Development of the Canadian West

Mr. President aced Gentlemen,--

The commercial history of Western Canada begins in 1670, with the charter by which Charles II. constituted Prince Rupert and seventeen of his friends " the Governor and Company of Adventurers Trading into Hudson's Bay," and permitted them to trade over an area of 2,500,000 square miles. For these tremendous privileges their only obligation to the monarch was to supply him annually with two elk and two black beaver from the country over which they practically assumed sovereign rights. The toll of elk and beaver has long since been superseded by a less picturesque method of making annual reports. The difference between the elk and beaver of the Governor and Company of Adventurers and the voluminous reports of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Canadian Northern Railway, and other large concerns, is the difference between Western Canada without transportation and Western Canada with transportation.

In the discussion of an Empire club there is room, I think, for inquiry into one of the most remarkable characteristics of the race to which we belong--I mean the pioneering instinct. It has made us what we are. Why do men carry implements and wives into the far country of the Peace River, when a thousand miles nearer the best market for their produce there are square miles of fertile land to be obtained for the asking? A gentleman, whom I will not name, was asked if he would sell, at a magnificent profit, his interests in a railway system. His answer was: " No; I like building railways." Now, the instinct of the Peace River agriculturist is vitally the same as that of the railway projector. Each is the complement of the other, and each contributes to the newness of life that comes to the migrating millions of the race, and without which no empire can save itself alive. The impulse that brings my fellowcountrymen to Canada is not always the desire to acquire a little money. It is rather the re-assertion of the elemental quality in virile mankind, which, first in the garden was impelled to subdue the earth, and later founded colonies and transplanted empires across the faces of the planet. Abraham trekked out of Ur of the Chaldees under Divine direction. Thousands of settlers in the Canadian West were moved by the same influence, though they didn't recognize it in the lantern lectures of the Dominion Government's agents, or the restrained advertisements of steamship and railway companies.

It is a profitable exercise occasionally to dip into the earlier literature of the Prairie Provinces of today. To glance over the prophecy of a living general in the British 'Army-Sir William Butler-written in "The Great Lone Land" in 1871, as you cross Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta in a luxurious train, is to make you fairly well satisfied with what has been accomplished. Butler trailed from Fort Garry to Edmonton and Macleod, and returned over Saskatchewan ice. Reading his book you breathe an atmosphere of isolation, not to say desolation. But in the middle of it there is the prediction of settlement and abounding grain fields--a prediction fulfilled in his own time. Butler's journey was made just 20o years after the charter of the Company of Adventurers was granted. The intervening years had seen the Company's work spread over a vast immeasurable territory, and had produced Lord Selkirk's heroic efforts to found an agricultural community, imported via Hudson's Bay to the Red River. But there was a majestic vacancy about the whole land. Even when a corner of the country had become sufficiently civilized to need an armed force to dissipate political rebellion the white population was pitifully sparse. The advance guard of ploughmen pioneers from the last soon afterwards, however, began to break through the woods and waters of the Dawson route. But there could be no real advance so long as the Red River and the Dawson route governed the going out and coming in of the people. Men looked for railways as eagerly as a lost voyageur looks for the dawn. They got the railways, but they have never been satisfied with them; and never will be so long as there is a railway builder in whom the pioneering instinct expresses itself in parallel lines of steel and in reduced passenger and freight rates.

The Canadian Pacific Railway in this connection is the forerunner of us all. The early promoters of that great corporation have never, I think, received all the credit due for their marvellous and successful effort to bind the last with the West. Remember the conditions under which that great enterprise was accomplished. Between settled Ontario and the prairies there was a wilderness of poverty. Between the prairies and the Pacific were ranges of mountains which many people thought no combination of engineer and capitalist could penetrate. The end-all of the scheme was foreseen by some excellent men to be unpaid bills for axle grease. Financially, the times were unpropitious. In 1879 Sir Sandford Fleming felt compelled, in view of what he considerately called " the necessities of the situation," to advise the Minister of Public Works to " establish a great territorial road on .the site of the main line of the Pacific Railway from Lake Nipissing to the north side of Lake Superior."

When, in 1881, the first Canadian Pacific Railway rails were laid west of Winnipeg; the white population between the western boundary of Ontario and the Rocky Mountains, and between the United States boundary and the Arctic Circle was 66,161. Manitoba contained 59•I87 whites, of whom 8,00o were in Winnipeg, and several thousands were brought in by railway contractors. The true population indicator of that time is the fact that in the Northwest Territories there were only 6,974 whites, practically all living on the fur trade and business, with 49,500 Indians. It was only in 1876 that civil government was organized in the Territories, and Governor Laird, who took up his abode at the new-founded Battleford, and who still lives in Winnipeg, has described the perilous conditions under which he journeyed officially to Fort Macleod, which is now in the fall-wheat section of Southern Alberta. Eliminating British Columbia, then, the C.P.R., in > 88>', began to open up territory goo miles long and 300 miles widetaking roughly the Saskatchewan Valley as the northern frontier-with a population of 66,000, or one-fourth of a civilized person to the square mile. But in the Territories, or three-fourths of the prairie country, there was only one white person for every thirty-five square miles of cultivable land. It was not an inviting prospect for men of faint heart and little faith. The Canadian Pacific builders were of another sort. True, the Company was given an unprecedented stake in the possibilities of they Nest, but its early history was one of hard times, and for years was a load of care to those who had riveted to it all of their own fortunes and as much of the fortunes of other people as they could attract to their cause. That it is today an enterprise of which all Canadians are proud is gratifying alike to the Dominion and to the Company. Look at some facts that shine with Canadian Pacific history. Beginning with 1881, the growth of white population in twenty-five years has been as follows

Quite as illuminating as the growth of population are the immigration returns, which show that during the year ended June, 1896, the total immigration to Canada was 16,835, and in the year ended June, 1907, it was 256,000. But this Century had come in before the immigration reached 50,000 in a year. In 1901-2 it was 67,379, and in 1902-3 it reached 128,364. Equally illuminating is the growth of actual settlers located on free lands granted by the Dominion of Canada. Thirty years ago, or in 1877, 845 homestead - entries were made, aggregating 135,200 acres ( a homestead is 160 acres), but 54 per cent. of the entries were subsequently cancelled, the duties required under the Homestead Act not having been complied with, and the land reverted to the Government. Five years later, in 1882, when the railway reached Brandon, the homestead entries were 7,483, representing 1,197,280 acres, with cancellations of 47 per cent. Twenty years later-in 1902-the Western country had passed the experimental stage, and the larger movement of settlers was in full swing. Then began what has often been called the " American invasion," and that year, in addition to hundreds of thousands of acres of land sold by band companies to actual settlers, 22,215 homestead entries, representing 3,554,40o acres have been made. The figures are as follows

Up to the end of June, 1907, it may be conservatively estimated that over 30,000,000 acres of land have been granted by the Crown to legitimate settlers in Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan. Add to this acreage the sales made by Railway companies and band companies of approximately 20,000,000 acres, and it is not difficult to foresee that the Canadian West must soon become the bread basket for the world. The Surveyor-General of Canada estimates that in Saskatchewan and Alberta alone there is a total land area, after deducting 30,080,000 acres for water, of 324,125,440 acres, of which he says 106,240,000 acres are suitable for growing grain, the remainder being suitable for ranches and mixed farming. The influx of people and occupation of land have been coincident with railway expansion on the prairie itself, to say nothing of what has been done elsewhere to serve the West. The Comptroller of RailwayStatistics informs me that this year there are in Manitoba 2,823 miles of railway, and in Alberta and Saskatchewan, 3,173, a total of 5,996, with hundreds of miles under construction. The great expansion in immigration in 1902-3 was in a most remarkable degree coincident with the extension of the Railway with which I am associated. The Canadian Northern claims no special credit for the phenomenal increase in immigration, but it cannot dispute the fact that the rapid development of the enterprisive opened up a wide and fertile territory and made it possible for the great influx of new settlers to locate on free or cheap lands near to markets and general supplies. I am not here to laud the particular enterprise to which I devote my working hours, or to defend it from criticism to which, in common with other systems, it is subjected. But as it is essentially a Canadian undertaking, projected and governed by typical Ontario men--may I localize it, and say Toronto men?--it is perhaps not unfitting that some note should be taken of what has actually been accomplished to meet such a situation as is embedded in the immigration and census figures I have just given. Besides enjoying the privilege, as I do, of being the first officer of the Company in the immediate charge of all its operations from the first day a wheel was turned, I am able to speak from a personal knowledge of what has been done. T shall refer exclusively to the lines west of bake Superior. Ten years ago--in I897--we operated zoo miles of railway through a then unsettled country. Traffic was light and the train service limited. Our equipment consisted of three locomotives and some eighty cars all told, a working staff of less than twenty men altogether, and a pay-roll for the year under $17,000. The gross revenue for the first year was under $60,000, but it was more than sufficient to pay our debts. During that year we handled 25,700 tons of freight and carried 10,343 Passengers. There is nothing particularly impressive in these figures. Today, or ten years afterwards, we are operating-or shall be when, in a week or two, the last rails are laid on the Brandon-Regina line--3345 miles. We have an equipment of 237 locomotives, 219 passenger cars, including 35 sleeping and dining cars, and about 8,500 freight cars of all kinds. These figures, of course, do not include the large number of locomotives and cars ordered and now in course of construction by the builders. The 20 men of 1897 have become 10,700 in 1907, with a pay-roll of over $5,000,000 a year. And these figures do not include the large construction forces, which at times run into thousands of men. The gross earnings are now on a basis of over $10,000,000 a year; the freight handled for the past fiscal year was 1,822,220 tons; and we carried 703,988 passengers.

We are accepting freight and passengers for 4m different points west of Port Arthur. If I were dealing with Eastern as well as Western lines, I could tell you that the Canadian Northern has become the second largest railway in Canada. Only a chastened humility prevents me enlarging upon the fact that with 2,990 miles in the West actually in operation, 150 in Ontario, 531 in Quebec, and 431 in Nova Scotia, we have in all 4059 miles in Canada, whereas the Grand Trunk Railway has in the Dominion 3,829 miles. I will leave the comparison at that.

To me, however, the most fascinating result of the past ten years of Western development is that the Canadian Northern system is responsible for the creation of over 150 townsites, of which at least 125 have been named by our officers, and at least 70,000 persons (ex-' elusive of Winnipeg and other large centres) have found homes tributary to that Railway. I think it is reasonable to estimate that at least one-third of the growth of Winnipeg in this century is directly due to the business opened up by the Canadian Northern. Let me repeat, we claim no special credit for that. But even railway men are not devoid of the instincts of citizenship, and may be allowed to reflect without boasting that they have inaugurated communities wherein the institutions of a free, strong and intelligent people may mature.

The railways which connect Winnipeg with populous Eastern Canada are Western lines, in as much as without them the West could not be served. They bind the East to the West and the West to the East as nothing else could. They are the abiding symbol of Canadian nationality, and, as they increase in number, they make the nationality the more abiding also. Geography has been liberal to us. It has laid a leviathan responsibility upon our shoulders. The lakes are the friend of the West in summer, but steel is its defence against the rigours of winter. The railways are more vital to the national prosperity than water, for rails can do without the help of navigation, but navigation, of itself, would be helpless against the forces that tend to an identity of interest between the Western United States and the Western Provinces. The function of railway transportation in the West, then, is to keep open communication with .the East. On purely commercial grounds, it is infinitely more important to the East than to the West that it should be so. May we not say that that is true, also, as a matter of sentiment? It is not necessary to argue that the present day prosperity of Eastern Canada is the fruit of transportation in the West. It is conceded, on the one hand, that the rural population of Ontario has declined. On the other hand, the manufacturing population of Ontario has enlarged out of all proportion to the increase of Ontario's demand for Ontario-made goods; while the Winnipeg warehouses of Eastern manufacturers tell an eloquent story of the origin of modern Canadian growth and pay tribute in the fullest sense to the wisdom of the rail connection with the East. The supreme importance, then, of transportation to this aspect of our national growth is too obvious to be recounted.

If it is true that for Canadian solidarity there must be more, and still more, communication to and from the West, the principle is equally important Imperially. Around this board you habituate yourselves to think Imperially. I venture to suggest to you that in the wise elucidation of transportation problems lies the premier aid to strengthening the ties that hold a loosely-compacted body politic together. While statesmen have discussed closer union by half a dozen means, the railways of Canada have opened up new country, which, within a decade, has afforded homes and new prospects to 400,000 British-born people, whose experience has doubly enriched the Empire through its reflex action upon the friends they left behind. There is room for millions more, thanks to the same pioneering agencies. It is not necessary to discuss the wisdom of " pumping them in " before you discern the immense worth, to the Empire as a whole, of the access that has been afforded the resources of the Dominion by the railways of the' Dominion.

In the United Kingdom a great deal has been said of late years about the extreme need of having capable business men in public administrative positions. It would be impossible, I suppose, to run the Empire on, the principle of strict accountability which governs transportation management. But if Governments made as good a job of dealing with new conditions as, on the whole, the railways do, I venture to believe there would be less complaining in the land, and fewer thorny and perplexing problems for members of empire clubs to ponder. The statesmen have the advantage of us every time. Governments who do your imperial business will get all the money they need, and do not spend anxious nights trying to discover the relation of labour demands and of the increased cost of materials to net earnings. They produce pay-rolls as the precocious youngster told his sister the Lord produced kittens--the Lord just says, " Let there be kittens, and there are kittens."

We are beset by so many trials that we have scarcely time to complain. Our managers' offices become the constant Meccas of trainmen, trackmen, telegraphists, skilled and unskilled men, looking for more pay, and saying, "We can't be happy till we get it," while the hosts of men who serve the railways, and, on the whole serve them well, all the time desire to take more money from the till; the passengers, if two or three newspapers can be believed, want to put less in it. In the West there is a mile of railway for every 134 People. In Great Britain there is a mile for every 1,911 people, and perhaps 70 per cent. of the employees do not receive $5 a week, yet we are asked to carry passengers at the same rate as the English railways. Really, gentlemen, I think the statesmen who have only to say, " Let there be revenue," and there is revenue, are to be envied. But we have no time even to become envious, and are 'lucky to find the opportunity to tell part of the truth about ourselves. today I shall feel compensated for breaking out in an unfamiliar and dangerous role if I have assisted any of you to think more kindly of the railway enterprises that have brought some of the hidden treasures of the West to the generous hearths of the last, and to appreciate some of the difficulties that daily crowd upon them.