grants
and guarantee of bonds by provincial and federal governments. This has
given Canada's Railway Commission a whip handle over rates and
management, which perhaps explains why railroads in Canada have never
been regarded as lawful game by the financial powers that prey.
Including municipal, provincial and federal grants, stocks and bonds,
Canada has spent on her railroads a billion and a half. Including
capital cost and maintenance, Canada has spent on her canals
$138,000,000. On steamship subsidies, Canada's yearly grants have
gradually risen from a few hundred thousands to as high as two millions
in some years. Nor does this cover all the national expenditure on
transportation; for besides the thirty-eight millions spent on dredging
and improving navigation on the St. Lawrence, twelve millions have been
appropriated for improving Halifax Harbor; and only recently federal
guarantee for bonds to the extent of forty-three millions was accorded
one transcontinental. This road was so heavily guaranteed by
provincial governments that if it had failed it would have involved
four western provinces. Its plight arose from two causes--the
extravagant cost of labor and material in an inflated era, and the
depression in the world money markets curtailing all extension.
Workmen on this road were paid three to seventeen dollars a day, who
would have received a dollar and a half to four dollars ten years ago.
In fact, the owners of the road themselves received those wages thirty
years ago. Sections cost one hundred thousand dollars a mile which
would formerly have been built for thirty thousand; and prairie grading
formerly estimated at six to eight thousand dollars a mile jumped to
twenty and thirty thousand dollars. In coming to the aid of the Canada
Northern, the government did no more than Sir John Macdonald's
government did for the Canadian Pacific Railroad in 1885, and the
prosperity of the Canadian Pacific Railroad has amply justified that
aid.

Canada's transportation system has been a national policy from the
first. Her first transcontinental she built to unify and bind
confederation. Her second two transcontinentals she launched to carry
commerce east and west, because the United States had built a tariff
wall which prevented Canada moving her commerce north and south. Her
canal system to cut the distance from the Great Lakes to the seaboard
and to overcome the rapids at "the Soo," at Niagara and on the St