July 1966 — VOL. 47, No. 7 —
The Province of Ontario
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Its first century under Confederation
has proved to be a period of remarkable development in Ontario.
This province has been called the fastest growing piece of
real estate in North America. It has 34 per cent of Canada's
population and 40 per cent of Canada's $38,000,000,000 personal
income.
Ontario contains the most balanced regional economy in the
country. It is rich in natural resources, fertile agricultural
lands, timber and pulpwood, precious and base metals, and
sources of water power. As Morley Callaghan wrote in his introduction
to Ontario Style: "The land is rich and varied enough
in natural resources to sustain an empire."
Commercially, Ontario commands the richest market in Canada
and has ready access to the United States market. There are
eighty million consumers within a day's drive.
Geographically, its western border lies in part along the
central meridian of Canada, adjoining Manitoba; its eastern
boundary is the province of Quebec; on its south it adjoins
six states: New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin
and Minnesota. It is a thousand miles from east to west and
1,050 miles from south to north; its area is 412,582 square
miles.
There is a wide variety of climate within this great expanse
of land and water. The western peninsula, enclosed by lakes
and connecting rivers, is one of the most temperate regions
in Canada.
Exploration and settlement
Many names of the chivalry of France are inseparably linked
with Ontario's early history. Samuel de Champlain was the
first European to record anything about the present Ontario.
In 1613 he went up the Ottawa River in a vain search for the
northern ocean, and in the spring of 1615 he crossed the height
of land and pushed westward to Lake Huron, becoming the first
to tell about the Great Lakes.
But in 1763, when France ceded her North American possessions
to Britain, Ontario was virtually an unsettled fur-traders'
wilderness.
The first English settlement was planted on the shore of
the Niagara River in 1780. Three years later, driven by the
persecution they suffered at the hands of those who had revolted
against British rule, the United Empire Loyalists started
to enter Ontario.
These settlers were followed by other immigrants from New
York, Vermont and Pennsylvania, and from overseas, and by
1812 the population of the province exceeded 80,000.
The first capital of Ontario (then Upper Canada) was Niagara,
but in anticipation of renewed war it was removed to Toronto
(then York).
The legislature met for the first time in York in 1797,
when York was alone in the wilderness with no neighbouring
settlements east or west. There were twelve houses in the
little village in June that year.
The outstanding fact about Ontario is the dynamics of its
growth in population and achievement. By 1840 Ontario had
430,000 people and at the time of confederation in 1867 it
had 1,500,000.
In the years 1951-61 Ontario received 817,300 immigrants.
At the time of the Census in 1961 its population was 6,236,000;
in 1966 the estimate is 6,800,000, and by 1980 the population
is expected to be eleven million.
This is the most populous of the provinces, but the bulk
of its inhabitants live in one-tenth of its area. Urbanization
has been a trend since the second part of the nineteenth century.
In 1881 there were nearly twice as many people on the farms
as in the towns and cities, but twenty years later the numbers
had become nearly equal, and a decade after that less than
half the population was rural. In 1961 the farm population
was 8 per cent.
Immigration made a great contribution not only to the economic
development of Ontario but also to its cultural enrichment.
Toronto has the largest Italian community in North America,
and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Jews, Poles, Germans
and Hungarians. They have not fallen into a melting pot, but
have emerged as a society of homogeneous groups; they form
a mosaic, each group contributing to the whole.
Transportation
Ontario has a fresh water shoreline of 2,362 miles on the
Great Lakes and a salt water shoreline of 680 miles on Hudson
Bay.
Starting with the travel routes followed by explorers, the
settlers improved them by building canals to bypass rapids
and waterfalls.
One of the biggest obstructions to shipping was Niagara
Falls. The first sod of the Welland Canal was turned in 1824,
and the first ship passed around the Falls from Lake Ontario
to Lake Erie in 1829. The Cornwall Canal, to bypass the Long
Sault Rapids, was opened in 1843.
Today, Ontario is a province of half a million square miles
in the heart of a continent open to ships of the seven seas
through the St. Lawrence Seaway.
New trade and business patterns have emerged. The Seaway
carried more than fifty million tons of cargo in 1965, of
which Ontario ports handled thirty million. The port of Toronto,
one of the most modern and efficient on the Great Lakes, had
more than six million tons of foreign and coastwise cargo
in 1963. The greatest wheat depot in the world is at the lakehead
cities, Port Arthur and Fort William, 2,000 miles from the
Atlantic Ocean.
This is not to say that Ontario has lagged in other modes
of transportation. She has more than 10,000 miles of railway
track, more than 20,000 miles of paved road, and 130 licensed
airports, the biggest of which are used by ten international
carriers.
Highways have unrolled across the map in keeping with the
development of automotive transportation. Ontario has one
car for every three people, and Toronto has the second largest
per capita concentration of cars of any city in North America.
There are 85,000 miles of roads in Ontario, ranging from a
twelve-lane freeway route through the northern part of metropolitan
Toronto to graded gravel roads into the northland bush.
The first government appropriation for roads was £1,000;
in 1965 the total expenditure for roads was $456 million,
$352 million of which was spent on the King's Highway and
secondary highway network.
Agriculture
People are inclined to think of Ontario as a wholly industrialized
province, forgetting that her farm lands yield rich revenue.
In the south there is intensive mixed farming; in the east,
dairying and livestock; in the southwest, tobacco and vegetables;
in the Niagara Peninsula, fruits of all kinds. In northern
Ontario the clay belt provides a large tract of good farming
land.
At the time of the last census Ontario had 121,333 farms,
most of them in the range from 70 acres to 240 acres, covering
in all 18,600,000 acres.
An estimate for 1965 set the cash receipts from the sale
of farm products at more than $1,082 million. Capital value
of farms is nearly $4,000 million.
Forests and minerals
More than three-quarters of Ontario's land is covered by
forest. Of this, 165,000 square miles is considered to be
productive, and of this about four-fifths is close enough
to transportation facilities and markets to be commercially
useful.
Pulp, paper and sawn lumber are the three main products.
More than 200,000 square miles of forest blanket the province
north of Georgian Bay, and support a thriving pulp and paper
industry producing about twenty per cent of the total Canadian
output.
Although the northern regions of Ontario are thinly inhabited,
their contribution to the industrial output of the province
is large. The Ontario portion of the Canadian Shield has long
been a producer of many metals. In 1965 Ontario's production
of all minerals, $986 million, was 26.4 per cent of Canada's
total mineral production.
There were discoveries and some development earlier, but
virtually all of this contribution to the economy has been
concentrated in the present century. Jacques Bellin, a French
hydrographer, drew a map about 1740 on which he indicated
the presence of silver in the area near Cobalt, but it was
not until 1903 that railroad builders uncovered a vein that
made the district world famous.
Nickel came to light near Sudbury during construction of
the C.P.R., when excavators came upon the most valuable deposits
known anywhere in the world. By 1913 Canada was producing
nearly 70 per cent of the world's supply of this metal.
Iron became important in Ontario only with the discovery
in 1938 of rich ore at Steep Rock Lake, west of Port Arthur.
It is estimated that Steep Rock can produce 8½ million tons
of ore every year for a hundred years. Ontario iron mines
yielded the biggest total in 1965, valued at $91 million.
Petroleum was discovered in western Ontario in 1857, and
by 1870 production reached 5,000 barrels a week. Today's production
of oil and gas is less than ten million dollars annually,
but crude oil is carried from the oil fields in Alberta to
Sarnia, Canada's most important complex of petrochemical plants
and oil refineries, by 2,000 miles of pipeline.
While boring for oil in 1865 near Goderich, the drillers
found salt. The bed, thirty feet thick, is capable of supplying
world needs for hundreds of years. Production accounts for
about half of the total value of non-metallics ( $12½ million
in 1965 ).
In the years from 1956 to 1964 the uranium mines of Ontario
yielded well over $1,000 million in new wealth. Production
of nepheline syenite in the Blue Mountain near Peterborough
gives Canada a world monopoly in a compound which has a wide
range of uses, particularly in the ceramic industry.
There was no mineral discovery of major importance to start
a staking rush in 1965, but the interest of prospectors remained
high, and nearly 39,000 claims were recorded. Courses of instruction
for prospectors are given at various centres. The Provincial
Institute of Mining makes it possible for graduates to obtain
such positions as mine surveyors, assayers, geological assistants
and mill technicians.
Fur production, the oldest economic interest of Ontario,
is no longer of major significance, but it is still carried
on actively, both by trapping and on fur farms. Commercial
fishing is of importance, and Ontario is the leading province
in the value offish taken from inland waters.
Industry
Because of a fortunate combination of fertile soil, navigable
waterways, rich natural resources, abundant sources of power,
and ambitious and energetic people, Ontario emerged early
as an industrial region. Now this province stands first among
the provinces in industrial wealth, with 40 per cent of the
gross national product, and more than 50 per cent of manufacturing
production. Ontario's total manufacturing shipments in 1965
were valued at $17,640 million.
"The Golden Horseshoe" is a ll5-mile stretch of Lake Ontario
shoreline which bristles with industrial activity in an almost
unbroken chain from the Niagara Peninsula to Oshawa. It produces
everything from fine precision instruments to airplanes and
cars.
This activity does not represent an influx of factories
so much as it does the evolution of industry from small beginnings.
Blacksmith shops in the old villages grew into iron works;
back-room carding and weaving grew into great mills. As an
example, consider the blacksmith shop opened in Oshawa by
an enterprising settler named McLaughlin. It expanded into
a small shop for making wagons, which turned into a modest
factory, then a carriage works, and finally a vast modern
plant producing automobiles. In 1965 more than 854,000 motor
vehicles were produced in Ontario.
In 1851 Ontario had five small paper mills; in 1965 its
pulp and newsprint sales were valued at $354 million.
Consider iron and steel. There was an iron works at Marmora
as early as 1822; in 1852 the first mowing machines and reapers
were being produced by H. A. Massey at Newcastle; in 1857
the Harris firm was making revolving hay rakes at Beamsville;
and in that same year the first railway sleeping cars in the
world were made in Hamilton; an iron works at Oshawa was doing
a thriving export business in agricultural tools in 1870.
Today the province's iron and steel mills produce 84 per cent
of the total output for Canada, and are among the most efficient
in the world.
Electric power
Basic to all this progress is the fact that Ontario developed
hydro-electric power to overcome the handicap of having no
coal.
The first generating plant in Canada was built in 1882 to
furnish electric light for a sawmill at Ottawa. Six years
later, electric power was supplied to a paper mill in Georgetown
by generators situated two miles away, proving that industries
were no longer tied to the site of a power dam. In 1906 the
Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario was created as
the pioneer project in the public ownership of hydro power.
For more than half a century the Commission's energy resources
were derived almost exclusively from the development of hydro-electric
power, commencing with the Niagara River and moving progressively
to the harnessing of power on a number of large rivers throughout
the province. With the development of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence
rivers, the last major source of hydro-electric power in the
southern part of the province has been put to use. So the
province is turning to stations fuelled by coal or by nuclear
energy.
The present capacity of some eight million kilowatts will
have to be increased to about 22 million kilowatts during
the next fifteen years. This means that Hydro may be called
upon to build into its system twice as much new capacity as
has been provided in the 56 years since power was first supplied
over its lines.
Ontario is in the forefront of those engaged in the development
of nuclear power. It has a 20,000-kilowatt station in use,
a 200,000-kilowatt station in the final stages of construction,
and a 1,080,000-kilowatt station, the largest now under construction
in North America, scheduled for completion in 1971. There
will be some 3.2 million kilowatts of nuclear capacity in
its system by 1975, and 8.2 million kilowatts by 1980.
Economic expansion
Ontario has been called the "expansionary province". Its
Department of Economics and Development has eighteen programmes
to stimulate trade and industry. The Department's goals include
an average of 75,000 new jobs a year and an unemployment rate
of no more than two per cent by 1970.
When the province reaches its 1970 goals the total value
of goods and services produced should be $30,000 million.
In pursuit of this objective, scores of sales opportunity
missions have been sent out, each composed of eight or ten
senior business men of non-competitive companies, led by a
government marketing expert. Ontario manufacturers showed
their goods at nine international exhibitions in 1965.
By spending $4,400 million in 1965 for new plants, equipment,
housing, highways and public works, both government and private
industry have expressed a strong vote of confidence in the
future of Ontario. During the year, 178 new plants entered
the picture and 494 existing manufacturing firms expanded
their facilities. The average weekly wage in Ontario was $95.65,
compared with $92.28 in Canada as a whole. Personal income
reached $15,239 million, or $2,264 per capita.
Education
This province has been distinguished for its ready support
of education, and no other service of government absorbs so
large a proportion of the provincial expenditure. This year
it amounts to 45 per cent of the budget.
Today's educators have a formidable task in deciding what
to teach and how intensively to teach each subject.
The problem is specially difficult in a community like Ontario,
where the life of a century and a half ago is already extinct,
where people have moved from the placid educational culture
of the farm to the animated and competitive life of city and
factory and marketplace. Since about 1960 technological changes
have made it nearly impossible for a pupil leaving school
without a diploma and without a specific skill to obtain employment
with any degree of security for the future.
To meet the challenge, Ontario has in five years completed
358 new vocational schools or additions to high schools at
a cost of more than $630 million. More than seventy per cent
of children in the 15 to 19 age group are now being retained
in secondary school, as compared with 35 per cent eighteen
years ago. During 1965 the six Institutes of Technology enrolled
5,500 students in day courses and 8,200 in extension courses.
On-the-job training is upgrading skills.
The estimated education budget for 1966-67 is $595.7 million,
and when expenditures by municipalities and the grants made
to universities are added, the amount exceeds $1,000 million
annually.
Universities are expanding rapidly, and with considerable
success, to meet the demands of increased enrolment. It is
expected that the total number of university students in the
province, which stood at nearly 57,000 in 1965-66, will exceed
100,000 by 1970 and 150,000 by 1975. To assist the universities
in meeting this situation in 1966-67 the province will provide
$81 million in operating grants and $150 million in funds
for capital projects.
The arts
Ontario has made numerous contributions to the artistic
and cultural life of Canada. Its art in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries was different in many ways from French-Canadian
art. People were less deeply rooted in the soil than in Quebec,
and there was little local tradition of craftsmanship.
In the early years of this century an organized attempt
was made to develop an independent approach to painting. Younger
artists thought that the style of the nineties was too full
of romantic fancy and elegance, quite unsuitable for depicting
the rawness and grandeur of Canada. Out of their urge to portray
what they saw and felt there arose the Group of Seven, whose
first joint exhibition was in 1920.
Architects have done meritorious work in designing commercial
and industrial structures and public buildings in Ontario.
The School of Architecture established in the University of
Toronto in 1890 is the oldest in the Commonwealth.
Canada has been for many years a producer of operatic talent,
but much of it has been exported for lack of a domestic market.
That situation began to change with the formation of the Canadian
Opera Company, which emerged in the mid-fifties from the Opera
School of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.
The first concert of the Mendelssohn Choir, which has brought
choral singing to a high peak of excellence, was given in
1895. Elmer Iseler's Festival Singers, well known for performances
at the Stratford Festival and for broadcasts with the CBC
Symphony under Stravinsky, is a new force in choral music.
Drama is highlighted every year by magnificent productions
in the Stratford Shakespearean Festival. The National Ballet
is one of three professional ballet companies in Canada, and
was the first school on the continent to offer full-time academic
and ballet training. The Hart House Orchestra has established
an enviable reputation for chamber music; the Toronto Symphony
Orchestra maintains a high standard of excellence, and the
National Youth Orchestra, centred in Toronto, is dedicated
to the discovery and encouragement of young instrumentalists
under a faculty of top conductors and teachers.
Into the future
This brief narrative of some of Ontario's advancement, most
of it in a short hundred years, has demonstrated a steady,
purposive march toward better things, and Ontario shows no
sign of breaking step as she enters the second century of
Canadian Confederation.
The zeal for systematic progress has marked the whole history
of Ontario since it became an autonomous province. Plans are
being drawn and beginnings are being made which will come
to fruition many years hence.
The immigration of the past quarter century has brought
a sprightly element of continental Europeans to liven the
Ontario scene, but despite the hard-driving of today the people
of Ontario remain quiet, peaceable people who like to live
a well regulated life. If Montreal, Quebec, is the vivacious
Paris of the New World, Toronto, Ontario, likes to think of
itself as its circumspect Athens.
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