Said an American whom I met in Toronto the other day:
“I don’t care for this place; it’s too much like home. When I travel I want to see something different.”
I don’t know just what this man hoped to find here in the second largest city in Canada. I fear that he expected to find Toronto so inferior that he would be able to indulge in some boasting at the expense of the Canadians. If so, he came to the wrong place, for, judged by American standards, Toronto is thoroughly alive, first class, and up-to-date.
Located on the north shore of Lake Ontario, and the political and commercial capital of Ontario province, Toronto is the “Chicago of Canada.” It is larger than Buffalo or San Francisco, and nearly as big as Los Angeles. It is the greatest live-stock market of all Canada, and the chief butcher shop of the Dominion. Like Chicago, it is on the route of the transcontinental railroad lines. It is the centre of tourist travel to Niagara Falls, the Thousand Islands, and the vacation lands of the North. It supplies the mines, the mills, and the farms of a region rich in natural resources, and fast becoming as highly industrialized as New England. Ontario does more than half of the manufacturing of Canada, and one third of the factories of the province are located in Toronto. Seven of the great chartered banks of the Dominion have their home offices here, and the city is second only to Montreal in its financial strength.
In Toronto, I find myself again in a city of twenty-story skyscrapers, big department stores, and American “hustle.” It is, I suppose, because it does not seem “foreign” that visitors from the States find this city disappointing. The people are mostly of British extraction, and, unlike Montreal, there are but few French, and comparatively few Catholics.
The city was founded by Tories from New York just after our Revolutionary War, and it soon became the capital of Upper Canada. Our soldiers burned it once and captured it twice during the War of 1812. Its name Toronto, an Indian word meaning “place of meeting,” was chosen about a century ago. Since then the city has doubled in population and wealth every fifteen years.
In the residential districts, I saw scores of magnificent homes that compare favourably with those of any of our large cities. The town is built entirely of brick, and sixty-seven per cent. of the homes are occupied by their owners. The residents, all of whom seem to belong to a boosters’ club, tell me that they have the lowest death rate but one of any city of five hundred thousand population in North America, and that they have fewer deaths from tuberculosis than anywhere else on the hemisphere.
I have been out to Queen’s Park to see the provincial government buildings. Here also is Toronto University, the largest in the British Empire, with several thousand students of both sexes. The park is approached by University Avenue, a broad street with rows of elm and chestnut trees on each side. There are many other schools and colleges, making Toronto the educational centre of Ontario.
It was at the University of Toronto that Dr. F. G. Banting discovered insulin, the new treatment for diabetes obtained from the pancreas of cattle. Doctor Banting and his associates have since received many honours. The Dominion government gave him seventy-five hundred dollars a year for life, so that he might continue his investigations, while the provincial government has established him in a chair of medical research at Toronto University paying ten thousand dollars a year. Instead of commercializing his discovery, the doctor had it patented in the name of the university, and the royalties are devoted to research.
Toronto is about equidistant from New York and Chicago, and nearly midway between Winnipeg and Halifax. It is only three hundred and thirty-four miles from Montreal, but between the two cities are the rapids of the upper St. Lawrence, which so far have prevented the lake port from becoming accessible to large ocean-going vessels. The present canals along the St. Lawrence can accommodate ships up to twenty-five hundred tons, but Toronto has a plan for bringing ten-thousand-ton steamers to her front door. She proposes to overcome the rapids and shallows with lakes and canals, and at the same time utilize the fall of water, which exceeds two hundred feet, to generate electricity.
The locks of the new and larger Welland Canal around Niagara Falls have been built thirty feet deep and eight hundred feet long. When this work is completed, the improvement of the St. Lawrence will be the only thing needed to make possible the passage of deep-water ships from the Atlantic to Lake Superior. The St. Lawrence project has the enthusiastic support of the people of middle Canada, who see their grain of the future going direct to Liverpool in steamers loaded at the lake ports. This will cut down the freight charges on every bushel and add millions to the farmers’ profits.
Our own middle western states also want this Lakes-to-the-Atlantic waterway, but New York and Buffalo, which have grown fat on handling freight from the Great Lakes, oppose it. So does Montreal, for fear that her port might suffer, just as Quebec did when the St. Lawrence was dredged out from that city to Montreal.
Since the St. Lawrence, for part of its course, borders the state of New York, the project requires the coöperation of the United States. The International Joint Commission, representing both Canada and the United States, after investigation, unanimously approved it. It recommended the construction of nine locks, thirty-three miles of canals, forty miles of lake channel, and one hundred miles of river channel improvements. It also recommended the construction of a hydro-electric power plant near Ogdensburg, New York, which, it is estimated, would produce sixteen hundred and forty thousand horse-power, to be divided between the United States and Canada. To do all this is comparable to the building of the Panama Canal. It is estimated that the job will take about eight years and will cost more than a quarter of a billion dollars.
Meanwhile, Toronto is so sure that the project will be carried out that she has already spent more than twenty million dollars in getting her harbour ready for the business she expects in the future. Her port to-day is like a newly built palace, awaiting the birth of an heir to the throne, with the king still a bachelor.
An island lying about a mile offshore from the city gives Toronto a natural harbour. The Harbour Commission has built breakwaters, channels, and anchorages, and erected piers and berthing spaces to accommodate fleets of large tonnage vessels. So far, however, these improvements are used mostly by passenger steamers handling the summer tourist travel to points on the lakes and along the St. Lawrence. In part the work of the Harbour Commission has already paid for itself. It has reclaimed a large tract of marshland along the eastern shore of the harbour and converted it into industrial sites, equipped with docks, railroad tracks, and other facilities. There are now more than eight million dollars’ worth of buildings and machinery in operation on this area.
The Harbour Commission has developed the lakeside not only for commercial purposes, but also for the use of the people. West of the city it has built Sunnyside beach, a half mile long, with accommodations of all kinds for seventy-five hundred bathers. Across the harbour is Island Park, another great playground.
Toronto was the first city in the world to establish a municipal athletic commission to promote sports and outdoor games. Though baseball is not native to Canada, six thousand Toronto boys played in regularly organized leagues last summer, and eight thousand soccer or association football players were listed with the commission. The city maintains two public golf courses, and there are country clubs, canoe clubs, and yacht clubs.
Another publicly owned institution in Toronto is an abattoir, built and operated by the city. Here any cattle dealer or local marketman may have his animals killed under the most sanitary conditions. The city owns also its waterworks and has a Hydro-Electric Commission which furnishes power to its factories and homes at low rates. It has invested more than two million dollars in grounds and buildings for the Canadian National Exhibition, held here every September with an attendance of over a million.
Its street railway system is Toronto’s latest and largest venture in public ownership. Both the cars and the service are by far the best I have seen anywhere in Canada, and few of our cities can show better. The city paid forty-five million dollars for the property, and within two years it had doubled the single fare area, increased the mileage twenty-five per cent., built extensions out to the suburbs, replaced antiquated cars with the newest and best, and speeded up service. On the main lines, the cars are very large and during rush hours they are run in twos, coupled together. In the newer cars the conductor sits perched in a cage in the middle. Passengers enter by the front door, and if they pass down the aisle to sit in the rear they pay the conductor as they go by. If they take seats in the front half, they do not pay their fares until they get up to leave by the door in the middle. It is interesting to know that the first electric street car in America was operated in Toronto.
Conservative Montreal looks upon Toronto’s plunges into public works as the height of folly, and sometimes gives her sister city a lecture. Replying to such criticism, a local paper said the other day it supposed Montreal would have every Torontoan go to bed at night saying these verses:
But Toronto comes honestly by its independent spirit and bold experiments for the public welfare. The entire province of Ontario is imbued with the same tendency. With an area eight times that of New York, it is, next to Quebec, the largest province of Canada, and with three million people, mostly of British extraction, excels them all in population. It is richer in mineral wealth, agricultural resources, and industrial development than any other province. The people believe in their future and they show the courage of their convictions when it comes to going in debt to back public enterprises.
The province owns a railroad that taps the Cobalt silver mining district and the northern agricultural lands. The main line of the road extends from the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National lines at North Bay two hundred and fifty-three miles northward to Cochrane, where it meets the northernmost of the three transcontinental routes.
A few years ago Ontario increased its expenditure for good roads from two million dollars a year to nine millions. It created the Ontario Hydro-Electric Commission, which generates and distributes more electric power at lower rates than any other similar body in the world. The province pensions needy mothers, and its public health service furnishes serums and toxins free to the public.
The Ontario parliament has no upper house, but only a single chamber to which members are elected by the votes of both men and women. Not long ago the farmers’ organizations captured enough seats to give them control of the government.
In Toronto I have seen so many familiar names on the factory buildings that I have had to ask myself whether I was in a British Dominion or back in the United States. These are the “branch plants” of American firms, established here to be inside Canada’s tariff wall and to get the benefit of the preferential tariffs conceded by Great Britain and her dominions to Canadian products. From automobiles to silverware, and from bridge steel to fountain pens, many of our best known American goods are not only used but made in Canada. Some of the branch plants bear the same names as at home, but many adopt for Canadian use designations that give no trace of their American origin. For example, world-famous corporations that use “United States” or “American” as part of their names, are the “Dominion” this or the “Imperial” that in Canada. This policy caters to the growing movement among the people to buy only goods “made in Canada.” The American branch-plant system accounts in part for the resemblance of Toronto to American cities. On every hand I see electric signs, window displays, and bill-boards bearing the same appeals to buy the goods that are so extensively advertised at home.
No one knows just how many American branch factories Canada has, but their number is well over one thousand. There are more than two hundred in Toronto alone, and as many more elsewhere in southern Ontario. Montreal has many American branch plants and American owned enterprises. Its largest hotel belongs to an American syndicate, and so does my hotel in Toronto.
Americans control nine tenths of the automobile accessory business of Canada, and in their branch plants they make three fifths of the Dominion’s automobiles. Practically all of our well known firms devoted to low and moderate priced cars have big factories in Canada, and they do practically all their exporting to Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, and South Africa through their Canadian branch plants. This export business amounts to more than twenty-five million dollars a year, while the cars made here for the Canadian market represent a value three times as great.
In other lines American capital is conspicuous. Half of the Canadian rubber factories are owned by Americans, and nearly half of the meat packing, paint, brass, condensed milk, car construction, and electrical apparatus industries represent American money. American controlled concerns do more than half of all the oil refining, while two hundred and fifty million dollars of our money is invested in the pulp and paper industry.
Altogether, it is estimated that American investments in government loans, corporation bonds, land mortgages, and industrial enterprises amount to two thousand five hundred million dollars. Our stake in Canada has been increasing rapidly ever since 1914, and now it nearly equals that of the British. Within a few years it will probably be much greater. Nearly one sixth of all the money we have invested in foreign countries is in Canada, and in return for the capital Canada is now buying from us more than three fifths of her annual thousand million dollar purchases abroad. In fact, her people are our best customers; their purchases of us amount to eighty-three dollars per capita a year as compared with five dollars for all Europe and fifty cents for China.