Canada and the British immigrant

by Emily P. Weaver

THE FISH MARKET, VANCOUVER.

The man whom Canada needs is strong and healthy, preferably young enough to be readily adaptable to new conditions, sound in mind and well taught, trained and educated. The man she desires most of all is one of the good blood of the British Isles, imbued with love for the old flag of the Empire, and for the ancient traditions of his race; one who will help in the building up of Canada on the same lines as those on which the work has been begun—as a free British nation within the Empire; one, in short, who is adapted by heredity, education and previous history to understand this ideal of nationhood, and to take his place in the furtherance of it.

Good British immigrants are the more needed—to aid in leavening the whole lump—because to-day Canada is the goal for people of many races and languages, who, in most instances, have everything to learn of the institutions and the ideals of the nation, which (according to laws perhaps too speedily allowing to foreign men a voice in the affairs of the country) they will soon be helping to mould. That the problem is serious will be seen from the fact that, according to the figures of 1911-12, and apart from the English-speaking immigrants from the United States, more than one immigrant in each four that year was a foreigner in birth and speech, and in some years the proportion of foreigners has been higher. The immigration of the afore-mentioned year represented no less than sixty-five nationalities in all, including Ruthenians, Bulgarians, Chinese, Hebrews, Italians, Finns, Scandinavians—literally by the thousand.

There are whole districts in the West largely settled by groups of foreigners. For instance, in Saskatchewan, between Saskatoon and Prince Albert, the Canadian Northern Railway runs through a region which, though colonized in part by English-speaking people, is dotted with foreign settlements. Amongst these are the quaint community villages, built of mud, of that Quaker-like Russian sect, the Doukhobors. Some of their number gave at one time considerable trouble to the authorities, and endangered their own lives by going on strange pilgrimages in the depths of a Saskatchewan winter to seek for Christ, Whom they believed to have returned to earth; but in general they are a quiet, inoffensive, cleanly, honest people. In the same district are many Galicians, less remarkable for cleanliness and sobriety of demeanour than the Doukhobors, and often living in small mud huts thatched with straw, which, though of picturesque exterior, are often ill-ventilated and ill-kept within.

The schools, however, are rapidly making “Canadians” of the younger generation—in speech, and perhaps to a certain extent in ideas.

The prairies have also their Icelandic and Norwegian and Swedish settlers, who are generally credited with being of an excellent type. Then in the cities and in the railway construction camps are Italians, somewhat quarrelsome and ready to use their knives amongst themselves, but excellent workers in all the digging and delving necessary for the making of a railway line or preparing for the foundations of some great new building. It is said to be the ambition of many an Italian to become the owner of a fruit store, and to judge by the numbers of such little shops in every city—over whose treasures of apples and oranges and bananas a dark-eyed woman or child is keeping guard—it must be an ambition often fulfilled.

It is odd, indeed, how the different nationalities seem to have such strong predilections for particular trades. Every considerable centre of population in Canada must surely have its Chinese laundries, very numerous in the large towns. The Chinese, too, go into business as restaurant keepers, or keepers of tea and curiosity shops; and in the West they enter domestic service in private houses or hotels. But one never sees a Chinaman engaged in the rag-and-bottle-collecting business, for instance. Indeed, that occupation seems to be left wholly to the Jews; while the porters on the Pullman cars are nearly always negroes, with an occasional Jap on the western lines.

It is often said that much of the hardest and heaviest work in city and mine and railway making is done by foreigners. In that respect alone the country owes them a real debt; but there is no doubt that the bar of differing language and customs prevents Canada getting the best contributions to her total strength from the little-understood and often-misunderstood foreigners. As time goes on the Canadians may be more successful than hitherto in bridging the gulf that separates them from the newcomers of alien speech, but at present the tendency is for the foreigners to cluster together in certain districts in the country—certain quarters in the cities—where it is difficult to reach them with Canadianizing influences. In unskilled labour and in some more skilled trades they are formidable competitors to the newcomer from the British Isles. But in a measure—because of their coming in such numbers—the Briton is all the more the man Canada wants; and it is satisfactory that the proportion of British-born to the whole number of immigrants has of late tended to rise. During the decade ending March, 1912, the British immigrants outnumbered the foreign-born by nearly 300,000. This is leaving the newcomers from the United States out of account; but they also outnumbered the foreigners.

As has been stated already, the man wanted most of all is the man willing to go on the land. Every province, from Nova Scotia in the east to British Columbia in the west, has land waiting for the farmer, the market gardener and the fruit grower.