two-fifths of that growth came from immigration. As noted Canadian historians Robert Bothwell, Ian Drummond, and John English remarked, both of these figures are “extraordinarily high; nothing like them had been seen before or since.”4 Not only did immigrants come in vast numbers, but outmigration to the more prosperous United States—the bane of the country’s early years—slowed to a trickle.5
The rush of newcomers was so great, and the attraction of the West so irresistible, that Laurier was obliged in 1905 to cut two new provinces out of the federally administered western territories. One of the new provinces, Saskatchewan, was seen to be such a land of opportunity that it quickly became the country’s third-largest province by population and remained so for a number of years.6
The West’s growth was more than mere dry statistics. Rather, it was the sum of choices by hundreds of thousands of people, each of their lives woven into the tapestry of Canada’s emerging future. Both sets of maternal great-grandparents of Brian Crowley, one of this book’s co-authors, were part of the great movement of people unleashed by the prosperity of the Laurier years. In 1891 Richard Lane and his wife, Mary Irving, were living in the rural Ontario of their birth; Crowley’s grandfather, Russell Lane, and his twin brother, Richard, were born to them in Huron County that year. By 1901 the family was in Toronto, part of the exodus from rural regions to the prosperous cities. But soon on the move again, by 1906 they had left Ontario, headed for the promised land of Saskatchewan, where Crowley’s mother was eventually born in North Battleford. Their initial destination was Saskatoon, a city that had barely existed a decade before.
Crowley’s other maternal great-grandparents, Henry and Edith Bierschied, came from the United States in search of the free homestead land that had been largely exhausted south of the border but was still relatively easily available in the Dominion.7 When they crossed the border from North Dakota at North Portal, Saskatchewan, in August 1911, they brought with them seven-year-old Grace, Crowley’s grandmother. Henry was of German immigrant stock, and it was not unusual for the many ethnic immigrants who ended up in the Canadian West—the Poles, the Russians, the Germans, the Ukrainians, the Galicians, the 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
