We’ve previously seen a menu whose cover is almost identical to this booklet. Nothing on the two covers discloses whether they are a booklet or a menu. We’ve also seen a booklet similar to this one that has Lake Louise on the cover instead of Victoria’s Empress Hotel.

Click image to view and download a 44.5-MB PDF of this 16-page booklet from the Chung collection.

As I wrote in the post about the Lake Louise booklet, I am pretty sure Canadian Pacific issued this series of menus and booklets as a defensive measure against the Canadian National Railways, its government-subsidized competitor. If so, it seems to me this is a poor job of marketing. On one hand, the covers of hotel-oriented booklets failed to provide people with an attractive reason to stay at those hotels. On the other hand, the claims that the private Canadian Pacific was somehow more of an “expression of a progressive nation’s character” than the publicly owned Canadian National would be considered laughable to anyone with a socialist leaning.

Inside, the booklet has hotel floor plans and descriptions that make it clear that the Empress was a first-class hotel and probably too expensive for anyone but the nation’s upper crust. While I have a lot of sympathy for Canadian Pacific, which I think got a raw deal from the Canadian government in a lot of ways, it wasn’t likely to get very far by claiming that services that were affordable only to the wealthiest people were somehow more democratic and egalitarian than a government-owned “people’s railway,” which is how the Canadian National portrayed itself.

PDF page 12 says that Canadian Pacific’s York Hotel “opened [in] June, 1929.” Meanwhile, page 5 says that a new wing of the Empress Hotel will open when “construction is completed in October, 1929.” Based on this, it appears that this booklet was issued sometime between June and October, but certainly in 1929.