696 TRANSACTIONS OF SUB-SECTION K. 
another estimate was quoted as made in 1892, but endorsed as not over- 
stating possibilities of the future in July 1904, and this classified somewhat 
more than half of the land of Manitoba as ‘ land suitable for farming,’ or 
23,000,000 acres, allotting to the rest of the North-West 52,000,000 acres 
more, or in all 75,000,000 acres. The same estimator, forecasting the results 
for 1912 (or three years from the present time), allotted to Manitoba a 
probable wheat production of 168,340,000 bushels, and to Alberta, Assiniboia, 
and Saskatchewan 181,600,000 bushels. This crop of 350,000,000 bushels 
of wheat was in addition to an estimate of a further 200,000,000 bushels of 
oats and 50,000,000 bushels of barley. I have little hesitation in concluding, 
with Professor Mavor, that such widely divergent results, arrived at, as we 
are told, by competent estimators, illustrated the impossibility at the time 
of that report of setting out precise limits of cultivation in a region in which 
so much has yet to be done. To-day I would ask, Has the lapse of another 
quinquennium, full of interesting movements in both the population and 
the crops of the North-West, enabled us to reach any greater certainty ? 
If so, the opportunity of this meeting affords an occasion to submit the 
conclusions, optimistic or pessimistic, practical or theoretical, economic or 
scientific, to the test of friendly and thorough discussion. 
It is a relief to turn from the perplexing variety of these speculations 
as to the future to the relatively more solid ground afforded by the actual 
records of wheat extension here. If the progress of the past, and here once 
again more especially of the very latest decade, is to govern the prospect of 
the years to come, the wheat area of Canada must still possess a great 
expansive power. 
There are defects of continuous statistics showing from year to 
year the total acreage of the Dominion, although the recent good work of 
the Census and Statistics Office promises that this will henceforth be 
remedied. But outside of the three great wheat-growing sections—Ontario, 
Manitoba, and the North-West—the surface under this cereal is not 
material. By the latest figures available the four Eastern Provinces do not 
now grow 170,000 acres collectively, while the small surface in British 
Columbia, not appearing in the last general Bulletin, was only 15,000 acres 
at the last census. In the roughly sketched diagram I insert here, therefore, 
the course of wheat-growing on 97 per cent. of the 6,611,000 acres accounted 
for in 1908 may be conveniently, if only approximately, traced. 
The decline in Ontario, where, as in other older settlements, wheat-growing 
shrinks as more diversified forms of agriculture evolve, is much more than 
compensated for when the acreage of Manitoba, and in later years the 
rest of the North-West, is superadded, as in the columns of this diagram, 
and the rapidity of the recent extension, which—had the 1909 figures reached 
my hands sooner would have carried the total area far beyond the seven 
million limit—testifies to the energy in the task of bread-raising which this 
hopeful section of the British Empire displays.’ 
But whatever determinations we can reach on the hypothetical ques- 
tions here propounded, whether we may regard the greater rate of wheat- 
field extension in the world at large, which has marked the last decade, as 
disposing of immediate alarm for the bread supply of the next generation, 
or whether we find in the recent whisper of augmenting prices corroboration 
of the gain of population on subsistence, it is clear that our statistical 
records require a further development and a much improved continuity, 
* Were the preliminary estimates for 1909 taken into account, the total acreage 
would have been given as 7,750,000 acres—a rise of 1,139,000 acres in the latest 
twelve months. This is indeed the net result, for the West has added 1,402,000 
acres—of which 1,289,000 were in Saskatchewan and 113,000 in Alberta—while 
there are declines in the East and in Ontario of an almost exact equivalent of the 
last-quoted figure, or 114,000 acres, and likewise a reduction of as much aa 
149,000 acres in Manitoba since 1908. 
