Emily Poynton Weaver - Canada and the British immigrant

Thus was forged another link which bound the colonies to the Empire, for at last the people felt that the Mother-land could no longer be blamed for any blunders and wrong-doing in the administration of the governments on this side of the ocean; and the electors knew that if the government was not so good as it might be, it was at least as good as those who put it into power deserved to have. The system had also, like its British model, a flexibility and a capacity for readjustment to new situations or more advanced views, which made it peculiarly suited to a land where conditions are constantly changing.

The government has remained to this day essentially British in its underlying principle of the ultimate responsibility of the cabinet to the electors, though in some respects, since the confederation of the provinces, it has had in outward appearance a considerable resemblance to the government of the United States.

HISTORICALLY, the Dominion of Canada was evolved from the separate provinces; but it will be more convenient here to consider it as a whole before giving some account of each of the nine provinces separately. In this chapter, and generally throughout the book, when I speak of Canada, I mean the Dominion of Canada, though the name was first applied to the French province on the St. Lawrence, which was sometimes also called New France. Afterwards, for three-quarters of a century, from 1791 to 1867, the province now known as Quebec was called Lower Canada, or Canada East; and that now known as Ontario, Upper Canada, or Canada West.

The immense area of Canada is one of its most striking features. Its size is one of the reasons that it is a land of great opportunity; it is also the root of many of the most difficult problems of its government and development. In area it is over 3½ million square miles; that is to say, it is a little larger than the United States, or than Europe would be without France. It stretches from the Atlantic Ocean on the east to the Pacific on the west, and from the United States boundary on the south to the Arctic Ocean on the north. The distance from Halifax in Nova Scotia to Vancouver in British Columbia is about 3,660 miles, whilst that from Halifax to Liverpool is only about 2,820; and the traveller, wishing to go from Victoria in Vancouver Island to Dawson in the Yukon District, has to make a journey by land and water of over 1,500 miles.

It is just as well for the intending immigrant to try to realize that Canada is a land of “magnificent distances”; otherwise, on his outward journey, perhaps to some point in the far west, it may seem that the distance he is putting between himself and his old home is interminable. With modern conveniences of travel, however, the immigrant of to-day can come from England and cross Canada to Vancouver in a shorter time than it took the Loyalists to go from New York to Toronto.

The most southern point of Canada, a little islet in Lake Erie, is only about the same distance from the equator as is Valladolid in Spain, whilst Toronto is in nearly the same latitude as Florence, and the new town of Prince Rupert, far up on the Pacific seaboard of the Dominion, is not much farther north than Liverpool.

The vast extent of country and the variety in its physical features cause considerable differences of climate; but generally the interior is rather colder than the same latitudes in the west of Europe, and the summer, though hot and dry, is shorter than in Europe. The climate in the region near the Atlantic is colder than the countries on the opposite side of that ocean, owing to a cold current which flows southward along its shores from the Arctic regions; but the Pacific Coast, which has the benefit of the warm Japanese current, has a climate very much resembling that of the British Isles.

Upon the whole, however, it may be said that one of the strongest points of the Canadian climate generally is its amount of sunshine and clear weather. Even in the high latitudes the summer, though short, is warm, and, of course, as one goes further north, the possible number of hours of sunshine in the day during the summer increases, so that growth is extremely rapid. Thus results the ripening of crops of grain and vegetables and certain kinds of fruit much farther north than a mere glance at the map would lead one to expect. There has as yet been little systematic experiment as to what crops can be grown in the higher latitudes; but for generations vegetables have been cultivated in the gardens of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s factors, and also at many a mission station in the northern wilderness; and it is an interesting circumstance that the imaginary line beyond which profitable farming has been supposed impossible has again and again been pushed farther north.

Till within the last half century, indeed, the “North-West Territories” were held by the Hudson’s Bay Company, and as agriculture and fur trading are hardly compatible industries, it was not to the interest of this powerful fur trading corporation to advertise the agricultural possibilities of the country, nor to set right the popular misconception of British North America as a land of nothing but snow and ice. It is quite true that it has snow and ice in plenty; but there is a golden side to the shield as well as a silver one; and Canada might just as fairly claim the title of “Our Lady of the Sun” as that of “Our Lady of the Snows.”

A feature of the Dominion, of which the ordinary small-scale map gives little idea, is the diversity of surface. Every map indeed suggests in the west the bold line of the Rocky Mountains, but even in that case scarcely hints at the fact that between the Pacific Ocean and the prairie regions, the mountain barrier is ranged rank behind rank, peak above peak.

In the ordinary map, moreover, the eastern provinces look as level as the prairies; but they are not so. The Maritime Provinces, Quebec and Ontario, may be described generally as a land of plains and valleys and hills, which, in some regions, rise to an elevation deserving the name of mountains—a word which is used somewhat freely in Canada.

The map usually does make clear to a careful student of it the fact that the Dominion upon the whole is a land of noble rivers and of lakes, some small, some large enough to deserve the name of inland seas, though they have neither the salt of the sea nor its tides; and that Canada does actually possess one great inland sea, a thousand miles long and six hundred miles broad, in Hudson Bay. This thrusts itself deep into the heart of the country, and for a couple of centuries was, as it may soon be again, a recognized gateway to the interior.

Of course, altitude and “the general lie of the land” have a great influence on climate as well as latitude. The prairie country is more correctly a series of plateaux than a great plain; and though one hardly realizes the fact when travelling across it, there is a great difference of level between the region about Winnipeg, and that where it approaches the foot hills of the Rocky Mountains. The altitude of Winnipeg is only seven hundred and fifty-seven feet above the sea-level, whilst that of Calgary is actually two hundred feet higher than the topmost peak of Sea Fell, England’s highest mountain; and perhaps the elevation of much of the country accounts not only for its being colder than some corresponding latitudes of the old world, but also for the buoyant atmosphere in the west, and for the characteristic hopefulness and eagerness and energy of the people.

A great part of northern Canada is still a wilderness, only partially explored; and at brief intervals comes news from east or west or north of some fresh discovery of minerals or water powers; or amazingly fertile soil, in some region where no one had dreamed hitherto of reaping a harvest.