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Canada's vast area (next in size to the Soviet Union and China) throbs with industrial action. In bleak Ungava, where only the rashest prospector ever ventured a decade ago, a new railway is thrusting through the wilderness to tap an iron-ore lode larger than the state of Connecticut, and perhaps as rich as the famed Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota. Above an Indian village named Kitimat, in the stony heights of British Columbia, engineers are damming half a dozen mountain lakes, creating a waterfall 15 times as high as Niagara, to power the world's biggest aluminum plant. In Northwestern Ontario, engineers are draining a 150-ft.-deep lake; when it is dry, they will dredge away 70 million tons of clay and gravel from the bottom to get at an iron-ore deposit that lies underneath.
Even in the dead of winter, when temperatures drop 50° below zero, the search for oil continues on the Canadian prairies. Winter has actually speeded development in Northern Manitoba; a whole town is being moved overland by tractors and sleighs to the isolated site of a new nickel mine. Another town, Uranium City, is springing up in the far north of Saskatchewan near the shaft of a new uranium mine that will be the biggest in North America, and may be the richest in the world when it goes into production late this year. Meanwhile, Canada's big cities—Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Hamilton and Winnipeg—are growing upward with modern skyscrapers, and outward with bright-roofed new industrial suburbs.
Not the biggest, but perhaps the most significant of all Canadian enterprises now afoot is the St. Lawrence Seaway, a canal system linking the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes to enable all but the biggest deep-sea vessels to sail upstream into North America's industrial heartland. This project has been pressed and attacked on both sides of the border for more than 50 years. Canada has been anxious to build it; all U.S. Presidents from Coolidge to Truman have advocated it (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). But the U.S. Congress, hobbled by minority interests (railroads and East Coast shippers), has never given its consent. Canada, feeling her newly won strength, has now announced that if Congress does not agree to a joint project before May, she will build the $300 million seaway alone. Henry Ford II, president of the Ford Motor Co., hailed the Canadian seaway plan last week as "an example of initiative and imagination in action—the spirit of contemporary Canada."
This spirit of growing confidence, both at home & abroad, has helped attract an ample supply of fresh capital to keep the boom going. Canadian investors, who were once somewhat timid about their own prospects, last year plowed back a record 22% of their national income into new development. United States, British and Swiss capital is rushing into the bullish Canadian market. American investors have put more than $7 billion into Canada, the heaviest U.S. stake in any foreign country. And the flow is increasing steadily, as Canada shows that she has both the wealth and the men to work it.