Economic Life

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Americans were among the economic leaders of British North America, active in every field of enterprise then conducted and dominant in several. They brought to British North America a highly developed spirit of entrepreneurship under pioneering conditions, although they had some reputation for sharp practice which may or may not have been deserved. As well, they brought with them their distinctive landholding patterns and predilections. In terms of landholding, the New England “Yankees,” the Loyalists, and the post-Loyalists all shared the typically American attachment to freehold tenure.

Patterns of land allocation in the new settlements of Nova Scotia in the 1760s were quite variable, as the New Englanders subdivided among themselves the 40,000-hectare townships they had been collectively awarded according to whatever practices they were familiar with at home. Most arrangements involved the scattering of individual holdings, but all landholding was based upon freehold tenure. Many of the Loyalists had been tenants on large estates in New York and were not anxious to repeat the process. Although many landlords would attempt to construct European-style estates in British North America, freehold tenure was so thoroughly established by the early American settlers that it was impossible to alter.

Over 80 percent of the Loyalists were farmers, and indeed the most common economic enterprise for Americans to enter before 1930 was farming, for which they were regarded by the Canadian government as peculiarly well suited. As for American involvement in another sector – business – the picture is complicated by the tendency of many American managers and executives to move back and forth across the border without establishing deep Canadian roots and by their equally common disinclination for publicity. Nevertheless, according to scholar Paul Harvey, more than sixty American-born entrepreneurs founded business enterprises in Canada in the period between 1871 and 1914, and 358 “former Americans” were members of the Canadian business élite from 1850 to 1978. Americans tended to be most active in those industries where United States ownership or control was most significant or in industrial development around geographical border regions. More than 40 percent of American businessmen in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were involved in manufacturing, and more than 20 percent in forest products. The most important industries for American involvement were manufacturing and natural resources (forest products, oil and gas, and mining and smelting). The Americans often brought technical knowledge and technology acquired at home to their Canadian activities. Clarence Decatur Howe used his engineering background to set up a firm designing wheat elevators on the prairies before entering federal politics in 1935. Sir William Van Horne brought several decades of specialized managerial experience in the American railway industry to the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Other American businessmen were best known for what became regarded in many quarters as the chief American business characteristic: promotional abilities at the edge of legitimacy. Two American businessmen in Canada in this category in the period before World War I were Francis Hector Clergue and Henry Melville Whitney. Both became notorious as reckless industrial promoters, a style often associated with American entrepreneurs in Canada. Clergue had been born in Bangor, Maine, and had been involved in a variety of entrepreneurial promotions in the United States before coming to Sault Ste Marie at the end of the nineteenth century. Attracted by cheap waterpower, he built a network of industries ranging from pulp and paper to steelmaking (Algoma Steel) at the Sault, financing it with imported American capital aided by government concessions and bounties. He was driven out of this industrial empire by 1909, a victim of his own financial recklessness. Henry Melville Whitney was Cape Breton’s leading industrialist. Unlike Clergue, he was a member of a successful Massachusetts business family, although like Clergue he expanded his Cape Breton activities from an initial investment in a colliery in 1892 to the Dominion Coal Company and then to the Dominion Iron and Steel Company. By 1901 he had been driven out of these enterprises, chiefly by “reckless and extravagant expenditure and miscalculation.” Clergue and Whitney were spectacular and well-publicized successes – and failures. Small wonder that most American businessmen preferred a lower profile.

Besides experiencing considerable American business involvement, Canada also was influenced – often more directly – by the American labour movement. The first labour union to attempt to incorporate large numbers of disparate workers was the Knights of Labor, which came to Canada shortly after its appearance in the United States, although in Canada it was founded by Canadians. The various Canadian unions of the American Federation of Labor also were founded chiefly by Canadian or British-born workers. But a substantial proportion of the workers in the resource industries of Canada, particularly in the western region including British Columbia, were of American origin (probably at least 10 percent). Many of these workers were political radicals with a deep commitment to trade unionism.

Like the farming population of Canada in general, particularly since World War II, American-born farmers have gradually moved out of farming, although they remain more likely to be farmers than either British-born or other foreign-born residents of Canada. Even including the war resisters, the characteristic occupational patterns of American immigrants to Canada since 1930 have been professional and managerial, with a distinct shift to a professional migration beginning in the 1960s. The war resisters may not have already had a professional specialization when they arrived, but many were well educated and acquired Canadian training, which would explain the fact that in the 1981 census, for example, there were five times as many American-born in law and jurisprudence as had migrated during the previous decade with the intention of practising law. By 1971, 41 percent of all American-born professionals in Canada were involved in teaching (including some war resisters), and indeed teaching has been the single most common occupation of the American-born professional since the 1931 census. From the 1960s on, the American immigrant also entered the fields of health care, religion, engineering, and the arts. Women have been well represented among American immigrants active in the teaching profession, especially at the pre-university level, and also in health care. Since the 1921 census, the proportion of all Canadian workers represented by the American-born has declined markedly, from 5.3 percent in 1921 to 1.2 percent in 1981; and, among major nonmanagerial and non-professional economic sectors, farming is the only area with a high U.S.-born percentage. American-born workers are under-represented in the manufacturing, construction, and trade sectors of the economy.

The high concentration of professionals among the American-born residents of Canada, with the peak period of immigration between 1965 and 1974, can be partly explained by the need for external recruitment in expanding sectors of the Canadian economy. Health care and education (especially higher education) grew enormously in Canada in the 1965–74 period. But, while Canadian shortages of trained professionals doubtless explains the demand for Americans, it does not explain the willingness of Americans to come to Canada. To some extent, American professionals responded as Americans always had to Canadian economic opportunities. Seeing the border as an artificial construct, they were willing to come north for better work and to return to the United States when possible. Historian A.R.M. Lower’s observation in 1961 that “Americans live in Canada as transients; they are our technicians and managers, doing a tour of garrison duty in this northern hinterland before returning home” continues to have a certain plausibility, particularly since the transiency rate for the American-born in Canada, always high, has been in recent years more pronounced relative to other foreign-born residents in Canada. Between 1961 and 1981, for example, American-born immigrants represented over 11 percent of immigrating workers but accounted for only 3.4 percent of the gain in the foreign-born labour force. Not only have many Americans returned home in recent years but they have returned home far more frequently than the total immigrant population. Transiency rates have understandably been extremely high among managerial immigrants from the United States. On the other hand, it would be far too simple to see the American immigration solely in Low-er’s terms. While many Americanborn returned to the United States, many others have remained permanently in Canada. It is possible but not provable that many of those settling permanently immigrated to Canada in the first place not solely for economic or vocational reasons.

Americans in Canada have always enjoyed a relatively high socio-economic status, the product of their levels of education, skills, and wealth. In one 1973 study of five groups in Canadian society (Canadian-born of French or other ethnicity, foreign-born of United Kingdom, United States, or other countries), the American-born consistently finished among the highest of the five groups on scales of social origin, education, and occupation, and invariably higher than the Canadian-born in almost all categories.