AMERICA AND CANADIAN FORESTS.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—I feel that your readers will be interested in a piece of news which reaches me from Canada. It seems that an American firm has just purchased, in the province of Nova Scotia, between six and seven thousand acres of virgin forest suitable for the manufacture of paper pulp. Their eagerness to acquire this land is manifest in the unusually high price
which they have paid for it—from thirty-five to forty dollars an acre.
The incident has, I think, a significance both for Anglo- American relations and for the future of the British Empire. Not long ago the New York Bank of Commerce reported that the present supplies of American pulp would be exhausted within thirty years. America is therefore turning to Canada for her supplies and that Dominion is easily first amongst the countries which already export to the United States 40 per cent. of the wood pulp used there. But Canada not only possesses vast areas of timber available fo; pulp ; it is not improbable that there will be added to these resources the straw from her twenty-two million acres of wheatlands in the Prairie Provinces, which, by a new process about to be tested in Kent, may at no distant date be transformed on the spot into thousands of tons of pulp for high-grade paper. This being so, what ought to be Canada's pulp policy towards the United States ? At present she places an embargo upon the export of timber for conversion into pulp in American mills, and the natural result has been the setting up of American owned mills in Canada. It is true both that the proprietors of these mills pay taxes to the Dominion and that thus far they have employed Canadian labour in running them. The question which arises is whether that process of peaceful penetration can go on indefinitely. In other words, is it quite politic that these considerable resources of ours should be owned and controlled by American citizens instead of being retained by Canadians for the Empire ? The matter is one which with propriety might well be considered at the forth- coming Imperial Conference.—I am, Sir, &e.
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