The province of Ontario has over one-third of the total population of Canada and is geographically also the largest province. This combined with its central location in the country makes it a giant among the provinces with proportionate political and economic power. Its beginnings however were more modest.
At the conclusion of the American Revolution in 1783 some 40,000 Americans remained loyal [1] to the British Crown. New lands were found for them in Nova Scotia, in New Brunswick, and in the unsettled areas along the upper St. Lawrence [2] and the western and northern shores of Lake Ontario [3]. Shortly thereafter, under a new Lieutenant Governor, John Graves Simcoe [4], a plan was presented for fortifications, roads, towns and rural populations in the fertile lands of the Ontario Peninsula.
By 1825, 150,000 people had established in this colony of Upper Canada [5], most upon 100 or 200 acre farms [6], but also in a number of urban places, the largest of which were Kingston at nearly 3 000 and Toronto (then "York") at 1 800. Large immigrations [7] from Scotland, Ireland and England from the 1820s to the 1840s, in conjunction with companies [8] dedicated to particular land settlement schemes, and spread this essentially agricultural population [9], specializing in wheat for export an some other crops over most of the province's best agricultural lands. The rural population reached its peak by the 1880s.
Intermingling with the agricultural settlements on its fringes was an economy based upon the exploitation of the white pine forests. In the first half of the nineteenth century [10] the industry concentrated upon extracting the pine in the form of long pieces of tree trunk [11], squared by axe and floated down rivers (largely the Ottawa and St. Lawrence) to Quebec City for export via timber [12] ships to England. In the second half of the century this was supplemented and then superseded by an industry that established sawmills [13], sending boards and planks via sailing ship and canal, and then by railway to markets in the north-eastern United States.
Both the agricultural and forest industries established a complex infrastructure that involved transportation [14], commercial agencies and information flows, much of which tended to centre on urban transhipment points. This hierarchical urban system channelled products outwards to foreign markets and inwards to the Canadian population.
The majority of the manufacturing in this region in the first half of the nineteenth century was based upon the processing of the produce of farm [15] and forest: grist mills for grinding flour [16] from wheat and sawmills for boards from logs. These factories tended to be located in smaller urban places that had grown around water-power sites. However, during the second third of the century conditions were in place for a more city?based industrial sector: overseas immigrants were coming into the port cities during the 1840s and 1850s; canals, steamboats, and railways could move both raw materials and products at a fraction of the old wagon?road costs; and an ability to bring power sources to the cities with the widespread use of stationery steam engines [17]. The large factories that we associate with heavy industry today were the result, sprawling across city?edge sites, their labour able to come by electric streetcar [18]. By the end of the nineteenth century, tied to the rest of the vast country by railways, the cities of Montreal, Toronto and Hamilton were national centres of commerce, manufacturing and finance. Industry still provides 25 percent [19] of Ontario's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) today, but a major shift has occurred away from agriculture (35 percent of GDP in 1880, but less than 3 percent in 1996) towards the tertiary sector (65 percent today) .
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