John Grierson's First Years at the National Film Board

At the outbreak of World War II Canada was something of a sleeping giant. In certain ways it was also a geographical and cultural anomaly which no orderly-minded nation planner would have perpetrated. Larger in area than the United States, its sparse population stretched across a 200mile-wide strip along its southern border; physically it really represented an extension of the United States up into the uninhabitable arctic. Its prodigious breadth of forest and prairie, blocked at the western end by a fierce mountain range, took considerable conquering before the Atlantic was finally linked to the Pacific with steel rails. By 1939, as a result of railroad building, it was able to make fully available its enormous natural resources-lumber, wheat, minerals and ores-to a world plunging into war. And with the air age, Canada's former remoteness would become a mainline global air route, and the newly-established Trans-Canada Air Lines, a Government monopoly, would reduce some of the unwieldiness of its own size

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