Canada: Northward Ho!

From Nova Scotia’s Cabot Trail to British Columbia’s Malahat Drive last week Canada’s nine provinces spruced up, put on their best bibs and party manners to play host to the biggest drove of U.S. tourists in history. In all, Canada expected 25,000,000 visitors to spend well over $200,000,000 this year (last year’s intake: over $160,000,000).

Travel-hungry Americans have always liked Canada’s wide open spaces and the fact that the U.S. dollar was worth $1.10. Now there was another reason for their desire to trek northward: a heavy-handed price control had kept food, lodging and entertainment prices well below U.S. levels. They had also been lured on by splurges like the $750,000 spent this year by the Canadian Pacific Railroad to advertise its hotels, by tons of gaudy literature, by newspaper and magazine ads plugging everything from Quebec’s salty seaweed-fed lamb to junkets to Alaska and Hudson Bay.

Most Americans were going to the lodges, resorts, hunting and fishing clubs in Quebec and Ontario. The resorts of Banff, Lake Louise and Jasper in the Rockies, closed during part of the war, would reopen June 15. They have already been booked solid. A select few tourists would confine themselves to the “million dollar” salmon fishing clubs along New Brunswick’s Restigouche and Metapedia Rivers. Vancouver was assured a bumper crop of visitors for its July Diamond Jubilee to be highlighted by an $80,000 historical pageant.

By midsummer Canada would be busting at the seams. Housing shortages, wartime neglect of roads, other handicaps would make the task of playing host to twice her population more than doubly hard. To ease the strain, housewives have been asked to open up their homes to visitors.

Last week, named “Tourist Service Educational Week,” touched off a campaign to instruct Canadians in the know-how of good service, courtesy, imaginative cooking and comfortable beds. Said Trade and Commerce Minister James A. MacKinnon: “Let every Canadian become a partner in our national tourist industry, and make a kindly word and a friendly smile among our great assets in achieving for Canada a reputation as a vacation center second to none.”

Scenery was not Canada’s only attraction for Americans. In Ottawa last week it was announced that in 1945 Americans invested $380,100,000 in Canadian stocks & bonds.*That was an alltime high, and $173,800,000 higher than the year before.

*Canadian investments in the U.S. in the same year: about $190,000,000.