Canada: Surging to Nationhood

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Long into the night the combines clattered and roared, their headlights probing like huge pale fingers into the golden sea of Saskatchewan's wheatfields. As the harvest gathered momentum across the 1,000-mile sweep of the Canadian prairies last week, the empty, echoing granaries filled with the largest crop in the nation's history—a crop that is already sold out, as is all the grain the prairies can grow for the rest of the decade. With the rumble of the harvest came a cacophony of Canadian sounds that, taken together, sounded unmistakably like boom.

Among the scrub pines and lakes of the Manitoba wilderness, where only the cry of the loon could be heard a few years ago, the stillness was shattered by the hissing and hammering of the world's largest nickel mine and smelter. In the Alberta foothills northwest of Edmonton, the ring of sledge hammer on steel counterpointed the polyglot curses of Portuguese, Greek and Italian gandy dancers, pushing the Alberta Resources Railway 111 miles north to the coal and gypsum deposits of the Peace River country.

Farther to the north, construction crews swarmed over the superstructure of a $230 million Great Canadian Oil Sands Ltd. processing plant that next year will begin tapping the Athabaska tar sands—an oozing black oilfield the size of Maine, which contains as much petroleum as all the world's proven reserves.

The bulk of Canada's 20 million people are clustered within an hour's drive or two of the U.S. border. Many of the nation's cities are within reach of wilderness where Indians still hunt deer. Canada remains one of the world's last frontiers, but it is subduing nature with the tools of modern technology rather than oxcarts and covered wagons.

No man exemplifies that spirit of machine-tooled pioneering better than British Columbia's Premier William Andrew Cecil Bennett, 66, full-time politician and part-time prophet. He feels that Canada's thin population belt must push into the undeveloped North and the still developing West. "Canada is as broad as the U.S.," Bennett says, "but only half an inch deep. Until we push up from the border, we just won't go anywhere." Bennett himself has been pushing for 14 years, and it is his sort of effort that lies behind Canada's hope for the future.

Looser Reins. On the eve of its 100th birthday, Canada is surging with unprecedented prosperity—a prosperity that its American next-door neighbor is scarcely aware of. That ignorance is doubly ironic since it is largely because of U.S. capital investment—$8 billion in the past decade—that the Canadian boom was launched. Much of that ignorance will be dissipated during 1967, Canada's centennial year, when Americans in considerable numbers will head north of the border to visit Expo 67, the Canadian world's fair in Montreal. Just how considerable is far from clear. Expo has counted on attracting 5,000,000 U.S. fairgoers, but its promotion has fallen badly short.