The Canadian Century. Brian Lee Crowley
Swedes, and others—to have tried their luck in the US first. In fact, this theme of the competition between Canada and the US for the best immigrants is one to which we shall return.
The Lanes and the Bierschieds were but two of the tiny trickles that together added up to a mighty torrent of humanity sweeping into the West, changing the politics, the economics, and the population of Canada forever. As one of Laurier’s biographers, Joseph Schull, points out, the wheat yield in the three Prairie provinces rose during Laurier’s time from eighteen million bushels to nearly one hundred and eighteen million.8 This was the time when the West began to flex its muscles and the whole country saw the promise of the West as a powerful theme in the growing symphony of Canadian prosperity and optimism.
But there was more. The country’s natural resources, its minerals, its timber, its agricultural products were flowing in ever-increasing streams to the markets of the world. As much as the West, the North was proving to be a treasure trove of natural wealth and a magnet for newcomers. Provinces such as Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec were pressing to expand their borders northward to capture the spreading prosperity.9 Manufacturing was booming and finding not just domestic markets behind modest protectionist barriers, but was part of a great Canadian effusion into foreign markets. Foreign trade tripled during this golden decade.10
William Cornelius Van Horne, the head of the CPR, saw his railway in terms that seem strikingly modern as we talk today about Pacific and Atlantic gateways to trade: Van Horne said that the CPR had one terminus in Euston station in London, metropolis of the greatest empire the world had ever seen, while the others were in Hong Kong and Sydney. And Laurier himself was “a convinced and ardent enthusiast for the ‘All-Red Route’ [red being the colour then reserved by mapmakers for the pieces of the far-flung British Empire, including Canada] which would link the British Isles with Australia and New Zealand by means of fast steamships and direct rail connections across Canada.”11
Yet the CPR was not enough. The growth of Canada’s production of every kind, and our energetic push into the world’s markets, soon exhausted the ability of our single transcontinental tie to transport the fruits of our blooming, buzzing energy. Given the optimism of the day, it is perhaps no surprise that we ended up with more railways than we knew what to do with, although that may be as much due to our failure to stick with Laurier’s plan as to any flaw in that plan itself.
Canada’s boom cannot, however, be ascribed solely to exports. The new country was hungry for investment—it was not enough to plunk people in the wilderness and expect them to produce the New Jerusalem. They needed tools, homes, and institutions, things like railways, factories, mills, ships, equipment, roads, bridges, houses, schools, courts, customs houses, and churches. The new country was sucking in capital, chiefly from Britain and the United States, at a dizzying pace; the new investments themselves drove the boom even more than the exports that they made possible. “The value of new and repair construction increased by almost 400 per cent, while the value of exports went up just over 100 per cent. The size of the railway system and the quantity of residential housing increased much more rapidly than the volume of exports.”12 And contrary to the much-caressed prejudices of the big-government apologists and historical revisionists of our own time, historians are clear that this investment boom was led by the private sector, not government investment, although the government certainly played its part.13
And while we were predominantly a rural people, our cities—home to much of our manufacturing—boomed with the countryside: Montreal, Toronto, and Ottawa more than doubled in population, while Vancouver and Winnipeg far outstripped them in their rate of growth, quintupling in the same period. Hitherto empty plains saw cities suddenly mushroom in their midst, as Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, and Saskatoon became centres of the new prosperity.14 The rate at which new companies were formed and chartered by the Dominion government grew over twelve times during the first decade of what Laurier felt in his bones was the Canadian century.15
A Man, a Plan, a People—Canada!
What was Laurier’s plan, his vision for a Canada that would be the best the New World had to offer the Old, a plan that had already unleashed the greatest growth in our level of prosperity ever seen and that he expected would fuel our development for decades to come? That policy had four distinct elements.
1. Prosperity grows from liberty’s soil
First, he thought it vital to preserve and protect the institutions brought to Canada by our forebears, the “British liberty” composed of the rule of law, free speech, freedom of conscience and religion, respect of minority rights, habeas corpus, parliamentary self-government, minimal state interference, low taxes, and respect of property and of contract.16 That liberty and those institutions were, Laurier believed, the catalyst that released the energy and dynamism of those who lived under them, whatever their ethnic origin or religious convictions. When people were free to follow their own star, to determine what was important to them, to build their own relationships with family, friends, and colleagues, they built well and energetically—they had confidence in the future, they took risks, and they reaped the reward.
Laurier was convinced that the best people in the world would jostle one another at Canada’s door, not just because they would enjoy a higher standard of living but, much more importantly, because in Canada they would be free: “I think we can claim that it is Canada that shall fill the twentieth century . . . For the next seventy-five years, nay the next hundred years, Canada shall be the star towards which all men who love progress and freedom shall come.”17
A society like this, where people were responsible for themselves, made their own plans, and accepted that their fate was in their own hands, was one that could be open to immigrants on a vast scale. Newcomers could not be a burden to the government or the population, because if they succeeded, they became net contributors, and if they failed, they were no affair of the state.
Canadians today, used to thinking of themselves as more caring and sharing, and just altogether “nicer” than, say, our American neighbours, may be shocked to learn that this failure to use the state as a way to support the poor was not an oversight, and even less was it a matter of waiting impatiently until the country was rich enough to pay the bill. The very idea of the state acting so as to relieve people of responsibility for their own choices and actions was anathema to the entire political class.
No one was interested in the devices which a later generation would call the “welfare state” . . . Neither Canadian governments nor the fashionable “reformers” were much interested in sickness insurance, old-age pensions, disability insurance, or unemployment insurance (not to speak of day-care centres!). Imperial and undemocratic Germany had provided sickness insurance and old-age pensions since the 1880s. Britain introduced such pensions, and a form of health insurance, in 1911, and New Zealand had already done likewise. These examples were not followed.18
Laurier’s objection to such schemes, like that of his Liberal colleagues, was one of principle: when people were expected to take responsibility for themselves and their family, they made better provision for their needs and directed their productive efforts where they would do the country and themselves the greatest good. When this natural necessity to strive was diluted by an easy access to the public purse, the ever-present danger was of the enervation of the individual and the stagnation of the progress of society. “If you remove the incentives of ambition and emulation from public enterprises”—by which he meant the economic undertakings of individuals and businesses, not state enterprise—Laurier said on the subject in 1907, “you suppress progress, you condemn the community to stagnation and immobility.”19
That individuals and families might occasionally need help to overcome the vicissitudes of life went without saying, but the appropriate institutions to deal with these hardships were ones that the community generated quite successfully itself, and no one in government saw any need to try to supplant the efforts that communities and families made together to protect themselves from the shoals and reefs of the human condition, such as illness and unemployment.20
2. Limited government, light taxes,