McInnis on Exagerated Rumours of the Prairie Wheat Rollercoaster
His talk at the University of Guelph Rural Roundtable yesterday, presented a nuanced and revisionary look at the common story that wartime demand drove Canadian farmers to double acreage devoted to wheat as a result rely on it as a dominant crop resulting in a huge blow to GNP when the price of wheat collapsed after the war. … In this paper, McInnis questions the conclusion that Canada’s rapid economic growth during the first decade and a half of the twentieth century rested on western settlement and the ‘wheat boom.’ … The commonly held vision of mass migration to the prairies and the subsequent breaking of new land leading to verdant crops of wheat has gone hand in hand with a picture of Canada as the wheat bowl for the Empire during the time of the First World War.