The flourishing economy in the years before 1914 was both a cause and a consequence of a dramatic growth in the Canadian population. In 1901, 5,371,315 people lived in Canada; in the next ten years a 34 per cent increase brought the total to just over 7,200,000, and by 1921 the figure had jumped another 22 per cent, to almost
8,800,000. Like economic expansion, population growth was unevenly distributed. The Maritimes received only about 3 per cent of the increase, British Columbia 9 per cent, the prairies 49 per cent, and Ontario and Quebec 40 per cent. Though exact figures concerning the movement of people in and out prior to 1921 are impossible to ascertain (especially because of the relatively open Canada-U. S. border), it is clear that Canada benefited from a net inflow of about one million people, an extraordinary leap. But almost as striking was the varied ethnic character of this population.
The success of Canadian immigration policy after 1896 can be explained by changes both in Canada and elsewhere. With most of the cheap arable land in the United States occupied by the mid-1890s, the sparsely populated Canadian prairies became a magnet for people seeking a new life. That included a large number of Americans who sold their farms at a profit and headed north to take advantage of cheap lands for themselves and their children. About one-third of all the settlers in the pre-war years arrived from south of the border—many being Canadians who had moved south during the depression of the late nineteenth century. Their capital and machinery, the knowledge which they had of dry farming, and the ease with which they were assimilated into a fairly familiar cultural environment, ensured that these incoming Americans would be among the most successful agricultural settlers. But not all prospective settlers from the United States were welcomed. Blacks were vigorously and successfully discouraged from entering Canada.
Two international factors that contributed to the success of Canadian immigration policy were rising grain prices and falling ocean-freight rates, which together made agriculture more profitable. Moreover, the increase in Europe-bound grain ships made passage for immigrants as a return cargo readily available. Accommodation was less than luxurious, often not even comfortable or clean, but it was inexpensive. Since the recruitment of immigrants was, to a large extent, left in the hands of shipping companies, who received per-capita bonuses from the government, the availability of “unused capacity” was of major significance in the drive to populate the Canadian prairies and to create a labour force for mining, manufacturing, and construction industries. Into this changing international climate stepped Clifford Sifton, a westerner determined to turn the failures of the previous decades of immigration policy into a success story.
Though born in Ontario, Sifton had gone west as a youth. His father’s success and his own convinced him that the West’s potential was unlimited. But that potential
This lively poster advertising the precursor of Calgary’s famous Stampede laments the changing shape of the West, when wheat farming was replacing cattle ranching. But Canada’s “wild west” had been largely a romantic fiction. Colour lithograph.
Could only be realized when the prairie grasslands were turned into cultivated grain fields. That change required people. Having served in the Manitoba government in the 1890s, Sifton moved to the federal Cabinet in 1896 to represent the West in Wilfrid Laurier’s ministry of “all the talents.” No one in that Cabinet was more energetic, strong-minded, or ambitious than Sifton, unless it was Laurier himself When he left the government in 1905, after an unsuccessful test of wills with Laurier, Sifton could claim a record of achievement in several areas, but none more important than his administration of immigration. It was not so much that Sifton devised new policy, for he followed the general lines set by his predecessors. Rather, it was the energy and organizational skill he brought to the department that made the difference. Centralizing authority in his own hands, Sifton appointed a whole new group of officials—mostly identifiable Liberals from the West—who were convinced that Canada, and especially western Canada, was the land of promise. Using the Dominion Lands Act (1872), which offered new settlers 160 acres (65 hectares) of virtually free land, with pre-emption rights to another quarter section, in return for a ten-dollar registration fee, Sifton dispatched agents and a flood of propaganda to Great Britain, the United States, and Europe.
Great Britain had been the traditional source of immigrants and it remained so.
For newcomers from across the Atlantic, Quebec City was the principal point of entry. These arrivals from Great Britain include some Orthodox Jews who prefer not to be photographed.
Sending more than a third of all those who arrived before 1914. British immigrants usually had much less farming experience than their U. S. or European counterparts. They ranged from the petty aristocrats of the Barr Colony in Saskatchewan, who attempted in 1902 to establish a little Britain, through the orphan children sponsored hy Dr. Barnardo and other less famous agencies, to lower-middle - and working-class Englishmen eager to escape their class-ridden homeland. While the Barr Colony foundered on the unrealistic expectations of its leaders, many other British immigrants became successful farmers. Others found the new rural life too demanding and isolated, and the climate too ferocious. Some returned home; a few were deported for breaking the law; others drifted into towns and cities where they found work in industry or in domestic service. While signs reading “No Englishman Need Apply” occasionally appeared, suggesting that Englishmen had been found wanting—or too arrogant—by some employers, the majority fitted into the new society with relative ease. Like that of the newcomers from the United States, their cultural background made assimilation easy, and they were among the first to move into the mainstream of Canadian life.
The principal change in immigration policy initiated by Sifton was his concerted effort to attract European, and especially eastern European, settlers. While there had
A house of sod and mud-brick could be assembled quickly and cheaply by newly arrived settlers. The boorday, as Ukrainian settlers called such a house, would soon be replaced by a brighter, more commodious dwelling, but mud and straw often continued to substitute for lumber on the treeless prairies. Above; Homesteading near Lloydminster, Alberta: photo by Ernest Brown; left: Galician Settlers. Theodosy Wachna and family, Stuartburn, Manitoba.
Been group settlements of small numbers of Mennonites and Icelanders before 1896, it was only after the turn of the century that large numbers of non-English-speaking people were sought out and directed to Canada. These included Germans, Scandinavians, Austrians, and a trickle of French-speaking settlers from Belgium and France. But most notable among these new groups were the people called “Ruthenians.” These Slavic-speaking immigrants, mostly agricultural peasants known as “people in sheepskin coats,” originated in the Polish part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in Russia. Eventually most of them would call themselves Ukrainians. Encouraged by Sifton s agents, who were instructed to find prospective settlers with farming experience, strong backs, and fecund wives, they settled in fairly homogeneous communities near Dauphin, Manitoba, and Yorkton, Saskatchewan, and in areas around Edmonton.
Vilni zemli, free land, attracted these people, and though the land they obtained was often chosen for its hills and wooded areas similar to their homelands, it was
The dream of every prairie settler was a comfortable house and a contented family. The reality was that getting the crop off before the first frost meant riding the binder from dawn till dark. M. Seagart’s Farmhouse: photo by Ernest Brown.
Sometimes poor and unproductive. The initial poverty of these immigrants frequently necessitated years of work in non-agricultural activities: mining, railway building, lumbering. Their lack of skills, their language problems, and, above all, their economic need meant that they often became the most exploited of the “bunkhouse men,” working long hours for low wages, living far from their wives and families in cold, sometimes insect-infested shacks. Other men, sometimes alone, sometimes with their families, found insecure jobs in the burgeoning urban areas, especially in the West. There, in such places as north Winnipeg, on the other side of the tracks, families lived in tenements and slums, cheek by jowl with a mixture of new immigrants and traditional poor. They struggled to earn and save the capital necessary to pay for the equipment and domestic supplies required to begin farming. (One estimate suggested that $250 was necessary for even the most meagre beginning—a yoke of oxen, a milk cow, seed, a plough—and for those who wanted something better than a sod hut, the costs rose to between $600 and $1,000.) Conditions in these slums were hardly better than those in the bunkhouse: overcrowding, filth, unemployment, cheap alcohol, and prostitution were common. These conditions were only partly offset by the efforts of the city missions, and by the chance for their children to attend school.
Life in the rural settlements was more satisfactory, though just as arduous. There, the newcomers could rely on one another for aid in times of crisis. The loneliness of life in the new land was reduced by the presence of others who spoke the same language. Though the activities of the priests of the Russian Orthodox church could sometimes be a source of rancour and division, religion, or at least the church, nevertheless played an important role in easing the immigrant into his new surroundings. In many communities on the prairies, the onion-domed church stood
The herculean task of breaking prairie sod—once done with a horse-drawn single-furrow plough—was revolutionized by the steam tractor, which could weigh as much as 20 tons and pull a plough that could cut as many as fourteen furrows at once. The tractors could also be used to power threshing machines.
Out against the prairie sky as the spiritual counterpart to the hard-edged, geometrical grain elevator, the symbol of prairie man’s earthly ambitions.
While the foreign tongue and unfamiliar customs of the Ukrainians and other immigrants of European origin often caused French - and English-speaking Canadians to wonder what kind of a polyglot country Sifton’s policies were producing, it was the Doukhobors, or at least a minority of them, who attracted some of the earliest and most vicious nativist reactions. In 1898, some 7,400 Doukhobors, under the auspices of Count Tolstoy and Professor James Mayor of the University of Toronto, negotiated an agreement with the Dominion government which gave them a block of some 40,000 acres (16,000 hectares) near Yorkton, Saskatchewan. This agreement included a recognition of the group’s conscientious objection to military service. Though the majority of the Doukhobors were peaceful, hard-working settlers, a conflict took place in 1902 that led to the emergence of a radical sect. These believers in the coming of the millennium set out on a long trek towards Winnipeg apparently in an ecstatic search for the “Promised Land.” But the Sons of Freedom trek collapsed in the cold prairie winter. Peace was restored between the factions of the community with the arrival of their leader, Peter Verigin, newly released from his Siberian exile. “Peter the Lordly,” as he was called, could control his followers but he could not extinguish the suspicion and hostility that the wanderings of the Sons of Freedom had aroused in many western Canadians. As the prairies began to fill up, dissatisfaction against the Doukhobors grew, especially among those who coveted their extensive, community-owned lands. When in 1905 nearly half of these lands were confiscated after the Doukhobors refused, on religious grounds, to take the oath of
The Department of the Interior was run by Clifford Sifton, an aggressive promoter of immigration, from 1896 to 1905, and during that time it co-operated with private shipping companies to blitz Great Britain, the U. S., and Europe with pamphlets and posters extolling the future of the “last, best West.” This poster showcases the government’s experimental farms.
Allegiance, the radicals once more demonstrated. But Verigin again proved equal to the challenge and brought the dissidents under control. He also decided that a new settlement should be established, this time on a large block of land in the Kootenay region of British Columbia. There, after Verigin died in the mid-twenties, the Sons of Freedom would cause new problems, but the majority of the community lived quietly and prospered.
The Doukhobors and Ukrainians were only the most distinctive groups among the numerous new ethnic communities that came to establish homes in Canada. When they began to arrive there was no settled policy about the future of their cultures, though it was generally assumed that they would assimilate into the dominant British mainstream. “We must see to it,” one western Protestant leader declared, “that the civilization and ideals of Southeastern Europe are not transplanted to and perpetuated on our virgin soil.” The process of assimilation was partly voluntary, partly enforced. The public educational system, outside of Quebec and those areas of other provinces where significant Francophone minorities lived, operated as the main vehicle of assimilation into the English-speaking world. Indeed, the influx of peoples of many different languages led to a stronger desire for linguistic uniformity, with results that were damaging to Erench-speaking groups outside Quebec. When
Saskatchewan and Alberta were created in 1905, only the most limited provisions for Roman Catholic schools and the use of the French language were included, and even those largely disappeared as a part of a series of school “reforms” in 1918. In both Manitoba, where multilingual teaching was permitted after 1897, and Ontario, where teaching in French had long been accepted in the early grades, the ethnic tensions of the war years ended these privileges. Outside of Quebec, Canada was to be an English-speaking country.
While the school system made the learning of English compulsory, something which most immigrants probably accepted as a key to social mobility, there were also voluntary agencies that assisted in the assimilation process. The missions established by the Protestant churches played an important role: Methodists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, and the Salvation Army all established special “home mission” branches to promote both Protestantism and Canadianism among the “foreigners.” In 1908 the Methodist Missionary Outlook expressed a view which was common currency among English-Canadian Protestants:
If from this North American continent is to come a superior race, a race to be specially used of God in carrying on His work, what is our duty towards those who are now our fellow citizens? Many of them come to us nominal Christians, that is, they owe allegiance to the Greek or Roman Catholic Churches, but their moral standards and ideals are far below those of the Christian citizens of the Dominion. These people have come to this young, free country to make homes for themselves and their children. It is our duty to meet them with
Near Bruderheim, Alberta, around 1910. These children attended a one-room school where reading, writing, and arithmetic were mixed with lessons on patriotism and loyalty to the British Empire.
The open Bible, and to instill into their minds the principles and ideals of Anglo-Saxon civilization.
Whether at Fred Victor in downtown Toronto, in All Peoples’ in north-end Winnipeg, in McDougall Memorial Hospital in Pakan, Alberta, or at Frontier College, established to teach men in work camps, nationalist, Protestant, and humanitarian motives combined in an effort to Canadianize new immigrants. It was a difficult task and one that was far from complete before the outbreak of war in 1914. The simple truth was that the existing Canadian population was not large enough to absorb the waves of newcomers that arrived each year.
Whatever variety there was in the languages of early-twentieth-century Canada, colour uniformity was nearly complete. Native peoples were hived off on reservations; blacks, with the exception of small communities in Nova Scotia, Montreal, and southern Ontario, were excluded; while entry of Chinese, Japanese, and even fellow members of the British Empire who came from India was severely restricted. As the anti-Asiatic riots in Vancouver in 1907 revealed, even a tiny Asian presence created deep hostility. So, too, the southern European was unwelcome in a country built on the national selfimage of the “true North, strong and free.” Even such a sympathetic commentator on the Canadian ethnic mosaic as J. S. Woodsworth, the founder of AU Peoples’ Mission in Winnipeg, found it necessary to distinguish between desirable immigrants from northern Italy and the “diseased and criminal Italians from the south.”
That a mosaic, not a melting pot, was the best description of the new Canada could not disguise the vertical character of ethnic relations. The English, and to a lesser extent the French, were the dominant groups. Edwin Bradwin, who carried out a careful study of the bunkhouse men in the early 1920s, discovered two distinct ethnic classes. The “whites,” composed of Canadian-born French and English, English-speaking immigrants, and some Scandinavians, occupied the skilled, better-paid positions. The “foreigners” were those who “stolidly engage in mucking and heavier tasks.” Class and ethnic divisions, then, frequently coincided, while in the growing cities the new immigrants were often separated, especially from the English-speaking middle and working classes. Most cities had a version of North Winnipeg, Toronto’s “Ward,” or Montreal’s “City below the Hill”—ghettos for foreign workers and their families. One worker described a common situation in north-end Winnipeg:
Shack—one room and a lean to. Furniture—two beds, a bunk, stove, bench, two chairs, table, barrel of sauerkraut. Everything very dirty. Two families lived here. Women were dirty, unkempt, barefooted, half clothed. Children wore only print slips. The baby was in swaddling clothes, and was lying in a cradle made of sacking suspended from the ceiling by
In the early twentieth century, “bunkhouse men” formed a large, mobile labour pool for such industries as mining, logging, harvesting, and construction. They were often badly exploited, doing heavy work for low pay in hopes of earning enough to start a farm. This northern Ontario bunkhouse, owned by the National Transcontinental Railway, is better than average—some had bunks called “muzzle-loaders” which could only be entered head first.
Ropes at the corners____The supper was on the table—a bowl of warmed-over potatoes for
Each person, part of a loaf of brown bread, a bottle of beer.
For the newcomers life may have been better in Canada than in their homeland, but for many that was only because the future continued to look promising.
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