Surging to Nationhood
(See Cover)
Long into the night the combines clattered and roared, their headlights probing like huge pale fingers into the golden sea of Saskatchewan's wheatfields. As the harvest gathered momentum across the 1,000-mile sweep of the Canadian prairies last week, the empty, echoing granaries filled with the largest crop in the nation's history--a crop that is already sold out, as is all the grain the prairies can grow for the rest of the decade. With the rumble of the harvest came a cacophony of Canadian sounds that, taken together, sounded unmistakably like boom.
Among the scrub pines and lakes of the Manitoba wilderness, where only the cry of the loon could be heard a few years ago, the stillness was shattered by the hissing and hammering of the world's largest nickel mine and smelter. In the Alberta foothills northwest of Edmonton, the ring of sledge hammer on steel counterpointed the polyglot curses of Portuguese, Greek and Italian gandy dancers, pushing the Alberta Resources Railway 111 miles north to the coal and gypsum deposits of the Peace River country.
Farther to the north, construction crews swarmed over the superstructure of a $230 million Great Canadian Oil Sands Ltd. processing plant that next year will begin tapping the Athabaska tar sands--an oozing black oilfield the size of Maine, which contains as much petroleum as all the world's proven reserves.
The bulk of Canada's 20 million people are clustered within an hour's drive or two of the U.S. border. Many of the nation's cities are within reach of wilderness where Indians still hunt deer. Canada remains one of the world's last frontiers, but it is subduing nature with the tools of modern technology rather than oxcarts and covered wagons.
No man exemplifies that spirit of machine-tooled pioneering better than British Columbia's Premier William Andrew Cecil Bennett, 66, full-time politician and part-time prophet. He feels that Canada's thin population belt must push into the undeveloped North and the still developing West. "Canada is as broad as the U.S.," Bennett says, "but only half an inch deep. Until we push up from the border, we just won't go anywhere." Bennett himself has been pushing for 14 years, and it is his sort of effort that lies behind Canada's hope for the future.
Looser Reins. On the eve of its 100th birthday, Canada is surging with unprecedented prosperity--a prosperity that its American next-door neighbor is scarcely aware of. That ignorance is doubly ironic since it is largely because of U.S. capital investment--$8 billion in the past decade--that the Canadian boom was launched. Much of that ignorance will be dissipated during 1967, Canada's centennial year, when Americans in considerable numbers will head north of the border to visit Expo 67, the Canadian world's fair in Montreal. Just how considerable is far from clear. Expo has counted on attracting 5,000,000 U.S. fairgoers, but its promotion has fallen badly short.
Visitors to Canada in its centennial year will see a phenomenon subtler than the fair's attractions: a nation still in the painful process of realizing its own identity. When Prime Minister Lester Pearson's Liberal government came to power three years ago, some wondered whether there would be a Canada, at least in its present form, to celebrate the centennial. The French-speaking third of the population was demanding ever more stridently that Ottawa loosen the reins of strong central control acquired during World War II and permit French Canada to go its own way. Separatist fanaticism was fanned by extremist parties, which demanded that Quebec secede from the Canadian confederation and assume national sovereignty on its own.
Over the past three years, Pearson has allowed the delicate balance between Ottawa and the provinces to alter. He has eased up on central control and given in to provincial demands for a larger share of federal tax revenues. He has gone far to ease French Canada's sense of second-class citizenship by massively promoting the use of Canada's two languages throughout the civil service and the armed services.
Leggy Gerda. Not that Canadian politics are tranquil. Pearson is preoccupied by a running blood feud with his archenemy, Opposition Leader John Diefenbaker. As a result. Ottawa echoes with the insults and absurdities that the two national leaders regularly exchange. Noisiest at the moment is the "Munsinger Affair," which involved former Associate Defense Minister Pierre Sevigny and his affair with a leggy West German prostitute. Gerda Munsinger, who had been a minor espionage agent for the Soviet Union. Last week Canadian Supreme Court Justice Wishart Spence delivered his long-awaited judgment on the scandal, concluded that Diefenbaker. while Prime Minister in 1960. had been ''most imprudent" in retaining Sevigny in his post although he knew about the affair.
With Ottawa engaged in its own petty wars and party intrigues, the provinces have surged ahead on their own under strong premiers, and especially British Columbia's Bennett, who typifies the questing confidence of this new leadership. Under the urging of these premiers, confidence in Canadian nationhood has been reborn. Canada's historic fear of being more or less taken over by its powerful U.S. neighbor--though still strong and often shril!--has diminished. Prosperity is building toward a crescendo. And this is happening not only in Bennett's West, but all across the nation, to the bleak barrens of Newfoundland in the East.
Signs of Change. In Newfoundland, Premier Joey Smallwood. 65, a scrappy high-school dropout, has concentrated much of his abundant energy on building Memorial University, the province's first institution of higher learning, and the only university in the world where students are paid salaries ($50 to $100 a month) to attend classes. Nova Scotia's hard-bargaining Premier Robert Stanfield, 52, has won for his province an impressive string of achievements: an RCA satellite communications station at Liverpool, a Volvo automobile assembly plant in Halifax, two heavy-water plants that will concoct coolants for the Canadian atomic energy generators of Ontario.
Toronto, capital of Ontario, reflects the new sense of vigor and individualism in Canadian arts and architecture: Toronto's daring, curved city hall symbolizes the gradual emancipation of Canada's largest English-speaking city from its provincial past. A massive bronze sculpture by Britain's Henry Moore will soon adorn the city hall, shortly to be neighbored by a $260 million high-rise complex of office buildings, apartments and a circular hotel.
At Chez Fanny. Montreal remains Canada's most exciting city: its skyline altering almost as rapidly as New York's with such buildings as the Montreal Stock Exchange tower and Canadian Pacific's Chateau Champlain. From the glassed-in rooftop restaurant of the $100 million Place Ville Marie, a diner can watch Soviet freighters loading grain. As the second largest French-speaking city in the world. Montreal has long been praised for its restaurants, but increasingly the words of praise for the bouillabaisse at Chez Fanny or the Cafe Martin are in the Ukrainian. Hungarian or Polish of Eastern European immigrants.
But it is still in the West, in the Big Sky country where the chief amusement is shooting a stick of pool at Fort St. John's Klondike Recreations parlor or listening to the marching bands tootling up Moose Jaw's Main Street, that Canada's frontier spirit is most exciting, its economic boom most startling.
Until the Canadian Pacific Railway forged its "two streaks of rust across the wilderness" through the Rockies, the Canadian West was, as one Canadian Prime Minister lamented, "little more than a geographical expression." At Craigellachie, B.C., C.P.R.'s Donald Smith hammered the last spike of the continent-spanning line on Nov. 7, 1885, and before the century was out. the Canadian prairies buoyantly celebrated Queen Victoria's Jubilee with the slogan, "Granary of Empire: Free Homes for Millions: God Bless the Royal Family." This invitation, plus government-subsidized tickets for the voyage, brought the dispossessed of Europe flocking in by the tens of thousands. J. S. Woodsworth, the pastor of a Winnipeg mission who was later to lead Canada's socialist party, swore that when he was once asked his nationality by a census taker, his reply of "Canadian" so puzzled the man that Woodsworth had to spell it out. "First one of them kind of people I've found around here," said the official.
The homesteaders were lured by the promise of a 1,000-mile sweep of land where, as the land agents put it, there was "neither stone nor stump to check the plow."
Thus, gradually, the West was won--but it took a long time to come into its own.
The Tall Firs. Today, from an Air Canada DC-9 flying west from the foothills of Calgary to the Pacific, Bennett's British Columbia still seems a vast corrugation of rivers and snow-streaked Rockies. Closer to the ground, the theatrical effects are only slightly diminished in a land as large as Texas and half again. The fjords of its 7,000 miles of coastline jut into forests timbered with Douglas firs that were saplings in A.D. 600. The warm offshore Japanese Current gives Bennett's capital of Victoria an English winter (and English fogs).
In the interior is the high plateau of the Cariboo, where Texas longhorns came lowing and kicking up the Oregon Trail in the gold rush of the 1860s. It is one of the last open ranges in North America; its Gang Ranch is a larger spread than Texas' King Ranch. But mostly B.C. is forest--a $1 billion-a-year resource that accounts for 11% of Canada's exports to the U.S. It is not a declining asset: B.C. grows enough new wood every year to build a 10-ft. boardwalk to the moon.
Up from Poverty. As Canada's most ebullient premier, Bennett falls into the tradition of a British Columbia premier of the 1870s who loved the world so much that he legally changed his name to Amor de Cosmos. At 19, Bennett abandoned the rural poverty of New Brunswick for the beckoning West, and he affects a pride that he never finished high school. In the Okanagan Valley town of Kelowna, Bennett went into the hardware business, intending from the start to make himself financially independent for politics. Brash and backslapping, he was an instant success.
As premier, he has carried his salesmanship to the place where votes are. No promise is too glittering: "Life in contentment to each man, under his own fig tree," he loves to shout to his delighted audiences. And no stunt is too outrageous. In 1959, when he announced retirement of B.C.'s $190 million public debt, he hired an armored truck to cart the last $85 million worth of bonds to Kelowna, where they were soaked in gasoline and floated out on a raft into Okanagan Lake. While a festive crowd of 20,000 lined the starlit shores, "Der Preem" shot a burning arrow in the air--and missed, leaving a Mountie to put a torch to the bonds.
Such pizazz has paid off. Two weeks ago Bennett's Social Credit Party* went to the polls, and his government breezed home for another five-year term with 33 of the legislature's 55 seats. Somehow Bennett managed to be disappointed that he won only 46% of the popular vote.
Whatever his majority, Bennett is so adroit a doer that he has reduced his socialist opposition to largely ineffective me-tooers. He runs a coastal ferry service that has more ships (23) than the Royal Canadian Navy has frigates, and his own railroad. The 800-mile Pacific Great Eastern (once otherwise known as the Past God's Endurance) stretches from Vancouver to the Peace River country; Bennett intends to push it on to Alaska. He has also built a remarkable 6,400 miles of highways, has equipped his flamboyant highways minister Philip ("Flying Phil") Gaglardi with a 518-m.p.h. Lear jet to make it easier to inspect his road crews.
The key to Bennett's dream of developing the vast mineral riches of the north is hydroelectric power, and in this, the premier has proved himself a locksmith with few peers. Under the Canada-U.S. Columbia River treaty, Bennett is building three massive storage dams on the Columbia that will hugely increase the hydro power that such U.S. dams as Grand Coulee can generate downstream. Half that extra power will be Bennett's, and he has already sold it to a consortium of U.S. power companies for a sum that more than pays for the dams. When Lyndon Johnson and Lester Pearson put a seal on the deal at a ceremonial inauguration at the Friendship Arch straddling the border 30 miles south of Vancouver, Johnson noted that Bennett's check for the power came to exactly $253,929,534.25, and drew a chuckle from the crowd with the wry comment that "the Canadians even went for the last 250."
With his Columbia dams thus nicely paying for themselves, Bennett plunged ahead on the northern Peace. The Peace dam is a great earthen slab that will rise higher than the Grand Coulee, 2,700 ft. wide at the base and stretching 1.3 miles across the valley. Engineers devised a mammoth conveyor belt that, moving at 121 m.p.h., delivers 12,000 tons of fill an hour from a moraine four miles away. When the dam is topped off, it will back up a lake stretching for 240 miles.
Tuxedos & Stocks. The $800 million that Bennett is pouring into the Peace project have already quickened a northern rush in anticipation of the power. British Columbia can muster some epic boomtown types. In Prince George, for instance, there is Contractor Ben Ginter, who arrived in 1949 with a stake of $1,500. He has run it to $20 million since, building highways and pulp mills, and a $250,000 hilltop house for himself that includes an indoor waterfall and swimming pool fed by a diverted mountain creek. While clearing the sites for the new pulp mills of Prince George, Ginter thought ahead and bought up swatches of land in the hills overlooking them. "When those pulp mills start producing," he says, "that stench is going to sit right down there in the valley. And people are going to start scrambling up these hills to build their homes. And they are going to build them on my land."
Ginter is fairly typical. In a 250-mile radius of Prince George, miners are digging for mercury and steel-hardening molybdenum, copper and zinc. At least 125 mining-company whirlybirds are chopping the mountain air in the hunt for minerals. In the past three months alone, 130 mining companies have been formed, mostly to mine the craze for penny dreadfuls on the frantic Vancouver Stock Exchange, where, since trading opens at 6 a.m. to be on schedule with Toronto and New York, it is not uncommon to see tuxedoed partygoers stagger in for a fling of late action.
In Vancouver, an alpine cable car whisks diners to a restaurant 3,700 ft. up the side of Grouse Mountain, overlooking the lights of the busiest harbor on the entire West Coast and a forest of apartment towers on English Bay that give the city the look of a northern Rio. Downtown, the old waterfront is getting a face lift, and the commercial center a cluster of towers, one of which would be ideal for the Bank of British Columbia that Bennett promises.
British Columbia shares the great boom with three other provinces of Canada's West:
Saskatchewan (pop. 954,000) has been transformed by the great wheat bonanza from a simple society where, until well into the 1950s, farm wives cooked on wood stoves, hauled water from the well and did their evening chores by the flickering light of a coal-oil lamp. Now farm families are moving into town, and the old-fashioned threshing gangs have given way to the farmer who sits in the air-conditioned cab of a $ 15,000 combine; he can now harvest a 1,000-acre crop with the help of a single hired hand. The farm-equip ment industry is, not surprisingly, in clover. Near Kamsack, Sask., Farmer Paul Strilaiff farms the homestead where his Russian immigrant parents settled at the turn of the century. He has done so well sending wheat back to Russia that last fall he walked into the office of a Kamsack implement dealer, placed an order for four swathers, six tractors and eleven combines--and wrote out a check for $200,000.
Ironically, two Communist countries are responsible for much of this new prosperity. Since Red China placed its first order in 1961, the Canadians have sold a billion bushels of grain behind the Iron and Bamboo curtains, not to mention to Britain, Japan and 101 other countries.
Not that wheat is the only treasure of the prairie provinces. Another is potash, greatly in demand as fertilizer. Saskatchewan has so much of it underground that Premier Ross Thatcher may fairly accurately boast that his province not only grows the wheat that feeds the world, but also mines the potash that grows the wheat that feeds the world. At Esterhazy, the 3,200-ft.-deep corridors of a new $60 million International Minerals & Chemical Corp. mine glow in strobe lights, as drilling machines shear out the pink ore for export to Europe and Asia. Eleven more potash mines are in prospect.
Manitoba (pop. 958,000) is the only relatively "have not" province in the West, though it too has greatly progressed in recent years. In Premier Dufferin Roblin, 49, it has an able Tory whom many Conservatives consider a good bet for the leadership of the national party when John Diefenbaker eventually retires. Manitoba also has the prairie's most diversified industry and a newly beckoning north into the bargain.
International Nickel's new town of Thompson is still farther into the wilderness of scrub pines and countless lakes, but shows the new face of the push north. Its curving streets of ranch homes might have been lifted from the split-level suburbia of Cleveland or Chicago and deposited as they are 476 miles north of Winnipeg. On the Nelson River, 579 miles northeast of Winnipeg, construction was started this summer on a $325 million power project, as well as a new $100 million forest industry complex at The Pas.
Alberta (pop. 1,464,000) is the West's great oil domain. It is administered by Premier Ernest Manning, 58, who, like his colleague Bennett, has his political roots in the Social Credit movement, though his policies are now cautiously conservative. Every Sunday Manning conducts a radio Back to the Bible Hour (his wife plays the piano) devotedly followed by an audience of 1,000,000 in Canada. Every summer, the province is rocked by the Calgary Stampede ("the Greatest Outdoor Show in the World"), during which secretaries dress as cowgirls, oil barons race wagons, and everyone pretends that Alberta is a hick town still. Since Imperial Oil's Leduc No. 1 blew in 20 miles south of Edmonton 19 years ago, Alberta has collected $1.8 billion in royalties. On the 55-minute shuttle air flight from Edmonton to Calgary, the wheatfields look like a giant succotash birthday cake, with the flares of oil-well waste burning like thousands of candles. This year pipelines will carry 650,000 barrels daily of crude oil and 2.3 billion cu. ft. daily of natural gas to Eastern Canada and the U.S. Thanks to the oil wealth, Albertans pay Canada's lowest corporation tax, lowest gasoline tax and no sales tax, and even after spending notably more on highways and schools than any other Canadian province, Alberta's treasurer still stashes away a surplus every year, which now amounts to $542 million. Nor is there much chance of the black gold running dry. In the continent's hottest oil play since Leduc, the northwestern Rainbow Lake area has suddenly blossomed with oil rigs. Rainbow Lake pool may be larger than all of the reserves proven elsewhere in Alberta, outside the Athabaska tar sands.
In Fort St. John, radio station CKNL still broadcasts the radio personals that are essential communication in the north ("A message for Mrs. Barry Bragg. Baby Barry has been discharged. Providence Hospital"). But the rough edges are wearing off in the lively cities. In Edmonton and Calgary, Canada's two fastest-growing cities, slowly revolving restaurants atop hotel towers are the vogue. To be an artist is no longer to become an expatriate, as travelers with any waiting time at Winnipeg's and Edmonton's gleaming new airports delightedly discover. They display inventive murals and sculpture, including, at Edmonton's International Airport, a 37-ft. impressionistic landscape that moved Edmonton's M.P. to ask the government "to give serious consideration to my suggestion that we hang the painter instead of the painting."
For all the promise of Canada's economic boom, problems still hang over the nation. Industrial growth demands investment capital, and Canada is still suspicious of its best source: the U.S. As the boom expands, Ottawa may be tempted to follow the advice of Former Finance Minister Walter Gordon, who urged the nation to "buy back its heritage" and put even stricter bars on the inflow of the Yankee dollar.
Canada for the next few years will remain largely dependent on its national resources--and, as other countries have learned, metals and minerals can quickly become as cheap as sand. Al ready some gloomy Canadians say that sales of forest products are falling off. The deep divisions between the French and the English, though less troublesome, are hardly closed. And Canada is still sometimes hampered by a provincial outlook on the world. In one sense, Canada is international-minded: there has been no U.N. peace-keeping mission in the past decade that has not prominently included Canadian troops. Yet Canada has been able to fulfill this role only because it is not a major world power. Most Canadians accept their country's role as a middle power, but still wish that Canada could display more initiative.
Visitors Welcome. Such concerns aside, Canada is justly proud of its achievements. Next year's centennial shivaree will symbolize this pride. It will be the longest and one of the most expensive birthday blowouts any nation has ever had. At the spectacular harbor site of Expo 67, on mainly manmade islands in the St. Lawrence River, the pavilions of 70 nations, which are now abuilding, will welcome visitors. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip have already accepted invitations. The Parliament buildings in Ottawa will provide a backdrop for a May-to-October son et lumiere spectacle, and Sir Tyrone Guthrie, the Shakespearean showman who launched Canada's Stratford, will produce a centennial spectacle on Parliament Hill.
As part of the celebrations, 2,500 cities and towns have adopted civic projects that range from Ottawa's plan to plant 70,000 flowering crab apple trees to a Japanese garden in Lethbridge, Alta., that expects to get a school of royal carp from Emperor Hirohito's moat. Athletically, Canada will be host to no fewer than 17 international competitions, from snowshoeing (in Ottawa) to water skiing (in Sherbrooke, Que.) to the Pan American games in Winnipeg.
When the centennial bells ring out, wildly, in the tiny outport churches of Newfoundland, in the cathedrals of Quebec City, in Peace Tower on Parliament Hill, in prairie steeples and out to the West Coast, they will ring in a 100th year that Canadians should indeed find a cause for cheer. In the sound and fury of the centennial celebrations, Canadians are bound to hear echoes of their own success in turning the wilderness into a thriving nation.
* Social Credit derived from an economic movement current during the Depression. It involved the artificial creation of purchasing power through "prosperity certificates" that were issued like scrip. Since then, the movement has abandoned "funny money" theories and turned conservative.
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