British Columbia

Mr. President and Gentlemen,

As I understand, you receive here two classes of discourses, one that is finished and elaborated in such a way that it can be published in your Annual Reports, and the other just informal talks from men who are too busy to prepare anything for publication; and I wish to tell you that the discourse today is of the latter kind. I am just going to talk; I am not going to try to make a speech.

I wish to tell you something about British Columbia, perhaps nothing new. I know that when I went out there I learned a great many things that I never knew before. For instance, it may not add anything to your knowledge of geography, but I learned something new when I had to travel from Vancouver to visit the south eastern corner of British Columbia. British Columbia is bounded on the south by the State of Washington, the State of Idaho, and about a hundred miles of the State of Montana, and we found, as railway matters are at present, that the quickest way to go from Vancouver to Fernie, for instance, in the Crowsnest Pass, is to go into the State of Washington and by the Great Northern Railway till you get opposite the Kootenay District, and then turn in and travel east in British Columbia. They are now building roads that will shorten the distance and make the route a very much straighter one between Vancouver and the Kootenay District. It was a great problem how to get over the Hope Mountain, as they call it, about seventy-five miles east of Vancouver. But they are at work now, two different railways, the Canadian Pacific and the Great Northern, or Jim Hill's road, as they say out there, and they are going to be over the Hope Mountain perhaps next year, perhaps the year after.

British Columbia is a vast territory. You might take out of it a territory large enough to make the German Empire, and then after that take other countries as large as England, Scotland, and Ireland, and still have territory enough left to make a very respectable province. You may imagine it as a rectangle approximately some five hundred miles wide and eight hundred miles long. What is going to be the future of that country? I have come back from the west with this impression that, if Ontario is going to continue to be called the Banner Province, it has got to hustle, as they say out west. When you consider the vast extent of that territory and its geographical position and resources, I think, really, that it is going to be one of the most influential and one of the most populous provinces of Canada in the future.

You have there almost every variety of climate, every variety of the temperate zone anyway, and that variety of climate is one of its advantages. You have, on the coast, a climate very much like that of the British Isles, and for the same reason. British Columbia occupies, relatively to the Pacific Ocean, exactly the position of the British Isles relatively to the Atlantic Ocean. The same movement of currents and that north-east trend of warm water that modifies the climate of the British Islands has exactly the same effect in British Columbia. I know by intercourse with them, that people who come from England, Scotland, and Ireland and settle in British Columbia, feel perfectly at home as regards climate. They see very little difference. Of course I speak of the coast climate, such as the climate of Vancouver Island or of the mainland, no matter how far north you go. That is the peculiarity of it; without the influence of the ocean, Prince Rupert, between five and six hundred miles north of Vancouver, would have a totally different climate. That difference of latitude would in itself make a vast difference in climate, but the influence of the ocean is such that the change is very slight. The climate of Queen Charlotte Islands, opposite Prince Rupert, is almost exactly like the climate of Ireland, the latitude is about the same, the length of day in summer is about the same, and the aspect of everything, the farming lands, minerals, and other things is very similar.

With regard to the resources of the country, if you take them in the order of their importance I do not know exactly with which one to begin. When I was coming away from Vancouver I was so very busy that I did not gather up the books that would serve to give me statistics in detail, and give you detailed knowledge. You can get it from any library; but, in a general way, the industries are mining, lumbering, fishing, and farming. As a compliment to the Empire Club, I should perhaps begin with fishing, because there is just a little bit of Imperialism involved,--and it may not be small either. Although fishing as yet is not the most important industry in British Columbia,--important as it is, and extensive as it is,--three years ago one would have been justified in saying that the Japanese were going to control the fisheries. At that time there were some eight or ten thousand Japanese in British Columbia--I have not seen the last census on that point, so I am not sure of the figure--but the Japanese really seemed to have control of the fisheries, not merely in the number of men employed, but in the management of the crafts, and in the financing of the business, and that would be a serious matter if it went on and developed. If, for instance, one were told today that the headquarters of the Japanese Navy knows more about the charts and details of the coast of British Columbia than is known at headquarters in London, I for one should not be very much surprised. They have their men there, and we do not know how many of them are taking soundings, mapping out charts, and so on, with no hostile purpose at all perhaps, but still they have their men on the ground. Today that is being modified. A certain number of companies have been organized, and have gradually taken hold, and are getting control of the fisheries of the coast of British Columbia, and these companies apparently have made it their policy to secure British control instead of Japanese control on that coast. (Applause)

One of the forms of fishing out there, if it can be called fishing, is killing whales and using various parts of the animal; and a fishery that will probably develop to a great extent is the cod fishery. I am told--I do not know, for it is not yet exploited--that on the banks that are out from the Queen Charlotte Islands they find cod exactly similar to the Atlantic cod. You all know how important the salmon fishery is. The salmon comes into the rivers there, crowds into the rivers; locally they call it sockeye, that is one of the species that is sought for most in the rivers. When our missionaries went to evangelize the Indians up the Fraser River they found that they did not know anything about bread, and it was a puzzle how to teach them in the Lord's Prayer to say: "Give us this day. our daily bread." The Indians did not know what it meant, but the missionaries found that they would understand very well the substance of it if they said, "Give us this day our daily salmon." The Indians apparently lived practically on salmon all the year round. That fishery, as regards the Fraser River, is likely to diminish. The industries that the growing up on the banks of the Fraser, the result, in a word, of civilized life, will probably interfere largely with, and perhaps even hinder altogether, the ascent of the salmon up the Fraser River. But even if no salmon ever went up the Fraser, there are still many rivers up the coast, the Skeena, and many others, into which the salmon will always go, and it is not likely that those northern inlets will ever be sufficiently inhabited to interfere very materially with this product of British Columbia.

The mineral resources are as yet barely touched. Copper is the most important mineral at present dealt with in British Columbia; it goes up to eight or ten million dollars a year. After that comes gold, and then, I believe, in the order of production, coal, lead, silver, and some other metals of various kinds. Men are always experimenting, always prospecting and, of course always speculating.- Mining is one of the most tempting forms of gambling that one can meet with. Those who get into it seem quite unable ever to shake off the habit; there is always the hope of finding something tomorrow. It is really wonderful to find immense coal beds right at the foot of the Rocky Mountains; here you have the mountains all around you, and there at the foot of one of them is an immense bed of coal, such as they have in the Crowsnest Pass, where it is being mined in large quantities. And then you go through the country and you find it in the valleys. You go over to Vancouver Island, and there they are shipping millions of tons every year. When you go up north where the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway is building across the country; you have, I am told, large beds of anthracite coal. So, with immense beds of coal all over the country, and large deposits of iron in different places, with other minerals scattered everywhere, and the country as yet only half or a quarter explored, I think that one is perfectly safe in inferring that British Columbia is really going to be a rich and powerful province. At least the world believes so. You find the moneyed men of Europe, of France, Belgium, Germany, and of course England, really interested in what is going on in British Columbia: Perhaps they are interested in what is going on in every part of Canada for aught I know, but I have occasion to know that for some reason or other, they are intensely interested in what is going on in British Columbia. I think, probably, they have been studying the resources of the country, and they know. One result is that they have agents in Vancouver, they invest a great deal of money out there, millions of dollars every year, and of course they hold a great deal of real estate and mining property throughout the country.

I am quite incapable of giving you an adequate idea of the extent of the lumbering, but it comes next to mining, if it is not ahead of it, in value of output.

I do not know whether I should include among the industries what they call real estate, or not. (Laughter) There are a good many men employed in it I know, and of course there are a good many men who are making money in it; but if you think that there is some kind of habitual boom going on in Vancouver, you are very far astray. There is really no boom in Vancouver itself. Sometimes they get up a flurry in places outside the city like Coquitlam, but I was there two years and a half and I did not see any sign of a real estate boom in the city of Vancouver during that time. Things go on, of course, somewhat rapidly, because it is really a rapidly growing city, and a rapidly growing country, and the world is interested, and therefore the activity is great; but it is great because of the expectation of the business world that it is going to be a great place. The highest point to which real estate rose before I left was $6,000 a foot, and there was nothing speculative in that price, because it was one of the banks that paid it. (Laughter) Ten years ago, the city of Vancouver was a city of about 30,000 people. Today it is a city of approximately 150,000. The census gives a little over 100,000 but that is only the legal city, the city that is described by boundaries in the law; but the suburbs are, practically, part of the city and, if you take in South Vancouver and Point Grey, you will have a city of approximately 150,000 people, and the growth will continue there as it will continue, no doubt, in Toronto.

The site is magnificent, with its scenery and shipping facilities, and the harbour is open all the year round. We never see a sign of ice upon the water there. I may tell you that on the seventh day of February last year I saw in British Columbia a new leaf on a tree out-of-doors. When I left Vancouver on the fifteenth of December I could have taken a rose from the lawn of the house in which I lived, and I am sorry I did not bring it. They are not in the least bit troubled with ice or snow. They tell me they had a good deal of snow there this year, but certainly nothing will interfere with the shipping from the Port of Vancouver any time of the year. Then four miles south of that harbour you have the Fraser River, a magnificent river, and they have shipping facilities up the river, twenty or thirty miles or more. Taking it all in all, with the country back of it, with the site of it, the mountains surrounding it, and every facility for communication, nothing but an earthquake or a European war or something like that will arrest its growth.

Two or three years ago the City Council adopted what they call the Single Tax. They call it that, but of course it is not that. (Laughter) I am perhaps skating on thin ice, but I just want to state the facts. They were not facing or thinking of any theory; they were too much in earnest about it for that; they were facing a condition, and the condition was this: The City Council had to deal with lots that were owned perhaps in New York or Europe or Montreal or Toronto, and the question was how could they deal with them on a fair basis. They had to carry their water-mains and their sewers and their sidewalks and so on right past those vacant lots that were held by men in Paris or New York or Montreal or elsewhere, and were held for speculation. Of course tourists went out there, for the climate perhaps, or the scenery, or the mountains, and would buy lots-the real estate men would see to that. And then the real estate men would get into communication by correspondence and advertising with people away in different parts of Canada and other parts of the world; and consequently the city of Vancouver had to deal with a situation that was peculiar. In 1895 they said to themselves, "We will put things on a fair basis this way; we will tax the improvements,--buildings at fifty percent of their assessed value and we will tax land the full hundred percent of its assessed value." That went on for ten years, and then they decided to take another twenty-five percent off the improvements, and then for three years the buildings or improvements were taxed at only twenty-five percent of their assessed value. Then in the following year, whether it was that they did not think it worth while to bother with that twenty-five per cent., or whether there was some party or theoretical interest involved, really I do not know; but they knocked that twenty-five percent off altogether, and then buildings were exempted. Now there is only one other fact in that connection I think it well to add, and it is this, that there is at the present time a considerable body of opinion in Vancouver to this effect, that, however necessary that species of single tax may have been as a temporary expedient, it is not a thing to be adopted permanently. Opinion is divided on that point. They find, as a matter of fact, that it tends to crowd houses together in the residential districts, or in the business districts, and then-I am speaking now of what I used to hear people say-there seems to be, and I am sure there is, a sense of injustice, a feeling that justice is hurt by the sight of an immense building or an immense property, a property worth say a million dollars and taking revenue from ten to fifteen floors and paying only the same amount of tax as a two-story building beside it. I have heard that frequently. Perhaps there is another thing I might add, namely, in that system there are no exemptions; churches 'are not exempted there. Suppose that to be the case, then you have a hardship that is really an injustice. Here is a species of building that literally cannot have more than one story. "Can't" is of course a large word; I heard of one congregation in the business district of Vancouver that were speaking of building a skyscraper and using the two top floors for a church. (Laughter) Of course such things are possible, but the general feeling would be against that sort of thing, and in the down-town district with a building such as a church where you can have only one or two stories, the result of that species of taxation is to drive them out of the business district altogether. I know one church property in Victoria which was taxed last year for, I think, $4,000, and that amount

I had to be raised by a congregation that would be called small in the city of Toronto. The result was that they decided to sell and build in another part of the city where taxes will not be so high. They must do it; they are driven out.

I thank you kindly, gentlemen, for listening to this rambling talk. The next time I hope to be one of the listeners myself.