CANADA'S GREAT FUTURE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20481, 5 February 1930, Page 8

CANADA'S GREAT FUTURE

BURSTING WITH WEALTH.

WORLD'S IMMENSE GRANARY.

EVOLUTION OF THE WEST. EXPANSION IN THE NORTH.

BY THE ET. HON. WINSTON" CHUBCHILL.

(Copyright.) In a journey across the North American Continent we are seeking to obtain what would in former times have been called a " bird's-eye view " of Canada. Hitherto from Winnipeg men have looked east and west-,' eastward across the tnmult of lake and forest which separate the cornlands from the settled Atlantic: provinces and Europe, westward across the Rocky Mountains, which separate them from the Pacific Ocean and Asia. There is much to say about each of these aspects. But now this year there opens another vista, and from Winnipeg wo must look in a new direction.

The Canadian Pacific Railway has thrust a branch line northward to the waters of Hudson Bay. Two centuries ago, Johii Churchill, afterwards the first Duke of Marlborough, looking ahead, became the third in succession of the Governors of the Hudson Bay Company, and Fort Churchill ' bears his name. The crash of the great European War, not this last one nor the one before, but what is called in history " the war of the Spanish succession," interrupted his vision, and absorbed the rest of his considerable life energies.

Fort Churchill slumbered as a trappers' post, but now all this is awake and is again on the move. The feature of the past quarter of a century of Canadian economic structure has been the march to the west. The feature of tie next 25 years will be the roll to the north. New Outlet Upon Europe. During the four or five months when the navigation of the Hudson Bay is open, the greatest vessels of our time can reach Fort Churchill from Southampton or Liverpool sooner than they can reach New York. An entirely new outlet upon Europe is thus afforded to all the foods and minerals of what may well become in the lifetime of grown-up people at least one of the greatest food and mineral centres of the world. Further and further to the north rolls the central wheat pi'oduction area of Canada, and the further north the greater the mineral possibilities become. We cannot doubt that in a century, and perhaps in much less, an immense debouchment of foods and metals will flow during tlie summer months through this entirely new channel. No one can prescribe the time-table, and no one can measure the volume; but that the Hudson Bay route will be one of the important supply feeders of the world can already be proclaimed. We are now only at the beginning. The population is small; the burden of winter, the hazards of individuals and of enterprises are formidable. Many mistakes will be made, many disappointments must be expected. Progress will be by jerks and back-slidings, but the end is sure. Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta form the world's greatest potential granary, and, in addition, they possess mineral and oil deposits at once enor-1 mous and unmeasured. Of all this, Winni- j peg, with one hand on the fresh water of . the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence < and the other now reaching to the salt " water of the Hudson Bay, is the centre. An Endless Wheatfield. i We must resume our journey to the ■west. In leaps of 300 or 400 miles we traverse the, three central provinces and j their new cities, modern in every detail • —Edmonton, Regina, and Calgary afford halting-places whence wide prospects may be surveyed. Hour after hour and day after day for hundreds of miles uhe train pursues its way through an endlesss wheatfield. As far as the eye can reach, the earth waves in a golden harvest, framed only on distant horizons by the blue or purple-grey silhouettes of mountains. The men and women who force this amazing reproduction from Naiure are rarely seen. They dwell in lonely, if serviceable homesteads, which for the most part they have been too busy even to shelter ani adorn by planting trees. In the provincial capitals our smoothrolling car pauses. in the shelter of a 20storey hotel amid the churnings of electric trams. We climb to the summit of these mammoth buildings—mostly in process of having extra storeys added—and gaze upon a surprising harvest panorama. Wonders .of Oilfields. We rumble on to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Charm and! beauty grow in the landscape. The busy hive of Calgary rises around us. All along * the eastern slopes and pockets of the Rockies lies oil. The Calgary oilfieldsTurner Valley—present an astonishing spectacle. You have to burrow down a mile and pierce through the limestone lid which has ppnt its treasures for millions of years. j . Once the drill strikes the mysterious honeyiomb' in which the naphtha gas is compressed demons are liberated from a very long bondage, and at a pressure of 20001b. to the square inch and a temperature of 40deg. below zero, the liberated gas rushes to the light of day. Imprisoned anew, it is turned into gasoline to drive motor-cars and farm tractors. But far more demons have been loosed , than can be harnessed. A 6in. pipe-lino heats the city of Calgary. As for the rest, it flares away in pillars of flame 80ft. high ; millions of gallons of a precious and by no means unlimited product burning lamentably to waste! So they say, " Let us build a pipe-line to heat Winnipeg; it is only 600 miles." And then comes the crash on Wall Street, and all hold schemes, practical or otherwise, recede into a murky background. Canada's Great Growth. Thirty or forty years ago it was fashionable to doubt whether a territory so long drawn out as Canada, so wasp-waisted, united only by railroads, obstructed by tremendous rock forest or mountain bar- j riers, could ever realise itself as an eco- I nomir, political and national unit,. Those doubts are dispersed The mineral wealth of the harsh regions north of the Great Lakes, the ceaseless widening and further potential widening of the central cornbelt. have given Canada that increase of girth required for her integrity. A geographical abstraction has become a physical reality. The central wealth of this thick slice of continent, happily dammed to the southward by the United States tariff, will discharge itself upon Europe through the St. Lawrence, and in a contributory stream through the Hudson Bay, and will overflow into the Pacific through Vancouver. | In proportion as China, rising in the j economic scale, consumes wheat instead of rice, this tendency will bo powerfully stimulated. The growth of population, petty as it is compared with what the future will bring, is already sufficient to sustain the social and political conceptions of what., will one day be a mighty nation rich in\ grain and cattle, with minerals and oils in her bosom, and with a cliniato to breed a sturdy race.