From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Irish Catholics/Mark G. Mcgowan
Forced from their homeland by adverse economic conditions, Irish Catholics were lured to Canada by cheaper fares, regular commercial connections between Canadian and Irish ports, free or inexpensive agricultural land, and the promise of wage labour in primary industries – fishing, forestry, and farming. Once they arrived in this country, they contributed in a variety of ways to its economic development and in the process improved their own social and economic position significantly.
Traditionally, our image of Irish Catholics in Canada has been inspired largely by the “famine motif” of Irish Catholic poverty, intemperance, and violence. Nineteenth-century observers, usually Protestant, identified Irish Catholics as an urban underclass, and many contemporary scholars have done so as well. For example, a study of nineteenth-century Hamilton indicates that, in 1851, 20 percent of that city’s Irish Catholics were among its poorest residents, and a decade later 45 percent fell into this category. Much the same has been said of the Irish Catholics of Victorian Halifax, many of whom were over-represented among the working class while the poorest were inhabitants of the city’s slums as late as 1871. Similarly, Toronto’s Irish Catholics have been described as urban peasants, uneducated and unskilled, to whom “drunkenness and alcoholism were endemic, almost genetic.”
New analysis of ethnicity, occupation, and religion in the 1871 census, however, paints a different picture. Based on a sample of 10,000 Canadian households, accounting for some 62,000 people, the 1871 census suggests that the percentage of labourers among Irish Catholics was slightly higher than the national average (19 percent compared to 12) and that the proportion of Irish Catholic farmers was significantly lower than that of other Canadians (44 percent versus 54). Yet these differences are not so pronounced as to justify the stereotype of the Irish Catholic as a poor city-dweller; many Irish Catholics, almost half in some parts of the country, lived outside urban areas and supported themselves by farming. By the time of Confederation, 48 percent of Irish Catholics in Ontario were engaged in farming, whereas in Quebec the level was 40 percent; in New Brunswick, 36 percent; and in Nova Scotia, 27 percent. Irish Catholics also appeared to be well represented if not over-represented in the skilled-craftsmen, merchant, and manufacturing categories, especially in Quebec and the Maritimes.
In some Canadian cities, notably Toronto, Irish Catholics demonstrated marked social progress and occupational mobility in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1890 and 1920, first- and second-generation Irish Catholics from rural and small-town Ontario were increasingly drawn to the province’s largest cities, Hamilton and Toronto. In these centres Irish Catholics recently arrived from the hinterland mingled with new generations of urban Irish Catholics who had absorbed ideas of social mobility and economic betterment from the community around them. By 1920, aside from the occasional clustering around a parish church, Toronto’s Irish Catholics lived not in specific ethnic ghettoes, as their counterparts in the United States did, but in all of the city’s principal neighbourhoods. More Irish Catholics of this generation than of previous ones also owned their own homes, and increasing numbers of young Irish Catholic men were abandoning the blue-collar occupations of their forebears for white-collar and supervisory jobs. No doubt this occupational movement was facilitated by the greater number and improved quality of separate Catholic schools. By the early twentieth century, Irish Catholics in the Toronto area could no longer be stigmatized by virtue of their ethnicity or religion as the servile “navvy” of English-Canadian society.
The situation for Irish Catholic women was somewhat different. For single women, the convent offered an opportunity for advancement. By means of the religious life, Catholic women in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canada often gained entrance to such professions as teaching, social services, and hospital administration. Irish Catholic sisters were among the only women in their society running schools, managing large hospitals, and administering extensive networks of shelters, orphanages, and charitable agencies.
For those Irish females who did not take the veil, the pattern resembled that of other women in the workforce. Though undervalued by a society that appreciated only paid work, women in the home played an invaluable part in meeting the physical and spiritual needs of Irish Catholic families. In rural areas Irish women often sustained families on their own when husbands and sons sought seasonable employment in forestry during the winter months. In the cities, working-class Irish families, like others, frequently required multiple wage earners, particularly when real wages failed to keep pace with the cost of living. Through such activities as running grocery stores and taverns out of the home, taking in boarders, offering childcare for other working women, and doing piecework for local garment companies, women supplemented the family income and, in some cases, supported themselves and family after being widowed. Outside the home, occupational challenges were limited. By the 1920s Irish Catholic women in Canadian cities were working as telephone operators and in other “pink-collar” jobs such as teaching, nursing, and domestic-service, and they were also earning a living in textile factories and food processing. Generally speaking, however, as soon as women were married, husbands and the local priest expected that the woman would cease working. In the eyes of the Church, women had a particular role in the home as nurturer, teacher, moral guide, and faithful wife – employment elsewhere was a serious distraction from these duties.
More recently, the idea that a woman’s sphere is that of the family has been seriously eroded by the development of the women’s movement and by the reinventing of Catholicism that was inspired by the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65. Today, the descendants of Canada’s nineteenth-century Irish Catholic women are indistinguishable from women in the larger society.
In the twentieth century, Irish Catholics have been found in all major Canadian occupational categories and many have distinguished themselves in the world of business and finance. Many, like members of Nova Scotia’s Connolly family, combined business pursuits with politics. Harold Connolly, a newspaper man from Sydney, became interim premier of Nova Scotia in the 1950s and later a Canadian senator. Frank O’Connor of Toronto, owner of several business ventures including Laura Secord Candies, also accepted a seat in the Canadian Senate. Sir Thomas Shaugnhessy, a scion of St Patrick’s Church, Montreal, became president of the Canadian Pacific Railway and a confidant of several Canadian prime ministers. In Calgary, Patrick Burns made a fortune in ranching and other ventures and directed a part of his fortune to Church-related charities and projects. The same might be said of brewer Eugene O’Keefe of Toronto, who in 1912–13 spent over $450,000 to build St Augustine’s Seminary. These Irish Catholic entrepreneurs established the groundwork for contemporary Irish Catholic business leaders, one of the most recent of whom was Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.
Nevertheless, scores of Irish Catholic labour leaders, craftsmen, retailers, and family business operations have yet to be examined in a scholarly way. A case in point is James Whalen and family of Collingwood, Ontario. At the turn of the century, at Port Arthur (Thunder Bay), Ontario, the Whalen family’s business interests included pulpwood mills, dry docks, a shipping fleet, dredging, towing, and wrecking, railways, theatres, newspapers, and thoroughbred racehorses. Like many Canadians of their time, they spread their business interests west to include agricultural ventures in Saskatchewan and, by the 1920s, pulp and paper mills in British Columbia.
