International exhibition Glasgow 1901
Official catalogue

176 The Dominion of Canada, eight blue on plan. THE DOMINION OF CANADA. INDUSTRIAL HALL, NORTH-WEST COURTS, AND PAVILION IN THE GROUNDS. Within about a week’s sail from the shores of the Mother Country, lies in the Western Hemisphere, the Dominion of Canada—Britain’s greatest Colony. It is a country so vast that to cross it from its eastern boundary, the Atlantic, to its western, the Pacific Ocean, necessitates a continuous journey by a fast train of nearly six days and nights. On the north it is bounded by the Arctic Ocean, and on the south by the United States and the Great Lakes. There are many fine harbours on the West Coast, the best known being Esquimalt, the station of the North Pacific Squadron of the British Navy; Vancouver, the terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway and the starting point of steamers for Australia and Japan ; and Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, situated on Vancouver Island. On the East Coast are the well known harbours, Halifax and St. John, and the Gulf and River St. Lawrence for seven or eight months in the year open a splendid waterway for ocean steamers to reach the ports of Quebec and Montreal, and on the North-Eastern Coast is Hudson Bay, the centre of the great fur industry, a land locked sea, as large in area as France, Germany, and Britain combined. The Canadian rivers, plains, and mountains are on a very large scale, and along the southern edge of Ontario, from the head of the St. Lawrence River, stretches the most wonderful chain of fresh water lakes in the world. They extend for over a thousand miles westward, and it is possible to sail the whole distance in a large vessel. Lake Ontario is as large as Wales, and Lake Erie a little larger. Lake Huron is equal in size to Belgium and Holland put together, while if Scotland were put in the centre of Lake Superior, the largest of all, there would be only a few mountain peaks visible from the shore. In the North-West are lakes like Winnipeg, Manitoba, Great Slave, and Great Bear, each of which is as large as lake Ontario. Thanks to a system of canals to overcome the rapiefa, a continuous waterway is open for steamers drawing fourteen feet, from the Atlantic Ocean to the head of Lake Superior, a distance of over two thousand miles. In the near future these connecting links will be deepened, so as to admit of an ocean steamer from Liverpool sailing into the heart of the country and discharging her cargo at Fort-William to reload with grain, cattle, horses, or dairy products for the British markets. Into the basin of the Great Lakes run hundreds of rivers, not only draining the country round, but supplying water power which only requires the electrician to take in hand, to become a very valuable asset. It will be surmised from the above particulars that a country so well watered has an exceptionally prolific soil. It is an alluvial black loam, with an average depth of twenty inches, resting on a subsoil of clay, and yielding an average in wheat of twenty bushels to the acre. The cereal yield in 1899, was 51,000,COO bushels, of which 28,000,000 were wheat. From this it may be gathered that Canada is destined to take a very high place among the world’s grain-growers. In 1900 the area sown in wheat was double that of 1890. And the same increase has taken place in other industries, proving beyond a doubt that the Government of Canada, in arranging notable exhibits of the National Products, Agriculture and Horticulture, Industries and Manufactures