Economic Life

Even before there was direct steamship service between Antwerp and Canadian ports, glass products and structural iron and steel were in sufficient demand to sustain a network of Belgian importers and entrepreneurs in Canada. Gérard Macquet in 1887 organized Quebec’s department of transport, which undertook the construction of forty-eight metal bridges. The following year the Comptoir Belgo-canadien, formed originally of fourteen major companies, was incorporated to carry out railway construction and public works. From 1902 to 1975 the Belgo-Canadian Paper Company operated successfully at Shawinigan until it was absorbed into what became Consolidated-Bathurst. The Belgian Trade Syndicate in Brussels provided information and personnel for such successful ventures as Alexis Nihon in ceramic, marble, and granite products, the Miron holdings in cement and concrete, and the Simard family in shipbuilding. In 1932 the Liège-based Franki company began the construction of large buildings in cities from Montreal to Vancouver. A few years later, Louis Empain opened a resort centre, Domaine de l’Esterel, in the Laurentians north of Montreal, which featured a luxury hotel, commercial complex, sports club, and theatre.

In Ontario, Union Minière Canada revived the northern mining community of Pickle Lake in 1970. A syndicate of Belgian capitalists in 1891 obtained control of the Atikokan iron mine in the northwestern part of the province and planned a railway (eventually built) from Port Arthur (Thunder Bay). Several financial organizations, backed by Antwerp banks and investment conglomerates, were incorporated to promote settlement on the prairies and in the Okanagan valley and to profit from the urban boom in Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Calgary. In 1929 Léon Dupuis organized the Canadian-Belgian Chamber of Commerce in Vancouver. By using the Hudson Bay railway route, his enterprises had no real competitors in rails, structural steel, wire, cement, and glass until the outbreak of World War II. Belgians became active again in 1945, especially in mining and the petroleum industry. Genestar, Canadian Petrofina, Canadian Hydrocarbons, and Great Northern Gas Utilities are a few of the Belgian-backed companies that have contributed significantly to the economy of the west. By 1960 Belgium ranked just after the United States and Britain in investments in Canada.

A few Belgians had been employed in collieries in Cape Breton as early as the seventeenth century, but it was not until the 1880s that miners from Hainaut were actively recruited. The Dominion Coal Company employed several hundred at the Glace Bay, Dominion, and Reserve Mines. In 1906 the company also began to recruit in the province of Liège. A contract provided for assisted passage to Sydney, a stipulated salary, and a schedule for repayment of the travel advance. What recruiting agents failed to clarify were the working conditions and the company’s monopoly of housing and the local store. Dissatisfied with conditions in Cape Breton, many of the men migrated to the mining centres of Inverness, Pictou, and Stellarton and eventually to Pennsylvania. The pattern of migration continued as miners moved on from the United States to Vancouver Island, Crowsnest Pass, Lethbridge, and Drumheller. In the company-built housing near the mines, various ethnocultural groups tended to form enclaves. At Reserve Mines the concentration of shacks known locally as Belgium Town was renowned for its house parties and the “Friday night friction” with local Scots. Near every mine the Belgians had their own boarding-houses operated by miners’ wives, who also attended to elementary medical needs.

Walloon miners had a reputation for being radical and anticlerical, and they were well acquainted with the tradition of working men’s political associations when they came to Nova Scotia. In 1909 they were caught up in a bitter struggle between the Dominion Coal Company and the United Mine Workers of America, which was seeking certification. There were strikes at other Nova Scotia mines in the pre-war years. At Springhill, Jules Lavenne emerged as a militant leader and member of the Socialist Party of Canada. As a result of the labour unrest that characterized mining in the province up to 1914, most of the Belgians, like those in Cape Breton earlier, moved on to mining communities elsewhere on the continent.

In 1888 James Dunsmuir had hired for his Vancouver Island collieries a number of Belgian miners anxious to flee the aftermath of strikes and riots in Liège and Charleroi. They were given exaggerated accounts of working conditions in the mines, and complaints soon began appearing in Belgian newspapers. There were frequent work stoppages, but a royal commission in 1903 was told by Dunsmuir that he would not keep any workers on his payroll who joined a union. When miners at Ladysmith and Comox went on strike for better wages and safer working conditions, Chinese replacement workers were brought in. By 1912, using experience gained in Belgium, Nova Scotia, and Pennsylvania, Belgian workers led in the organization of the Syndicalist League of North America. They also formed a Miners Liberation League to work for the release of organizers arrested at Cumberland and Ladysmith. Eventually the majority of these men moved into other sectors of the wage economy.

At the turn of the century, miners from Wallonia had begun arriving in Alberta to work for West Canadian Collieries, founded in 1903 by French and Belgian entrepreneurs, and Canadian Coal Consolidated, a Paris-based firm. Léon Cabeaux, a well-known union leader who had organized a particularly violent strike in Hainaut in 1886, settled in Lethbridge and soon attracted disgruntled compatriots from collieries in Pennsylvania. As elsewhere, the Walloon miners became involved in labour radicalism. Mine disasters in Alberta were among the worst anywhere, and there were no provisions for the welfare of families of miners maimed or killed at the workplace. Among the local leaders were Frank Soulet, Joseph Lothier, and Gustave Henry. Henry, who had come to Lethbridge by way of Cape Breton and British Columbia, was ordered deported in 1925 on the grounds that he had been convicted of theft. His appeal to the Supreme Court of Alberta was successful, however, and he was permitted to remain in Canada.

In another celebrated case in 1925, a police constable in Drumheller seriously injured a Belgian youth named Lambert Renners. In the courts the case turned on the legality of picketing, but the lower courts concentrated on an allegation that Renners was a member of the Young Communist League. Although the Labour Defence League supported his appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, he lost the case and never received compensation. Such incidents embittered the Belgian community and turned it against the Communist Party, which was perceived as having divided the community. In Blairmore, bitterness was also directed against the Catholic Church as part of the “establishment.”

As early as 1896 Belgians from overseas and migrants from North Dakota had come in search of employment in the lignite mines around Estevan and Bienfait in what is now Saskatchewan. Conditions were no better than elsewhere, but it was not until 1931 that the miners went on strike. Police and firemen broke up a rally at the Estevan town hall, injuring scores of people and killing three workers. Louis Revay was among those immigrants arrested, charged with unlawful assembly, and ordered deported.

In agriculture, Belgians have excelled in five specialties: market gardening, dairying, and the cultivation of sugar beets, tobacco, and fruit. In Quebec a couple of Flemings in the 1870s experimented with flax growing and market gardening near Saint-Hyacinthe, and later in the century, Belgian experience in intensive farming worked wonders when applied to the province’s previously haphazard approach to farming. In 1903 Johann Beetz introduced silver-fox farming, which became a lucrative business.

In Ontario, market gardening was undertaken by newcomers to the Windsor and Lake St Clair regions. After World War II, Leamington became the canning and food-processing centre for the southwestern part of the province. At the Klondyke Gardens, Gerhard Vanden Bussche produced quality vegetables on what had been an unproductive marsh. He also pioneered overhead irrigation for tomatoes and strawberries and new greenhouse watering systems. In Manitoba, market gardening boomed throughout the inter-war years around Winnipeg, but after World War II Belgians moved out of this activity into urban occupations. Belgians also took up market gardening in the Fraser valley of British Columbia, but they never dominated the enterprise there as they had in Manitoba.

The success of fruit growing in the Okanagan valley began in 1890 with the Okanagan Land and Development Company, in which eight Belgians held shares. Seven years later the Belgo-Canadian Fruit Lands Company, with headquarters in Antwerp, began operations. By 1908 a number of its shareholders had formed their own Belgian Orchard Syndicate, bought land from the parent company, planted seventeen thousand apple trees, and built their own packing house. The syndicate was reportedly selling 40,000 boxes of apples and considerable quantities of pears, peaches, plums, onions, and tomatoes annually by 1936. Belgian immigrants had also started to grow celery on a large scale around Enderby and Armstrong before World War II.

No less successful although short-lived were other enterprises in British Columbia. In 1909 the Belgo-Canadian Land Company invested in undeveloped lands east of Kelowna, imported Italian workers, and built up productive orchards under irrigation. The following year, the Vernon Orchard Company, organized in Belgium, developed orchards near Swan Lake. In 1912 the Antwerp-based Land and Agricultural Company of Canada invested money from land sales in Saskatchewan in the irrigation of a vast acreage and expanded operations around Vernon in apple orchards and sheep grazing. These developments helped to turn the Okanagan into a prime fruit-producing area and employed Belgian immigrants and their descendants in an area once considered semi-desert.

Flemings first became established as dairy farmers around Montreal and Sherbrooke. In southwestern Ontario, those who had first taken up mixed farming soon changed to dairying or market gardening. In 1879 the Bossuyt brothers were the first of many Belgians to begin dairying in the suburbs of Winnipeg. Nuyttens, Van Walleghem, and Anseeuw became familiar names to Winnipeg householders. These families dominated milk production until the 1950s. The Bossuyt dairy in Fort Whyte and later Oak Bluff Station was a show-place for the industry and was also well known in the Depression years for paying high wages to its workers and providing free milk to the poor. Urban sprawl eventually took over much of the valuable land of these dairies, and the children for the most part pursued other careers. By the 1970s the golden age of Belgian dairying in Manitoba had come to an end. At about the same time, Belgians took up the occupation in the Richelieu valley south of Montreal.

As part of the provincial government’s effort to modernize agriculture, Belgian farmers introduced the growing of sugar beets, hops, and chicory. Their association with beets had a long history – the vegetable had been grown in Belgium since the early nineteenth century. In 1875 the Quebec government became interested in this crop not only as a source of sugar but also as a means of promoting francophone immigration. Factories were established in Berthierville, Coaticook, and Farnham with French and German capital and Belgian expertise. Within a decade, however, the Quebec experiment proved unprofitable. The Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph then successfully tested the crop on nearby farms, and local businessmen invited entrepreneurs in Michigan, where a thriving beet-sugar industry used Belgian fieldworkers, to start up a plant in Wallaceburg in 1902. Seventy Flemings, who had been employed as seasonal workers in northern France, were brought in and Ontario provincial subsidies obtained for refineries in Wallaceburg, Dresden, Wiarton, and Berlin (Kitchener), but only the Dominion Sugar Company in Wallaceburg survived. In 1912 the company began recruiting workers in Flanders, and during World War I, when a second plant was opened in Chatham, employees were also obtained from Belgian settlements in Wisconsin and Michigan. After the war the company provided subsidized fares for immigrants, who were housed by compatriots on the small farms they had acquired. In this way, Belgian communities were built up around Chatham, Windsor, and Sarnia. The Depression of the 1930s affected the industry, and dissatisfied workers began leaving for the more-lucrative tobacco culture. Others, especially the youth, sought employment in glass, plastics, and auto-accessories manufacturing. By the end of World War II, Belgians were no longer closely associated with beet-sugar production in the region.

Beet growing had been introduced in Alberta, with a hefty provincial subsidy to a Utah company, in 1903. The Knight Sugar Company hired Flemish migratory workers for the back-breaking labour in fields around Raymond, promising them passage money, housing, and even a cow. However, the twenty-seven families who arrived in 1912 were bitterly disappointed because none of the promises were kept. The company closed down when the subsidy ran out in 1914, and the immigrant workers were left stranded. In 1925 another Utah company opened a plant in Raymond. The families recruited in Belgium were dissatisfied with housing provisions – sometimes only remodelled chicken coops or granaries – and wages, and they formed a Beet Workers’ Industrial Union. The British Columbia Sugar Company acquired ownership of the Alberta refinery in 1931 and set about dividing the growers and their hired workers in order to break down any common front against management. Work stoppages resulted in the recruiting of scab workers, as had been the case in the collieries. In 1941 the growers were able to use displaced Japanese Canadians as cheap labour, and so the remaining Belgians left.

In 1939 Baron Kronacher and a New York investor had opened a sugar refinery in Fort Garry, Manitoba. Dairy farmers living near the plant, mostly Flemings, began growing sugar beets on a crop-sharing basis. In 1955 the British Columbia Sugar Company also acquired the Manitoba refinery and eventually closed it down. By this time, prospective workers in Belgium had good reason to heed the warnings of their consular officials and emigration societies against the industry. The conditions that the workers now demanded were not acceptable to employers, and recruitment of Belgian fieldworkers came to an end.

It was primarily tobacco that drew Belgians away from market gardening and beet growing in southwestern Ontario. The first immigrants had not been active in the production of air-cured tobacco in Essex and Kent counties, but when flue-cured tobacco was introduced as a commercial crop around Tillsonburg and Delhi in the 1920s, Belgians were among the first to become involved. By this time 63 percent of Belgians in Ontario had migrated to Kent, Essex, and Lambton counties. The tobacco buyers exploited the small farmers through a system of barn buying, and the growers’ plight was aggravated by the onset of the Depression and a decline in prices. Although the large, cohesive family functioned well as a unit of production, many growers became hopelessly indebted. Flemings in 1932 helped to form the Southern Ontario Flue-Cured Tobacco Growers’ Association, which filed a complaint with the combines investigation bureau that the tobacco companies were price fixing. When it was unsuccessful, the growers organized their own marketing association with representatives from both growers and buyers, an arrangement that remained in effect until they adopted the European system of selling by auction in 1957. They also organized a Tobacco Growers Cooperative in Kingsville to buy, redry, and pack the crop. In the 1950s about twenty Flemish growers left Ontario to establish tobacco culture around Joliette in Quebec. Others introduced the crop to Nova Scotia in 1958, Prince Edward Island the following year, and New Brunswick in 1963.

The communities of Tillsonburg, Delhi, Simcoe, and Aylmer relied on tobacco wealth to build malls, banquet halls, and sports complexes and to send their youth to university. The harvest attracted about ten thousand transients each year to southwestern Ontario. Beginning in 1966, students sent out from Belgium to bring in the harvest also gave language lessons, staged plays, and put on concerts to reawaken an awareness of Flemish culture. Domestic tobacco consumption began to decline rapidly in the mid-1980s; many Belgians in the region therefore turned to growing vegetables and small fruits for local canneries. The youth increasingly looked to the urban centres for employment.

In 1872 Count Leopold d’Arschot brought out workers for a potato-starch, vinegar, and glue factory he intended to open in Quebec City. Single men coming to Saint-Boniface in western Canada often remained there to work in the local brickyards, lumber yards, abattoirs, meat-packing plants, and flour mills. In Weyburn, Saskatchewan, such numbers found employment, especially in the brickyards, that a section became known as Belgium Town. Some immigrants who found seasonal employment as freighters or lignite miners in the southern prairies worked in the factories of Chicago or Moline in Illinois during the winter months. In 1905 François Adam, an engineer who had taken up fur trading, turned his Alberta ranch into the townsite for Camrose, where he built twelve large business blocks and operated several businesses.

After World War II, Belgians were caught up in the movement from rural to urban communities. This pattern was particularly evident in the greater Winnipeg area, where insurance agencies, hardware stores, lumber yards, plumbing, building and electrical supplies, and bakeries bore recognizably Belgian names. In Ontario, Belgians became car dealers, innkeepers, insurance agents, salespeople, and retailers. Some started their own businesses; particularly successful was Michael DeGroote’s trucking company in Elliot Lake, which developed into the giant Laidlaw group of enterprises. After 1950, Belgian immigrants to the Montreal area made their mark as teachers, university professors, researchers, doctors, bankers, brokers, musicians, and artists.