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.