Telling Cinderella's Fortune: The Future of Canada
THE writing of history before it has been enacted is always interesting and may be profitable. More speculation — but not much more — is involved than in the recordation of past events, but on the other hand there is not the same temptation to attach undue importance to trivialities. A forecast of the progress of Canadian events in the next twenty-five years is the more interesting and should be the more valuable by reason of the fact that the British Empire and the United States are even more deeply interested in it than the Canadians themselves. Things may take a turn in Canada in the next decade or so that will lead to the ultimate breaking-up of the British Empire. They may so move as to affect vitally the economic future of the United States. They might so eventuate as to assure to the Canada of some still more distant day the position of keystone of the English-speaking and English-thinking arch. The one thing certain is that forthcoming events in Canada are bound to have economic, and are more than likely to have political, results of international magnitude.
Canada is a vast land with vast potentialities. These call for development on a corresponding scale, with large resources of money and men, and, above all, with big vision. The vision may be there, but the men and the money cannot be found by Canada herself. The United States can and will find much money for Canada’s industrial development, but has neither men nor money for the development of Canadian agriculture. Britain could, but does not, finance Canadian industrial development. She can find, but is not at present finding, both the men and the money for Canada’s agricultural development.
Probably in the next ten years, and certainly in the next twenty-five, one of the following things must happen: —
1. Canada will become an integral part of the United States.
2. Canada will remain politically British, but will have complete economic union with the United States.
3. Canada will become more firmly attached to the British Empire by new ties of sentiment — the result of British settlement in Canada on a great and organized scale — and by new economic ties in the form of a very substantial measure of intra-Imperial free trade.
Canada cannot herself do much to help, and will certainly not do anything to hinder, her own development. It is true that the Dominion is saddled with racial duality, but this is not, as in some other countries, a source of chronic discord and corresponding stagnation. The large Catholic French Canadian population of Quebec is consolidating its position, but it is not extending it. The French Canadians outbreed the Ontario English, but their surplus young men and women migrate, not to the newer Canadian Provinces, but to the New England mills. Of the seven largest cities of Massachusetts four have French Canadians as their predominating foreign element, and so has the State of Massachusetts as a whole.
The French Canadians take no interest in the British Empire and very little in France. The United States has no sentimental message for them. Their religion is their politics, and, as there is nowhere an ecclesiastically dominated State such as their almost mediæval Catholicism would allow them to be attracted to, they ‘keep themselves to themselves,’ as the charladies say, make the most of the power that their votes give them, and resist to the best of their ability such evils as conscription.
In so far as the future development of Canada is concerned, the French Canadian does not count. He is outnumbered, and in any case he has sense enough to realize that progress and development in any part of the Dominion must indirectly be of some benefit to himself.
The people of Canada are industrious, energetic, and prosperous. They have no capital, but they pay their way and can afford to manage their national affairs with great efficiency. No money is spared, for example, to supply the Canadian agriculturist with the very latest knowledge, the very newest machinery, the most productive seeds, and the stock best suited for his environment. Some of the performances of the Canadian Department of Agriculture — for instance, the establishment of the Prince Edward Island egg industry — read like miracles. Until recently Canada was the greatest cheese-manufacturing country in the world. To-day Canadian butter takes its place in the British markets along with that of Denmark and New Zealand and is actually imported into Ireland. Canadian store cattle, shipped thousands of miles, fetch twelve shillings a hundred more than Irish store cattle shipped from Dublin and Belfast. Efficient organization is the answer. As the manager of one of Canada’s many and splendidly equipped experimental farms said to the writer: ‘There are only two things in agriculture we cannot produce as well as or better than any other country in the world. Those are farmers and money.’
Canada cannot produce farmers because she has no surplus population. She can make enough money to pay her way, but has no large invested reserve with which to finance great projects of development, agricultural or industrial. We are apt to think of Canada primarily as an agricultural country looking for agricultural development. Canadians themselves are convinced that their country has an industrial future comparable with the industrial growth of the United States in the last half-century. They will point out to you that at the present time only one of the many raw materials of industry with which Canada is well provided — pulp wood — is being appreciatively exploited. The United States has no pulp wood for its pulp factories, no pulp for its paper factories, and no paper for its news and other needs unless Canada obliges. So plenty of American capital is forthcoming to buy Canadian pulp wood, if Canada allows it to be exported, to buy wood pulp if Canada prohibits the export of the wood, and to buy Canadian paper if Canada prohibits the export of both wood and pulp.
Anything else that Canada manufactures she manufactures in competition with the United States, which has both factories and raw materials. There is no American capital forthcoming to exploit Canadian steel, iron, coal, or copper, or articles manufactured from them. Eighty per cent of the world’s asbestos is mined in the Province of Quebec. The United States needs asbestos; so we find that the capital behind the asbestos industry is mostly American. It is not always America’s need of imports, however, that results in the development of Canadian industry. The McKenna Duties place an impost of 33 1/3 per cent on American motor cars but only 25 per cent on Canadian cars. To get the benefit of the difference many American cars intended for export to the Empire are now assembled in Canada.
One other accessory of industrialism — it can hardly be called a raw material — that Canada possesses, and is prepared to export to the United States in unlimited quantities, is water power. The most optimistic Canadian industrialist does not entertain hopes of seeing more than a fraction of this power driving Canadian mills for the next hundred years.
Another mineral that Canada produces and the United States needs is nickel, of which Canada mines about seventy per cent and New Caledonia the rest.
Water power, pulp wood, asbestos, and nickel represent Canada’s hold on the industrial affections of the United States. Of these commodities the Empire takes no water power, one eighth of the unmanufactured wood-products taken by the United States, three fifths of the nickel, and a negligible amount of asbestos.
Canada’s industrial potentialities have never been even approximately assessed. As an example, however, we may consider the fact that alone among the countries of the world she has the raw materials of an immense iron and steel industry in such proximity that no one of them needs to touch a freight car. Cape Breton Island has immense deposits of the finest and most easily workable steam and other coal situated on tidewater. Near it is limestone in adequate quantities. A short seajourney away, also on tidewater, are unlimited supplies of Newfoundland iron ore.
Canada is dependent on the United States at the present time for tobacco and cotton, and to a smaller extent for petroleum and sugar. Both tobacco and beet sugar are raised — at present in small quantities — in Canada, but these cannot be called thriving industries.
It is perhaps an imbecile act for any country to seek industrial development if it can export its surplus population and keep those that stay at home in tolerable comfort. The modern world does not take that view, however, and Canada would be glad to see its surplus young French Canadians going to work in Canadian factories, since they will not become Western farmers, rather than migrating to work in New England factories. Migrate they do, however, and even if Ontario had the factories to absorb them it seems likely that they would still prefer the milder and more Roman Catholic environment of Massachusetts.
The political absorption of Canada by the United States is a possibility, and that is all that can be said. Sentiment is involved, and national sentiment operates according to no known laws. At present British sentiment is very strong in Canada. Sentiment in favor of annexation to the United States is more often professed for political purposes than actually held. The United States-born population of Canada is only something over four per cent. Sentiment will never turn Canada toward the United States, but if pro-British sentiment dies out, and the Canadian becomes simply a Canadian, economic considerations might easily pave the way to his becoming an American.
At the moment, Americans are regarded in Canada as freaks, in just the same way as the Mid-Victorian Englishman was regarded on the Continent as more than a little mad. One has only to see the middle-aged American females who bob up in Montreal and Quebec in ‘plus fours’and horn-rimmed spectacles, and the collarless curiosities that accompany them, to realize why. A country can ill afford to be advertised by its tourists. Generally speaking, however, Canadians are moving, in all the details of their social and economic life, away from British and toward American models. One can imagine — without being dogmatic about it — that a judicious mixture of the two cultures would in time make Canada the hub of the intellectual English-speaking — or, rather, English-writing — world. At present, however, Canada is getting more and more out of touch with British culture and more and more identified with North American culture— in a word, with United States culture.
Canadians will quite possibly resent the suggestion that under any circumstances they are likely to acquire any culture that is not distinctively Canadian. It is practically impossible, however, under modern conditions, for a new country to evolve an endemic civilization, no matter how peculiar its environment may be. Climatic conditions may make the Canadian as different from the Southern Californian or Texan as chalk from cheese, but it will not differentiate him from the people of Maine and Vermont and Wisconsin and the Dakotas and Washington. Nor is race important beyond a certain point. All the great civilizations of the world have sprung from the amalgamation of two races, but there is no instance of an important new civilization materially and tangibly contributed to by half a dozen at once. If there is to be a great Canadian nation it must be contributed to equally by Britain and by the United States. Even now these two peoples alone are exercising a decisive influence on Canada’s culture, notwithstanding the fact that considerably less than half the Canadian population is of British extraction.
Identity of environment, proximity, and unity of commercial interest, all tend to efface the guinea stamp with the dollar mark in Canadian national life. Those who believe that the United States will sooner or later absorb Canada do so on the theory that facts are stronger than ideals, and that Canada, which is rapidly becoming Americanized in fact, is bound thereafter to become American in sentiment. They also assume that Britain will not within the next few years ‘pull her socks up’ and make a bold bid to keep Canada British, but will continue her traditional policy of cultivating her enemies and neglecting her friends.
Britain has ready to her hand two means of keeping Canada British: the extension of Imperial Preference to the point where it becomes in effect Imperial Protection, a substantial tariffwall within which the self-contained Empire does business with itself to the exclusion of the foreigner; and the settlement in Canada of Britain’s surplus population on a large and well-organized scale. Before considering these possibilities, however, we have to ask ourselves whether economic union with the United States really offers — in the absence of any counter-move by Britain — the substantial advantages to Canada that it is generally assumed to carry.
The question is a very complicated one, and figures do not provide a solution. The United States, like Europe, is over-industrialized, and immigration has been curtailed. Moreover, there is a steady movement of the industrial population from the colder to the more temperate parts of North America, as witness the shifting of the cotton textile industry from Massachusetts to the Carolinas and the beginnings of industrial development in and around Los Angeles. Canada has any quantity of cheap water power and can draw from Europe an unlimited quantity of industrial workers. It would be hard, nevertheless, to point to a single Canadian industry that is at present prevented by American tariff restrictions from securing a big or substantially bigger foothold in the markets of the United States. Canadian agricultural products would benefit, but Canadian agriculture is restricted at the present time, not by lack of markets, but by lack of labor. On the other hand, it is possible to enumerate a number of infant but thriving Canadian industries that are being fostered by the Canadian tariff and would be lost to the United States the moment the customs barrier was lifted. For example, Canada in 1924 employed over eight thousand people in the manufacture of tobacco, seventy thousand in the production of clothing, and eighty-five thousand in the manufacture of industrial equipment. Much of this employment might be lost to the United States if the Canadian tariff bars were to be lowered.
More important is the question of pulp wood. This, if cut on Crown lands, must be manufactured in Canada. Otherwise it can be exported. The result is that Canada manufactures 70 per cent of the pulp wood cut and exports the other 30 per cent to the States. The percentage manufactured in Canada increases yearly, and before long there will be nothing to prevent her from establishing a monopoly for all North America, not alone of wood pulp, but of paper also. Without artificial protection a much greater percentage of the pulp wood might be shipped to the States and manufactured there.
Those who think otherwise argue that the result of economic union would be to bring American brains and capital into Canada in a way that would result in Canada’s not only holding what she now has but increasing her industrial products at the expense of the United States.
Two other factors must be considered. In favor of the economic union is the fact that all boundaries are a source of expense and all customs barriers an unmitigated nuisance. The instinct of Governments is to preserve both; the instinct of the citizen is to do away with them. Against the economic union is the fact that at any time Great Britain, now the consumer of an enormous quantity of Canadian agricultural produce, may go in for protection. Already Canada has done well out of Imperial Preference, for it has given her a virtual monopoly of the Australian automobile market. To have the free run or a strongly preferential run of the British cheese, butter, egg, bacon, and cattle market against present Danish, French, United States, and other competitors would be a tremendous thing. Add to that, as we may, a possible preference over United States and South American exporters of wheat and meat, as well as a preference over Baltic exporters of paper and paper pulp, and enormous vistas of Canadian development and Canadian prosperity are opened.
In the long run, Canadian development means more trained agriculturists — not a few more, but hundreds of thousands more—and the great capital outlay required to settle them on an organized and lasting basis. Great Britain is the only country that can undertake this with advantage to herself as well as to Canada. There are a million and a half unemployed in Britain — many of them becoming rapidly unemployable — and this even though there are more in employment than before the war. The upkeep of these unemployed is costing the country many millions a year; their presence is demoralizing the employed workers. The actual unemployed are not in most cases of the stuff that Canadian farmers can be made of, but if a million of the right kind were shipped to Canada a hiatus would be formed into which the existing surplusage could be absorbed.
Two things are required. Great Britain would have to set up a number of large agricultural training schools for the intended emigrants and give them at least a year’s thorough grounding in the principles and practice of scientific farming before sending them out to Canada. A scheme would have to be formulated to settle these agriculturists in village colonies of five hundred to a thousand, each with its cinemas, chapels, concert halls, playgrounds, and other media of social existence, and with some organized industry giving the opportunity of profitable occupation during the months when there is no farming to be done. Then these settlers would ‘stay put.’ Otherwise they will simply dribble back to the cities and finally into the United States, or back to England, as so many do at present. To-day Canada loses two of her population in this way out of every five added to it. All this would cost a tremendous amount of money, but the sum would not be a third of the capital value of the sums now expended annually on unemployment relief.
A million immigrants of this class would do a lot to keep Canada British in habit and temperament. The idea is quite practical, but there are no signs that the next few years will evolve a British leader or party with the vision or determination to carry through a scheme of such magnitude. Successive British Governments are much more likely to go on treating Canada as a more or less useful but notto-be-too-much-encouraged Cinderella until she is driven to contract, faute de mieux, a marriage of convenience with the wealthy and eligible fairy prince who dwells on the other side of the lake.