Delphi complete works of.., p.733
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 733
The accumulated hard times were bound to bring an upheaval of discontent. Hunger will not be still nor misery keep silent. It is not fair that able and willing people, trained and willing to enter on their work in life, should find themselves dispossessed in a closed world, dispossessed even of work itself. For the young at least this cannot be. Old age may die quiet in a corner. Youth will fight first. Hence the new onrush of hard times and unemployment “Social Planning for Canada,” Joint Authors, 1935 brought to Canada a new social unrest, a dissatisfaction with the social quietism of existing political parties a demand for a new commonwealth, with the mirage vision of an imaginary Russia to lend it colour.
Most of all did the new winds of doctrine sweep over the desolated Prairie Provinces. Hard times, poor prices and crops that withered to the dry ground, had done this. The dust blew from the dried-out valley of the Missouri to dry out the Canadian West. With the dust-wind came the still drier wind of defeatism, the farewell to hope. Till then farmers, in all ages since the Garden of Eden, lived on a cheerful confidence in Providence — one year bad, the next good — crops not as good as the farmer had expected, but then he hardly expected they would be. Thus he lived on a sort of Monte Carlo attitude of rouge et noir. Now P. B. Sears, “Deserts on the March,” 1935 came the growing fear, the alarm that the West was gone. Classroom theorists began to explain that the world’s cultivation had been vain, that nature’s deserts would come back, as if an angered deity of nature was to bury Saskatchewan under dust and make of it a new Palmyra in the desert. For a short time even the stoutest-hearted drew an anxious breath — watching each year — till presently mother nature showered the prairies with soft rain and buried them again in green. Nature passed a soothing hand over the human child’s feverish forehead.
Most of all did the new doctrines sweep Alberta. To this province were imported certain economic profundities of British fog, impossible for most people to understand, which in sunny Alberta, by force of prayer, turned into Alberta Social Credit. Stephen Leacock, “My Discovery of the West,” 1937 The theory is an expansion of the idea of living by taking in one another’s washing. It is suggested that if all the people collectively give twenty-five dollars each to all the people separately, then each of the separate people can call for work and goods from all the other people, whereby everybody has work and the work supplies everybody with bread. The theory is parallel to all the new doctrines of ‘priming the pump,’ pensioning all old men who promise to spend every cent — in other words all the theory of ‘purchasing power.’ Whatever may be in it, in Alberta it led to partial repudiation of public debt, and scaling down of mortgage interest, things done however, under other names, in Saskatchewan. This involved invasion of federal power by the province, and led to a sort of deadlock — waiting for the sunshine of prosperity to unloose its grip — and finding war instead. We cannot yet tell whether Social Credit was the end of something just ending, or is the beginning of something just beginning.
JAMES CROCKART, A.R.I.B.A., MONTREAL, P.Q., 1941
“. . . the extraordinary advantages of water carriage. The cost of floating things, once loaded, seems to vanish” — page 238
In this darkness of depression something like a twilight of dawn seemed to show in the long-sought conclusion of Reciprocity with the United States. It has been seen that when the imperial preferential system came at last it had somehow lost its outline. Still more unrecognizable was Reciprocity, the lost child of 1866 brought home at last in 1935. This again was partly due to the change of government. Political parties like all other lovers, still seek their first love. The Liberals, who came back to power in 1935, succeeded in obtaining bilateral legislation with the United States which at last brought Reciprocity, or the ghost of it, to Canada. But like the Ghost of Queen Dido’s husband (in the first book of Virgil), how changed it was from its former self! Who could recognize in these intricate clauses and schedules, in this shifty give-and-take of movable duties, the broad, bold outline of the older Reciprocity. The new system was based upon the general Trade Agreement Act of Congress of 1934, authorizing the President to enter into reciprocal arrangements with any country and thereby reduce any existing duty, but not more than 50 per cent. It applied to any country. By 1940 Canada was only one of 21 countries with which it was concerned. Moreover, the schedules seemed so complicated and so mechanical, as to lack any vital animating principle. It was the change from a gospel to a bill of goods. To the public at large it had lost interest, and to the individual also, except his own little subsection of an industrial clause.
Perhaps the brightest page in these short inter-war annals of years closing towards disaster is the record of the discovery and exploitation of the incalculable mineral wealth of the central wilderness of Canada between the Hudson Bay and the Lakes. This means far more than the wealth itself, great though it must be. It removes from our commonwealth its fatal geographical defect of an uninhabited and seemingly worthless central area which broke East and West forever apart. The touch of King Midas is turning desolation into fairyland, a strange fairyland indeed, where the poison-breath of smelters withers and obliterates life and where uprooted trees and dynamited rocks show how hydraulic plants can tear the heart out of primitive nature, and yet a fairyland too, where the snug winter lights of happy Noranda twinkle back at the sulky thermometer; and where in summer the aeroplane hovers over still lakes as silver as its own wings. The story of the discoveries is a romance. The Government of Ontario, building a railway, for fun, to James Bay (to connect Moose Factory — with the contractors), ran into the treasures of the land of Saguenay of which the Indians had told Jacques Cartier. The Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway was found to be ballasted with silver rocks, and its roadbed dusted with sand containing platinum. To this was added the copper, already cut when the Canadian Pacific first cut through the wilderness.
The old story of the northern climate comes true again. It V. Stefansson, “Northward Course of Empire,” 1922 doesn’t matter how cold it is out of doors; it’s how cold it is inside. A blizzard doesn’t matter to a man in a club. Vilhjalmur Stefansson has told that the cold blizzards of Iowa made it seem utterly uninhabitable till houses were built. So with our new North. Here, where once Red Indians froze white, are the lights of happy Noranda — brick houses, apartments, electric lights, hotels with bell-boys bringing ice — thirty below outside but indoors, Rotary Club meetings, bridge, cocktails and a Ladies’ Club lecture on Browning and Freezing. Meantime from this L. Laughlin, “History of Bimetallism,” 1897 frozen north there is produced each year $150,000,000 worth of gold — more than all the gold brought home by Cortez and Pizarro in twenty years.
Another feature of development over the same period, promising great things to come, was the unexpected effect on British Columbia of the opening of the Panama Canal. The canal was built as a military measure, camouflaged as commerce. Its concealed object was to unite the American Navy; its unexpected effect to create Pacific commerce. The canal was initiated in 1903 and opened in 1914. Its development remained for the inter-war years. Now again appears the extraordinary advantages of water carriage. The cost of floating things once loaded seems to vanish. It often costs less to float a ton across an ocean than to cart it uptown. Where time is not a factor water wins. In some cases the time factor is reversed. Wheat shipped from Vancouver to Liverpool via Panama would rather not get there too soon. It lingers on the way like Red Riding Hood among the flowers, gathering free storage and arriving on a better market. As a consequence all the wheat of British Columbia, most of the Alberta wheat and some from Saskatchewan goes out via Panama, constituting about one-quarter of the total Canadian export, for example, 39 million bushels out of 146 million for the season 1938-39. This trade via Panama and the trans-Pacific trade that had developed before 1939 are only the first signs of what the Pacific commerce of Canada must be in the future. The City of Vancouver had no people (none findable by our census) in 1880; in 1891, 29,000; and in 1931, Vancouver with its suburbs, 308,000.
But after all, and all in all, and when the worst is said, the depression and the difficulty and the hard times never broke ranks in Canada, never even began to. We knew nothing of the fierce hatreds that tore the vitals of Europe. We knew nothing of the inhuman concentration camps, the mass executions, the pogroms, the liquidations, the secret police — the things that have driven from Central Europe all prospect of human happiness under human freedom. Our people through all the minor divisions of race or province or social class, preserved certain ideals, stood firm on certain ground. Even the worst Conservative knew that even the worst Liberal had a touch of good in him and both knew that a Social Crediter with such a genial face as that of Mr. Aberhart couldn’t be altogether bad.
So when the reality of war came, unexpected and scarcely believable, all Canada swung into a single front. It was not a question of whether Canada had to go to war if Britain went to war. That question had talked itself out years before, had run to seed, leaving nothing but academic chaff endlessly winnowed by vacant professors. The sinking of the Athenia and the massacre of the defenceless in Poland, settled for us the moral issue of the war at the outset. Nor were we prepared. No decent people were. Does a man walk the street prepared against murder? But from the very righteousness of this anger, from the very fact that we had not prepared for war, had not gloated over blood or fashioned young souls to cruelty, the war in its coming has been able to bring out all that is best in our people — as adversity, as illness, as danger. We cannot doubt its issue.
ORIGINAL PAINTING BY W. J. PHILLIPS, R.C.A., WINNIPEG, MAN., 1941 The Peace River Valley. “We need immigrants — not thousands, millions . . .” — page 246
CHAPTER X. CANADA AS A FUTURE WORLD POWER
THE PAST AS a Pledge for the Future — The New Horizon — World Security and Social Welfare — The Opportunity and the Responsibility of Canada.
No one can read the record of the making of Canada without realizing that a great work has been done. Nor can any Canadian read it without realizing also how much our own efforts have been aided by the good fortune of our history. The growth of the United States to a single vast power reaching from ocean to ocean, speaking all one language and pursuing one democratic ideal, has produced a continent that knows nothing of the divisions of race, language and purpose which have brought down Central Europe in ruin. Nor has the proximity of the United States either overshadowed or endangered our institutions. On the contrary, there has grown out of it an abiding friendship and a mutual esteem beside which all the treaties of Europe are scraps of paper.
Nor has there been wanting to us for nearly two centuries the sheltering protection of the mother country. No overseas aggression could reach us, and those who came must come in peace. To that has been added the rugged gifts bestowed by nature, the great buttress of the polar seas and arctic islands, the safeguard afforded by two oceans over which ride the fleets of Britain and America.
Such is the past. But this protected infancy and sheltered youth are over now. The time has come when our country must make its full return for all that has been done for it in the past. For the present we best do this in making every effort to aid in beating back from Great Britain the war by which a brutal and degenerate nation tries to overwhelm it. When that is over we must look to the future, where a higher place and a higher responsibility than anything the past has seen awaits our country. From its very situation Canada must be reorganized as the central buttress of imperial power. Wedged, as it were, between Great Britain and the United States, our Dominion becomes the keystone of a new arch of mutual support and common security.
We have to take for granted the sad truth that after this war the European world can be ruled only by superior power — our enemies’ or ours. Their rule would mean power with brutality, cruelty, injustice; ours a rule of decency and fair play with no further injustice than that of removing from a conquered nation every conceivable form of weapon of offence that could prompt a new treachery. This much we must do for our own preservation. There can be no question again of self-determined nations, all free, joining in a Free League of Nations to rule the world. It is well to be done once and for all and in time with the form of propaganda which still infests the British press and which pours over in leaflets to Canada. Here for instance is such a typical leaflet of the immediate moment, which urges a vigorous prosecution of the war to the complete destruction of German power, to be followed by setting up a new League of Nations, including Germans and such, but truly international in having its own armed forces, superior to those of any one nation in the League. This, of course, means winning the war and then handing over our lives and fortunes to a round-table vote, with a bunch of crooks among the voters. If idiocy can go as far as this, it is well to part company with it at the outset.
In point of force, then, it is plain that Canada must become, as it were, not exactly a fortified country in the old sense, but a country with a vast capacity, sufficiently developed to expand with ease, for producing armaments and munitions in places so safeguarded by natural obstacles that no war could impede the manufacture. Here is boundless water-power, as willing to run in subterranean channels as above ground; great battlements of rock that can be hollowed out into underground factories against which the largest bomber in the world is as harmless as a dragon-fly. With that is a store of minerals and metals that Pluto himself might envy. All hell can be raised in the bowels of northern Canada.
One speaks thus first in terms of war. To do so is a regrettable necessity of the hour. But we are here speaking of war only in the negative sense, of the means of protection and of potential war-power that would make an evil-minded nation hesitate to attack Great Britain. But all this is only to render possible our new destiny in peace.
It cannot be doubted that after the war there will be witnessed a great migration of population and capital to Canada from the British Isles. It is sometimes said — without thought — that Canada will become the centre and seat of Empire. That, to use a prayer-book phrase, is more than we either desire or deserve. History cannot be shifted and “1066 and all that” cannot be removed to Saskatchewan. Indeed we may well expect that in Great Britain, out of present tribulation, out of present heroism, there will rise on the ashes of burned cities, the wreckage of broken homes and the memories of lives given in sacrifice, a higher inspiration to great things than has been seen since the defeat of the Spanish Armada inspired the England of Shakespeare. No words that we may use of the coming greatness of our country should be so framed as to take away anything from the undying greatness of Great Britain. Both are needed. But undoubtedly a great migration of British people to Canada and still more a rapid natural increase among those who come, is a first necessity of our common welfare.
It would be a great mistake for us to divert attention from the present effort of the war by detailed peace-plans of the future. But the realization of certain broad ideals, to be achieved later on, can itself serve as a stimulus to the pursuit of victory. The war effort seems all the more worthwhile if we can see the vision possible beyond it. We need immigrants — not thousands, millions — not gradually, but in a mass. Above all we have to realize that the best immigrants — in fact the best of all general imports — are children. We need them, imported and homegrown, in cradlefuls. That way lies security. In no time they grow up; see them there in the air above us, the children of yesterday!
It may well be asked, for there is a dense cloud of error that screens the subject, whether our country can take many more people. All kinds of silly little totals are put forward as the maximum, or the optimum, or the God-knows-what, of our population. The United States, it is said, is nearly full. We cannot take in immigrants, it is urged, except in proportion as our trade expands, or as our factories increase. In other words, since we cannot step out both feet first, we are told to step out with neither.
It is not possible in these brief pages to explore so large a subject. We need and we shall presently obtain a new survey of our economic life. We shall have to revise all our views of the relation of migration to natural assets, of the increase of population to social welfare. The views we have are just a shredded old patchwork, a ‘coon-skin coat, dating down from days forgotten. Such studies, to be complete and convincing, would take much investigation and much labour of presentation. Yet even here a few suggestive considerations may be attempted. Within recent years the subject of the increase of population has received much scientific thought and statistical study. By science we mean thinking; by statistics, counting. We can easily understand that within the last fifty years the great advance of medical science, the increased control of epidemic disease, the progress of sanitation and the care of public health, must have greatly increased the average length of human life. We have to admit, indeed, that these things are partly offset by the fret, the worry and the congestion of modern life and by the change from the country to the city. No doubt an open-air cottager of the English countryside a hundred years ago, living with a maximum of breathing and a minimum of thinking, lived a long while. One recalls, as for so much of the social history of England, a picture in Punch. “And how old,” asks a lady of an old cottager, sitting in the sunset on his door-step, “how old was your father when he died?” “Bless you, ma’am,” answers the cottager, “father ain’t dead; he’s upstairs putting grandfather to bed.” But at best such cases were exceptions, survivals stranded in the backwaters of the vexed current of life. Even at that, in those days ‘sixty’ looked wrinkled and bent and toothless. With us men of that age would be out playing bridge.
