Canada (1944)

2,000 mi to the west of Great Britain at the dominion of Canada, biggest nation in the Western Hemisphere, Canada stretches over 3 and a2 million square miles of farmland and forest of all laden plains and barren wastes which cover a North American continent. Though Canada has more in common with the United States than any other nation in the world, relatively few Americans have any real knowledge of the 11 12 million people who just across their boundary to the north maintain a civilization which closely resembles their own parliament. Canada governs itself as a wholly sovereign and independent nation of nine provinces similar to American states. A nation whose only outside allegiance is to the British Commonwealth of Nations. Canada's many political and economic problems are largely defined by its geography. For all, Canada falls naturally into four general sections, each with its own particular needs and interests, each closer by natural economic ties to corresponding areas of the US than to other sections of Canada. Western Canada stretches from the Pacific coast to the barren midlands which separate east from west. Canada's Pacific seabboard has thrived on its riches of lumber, minerals, and fisheries. Its trade with the Orient has helped to build its great cities, Vancouver and Victoria, which stand as symbols of Canadian enterprise and determination. By far the greater part of western Canada is made up of the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. Strongholds of political liberalism and free trade sentiment. This vast cattle and wheat growing area has within 40 years run the whole gamut of frontier days, boom, distress, and recovery. Out of this immense region whose part of the food upon which the mother country Britain subsists. Though war brought prosperity to many farmers of this region, its wheat growers whose acres yielded almost fabulous riches in the First World War found only continued depression in the Second World War. For still piled up in Canadian government granaries were the immense surpluses of years of overprouction, more wheat than there were ships to carry it, more wheat than the wartime world could put to use. 800 miles to the east, concentrated in the St. Lawrence Valley and in the triangle that duts southward into the Great Lakes, is industrial Canada, the economic heart of the nation. Into this area has flowed most of the billions of dollars which US investors have poured into Canada. In this rich and densely populated section comprising southern Ontario and part of Quebec is centered much of the cultural life of the nation and the management of its widespread industry and commerce. Its two chief cities are the biggest in Canada. Toronto, conservative and British, has strong ties to the empire. Neighboring Montreal is cosmopolitan and predominantly French. Both are centers of the foreign trade upon which all Canada is largely dependent. Both have for years been butressed by tariffs which have protected Canadian industry and favored Canadian goods. Maritime Canada composes the provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, whose early settlers were Tories who fled New England at the time of the revolution. Those were followed by waves of Scottish immigrants. Compared to the rest of Canada, the Maritimes are poor indeed, earning a hard-bought livelihood on small farms and by fishing and lumbering. Maritimes have close economic ties with the New England states, in which are their logical markets. But these markets have been all but closed by American tariffs. And Canadian markets many hundreds of miles in the interior are too remote to be cheaply accessible. Industrialism in the Maritimes is largely confined to the coal mines and the steel mills of Cape Breton Island and the forest industries of New Brunswick. But through the port of Halifax, one of the busiest harbors in North America has always moved a profitable part of Canada's foreign trade. French Canada, which embraces the province of Quebec and adjacent areas, is almost a nation within a nation. In 1774, 11 years after England had gained control of France's North American colonies, French Canada was guaranteed by the British the right to retain forever its own language, its own laws, and its own religion. The civilization founded in Quebec is one of the oldest and most homogeneous in North America. Its 60,000 settlers have grown since the 18th century into a population of more than 3 million. Life among the French Canadians is largely pastoral and almost like the life of another century. The home is one of the two great institutions which mold their lives. Large families are encouraged both by national tradition and church precept. Among these kindly, frugal people, there has been an intense desire to keep things as they are and always have been, to continue to live in the simple, pleasant ways of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Passionately nationalistic, their traditional attachment is neither to the France of their origin nor to the British Empire of which they're a part, but to their own land, the fields and farms of French Canada. The second great institution which has shaped French Canadian civilization is the Roman Catholic Church, about which the existence of the province's predominantly Catholic population revolves. The authority which most deeply influences the life of the community has always been that of the church. But to this land of settled and timeless ways as to all the rest of Canada, modern times have brought swift industrialization and with it inevitable change. To a people who have always lived primarily by agriculture, the years since 1939 have brought an industrial upheaval of a magnitude beyond imagining upon the agricultural economy of the old Canada has been superimposed a vast and growing industrial establishment. Factories and mills which enabled Canada to take her place as the fourth largest producer of war materials among the 35 United nations throughout the Second World War. From Canadian farm, immense supplies of beef and bacon, butter, wheat, and eggs went overseas to feed embattled Britain and her allies. More than a billion dollars worth of food and war materials in one year alone went to Britain as a generous gift of the Canadian people. But it is the dramatic and sudden changeover from a predominantly agricultural economy to widespread industrialization which has most surely altered this nation's future. The new Canada, created by the war, found itself in possession of an industrial establishment capable of producing at a rate the old Canada had never dreamed of. Thus, the new Canada became a veritable arsenal of democracy, supplying strategic metals, copper in vast quantities, 40% of the United Nations aluminum, 85% of their nickel. Its steel output more than doubled. And where before the war it had not one plant capable of turning out munitions on any sizable scale, it now had scores which provided everything from airplanes to machine gun bullets. Out of a few small pre-war boatyards grew a huge Canadian ship building industry, which in a single year turned out as many cargo vessels as England itself, long the leader of all its years of costly total war, Canada accepted from the United States neither lend, lease aid nor loans. Instead, Canada set up its own land lease plan to aid its allies, paying its own way by a program of internal borrowing and heavy taxation as drastic and burdensome as Britain's. To Canada and its neighbor, the United States, the Second World War brought at last what many had long advocated in vain, a pooling of common interests through the relaxation of trade barriers hampering the interchange of war materials. And in addition to these benefits, in 1940, the Ogdensburg agreement set up permanent military partnership between these two North American neighbors. One practical outcome of this partnership has been the great US military highway stretching across western Canada to Alaska. Never before has any nation permitted a foreign government to make such use of its territory. Today, far-sighted Canadians and Americans meeting in both countries are looking ahead to a brilliant future of cooperation, anticipating the many problems which they know can be solved only by continued mutual understanding and goodwill between the two great nations of North America. >> The relations of Canada and the United States have been closer than those that have ever existed between any two countries. Our freedom had a common ancestor. We have shared a continent and the way of life we have made. We have founded our relations on generous words, generous deeds and generous thoughts.