Canada by Sir John George Bourinot (e ink ebook reader TXT) 📖

the long stretches then under construction. In 1918 it was 38,879 miles.

Almost as important to Canada as her railways are her canals and her waterways. In 1897, on the accession of the Liberal Government to office, it was determined to deepen the St. Lawrence canals and enlarge the locks sufficiently to allow the passage from the great lakes to the sea of vessels {419} drawing not more than fourteen feet of water. These canals afford a through water route, with a minimum depth of fourteen feet, from Montreal to Port Arthur on Lake Superior, a distance of 1,223 miles, 73 of which are by canal. The total expenditure of the Dominion on canals up to 1919 amounted to over $127,000,000.

Alongside the improvement in the means of communication--railways and canals--has gone a considerable growth of Canadian manufacturing industries. The iron and steel industry was scarcely in existence at Confederation. The Marmora plant at Long Point, Ontario, and a smaller plant at Three Rivers, Quebec, had been in existence since the forties; but the iron and steel industry, as it exists to-day in Canada, is largely the creation of the national policy of protective tariffs and bounties. The bounty system was instituted in 1883, chiefly for the benefit of a blast furnace of 100 tons capacity at Londonderry, Nova Scotia, which was then in difficulties. Besides this furnace, only two others--charcoal furnaces with an aggregate capacity of fifteen tons, at Drummondsville, Quebec--came on the bounty list in 1884. In 1897, when the Liberals came into office, furnaces had also been erected at New Glasgow, Radnor, and Hamilton, and the aggregate daily capacity of the furnaces of the Dominion was then 445 tons.

At the revision of the tariff in 1897 the bounty system was greatly extended, and under its aegis two great modern iron and steel plants--one at Sydney, N.S., and one at Sault Ste. Marie, O., came {420} into existence. Modern furnaces have also been established at North Sydney, Hamilton, Welland, Midland, and Port Arthur, and in 1908 the output of pig-iron from all these plants was a little over 600,000 tons. A large proportion of this pig-iron is converted at the Sault Ste. Marie and the Sydney plants into steel rails, for which the constant extension of the railways furnishes a steady market.

Next to iron and steel the most important manufacturing industries are the textiles. Both woollens and cottons were manufactured in Canada in small quantities before Confederation. A small woollen mill was established at Coburg, Ontario, in 1846, and even earlier than this there were woollen mills in Nova Scotia which had made the province notable for their Halifax tweeds. In 1908, however, the woollen industry generally was not in a flourishing condition. Of the 157 mills in existence when the census of 1901 was taken, 28 had disappeared before 1908, and several of the 129 that remained were closed either permanently or temporarily. The value of the woollen goods produced in 1908 did not exceed seven million dollars.

The cotton industry, which is well organised and financially strong, has its largest centres at Montreal and Valleyfield, Quebec. The mills, of which there are about twenty-three, are large, modern, and well-equipped, and the value of their output is more than double that of the woollen mills of the Dominion.

The industry which ranks next in importance is probably the manufacture of farm implements and {421} machinery, which is located at Brantford and Hamilton. Hamilton is also the centre of the manufacture of electrical equipment, stoves, wire, steel castings, hardware, and many other products of metal. At Montreal are the Angus shops, which rank with the finest on the North American Continent, at which locomotives are built for the Canadian Pacific Railway, and in 1908 the Grand Trunk Railway established similar shops on a correspondingly modern scale for locomotive building at Stratford, Ontario.

Shipbuilding was an important industry in the maritime provinces and Quebec in the old days of wooden sailing ships; but with the incoming of steamships of iron and steel the maritime provinces entirely lost their old pre-eminence and world-wide reputation for shipbuilding. It was July, 1908, before a steel ocean-going vessel was launched in the maritime provinces. This was a three-masted schooner of 900 tons burden, the _James William_, which was built in the Matheson Yard, at New Glasgow, N.S. Steel vessels had, however, been built for lake service at Toronto, Collingwood, and Bridgeburg from 1898 onward. At Collingwood and Bridgeburg the largest and finest types of lake freighters and passenger vessels are built. In 1908 a new steel shipbuilding yard was installed at Welland, and plans were completed for the establishment of a large yard at Dartmouth on Halifax Harbour.

Until the development of the prairie provinces, all manufacturing in the Dominion was carried on {422} east of the great lakes. With the opening out of the great wheat-growing regions of Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, however, Winnipeg is gradually becoming a great manufacturing city, and many miscellaneous industries on a factory scale have been established there. The most western iron plant--puddling furnaces and a rolling mill--is situated on the outskirts of the city.

According to the figures of the Canadian Manufacturers' Association, as given by Mr. E. J. Freysing, President of the Toronto Section, in July, 1908, there were in Canada at that time 2,465 firms which were either members of the Association or were eligible for membership. These firms employed either on salary or wages 392,330 men, women, and children. This number includes 80,000 engaged in the lumbering business--the largest number engaged in any one trade. Lumbering is carried on in Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, and the annual value of the product is over one hundred million dollars--a value only exceeded by the food products of the Dominion.

More important than all other industries put together is farming. The extent of this industry may be judged from the fact that each year from 1900 to 1908 from 20,000 to 40,000 homesteads were taken up. The usual size of these homesteads is 160 acres, and the acreage thus newly under cultivation varied during the eight years from one to twelve million square miles a year. In 1907 alone the new farms represented an immigration {423} of 105,420 persons. The total number of farms in the Dominion in 1908 was estimated at 600,000, representing a population directly dependent upon farming of over three millions. The principal crops in the prairie provinces are oats, wheat, and barley. The total crop of wheat in 1908 was about 130,000,000 bushels, of oats 270,000,000, and of barley 50,000,000.

In Ontario, Quebec, and the maritime provinces, dairying, fruit-growing, hog-raising--for bacon and ham--and mixed farming have taken the place of grain crops. In 1908 Canada had gained a strong position in the markets of Great Britain for cheese, butter, and canned goods, a position which was largely due to the work of the Dominion Agricultural Department in providing cold storage for farm products on the railways and steamers, and also to the educational work which the Department had been steadily pushing among the farmers.

The Dominion is rich in metals and minerals, and mining is an important industry in Nova Scotia, Ontario, and British Columbia. The largest coal-fields of Canada are in Cape Breton and in Pictou and Cumberland Counties, Nova Scotia, from which over five million tons of coal are mined each year. There are no coal measures between New Brunswick and Manitoba, and the lignite beds of Manitoba yield a much less valuable coal than that of Nova Scotia. The coal area of the Rocky Mountains, though not so large as that of the maritime provinces, yields the best coal so far found in the Dominion. The centre of this formation is at the Crow's Nest Pass. {424} There is another coal area on the Pacific Coast in the neighbourhood of Nanaimo and in Queen Charlotte's Island. The total amount of coal mined in the Dominion in 1908 was 10,510,000. Besides coal, there are in Canada rich deposits of iron ore, lead, nickel, copper, silver, and gold, and the non-metallic minerals include petroleum, asbestos, and corundum. Diamonds have been found in Quebec in a formation not unlike the diamond fields of Kimberley. Gold is found chiefly in the Klondike country and in British Columbia; but some gold is also obtained from Nova Scotia, and a fair amount from Ontario and Quebec.

Ever since the settlement of the maritime provinces fishing has been an important industry on their shores, and many of the disputes with the United States have arisen out of the privileges granted to United States fishermen in the treaty of 1818. These disputes have, however, concerned Newfoundland more closely than the Dominion, and the final settlement of all questions between the sister colony and the great republic is hardly yet in sight. A _modus vivendi_ pending settlement was again signed in August, 1908. The fishing industry is not confined to the maritime provinces. River and lake fishing are carried on in Ontario, Manitoba, and the new provinces; and British Columbia has fisheries and canneries of great importance on her coast and rivers. The total value of the yield of the fisheries for 1908 was about twenty-five million dollars.

The population of the Dominion in 1908 was {425} estimated to be about six and a half millions, with a yearly immigration of between 150,000 and 200,000. The French Canadians numbered about 1,500,000, and of the rest the majority were English, Scotch, and Irish. The new immigration is introducing each year a large number of non-English-speaking people, and also some very desirable settlers in the American farmers from the Western States. Among the more important foreign settlements are those of the Doukhobors, who were received in Canada as refugees from persecution in Russia, and who have repeatedly given trouble to the authorities on account of their fanatical resistance to orderly government.

The revenue of Canada for 1907-8 was $96,054,505, and the expenditure was $76,641,451, leaving a surplus of nearly twenty million dollars. At the close of the fiscal year the debt of Canada amounted to $277,960,259. Canals, lighthouses, railways, Government buildings, and other public works are the assets which Canada has to set against this debt, which represents the expenditure necessary for the development of a new and widely extended country.

In education the Dominion ranks almost equal to the Northern States of America. Every province has a public school system, and the primary and grammar schools, especially of Ontario, are a pride and a credit to the people of the province. In 1908 there were seventeen universities in the Dominion. Among them may be mentioned McGill in Montreal, Laval in Quebec, Queen's in Kingston, Dalhousie {426} in Halifax, University of Toronto in Toronto, and the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. The University of Alberta was founded in 1906, that of Saskatchewan in 1907, and British Columbia in 1908.

Every city in Canada and every town of any size has its newspaper or newspapers--daily, bi-weekly, or weekly. Canadian journalism has a character quite of its own, leaning more to American ideals than to those of England. A great change in this respect has come over the Canadian Press since about 1885, up to which time the more important daily newspapers in Montreal, Toronto, Halifax, and St. John had been on the English rather than the American model.

Self-government exists in the full sense of the term. At the base of the political structure lie those municipal institutions which,