From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Belgians/Cornelius J. Jaenen
Belgian authorities had from the early days of outmigration been concerned about the welfare of their emigrants. In 1842 regulations had been promulgated governing conditions on board steamships. The following year a commission for the inspection of emigrants was set up, and consular officials were required to include information in their annual reports on the state of Belgian nationals abroad. By the 1890s the port of Antwerp, which was served by all the major shipping lines, had an emigration commissioner with a retinue of inspectors and medical officers to control departures, enforce health standards, root out unscrupulous and unlicensed recruiting agents, and generally counsel and assist emigrants.
Several charitable agencies assisted the officials. The Société de Protection des Émigrants was founded in Antwerp in 1882 in response to a need voiced by Gustaaf Vekeman, a journalist who had emigrated to Sherbrooke. He had deplored the lack of an organization to care for emigrants in a country that had “societies for the improvement of horses, pigeons, canaries and blind finches, and yet there was none to improve the lot of farmers.” In 1888 L’Œuvre de l’Archange Raphael was organized in Brussels to provide guidance, shelter, and even financial assistance to emigrant Catholic families. A network of counsellors in Quebec and Manitoba supplied practical assistance, as well as spiritual guidance. The latter was considered important because clergy in Flanders were beginning to decry the potential loss of faith faced by immigrants to predominantly Protestant areas.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, consuls were reporting numerous cases of fraudulent contracts offered to Belgian miners or agricultural workers in the Maritimes, Ontario, and western Canada. Regulations governing the activities of steamship and immigration agents were tightened up. In 1924 the agronomist Alexandre Lonay came to Quebec to investigate agricultural possibilities for Walloons, and he returned two years later with a group of fifty farmers. Most of them soon left for Ontario and eventually perhaps the United States. As a result, in 1929 Louis Varlez and Lucien Brunin were commissioned to visit and report on all the centres of Belgian immigration in Canada. Their travels were paid for by the provincial governments and the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, all of which had an interest in promoting immigration. In their report, Varlez and Brunin commented on the “network of organizations ready to provide information” to newcomers but cautioned Flemish farming immigrants to settle near established fellow countrymen in the new land.
Most of the Belgian immigrants came to Canada on their own, without the support of either the state or private-sector organizations. Still, there were an unusual number of colonization schemes involving Belgian immigrants, only a few of which met with success. These projects were established either by the clergy intent on perpetuating religious loyalties among settlers or by financiers and entrepreneurs pursuing their own interests. The first scheme was organized by Abbé P.J. Verbist, who was appointed immigration agent for the Quebec government in western Europe and published Les Belges et les Alsaciens-Lorrains au Canada in 1872. He succeeded in attracting a number of immigrants – merchants, manufacturers, artisans, and market gardeners – who settled around Quebec City, in the Eastern Townships, and as the nucleus of the future colony of Namur near Ottawa. Verbist also encouraged Trappist monks to found a monastery at Sainte-Justine southeast of Quebec City, which would attract Belgian farmers to the neighbourhood. His brief career as a parish priest was terminated because he had engaged in the import business in violation of diocesan regulations.
Not much more successful was Gustaaf Vekeman, who came to Sherbrooke in 1882 with his family intent on founding a colony for members of the exploited working class in his homeland. His innumerable newspaper articles and public lectures attracted only twenty people with a limited amount of capital. He then attempted to interest European investors in purchasing farms and a sawmill, and finally, in 1890 he tried to organize a colony near Sherbrooke with the support of the Société de Protection des Émigrants in Antwerp. Not only were the results meagre, but he was arrested for land speculation.
A third venture was launched in 1886 by C.E. Lodewijcx, who had served as agricultural adviser to the viceroy of Egypt and had been impressed by the Canadian agricultural exhibit in Antwerp. He planned the resettlement of impoverished Flemish farmers in the Lac Mégantic area of Quebec near the Maine border. His projected joint-stock company was scrutinized by the Belgian government for possible violation of the law as it applied to foreign investment. This action so discouraged potential investors that no large-scale settlement took place.
The Quebec government’s efforts to attract francophone Catholic immigrants caught the imagination of a Belgian attorney in Montreal, J.V. Herreboudt, who urged the Baron de Haulleville, editor of the ultraconservative Journal de Bruxelles, to undertake a colonization project on the Gaspé peninsula. In 1891 Father H.J. Mussely pursued the idea of a colony at the Baie des Chaleurs. Only twenty-five Belgian families were among the seventy or more who settled at Musselyville, and it therefore was never a Belgian enclave.
Colonization schemes in western Canada were less numerous, but more successful. In 1887 the Société d’Immigration Française sent its secretary, accompanied by the Belgian engineer Georges Kaiser, who later recorded his impressions in Au Canada (1897), in advance of settlers destined for Manitoba. Three years later Quebec’s legendary colonizer Antoine Labelle convinced Louis Hacault, editor of the conservative Courrier de Bruxelles, to visit Manitoba. Hacault’s Notes de voyage au Canada en 1890 became a successful piece of propaganda in attracting settlers to southern Manitoba. His efforts were seconded by the parish priest for Flemish settlements, Gustaaf Willems, who published Les Belges au Manitoba: lettres authentiques (1894), a collection of carefully selected letters from successful pioneers that the Manitoba and dominion governments circulated throughout Belgium. Some immigrants acted as recruiting agents for governments or railway and steamship companies in the communities they had come from. Sebastien Deleau was one such agent; he succeeded in bringing out compatriots from his native province of Luxembourg to a community named after him in western Manitoba. In 1900 Louis Barceel travelled as far west as Edmonton on a tour in the interests of the Société Agricole et Industrielle du Manitoba, which had its headquarters in Antwerp. The following year the Belgian vice-consul in Ottawa, E.R. De Vos, explored British Columbia on behalf of mining and investment concerns as well as to study its agricultural potential.
In his efforts to create a chain of francophone parishes across the prairies, Abbé Jean Gaire turned to Belgium for recruits. He attracted a number of immigrants from that country for his settlements at Grande-Clairière in Manitoba (1888) and at Bellegarde (1891), Cantal (1892), and Wauchope (1904) in what is now Saskatchewan. In 1904 he founded the Société Générale de l’Œuvre de la Colonisation Catholique Française au Canada, with the support of the church hierarchy, to buy up farm lands and hold them for resale to approved immigrants. His colonization plan for the Red Deer region was less successful, and the Société de la Ferme Assiniboia-Alberta was liquidated in 1909 after having brought out only a handful of Belgians. Other colonizing priests were able to attract Walloons and sometimes Flemings to francophone parishes. Such was the experience of Dom Paul Benoît at Notre Dame de Lourdes in Manitoba, Abbé Paul LeFloch at Saint-Brieux in Saskatchewan, and Abbé Jean-Baptiste Morin at Morinville in Alberta.
More spectacular but not much more successful were several utopian colonies. In 1889 eleven aristocrats, including Baron van Brabant, established the elitist community of Saint-Hubert, south of Whitewood in present-day Saskatchewan. They recruited a number of Belgians with agricultural training and skills, built several imposing stone châteaux, opened a chicory-processing plant and a Gruyère cheese factory, and began horse ranching. The aristocrats left when blizzards and prairie fires destroyed their dreams, but their labourers remained, and their numbers were augmented by compatriots, including some agronomists. A second Franco-Belgian project was organized by the Société Foncière du Canada at Montmartre in 1893. The Belgians started a butter and cheese factory, but once again the investors allowed the scheme to founder. A few settlers remained, while other enterprising Belgians moved on to the Okanagan valley in search of better prospects.
In 1903 a utopian experiment took shape at Trochu in what is now Alberta when its stockbroker-founder recruited partners from the military and aristocratic classes to oversee ranching operations, dairying, retailing, and town planning. An ambitious and wealthy entrepreneur from a noted banking family, Joseph Devilder in 1905 incorporated the Sainte-Anne Ranch Trading Company, which assumed control of the settlement scheme. A thriving community developed, but the aristocrats left in 1914 to serve in the Belgian army.
The last colonization project was launched in 1935 by the son of a noted industrialist, Louis Empain, already well known for his work with handicapped children, Pro Juventate. He purchased land from the Sulpicians near Oka to settle carefully selected young families who possessed both farming skills suitable to Quebec conditions and sufficient capital to establish themselves. In this way he hoped to meet the challenges that previous projects had encountered. An Institut Agricole Belge at Oka would provide the basic agricultural education required of the newcomers, who would be sharecroppers for two years. Empain had some difficulty finding suitable agronomists in Belgium familiar with Canadian conditions to direct the experimental farm and training centre. The outbreak of World War II forced him to abandon a project that had begun well.
