The Nineteenth Century

With the exception of the natives, all these populations grew rapidly in the first half of the nineteenth century, a reflection of low female marriage ages, high birth rates, and relatively low death rates. Figures are best for the French-speaking parishes along the St Lawrence, where the birth rate was consistently over 50 per 1,000 people per year, the death rate only half as high, and the natural growth rate about 2.5 percent per annum – a population doubling every thirty years. To this natural increase was added, after the Napoleonic Wars, a stream of migration from the British Isles that quickly became a flood. From 1825 until the mid-1830s British North America attracted more emigrants from the British Isles than did the United States. In 1832 alone, some 60,000 arrived; in 1847 about 100,000; and in the thirty-five years from 1815 to 1850 about 960,000, an average of almost 28,000 a year.

Most people left the British Isles because their livelihoods were threatened and they had the means, barely, to get out. On the whole, the men were farmers, farm labourers, or common labourers. The majority, about 60 percent, came from Ireland, and half of the rest from Scotland. With some 8 million people in Ireland in the early nineteenth century, ordinary labour was worth a pittance, land was exceedingly expensive, and the new spinning and weaving machines were driving down the price of yarn and cloth, undermining the family livelihoods that, for many, had once come from a cow or two, a few acres, and a loom. Then, in the 1840s, blights decimated the potato crop, and famine followed. In Scotland improving landlords enclosed the Highlands, turning their estates over to sheep and their tenants to tiny plots or crofts along the coast, where they survived by gardening, gathering, and harvesting kelp for making soap. When chemical substitutes undermined the market for kelp, landlords were anxious to rid themselves of indigent tenants and often paid for their minimal passage. Other emigrants followed more established transatlantic linkages, as did some southern Irish and West Country English who, recruited for the cod fishery in the hinterlands of British ports, found life a little easier in Newfoundland and stayed. Overall, this was a migration of the poor towards the prospect of somewhat better wages and lower land costs. Many died en route and many went on to the United States, but most eventually found their way to others of their kind in British North America and to some niche in the economy.

The flood of migration intersected with the availability of land in Upper Canada (Ontario), where the population rose from 35,000 in 1800 to just under a million by mid-century. This was the age of pioneering in Ontario; countrysides replaced forests along a thousand kilometres of river and lake front from the border of Lower Canada (Quebec) to the St Clair River and northward to the Canadian Shield and Lake Huron. Along the river and lakes the population tended to be of American or English origin; in the back country it was more likely to be Protestant Ulster Irish, with enclaves of Catholic southern Irish, Highland Scots, and, in a few places, Germans. The Orange Lodge appeared, and so did Irish sectarian feuding. In Lower Canada, where agricultural land in the St Lawrence lowland was already taken, the immigrant stream was deflected northward into the timber camps of the Shield fringe or south into the Eastern Townships. Montreal became primarily an English-speaking city with a large Irish Catholic component. The Irish, particularly, poured into the timber camps of New Brunswick, and the Scots into Cape Breton Island, where most of them struggled to eke out livings on upland farms dominated by rock and winter. The southern half of the Avalon peninsula in Newfoundland became Catholic Irish, and most of the island’s other settled fishing shores West Country English.

These migrations shifted the population of the British North American colonies westward and filled most of their pockets of potential agricultural land. By 1850 the population of Upper Canada was slightly larger than that of Lower Canada, and Atlantic Canada comprised only a quarter of the total (compared to 35 percent in 1800). The colonies were still pre-industrial, their populations still almost 90 percent rural. Montreal, the largest British North American city, had only 58,000 people; Toronto, easily the largest city in Upper Canada, had only 30,000, just 3 percent of the colony’s population. Most people still depended on farming but, since they were squeezed along the northern continental margins of agriculture between the Canadian Shield and the United States, opportunities were limited. By 1850 the agricultural land in the British colonies was largely occupied, the young had nowhere nearby to go, and for many emigration to the United States was the only option. This southward drift had already begun, particularly from Lower Canada and Cape Breton Island, and it increased as the century wore on.

With land filling up and economic opportunities expanding rapidly in the United States, immigration declined sharply. Figures are uncertain: although almost two million immigrants arrived between 1850 and 1900, most of them probably continued on to the United States. British North Americans themselves were moving south in large numbers; the 1880s became the years of “the exodus.” Birth rates were declining, a reflection of higher female marriage ages and reduced marital fertility, particularly among the English-speaking. For all these reasons, the rate of population growth in British North America slowed considerably in the late nineteenth century.

Immigrants continued to come overwhelmingly from Great Britain, although, once the Irish famine was over, the number of Irish decreased in comparison with the Scots and English. But now there were more non-British people from radically different cultural backgrounds: Mennonites, for example, from Ukraine, Germany, and the United States, who began to settle in southern Manitoba in the 1870s; Chinese, mostly from peasant villages near Canton, who came, usually via California, to the British Columbia gold-rushes or, later, recruited by labour contractors to work in Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) construction gangs; or Japanese, from fishing villages in Wakayama prefecture in eastern Honshá , who entered the Fraser River salmon fishery in the 1890s.

The exodus to the south, a product of the shortage both of land and of urban employment, drained all the eastern provinces. Boston became a focus of emigration from the Maritimes, and the textile towns nearby attracted male and female workers from Quebec. French-language parishes, schools, and newspapers appeared. Throughout most of New England in these years, Canadians were the largest group of foreign-born. Ontarians poured into upstate New York, Michigan, and a northern tier of midwestern states; it was said that by the end of the nineteenth century more Ontario-born lived in the United States than in Ontario. Behind this huge relocation was a net out-migration from almost all of rural eastern Canada. Attempts, in both Quebec and Ontario, to colonize the fringe of the Canadian Shield had led to pioneer struggles with short growing seasons, rock, and acid soils, to be followed, more often than not, by farm abandonments. On the other hand, Montreal and Toronto drew from the rural exodus as well as from immigration, and grew rapidly.

Before the completion of the CPR to Winnipeg in the early 1880s, some of these flows began to turn towards the Canadian prairie where, in 1870, there was a largely Metis settlement of about 12,000 at Red River and a great deal of land suitable for agriculture. The Metis farmed along the Red and Assiniboine rivers, but they also fished in Lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba and hunted in winter in the coniferous forests to the east and in summer across the plains to the west. Their extensive land use and intermediate, part-European, part-native way of life were threatened by land surveys and sedentary agricultural settlement. The defeat of the Metis during the North-West Rebellion of 1885 and the hanging of Louis Riel opened the prairie to other, more sedentary farmers; surveying and settlement spread westward along the CPR and quickly built spur lines. Some of the settlers were part of the immigrant stream, which was still overwhelmingly British but included more continental Europeans. More settlers came from eastern Canada, principally from Ontario and particularly from the counties around Lake Huron. In spite of population pressures, migration from francophone Quebec was small. New England was far closer, ties to Quebec more direct, and, after the hanging of Riel and the loss of linguistic rights in Manitoba during the 1890s, the west, as viewed from French-speaking, Roman Catholic Quebec, seemed a threatening cultural space.

In 1901, according to the census, fewer than 100,000 people, under 2 percent of the Canadian population, were natives, and perhaps another 35,000 were Metis. From the perspective of most Canadians, these people were invisible. Characteristically, they lived on reserves as marginalized wards of the state overseen by Indian agents. Except in the far north, subsistence economies had been undermined and alternative employments were few. Mortality rates were high. Residential schools forbade native languages and imposed austere disciplines. Natives themselves thought their peoples were dying out. Taken as a whole, the native population of Canada was lower, probably, than it had been for at least a millennium.

The total Canadian population in 1901 was a little more than 5 million, 88 percent of whom were of British or French ancestry. Then, as now, the Ottawa valley was a linguistic divide: French to the immediate east but only about 6 percent French to the west. Germans, most of them in Ontario, were the largest other group, representing an edge of the huge transatlantic migration of Germans in the nineteenth century who had gone to the United States. There was most ethnic diversity in the west; within and around the wedge of eastern Canadian settlement advancing westward from Winnipeg were not only French Canadians and Metis but also Mennonite villages and pioneer communities of Ukrainians, Icelanders, Germans, Poles, Jews, and Scandinavians. The cities, too, contained enclaves of other people: Jews, Germans, and French Protestants in Montreal; Germans, Swedes, and Jews in Winnipeg; Chinese and Japanese in Vancouver. Such people were far fewer, however, than in adjacent American cities. Detroit, for example, was an ethnic collage in 1900 with no clear dominance, whereas Toronto was an overwhelmingly British city. In the nineteenth century British imperial power was at its height and Canada was still a British colony. The combination of less attractive northern land, the delayed opening of the west, and late-nineteenth-century depression had deflected most of the continental immigrant stream to the United States. Canada’s population, as well as its rulers, had become predominantly British, although French speakers, somewhat protected by high birth rates, still made up 30 percent of the population.