CANADA'S TRANSPORTATION PROBLEM. 455 



HOW CANADA IS SOLVING HER TRANSPORTATION 



PROBLEM. 



By LAWRENCE J. BURPEE. 



OTTAWA, CANADA. 



TN Canada the main lines of transportation run east and west, 

 -J- much more decidedly than they do in the United States. The 

 Dominion is, roughly speaking, a vast parallelogram, three thousand 

 five hundred miles long by perhaps a thousand miles deep. Climatic 

 conditions have in the past confined, and probably will continue to 

 confine, the bulk of the population to the lower or more southerly half 

 of the parallelogram. The problem confronting the people of Canada 

 is, therefore, how best to provide adequate transportation facilities for 

 a population scattered over a relatively narrow belt of country three 

 thousand five hundred miles long. That they have already to a con- 

 siderable extent solved the problem, the remarkable prosperity of the 

 Dominion at the present time clearly shows; for transportation facili- 

 ties are an essential of national prosperity in any country, and espe- 

 cially so in one of such formidable distances as Canada. 



But these facilities must keep pace with the industrial development 

 of the country, and the industrial development of Canada is rapidly 

 outdistancing its means of transport. To bring these two great fac- 

 tors of national prosperity into line, and keep them there, is the ques- 

 tion of the hour in Canada, and the statesmen of the country are 

 devoting themselves to its solution with a largeness of view and far- 

 sightedness which augurs well for the future of the young Dominion. 



A glance at the map will show that in the facilities afforded for 

 transportation, nature has been on the whole very kind to the people 

 of Canada. She has provided, in the first place, an unrivaled system 

 of water transportation extending from the Atlantic to the head of 

 Lake Superior — almost half way across the continent; and, as if this 

 were not enough, an alternative and shorter route is furnished from 

 Lake Huron to the St. Lawrence, via French River, Lake Nipissing 

 and the Ottawa. West of Lake Superior we find a system of lakes and 

 rivers extending, with inconsiderable breaks, from the head of the 

 Great Lakes to the foothills of the Rockies, to Hudson's Bay and to 

 the mouth of the Mackenzie River on the extreme northern boundary 

 of the Dominion. 



While nature placed formidable obstacles in the way of Canada's 

 first transcontinental railroad — the Canadian Pacific — both along the 

 north shore of Lake Superior and in the Kicking Horse Pass through 



