The Government and the Rate of Canadian Prairie Settlement

Abstract

The determinants of the rate of Canadian prairie settlement have been a problem of long-standing interest to Canadian economic historians. Most authors acknowledge that the rate of Canadian prairie settlement was desultory prior to 1896 but very rapid thereafter. The traditional literature suggests that the period 1879-1911 cannot be examined as continuous and devoid of structural shifts.' Instead, it is argued, technological and institutional factors affected the response of homesteaders to economic incentives in prairie agriculture differently within subperiods of the years from 1879 to 1911. For this period, Norrie (1975) presents the most sophisticated analysis of the timing of prairie homesteading and structural stability. Norrie examined the determinants of the rate of prairie settlement using a partial adjustment model. In this model, homestead entries in the current period were assumed to be a function of nominal wheat prices of the previous period. A partial adjustment mechanism was specified because of assumed lags in factor flows and information. The results from the estimated model