Читать книгу The Canadian Commonwealth - Agnes Christina Laut - Страница 20
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“The Americanizing of Canada” is a phrase which has been much in vogue with a section of the British press ever since the attempt to establish reciprocity between the United States and the Dominion. It is a question if the glib users of the phrase have the faintest idea what they mean by it. It is a catchword. It sounds ominously deep as the owl’s wise but meaningless “too-whoo.” English publicists who have never been nearer Canada than a Dominion postage stamp wisely warn Canada against the siren seductions of Columbia’s republicanism.
If the phrase means that reciprocity might lead to annexation, Canada’s repudiation of reciprocity is sufficient disproof of the imputation. If it means increased and increasing trade weaving a warp and woof of international commerce—then—yes—there is an “Americanizing of Canada” as there is a Canadianizing of the United States through international traffic; but the users of the phrase should remember that the country doing the largest trade of all countries with the United States is Great Britain; and does one speak of the “Americanizing” of Great Britain? If it means that in ten years two-fifths as many Americans have settled in Western Canada as there are native-born Canadians in the West—then—yes—Canada pleads guilty. She has spent money like water and is spending it yet to attract these American settlers; and they, on their part, have brought with them an average of fifteen hundred dollars a settler, not counting money invested by capitalists. If in the era between 1900 and 1911, 650,719 American settlers came to Western Canada, and from 1911 to 1914, six hundred thousand more—or say, with natural increase, a million and a quarter in fifteen years; to counterpoise that consideration remember that in the era from 1885 to 1895 one-fifth of Canada’s native population moved to the United States.
There is not the slightest doubt that within ten years the balance of political power in Canada has shifted from the solidarity of French Quebec to the progressive West; but that can hardly be considered as of political import when two out of four western provinces rejected reciprocity.
What, then, is meant by the phrase “Americanizing of Canada”?
Consider for a moment what is happening!
Twenty years ago the number of American and Canadian railroads meeting at the boundary and crossing the boundary numbered some six. Ten years ago in the West alone there were sixteen branch lines feeding traffic into one another’s territory across the border. To-day, if you count all the American railroads reaching up from trunk lines north to Canada, and all the Canadian spurs reaching south from trunk lines into the United States, and all the great trunk lines having subsidiaries like the South Shore and “Soo” crossing the border, and all the lines having international running rights over one another’s roadbed, there are more than sixty railroads feeding Canadian traffic into the United States and American traffic into Canada. This explains why of all the export grain traffic from the Northwest forty-four per cent. only goes from Canada by all-Canadian routing, while fifty-six per cent. comes to seaboard over American lines; and all this is independent of the enormous American traffic through the Canadian “Soo” by the Great Lakes, in some years, reaching a total five times as large as the traffic expected through Panama. One can not contemplate this constant interchange of traffic without recalling the metaphor of the warp and the woof, of the shuttle weaving a fabric of international commerce that ignores dead reciprocity pacts and an invisible boundary. Yet England does three-fourths of the carrying trade for the United States across the Atlantic. Spite of high tariff on one side of the ocean and no tariff on the other side, spite of eagle and lion rampant, British ships weave like busy shuttles across the silver lanes of the sea an invisible warp and woof that are stronger than cables of steel, or political treaty.
So much for lines of traffic between Canada and the United States! What of the traffic carried?
American imports to Canada have doubled in three years; or increased from two hundred sixteen million dollars’ worth in 1910 to four hundred fifteen million dollars’ worth in 1913; and instead of the war causing a falling off, it is likely to cause an increase; for Canada’s purchases from Europe have been cut off and must be supplied by the United States. Of the imports to Canada, two-thirds are manufactured articles—motors, locomotives, cars, coffee, cotton, iron, steel, implements, coal. At time of writing exports from the United States now rank the United Kingdom first, Canada second, Germany third. When you consider that Canada’s purchasing power is that of seven million people, where the United Kingdom’s is forty-five and Germany’s sixty-five million, the significance of these comparative ranks is apparent.
From Canada to the United States, exports increased from $95,000,000 in 1910 to $120,000,000 in 1913, not because Canada’s producing power is so much smaller than her buying power, but because she is growing so fast that she consumes much of what she produces. To put it another way, of all Canada exports, the United States takes four-fifths of the coal, nine-tenths of the copper, four-fifths of the nickel, ten-elevenths of the gold, two-fifths of the silver, four-fifths of other minerals, one-third of the fish, one-third of the lumber, one-fourth of the animals and meat, one-tenth of the grain. It need not be told here that the other portions of Canada’s farm, mine and lumber exports go almost entirely to Great Britain.
