Canadian Forestry Journal, June, 1919 



259 



PAYING OUR DEBTS WITH SCENERY 



(By Robson Blac}( in Toronto Globe) 



If Canada Can Draw 1 per cent of Europe's Tourist Travel 

 Income Will be Half-Billion. 



The Magnet of Outdoor Canada creates more 

 national income and more employment than the 

 Canadian fisheries, probably five or six times 

 over It is to be counted as a natural resource 

 of such present profit and potentialities as to 

 rank with the mines and forests And yet it 

 seldom wins even a corporal's stripe in the blue 

 books of this Dominion's business. We have 

 figured out the pulpwood and the sawlogs and 

 mink skins, but the hidden gold of recreational 

 splendor somehow looks too intangible for men- 

 tion. With marvellously varied charms of 

 Nature to which processions of restless trampers 

 would find their way if they only knew, Can- 

 ada retains the distinction of the world's shyest 

 advertiser. 



Good ideas and pretty scenery seldom get 

 anywhere "on their own legs". What reader 

 has not heard of Denver, Colorado, and yet 

 Denver recently spent $75,000 to introduce her- 

 self to you and me, and is on the way to reap 

 $50,000,000 returns from motor travel alone. 

 We may be a self-governing people, but we 

 leave the details of food, clothing, politics, 

 charity and travel to the autocracy of the ad- 

 vertiser. So habituated are millions of folk to 

 picking rail and boat tickets according to brain 

 pictures painted by advertising science that only 

 those lands maintaining a first-class ballyhoo 

 have been able to turn tourist footsteps into 

 large national income. 



Thousands of our own people hitch up for 

 San Diego and Los Angeles who never yet have 

 conjured a curious interest in Algonquin Park 

 or Banff or Rideau Lakes or Vancouver Island 

 or Laurentides Park or southern New Bruns- 

 wick. The sort of export traffic that transfers 

 millions of Canadian dollars to Yellowstone 

 National Park and New Hampshire and the New 

 England coast can be countered and redirected 

 almost as easily as to change the public's whim 

 to another good brand of tooth paste. We must 

 start right now to "sell" Canadian scenery to 

 Canadians. 



A World's Industry. 



Tourist business, travelling, fishing, sight-see- 

 ing, have grown into one of the world's really 

 great industries. Because it is, consciously, a 

 quite unorganized idea with you and me to buy 

 a ticket to Mosquito Inlet does not mean that 

 your notion of travel is not as ponderable, com- 

 mercially speaking, as a shipload of spindles. 

 To turn 50,000 Canadians from the American 

 border to a rollicking good time in the glorious 

 outdoors of the Dominion, is, from the shock- 

 ing viewpoint of trade and commerce, a pro- 

 fitable and really easy thing to accomplish. 

 The country must advertise itself to itself. That 

 would cut off a large slice of needless cash ex- 

 port. Simultaneously we could advertise the 

 creational novelty of our country to others, to 

 the millions of others with their pockets bulging 

 full and a ready ear for the call of the wild, 

 when the wild does its calling in a universal 

 key. We could then settle down to something 

 that has a more exhilirating motive — to teach 

 Canadians how to play, how to build big busi- 

 ness on last week's recreation. Just now we 

 Canadians are in the way of thinking that a 

 "month's rest" means a membership in a Gaspe 

 salmon club. That is because we react ac- 

 cording to the mental pictures we have formed 

 from absurd data. It is also accounted for by 

 the fact that almost nobody in any Canadian 

 neighborhood, without a commercial interest to 

 advance, does any picture painting for the fel- 

 low with a fish-pole and thirty-two dollars. 



Department of Tourist Travel. 



If some Cabinet Minister at Ottawa brought 

 in a bill to create a Federal Department of 

 Tourist Travel, would he be showered with 

 flowers or flower-pots? It might help him to 

 mention that the American tourists spent in 

 France before the war about $250,000,000 a 

 year. The Rhine River brought to German 

 coffers $100,000,000 annually. Prior to hos- 

 tilities 300.000 well-to-do Russians spent the 

 summer at German and Austrian resorts and left 



