseeding, or one hundred and fifty-eight million bushels, and six bushels for food, or fifty million bushels, the three prairie provinces would still have for export more than five hundred million bushels. All this presupposes population. Granting each man one hundred and sixty acres, it presupposes 493,750 more farmers than are in the West; but coming to Canada yearly are four hundred thousand settlers; so that counting four out of every five settlers children, in half a decade at the least, Western Canada will have five hundred thousand more farmers—enough to feed Great Britain and still have a surplus of wheat for Europe.

In connection with wheat exports from the West one factor should never be ignored—the influence of the Great Lakes and the Soo Canal in reducing freight to the West. Great Lakes freight tolls are to-day the cheapest in the world, and their influence in minimizing the toll on the all-land haul must never be ignored. Freight can be carried on the Great Lakes one thousand miles for the same rate charged on rail rate for one hundred miles.[11]

And wheat is not the only product of the three prairie provinces. On the borderland between Manitoba and Saskatchewan are enormous deposits of coal which have not yet been explored. Canoeing once through Eastern Saskatchewan and Northern Manitoba, I saw a piece of almost pure copper brought down from the hinterland of Churchill River by an Indian, from an unknown mine, which no white man has yet found. On the borderland between Alberta and British Columbia is a ridge of coal deposits which such conservative experts as the late George Dawson estimated would mine four million tons a year for five thousand years. These coal deposits seem almost nature’s special provision for the treeless plains.

It is well known that the decrease in white fish in the Great Lakes for the past ten years has been appalling. Northward of Churchill River is a region of chains of lakes—the Lesser Great Lakes, they have been called—and these are the only untouched inland fisheries in America. To the exporter they are ideal fishing ground. The climate is cool. The fish can be sent out frozen to American markets. Of Canada’s thirty-four million dollars’ worth of fish in 1912, one and one-half million dollars’ worth came from the three prairie provinces.

Under the old boundaries, the three prairie provinces compared in area respectively Manitoba with Great Britain; Saskatchewan with France; Alberta, one and a half times larger than Germany. Under the new boundaries extending the province to Hudson Bay, Manitoba is fifty-two thousand square miles larger than Germany; Saskatchewan extended north is fifty thousand square miles larger than France; and Alberta extended north is fifty thousand square miles larger than Germany. And north of the three grain provinces is an area the size of European Russia.

We talk of Canada’s boom as “done,” but has it even begun? Strathcona used to say that the three prairie provinces would support a population of one hundred million. Was he right? On the basis of Europe’s population the three provinces would sustain three times Germany’s sixty-five millions.