Arrival and Settlement 1850–1914

In the second half of the nineteenth century, an incongruity of demand and supply arose. Though the arable lands of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the Canadas were for the most part occupied well before the Confederation agreement of 1867, the growth of commercial agriculture in the well-established areas, especially in Ontario, continued to absorb large numbers of farm labourers. The increasingly prosperous domestic population also generated an insatiable demand for female domestics that immigration was slow to provide. More and more, however, those unable to make a satisfactory living in England were neither farm nor service workers but people leading a troubled existence in industrial cities. Some came without farming experience or any other appreciable skills, others arrived with training in specialized industries that had no counterpart in Canada. Canada remained an agricultural country, with large-scale and mostly heavy manufacturing concentrated in only a few large centres such as Montreal and Hamilton.

Both the Yorkshire and West Country migrations continued into the 1850s and even beyond. Hull remained an important port for emigration to Canada, even at mid-century frequently accounting for 10 percent of the total English traffic, though by this time it had also become a re-embarkation point for Germans bound for Canada and the United States via the St Lawrence. The English passengers on the Hull ships continued to catch the eye of Buchanan, the government agent at Quebec, who reported them to be for the most part “farmers and agriculturalists, possessing capital” (1854), “highly respectable farmers and mechanics . . . in comfortable circumstances” (1855), and “generally respectable farmers, proceeding to friends in different sections of western Canada” (1857). The West Country emigrants moving to the Lake Ontario shore or to Huron County attracted similar comment. Buchanan contrasted them with “those by the Montezuma from London, [who] are chiefly mechanics and labourers seeking employment; there were a number of young men who had acted in the capacity of clerks or store porters, who aspire to a position above that of ordinary labourers: to persons of this class, Canada offers but little inducements at present, and unless they are prepared to undertake manual labour, they will, I fear, find some difficulty in earning their support.”

Thus, in modified form, the provincial and metropolitan streams persisted; farming families from the north and now the west of England emigrated in large numbers to join those who had made the move before, and growing numbers of young men displaced from London’s labour market still came out to British North America in search of work, though, owing largely to the great reduction in fares, they no longer indentured themselves to pay their passage. Most remarkable was the continuing exodus of Yorkshire farm families, but this was soon to end. The young urbanites were the wave of the future.

The English tradesmen who had come to America in the 1770s had gone where there was demand for their labour, largely the ironworks and shipyards of the old middle colonies. In the late nineteenth century they continued to go to the rapidly industrializing United States in far greater numbers than to Canada, but enough came to northern shores to excite laments that what Canada needed most was farm workers. Their arrival was facilitated by improvements in transportation. Steamships began plying the Atlantic in earnest in the late 1840s and within twenty years had supplanted sailing vessels in the emigrant trade. The expansion of railway networks on both sides of the Atlantic also facilitated emigration and concentrated departures in the major ports. As well, the Canadian railways increased the numbers coming to Quebec and later Halifax with through-tickets to the central and western states, compelling government expenditure on relieving transients and wreaking havoc with later efforts to collect accurate statistics of those actually settling in Canada.

The effective end of the frontier of available crown lands during the 1850s greatly diminished interest in Canada and so, after the middle of the decade and through the 1860s, an average of only 3,000 to 5,000 English a year arrived. The economic boom that coincided with Confederation saw numbers triple in 1869 and then rise to 21,000 in 1870, and the influx carried on for a time at triple previous levels. Much of this population was obtained only with the expenditure of large amounts of money and energy by the Canadian government and British agencies. Probably about 15 percent of English immigrants received aid under various English programs, including child-rescue charities and various philanthropic emigration societies. However, over half and in some years approaching two-thirds of English steerage arrivals were forwarded from the port to their destinations at the partial expense of the Canadian government under a program begun in 1872. This program replaced free tickets, which had proved highly popular, but the numbers suggest that newcomers continued to abuse the system, posing as impoverished in hopes of a subsidized trip to the United States.

In 1870 the Quebec agent reported that the assisted emigrants were of a better class than formerly, many in the prime of life and with children old enough to be useful farm servants. Wives and children of men assisted out in former years were arriving, their way paid by remittances sent home from Canada. The application of steam technology to the rivers and to foundries, machine and car shops, and sawmills opened jobs to skilled workers in these fields, and even common labourers found ready work in railroad construction. Although the 1873 visit of Joseph Arch, leader of the Agricultural Labourers’ Union, was expected to promote movement to Canada, the successes of the union in boosting wages at home combined with the deteriorating North American economy to reduce emigration in the second half of the decade. The large, well-developed farms in Canada’s older settlements demanded farm labour throughout this difficult period, and some English farmers arrived to buy farms in the depressed market, but openings in heavy industry evaporated. The reduction in assistance in this period suggests that the comparative few who came during the recession were reasonably well capitalized.

Halifax was by far the most important immigration port for the Maritimes but arrivals from Britain numbered only 500 to 1,500 a year until the late 1870s, a fraction of the numbers reaching Quebec. Better than 60 percent of those docking in Halifax were English, however, and most remained in the province. The number of English arrivals quadrupled to 1,187 in 1872 as a result of a visit the federal agent at Halifax paid to the west of England that year. In 1873 Colonel John Wimburn Laurie installed seven labouring families from Devonshire on his estate at Grand Lake, and he also took charge of placing in service hundreds of orphans brought out from Liverpool in ensuing years. In 1874 a number of “first-class Cornish miners” were recruited by the Londonderry Iron Mines in Pictou County. Most of the immigrants were mechanics, miners, and farm labourers.

The role of Halifax as an immigration port changed following completion of the Intercolonial Railway. In 1877, 132 of the 931 arrivals were ticketed through to central Canada as compared with the four who had travelled there the year before, and the following year the 1,051 who went on to Ontario and Quebec were responsible for doubling the number of arrivals at the port. The numbers doubled again after Halifax was designated a port of entry in 1881 and a new deep-water terminal was constructed the following year. By 1888, 15,000 arrived a year, two-thirds of them English, but only 17 percent were taking up residence in Nova Scotia. Forty percent went on to Ontario, 20 percent to Manitoba and British Columbia, and 15 percent to the American west.

Halifax retained few of the immigrants and as a consequence sank from fourth place among Canadian cities in 1881 to thirteenth place fifty years later. Local industries did recruit skilled labour in England and 5 percent of the juvenile immigrants brought to Canada were distributed throughout the Atlantic region from receiving homes in Nova Scotia. There were more English immigrants in Halifax itself than in most of the rest of the province; in 1881, 37 percent of the province’s English immigrants lived there, though there were more Irish in the city and nearly as many Newfoundlanders. Long a station of the Royal Navy, the English cultural stamp remained strong, and even in the twentieth century visitors perceived the architecture and public gardens as English.

The immigrant agents serving in Ontario cities in this period despaired of reporting accurate statistics, since those coming via the St Lawrence were often counted more than once. Many were going on to the United States, but in some years as many immigrants crossed at Niagara into Ontario as landed at Quebec, and a number crossed the border at other points. In any case, not all agents were satisfied with their ability to separate those intending to settle in Canada from those using southern Ontario as a shortcut to the American west. Thus, immigration figures, which depend heavily on the Quebec statistics, must be taken only as rough indicators of general trends.

A more accurate picture of the levels of actual settlement is provided by comparing the numbers of foreign-born in the decennial census. In 1842 there were as many English in Upper Canada as Scots, but twice as many Irish. Though the numbers doubled over the next decade, the proportions held. The increase of English and Scots was proportionally as great as that of the Irish during the Famine decade of the 1840s, a point that is often neglected. Thereafter Irish immigration began to decline. The number of English-born living in the province exceeded the number of Irish-born by 1880, and by 1900 the earlier pattern had been completely reversed, with the English-born being then double the number of Irish.

One of the most remarkable features of English immigration to Canada at the turn of the century is that for the first time it outstripped, and indeed had a deleterious effect upon, English immigration to the United States. The preference for the latter in earlier years is easily explained, for the United States was then economically a much more highly developed country than Canada and so the pull of economic opportunity was far greater there. Also, because English immigration to Canada was slower getting started than the Irish movement, many of the early-nineteenth-century migrants followed their predecessors to American destinations. A sentimental attachment to the British crown (though less pronounced than that of the Irish Orangemen) and the drawing power of shipping interests and developing chain migration explain why the English came to Canada at all, in numbers much smaller than but still proportionally higher than those of the more populous and industrialized United States. By 1905, however, the absolute numbers of English coming to Canada reached unprecedented levels and surpassed those going to the United States; the 127,000 who arrived in 1911 were more than double the number going to the republic.

This situation in part reflected the effective closing of the American frontier. British North America had seen the consequences of the full occupation of arable land in the older provinces by the 1860s, but the acquisition of Manitoba and the prairies and the establishment of easy access by rail in the 1880s had provided the new dominion with a new frontier. Most of the non-native inhabitants of the plains were Ontarians until after the depression of the 1890s, when the west began undergoing intensive settlement and the rest of the country entered an era of rapid urbanization and industrialization. The demand being strong, the land was expensive. Still, in the best parts of the Canadian west the soil produced a harder, finer wheat than that of the American plains, and experiments by the Canadian government introduced hardy strains that grew farther north and so allowed the extension of the wheatlands. Even Canada’s severe northern winters were said to benefit the early growth of grain by holding the moisture longer in the subsoil. Consequently, the English who intended to farm were drawn to the “last best west,” and in the decade before World War I half a million people moved north from the United States, an appreciable but indeterminable number of whom were earlier emigrants from the British Isles.

The number of English-born on the prairies increased by 100,000 between 1901 and 1911, but the increase was greater in Ontario, and another 50,000-rise was recorded in British Columbia. From 1911 to 1921, the increase in Ontario dropped slightly to 83,000, and it was nearly equalled by the combined increase in the prairies (46,000) and British Columbia (32,000). Unlike the influx of the 1830s–50s, however, the English who came in this period were not so much fleeing dislocations in English agriculture as escaping the uncertainties of urban life in the world’s most industrialized nation, a country that now was importing the bulk of its food (including prodigious quantities of Canadian wheat, beef, and cheese). The federal government was aware of this and knew that many of the English, being unaccustomed to farming, would proceed to industrial employment if given half a chance. Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier’s immigration minister, Clifford Sifton, therefore directed much of his ministry’s intense propaganda effort at east European peasant farmers and tried with only limited success to direct the English who did arrive into the west.

Though many Canadians already on the plains reacted with alarm to the increasing numbers of foreigners, the only major experiment in English block colonization did much to discredit future attempts. The Barr colony established in Saskatchewan in 1903 under the rallying cry “Canada for the British” dissolved in internal dissension and subsequent hostile publicity. It was the brainchild of the Reverend Isaac M. Barr, a native of Halton, Ontario, whose inept organizing abilities and innocence of prairie farming led to his deposition as leader in favour of a colleague, the Reverend George E. Lloyd. Lloyd enjoyed the privilege of having the new town of Lloydminster named for him, but his attempt to sever Barr’s name from that of the colony failed. Only 10 percent of Barr’s 2,000 recruits had experience of farming in any context and the party included many veterans of the Boer War of 1899–1902 and sixty clergymen’s sons. The settlers’ expectations were probably too high, although Barr seems to have warned them against taking the imagery of the land of milk and honey too literally, and they refused to believe that he was not exploiting them financially (for Barr had not envisioned the expedition as a philanthropic exercise) even though he claimed to have expended his profits on the settlers.

While as many English settled in eastern cities as on the plains, the nature of Canadian complaints about the urban ones had also changed since the Victorian era. The major lament had been that the English arrived with industrial skills too specialized for Canada’s primitive economy. Even professional men and merchants’ clerks were said to have had difficulty finding work in a market oversupplied by the upwardly mobile sons of well-established farmers. The complaint in the early twentieth century was that too many of the English arrived with no skills at all.

Urban workers who did have skills were much sought after by Canadian companies pushing the nation into the ranks of industrial producers. Many gave preference to British workers and actively recruited in manufacturing districts of England. The Canadian Pacific Railway recruited metalworkers for its Montreal car shops through an English union, and its foremen gave British workers preference in hiring. Before 1914, 60 percent of all immigrant artisans came from the United Kingdom. Skilled women, too, were sought out. The Penman’s knitwear plant in Paris, Ontario, hired female machine operators in the hosiery districts of the English midlands. The women were receptive, since the English unions were responding to a downturn in trade by redrawing gender divisions in the industry to favour men. These women – single, married, separated, widowed, many with children – came from and to a female-centred culture. In Paris there were few job opportunities for men and so most left or became dependants in a town where the breadwinner wage was earned by women. Because it was difficult to find a husband in such a place, women lived in boarding houses or in joint households, contracting out domestic chores that in other places would have been considered women’s work. Eaton’s, which always provided work for Irish Protestants on the strength of Timothy Eaton’s origins in County Antrim, recruited London seamstresses and shirt makers when they embarked on clothing production in 1911, and the store also favoured those with British accents for the position of sales clerk.

Sifton’s successor in 1905 as immigration minister, Frank Oliver, pursued an overtly racist policy that gave a preference to British immigrants and he discounted Sifton’s antipathy towards immigrants from English industrial cities. However, the short but severe recession of 1907–8 saw widespread anti-English sentiment unleashed with a virulence previously reserved for Irish Catholics, Italians, and Chinese. Canadians of Irish and Scottish descent had always distinguished between the “Old Country” and England, and the offspring of an earlier generation of English settlers were often among the strongest critics of the later arrivals. The unfavourable stereotype of the “pampered, charity-seeking, work-shirking” opinionated Englishman owed something to the much despised upper-class remittance men whom Sara Jeanette Duncan chided in The Imperialist (1904), but the English propensity to find fault with Canadian ways may also have owed something to emigration literature that underlined the very similarity of the two countries: the English arrived without any expectation that they would have to adapt.

More seriously, Canadians accused the English emigration societies of dumping the hardcore unemployable in Canada. In December 1908 a correspondent of the Times of London asserted that “the Englishman who succeeds is hardly ever a Londoner; the Englishman who fails completely is almost always a Londoner.” At the height of this anti-English hysteria a University of Toronto professor concluded from an inspection of Ontario asylums that a high proportion of English immigrants were “sexual perverts of the most revolting kind, insane criminals, the criminal insane, slum degenerates, general paretics and weaklings of other varieties.” These stereotypes were denounced by Englishmen as base lies, but most admitted that “Canada wants the cream of our British population, the English agriculturalist with more or less capital, but by advertisement and other means has also attracted penniless men for whom she has no work.” In 1908, 70 percent of deportees were British, and the government clamped down on assisted-emigration programs in an attempt to restrict the influx to domestic servants and agricultural labourers. The recession eased and the shouts diminished to the earlier grumble, but immigration was reduced drastically five years later as the economic boom finally collapsed and it was brought to a halt by the war in Europe.