Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

For many years the bulk of the immigration from overseas has come from the British Isles. During the periods of unemployment in England thousands of jobless men have made a new start on this side of the Atlantic. In one single summer, more than eleven thousand British young men came here to help in the harvest, and all but four hundred decided to stay. Relief societies in England have sent over several thousand destitute boys and girls, who work with farmers for their board, lodging, and schooling. In southern Alberta small parcels of land of from five to ten acres are being reserved for farm labourers who, though putting in most of their time working for others, may thus get a start toward having farms of their own.

The government extended to all British soldiers who served in the World War the same offer she made to her own men to set them up as farmers, and within a few years thirty thousand of them were placed on the land. It also loaned the former soldiers up to seventy-five hundred dollars each, and employed farm experts to train them and to help them get started. Eighty per cent. of them are regarded as making good.

As in the United States, domestic servants are at a premium. Consequently, young unmarried women are urged to come to the country. While in Toronto the other day I saw a party of fifty girls, Scotch, Irish, and English, who had just arrived from overseas under the wing of the Salvation Army. They were bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked. Their average age was eighteen. As soon as it was announced that the girls had arrived, the Salvation Army headquarters were surrounded by fashionable motor cars and overrun with Toronto women seeking cooks, maids, and governesses. Like the real bargains at a department store, this supply disappeared within a few hours. Some of the girls admitted privately that they were taking domestic employment only temporarily. They hoped soon to get places in factories or stores, or perhaps to find husbands.

Out in the farming country of Saskatchewan, girls are in as great demand as in Toronto. A record was kept during a period of three years of five hundred and twenty-six girls who were advanced their expenses to Canada. All immediately found household positions, and only six gave up and went home.

Canada estimates that each immigrant settler represents the addition of one thousand dollars to her national wealth. The railroads consider every man who takes up land along their lines worth seven hundred dollars as a producer of traffic. An even higher valuation is placed upon immigrants from the United States, because they usually bring in more cash, farm equipment, and household goods than the Europeans. During the height of the American invasion of Canada, from 1910 to 1914, more than six hundred thousand citizens of the United States, most of them farm folk, came to this country. Many of them had several thousand dollars in cash, realized from the sale of their high-priced farms in the States. They used it to buy the cheap rich new lands of the wheat belt. Allowing a minimum of only one thousand dollars for each American, this immigration from over the border gave Canada more than six hundred million dollars of new money for development. As a distinguished citizen here once observed, this is the cheapest new capital ever discovered; it carries no interest charge and is backed by muscle and brains.

Within the last twenty-five years more than a million Americans have come into Canada, and in the prairie provinces they form a large part of the population. At one time, the government conducted campaigns to persuade the agricultural population of our middle western states to come in. Its land agents had groups of our farmers name committees of their own number to visit Canada at government expense and see for themselves that everything was as they represented. In those days, western Canada enjoyed an old-fashioned land boom such as we had in the States a generation earlier. Fortunes were made by individuals and syndicates in dealing in Canadian lands.

Boom conditions no longer prevail, and the best lands now command a good price, though still much less than equally fertile tracts in the United States. Free lands are still to be had, but only on condition that the settler become a naturalized Canadian citizen. If an immigrant is not suited with the available free land, or if he chooses to retain his nationality, he is given every assistance in the selection and purchase of privately owned lands at a fair price.

Canada has had some curious experiences with colonization, especially with certain European religious sects. Among these were the Mennonites and the Doukhobors from Russia. The latter claimed to be descendants of Shadrach, Meshac, and Abednego, whom Nebuchadnezzar threw into the fiery furnace. They were an offshoot of the Greek Orthodox Church and lived by themselves beyond the Caucasus Mountains. In the early years of this century, when they were having trouble with the Czar’s government, Quakers in the United States and England helped them to emigrate. A grant of two hundred and seventy-five thousand acres of land was secured from the Canadian government, and some seven or eight thousand of these people were transported to Canada. They were located near Yorkton, northwest of Winnipeg, where they established communistic villages and patterned their existence on the life they had led in far-away Russia.

Corn is now grown successfully far north of the United States. Once thought to be suitable only for wheat growing and cattle raising, the prairies of Alberta have become the centre of mixed farming in the West.