There is a great demand for workers in the busy season on the farms. Farm labourers, during the summer, may expect from $25 (£5) to $40 (£8) a month, and, during winter, from $5 (£1) to $20 (£4), in both cases with board. In harvest time skilled men may receive as much as $50 (£10) the month, or $2 to $3 (8s. to 12s.) the day, subject to deduction if bad weather prevents work. Ordinary labourers get $2 or $8 (8s. to 12s.) a day without board, and lumbermen in the camps $30 (£6) the month, with board and lodging.
Often there is also a good demand for skilled industrial workers, but this varies greatly from time to time; and it is most important that before setting out the intending immigrant should obtain recent information concerning the industrial conditions in the locality where he thinks of settling. For addresses of persons who will give information, see Appendix A, pp. [295]-[297].
Carpenters in Winnipeg get 35 cents to 40 cents (1s. 5d. to 1s. 8d.) the hour. Bricklayers and masons receive about 67½ cents (2s. 9d.) the hour, but cannot work at their trade for more than seven or eight months in the year. Tailors get $17 the week, and printers $18 to $20 the week. In considering these high wages (amounting to £3 or £4 the week), it must be remembered that house rent, food, and the cost of fuel are also very high; but, in spite of all such disadvantages, the fact remains that for the young, strong, thrifty worker, Manitoba has great opportunities.
LOOKING DOWN MAIN STREET, WINNIPEG.
XII
SASKATCHEWAN, THE WHEAT PROVINCE
TO borrow a threadbare but expressive phrase, “Wheat is king,” in Saskatchewan. Go where one will, in the inhabited part of the province, one is never allowed to forget this. One travels through miles on miles of wheat fields, and the most conspicuous building at many a wayside station is a giant “elevator”—if there does not chance, indeed, to be a row of these. Every budding town seems to begin with an agricultural implement “depot”; and near the railway stations in the cities self-binders, gasoline engines, and threshing machines, gaudy with yellow and crimson paint, are drawn up, awaiting their purchasers, by the hundred.
Nor is this the only token of the empire of King Wheat! In train and city, as well as at the tables of the farmers, the talk is of weather—good or bad—for the sowing and the harvest, for in Saskatchewan every man, woman and child realizes that in the last analysis the dependence of the whole community is on the measure of success which attends the cultivation of the soil. Wheat is king; and as in the old days every road led to Rome, so in writing of Saskatchewan—though this is true to a certain extent of most of the Canadian provinces—it is impossible to avoid coming back again and again to the farmer and his crops and his doings, his difficulties and his successes, and his way of meeting all kinds of problems. Here at least he is the hero of the drama—the central figure in the picture, and therefore I shall make no apology for seeming to travel in a circle.