From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Scots/J.m. Bumsted
Over the years, many Scots have immigrated to Canada to settle upon the land and become farmers, but a significant proportion have gone into commerce and business. As in so many other areas, Scots were successful overachievers in the realm of business and commerce, particularly in the years before World War I. One study of the origins of the Canadian industrial élite in the period 1880–1910 shows the Scots distinctly over-represented. A full 20 percent of Canada’s industrial leaders in the 1880s – a group formed and nurtured in the years 1815– 70 – had been born in Scotland itself, and another 28 percent had Scottish-born fathers. Thus, nearly half of one major cadre of Canadian economic leaders came from a people who constituted only 16 percent of the total population. Significantly, the Scottish-born fathers of the industrial élite had been mainly farmers (46 percent), while 14 percent had worked in craft occupations, 11 percent in management positions, and 21 percent in manufacturing. These figures suggest the occupational distribution of Scots in British North America in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century.
As business leaders, Scots were well represented in all aspects of economic activity, ranging from the fur trade to shipbuilding to wholesaling to brewing to banking to railroading, typically employing both their connections with Scotland and their Scottish ethnicity to great advantage in the process. Scottish influence in business was felt in Canada, especially during the nineteenth century, from one ocean to the other.
The Greenock shipbuilding firm of Scott and Company imported hundreds of artisans and thousands of tons of materials, along with technology, to help establish shipbuilding on the St John River in the late eighteenth century. The firm’s North American operations were headed by younger brother Christopher Scott. Half of the original board members of the Bank of New Brunswick founded in Saint John in 1820 were Scots (including Christopher Scott) or of Scots descent. In Montreal, the Scots dominated shipping through the Allan family and others, and in Upper Canada the Glasgow-based hardware firm of the Buchanan brothers flourished for many years on the policy of concentrating on Scottish settlers and storekeepers while “distrusting Yankees as clients and accepting the Canadian born only after the most vigorous scrutiny of their means, their characters, and their possibility of prosperity.” In the west, the NWC in its higher ranks was dominated by Scots; of 255 important “Nor’Westers,” 126 were Scots-born and another 33 of Scottish descent. In British Columbia, the Dunsmuir family introduced Scottish coal-mining technology to Canada, making a fortune in the process.
The typical enterprising Scot brought an intensive work ethic to the Canadian business world. On one occasion George Stephen (Lord Mount Stephen), president of the Bank of Montreal and of the Canadian Pacific Railway, described that ethic to an Aberdeen audience. He attributed his success to the “Spartan training” he had received in his Aberdeen apprenticeship and the emphasis his mother had placed on the need for hard work “to the exclusion of every other thing.” Though such an ethic was scarcely the monopoly of the Scots, in the nineteenth century they often best exemplified it. In the process, the Scot made a major contribution to Canadian economic development.
By the later twentieth century, the successful businessman identified as distinctively Scottish or of Scottish origin had virtually disappeared, the victim of the concatenation of a number of tendencies in modern Canadian society. To be Scottish increasingly merged imperceptibly into being British or Canadian, while the successful businessman began to be seen less as a folk-hero than as a semi-anonymous member of an economic élite. Men born in Scotland or of Scots descent were still prominent in the business world in the twentieth century, once one began looking for them. James Muir was president of the Bank of Canada, and Donald Gordon was chairman and president of the Canadian National Railways. Publishing tycoon Max Aitken was a New Brunswick-born “son of the manse,” but few ever thought of him as a Scottish-Canadian, even before he became Lord Beaverbrook. Frank Sobey, the founder of a major food-distribution empire in eastern Canada, not only came from Scottish parents but grew up in the Presbyterian society of Pictou County, Nova Scotia, one of the principal centres of Scottish-Canadian culture in the country. Sobey, who founded his first grocery store in Stellarton in 1947, never tired of acknowledging his debt to his ethnic background, but most Canadians have never heard of Frank Sobey and those who have usually do not identify him and his business ventures with Scottishness. Similarly, despite the “Scots lass” on the cigarette packets, few Canadians know anything about the origins of the Macdonald family that founded and nurtured the famous tobacco company. Neither Wallace Clement nor Peter C. Newman, the leading modern analysts of the Canadian business establishment, have an entry for “Scots” in the indices to their books.
Indeed, since World War I, Canadian labour leaders of Scottish origins have been far more prominent than business leaders in the public eye. Scotland’s extensive industrialization meant that its workers moved into large-scale militant labour organization earlier than their colleagues in Canada, and the extensive immigration from Scotland of the twentieth century included a number of experienced labour leaders. Clydesider Robert (“Bob”) Russell was the acknowledged architect of the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, and Aberdeen-born William Cooper was the chief theoretician of the One Big Union and its unsuccessful attempt at “industrial unionism” in the post-1919 period. More recently, Joe Davidson (born in Shotts, Scotland), who immigrated to Canada in 1957, led the Canadian Postal Employees Association in its transformation into the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) in 1965. As president of CUPW from 1974 to 1977, Davidson directed the union through two national postal strikes.
