Homes and Careers in Canada

by Harry Jeffs

Though Canada, as a country explored and occupied by white men, is more than three centuries old, it is only within the last half century that its possibilities have begun to be realised even by its own settlers. There are reasons to explain this tardy awakening to the significance of the country. During the French occupation, which was decided on that dark night of 1759 when Wolfe’s army scaled the Heights of Abraham at Quebec and sent its crashing volleys into the regiments of Montcalm, Canada was as badly governed as any dependency of a Western nation has ever been. So far from encouraging colonisation and laying the foundation of a French nation on American soil, the French Government of Canada did everything, both positively and negatively, to strangle the child in its cradle. The France of Louis XV. especially did worse than neglect Canada. It sent to Quebec and Montreal men who were not merely incompetent, but who ruthlessly pillaged the Canadians by every legal and illegal means. The story told by Parkman and other recent historians who have examined the contemporary historical material of the way in which, with the connivance of the Quebec Government, the people were almost flayed alive by the malpractices of agents and contractors, is unparalleled in the history of wholesale robbery and corruption. The Verres of Cicero’s impeachment was a heaven-sent benefactor of the Sicilians compared with the Canadian Intendant of Finances, Bigot. The Canadian farmers had not only no encouragement to wring its riches from the soil, but they were punished for their success. They were made to pay over and over and over again for everything that was necessary to agriculture in order that the Governor-General, the Intendant, and their swarm of male and female satellites might strut as in a miniature Versailles, mimicking alike the manners and the morals of Versailles. The French Colonials fought well, in spite of all they suffered from the French Government, for the French dominion of Canada, but when, after the capitulation and the Treaty of Peace, the horde of ruffianly officials were sent back to France, they soon reconciled themselves to the British Government. They found that the alien Government was at least a Government and not a systematised official brigandage, and they settled down to their farming and to the enjoyment of their legal parochial self-government and of their complete liberty for their Roman Catholic worship. The French Canadians to-day number two millions, mostly concentrated in the Province of Quebec, though there is an increasing movement westward of the young French-speaking Canadians who have had their appetites whetted by the stories of fortunes to be made in the Prairie Provinces. The old folk at home and the Roman Catholic parochial clergy look askance at this movement of population, as they do at the increasing proportion of British and other non-French settlers in the Province. It is useless for them to fight against it. Quebec Province contrives to combine the most intense conservatism with regard to religion, language, methods of farming and manner of life with political Liberalism of a peculiar kind. The French claim that they are the real Canadians. “We were here before you,” they say to the English. They are proud of the fact that a French Canadian, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, was Prime Minister of the Dominion for fourteen years, and that during his term of office the country sprang forward by leaps and bounds. They are the backbone of the Liberal Party of the Dominion, they are Imperialists of the Imperialists, and yet at the same time they are Home Rulers of the Home Rulers. A saying of a French Canadian has been often quoted, that “The last rifle fired in defence of the British dominion in Canada will be fired by a French Canadian,” and yet it is the French Canadian Liberals who have made it an article of their political creed that the future Canadian Navy shall be a Canadian Navy and not an integral part of the British Navy; that is, that it shall be built, manned, and be under the control of Canada and not be regarded as merged in the ships of and directly controlled by the British Admiralty. By a curious reversion of position, Liberalism in Quebec Province means Provincial Home Rule carried to the extreme limit, while Liberalism in the Prairie Provinces means the maintenance of Dominion control of the Provincial land tax, and Prairie Province Conservatism means Provincial control of land tax raised in the Province.

QUEBEC FROM THE RIVER.

The French Canadians have good reason to be satisfied with British government, for under it they have privileges with regard to self-government and the maintenance of their religion such as are not possessed by any section of the population in any of the other Provinces. There is no country in the world where the Roman Catholic Church is in such complete possession as in Quebec Province, where it has a parochial system so thoroughly and so completely worked, and the people are so submissive to the parish priests, that the priests generally, to use a vulgarism, “boss the show.” One of the difficulties at present confronting the Dominion Government is the marriage law in Quebec Province. The Catholic Hierarchy of the Province have put into force the Ne Temere Decree of the Vatican, designed to check marriages between Roman Catholics and Protestants, and the Supreme Court of the Province has had to bend, as always, to the will of the Hierarchy. The Dominion Government desires to unify the marriage law throughout the Dominion, but it is brought up against the stone wall of the Roman Catholic Hierarchy and of Home Rule in Quebec Province. At present there seems no way of getting over the difficulty, but it is pretty certain, as years go by, that the strong grip of the Hierarchy will be relaxed, as it is already relaxing with the broader ideals with which the minds of the young French Canadians are infused as a result of travelling outside the Province, and so many of them seeking careers in the English-speaking Provinces.

It was fortunate for British supremacy in Canada that the French Canadians had been so often at war with the Yankees that at the War of Independence they were all instinctively on the side of the Power that was hostile to the Yankees. The French Canadians could have wished for nothing less than incorporation with the Puritan New England States and the Quaker State of Pennsylvania. They were already feeling the good effects of English government and were settling down to the peaceful development of their lands. There might have been danger of them instinctively favouring France in future wars between England and France, but the Revolution of 1789 put an end to all that. The Revolution was the end of the ancient régime in France and with it of the colonial domination of the Gallican Catholic Church. The French Canadians belonged to the ancient régime and had been preserved from the worst vices and corruptions of the Roman Catholic Church in the Old Country. Canada offered a refuge to a large number of priests and émigrés, and the French Roman Catholics brought with them appalling stories of the horrors and blasphemies of the Revolution. The French Canadians regarded the English, during their long war with the Republic and then with Napoleon, as the restorers alike of Royalty and Catholicism in France, and they thanked heaven every day that they were living under the Union Jack rather than under the Imperial standard of the Corsican usurper.

When in 1812 the United States declared war against Great Britain, the French Canadians fought as patriotically and valiantly as the English Canadians against the Yankee invaders, and shared in the glory of driving back the Americans and defeating them on their own soil. A long period followed in which little interest was taken by the Old Country in Canada. England attached small value to its Dominion across the Atlantic. Then there came political troubles which might have led to serious insurrection and civil war between the English Colonials and the French Canadians. The population was increasing and the French were not satisfied with the share they were taking in the government. The troubles were settled by a wise measure of conciliation which led to the laying of the foundation for the federation of the Canadian Provinces in the present Dominion. Now, though the French Canadians still keep themselves very much to themselves and regard their religion and their language almost as superstitiously as savages their fetishes, the only rivalry between the French and English-speaking Canadians is rivalry as to which are the best Canadians, the most fervent patriots, and the most loyal British Imperialists.

One reason for the late development of Canada was the flow of immigration during the greater part of the nineteenth century to the United States. The States had nearly three centuries start of Canada. Since 1772 they were an independent nation. They governed illimitable areas of cultivable land. Centres of manufacturing industry were early established and grew at an amazing rate. There was enormous railway development, facilitating intercommunication between the various States and encouraging settlement along the lines of railway construction. Along both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts there was an interminable seaboard offering farmers and manufacturers harbours and rivers for the carrying on of sea trade. The great emigrant nations of the world—Ireland, Scotland, Italy, Germany—found the United States a congenial country in which to settle their surplus population, and those already settled sent home glowing stories of the prospects and much money for their relatives and friends to follow them. The United States grew populous, rich and great by these feeders from the Old World. Canada, on the contrary, held out few inducements for settlement. Its people were satisfied with a moderate degree of comfort and showed little disposition to welcome new-comers. So Canada would have remained till to-day had it not been for the opening up of the country by railway construction, to the story of which a future chapter will be devoted. Somehow the idea had got into the mind of the world that Canada was a country of intolerable cold, covered in the Eastern Provinces with monotonous and depressing woods and practically a desert as to Central Canada, while only the Indians and a few Scotsmen of iron constitution in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company endured the terrors of the arctic North. Certain novelists, who had drawn their material partly from the facts of the life of the Canadian Far West, but mainly from their fertile imaginations, conveyed the impression that Canada was infested with tomahawking Indians and that no man’s life and no woman’s life was worth much if they settled outside the bounds of Old Canada. The Hudson’s Bay Company, during its hold of the Far West, rather encouraged such ideas. It did its utmost to keep immigrants at arms’ length and to prevent any rivalry with its profitable fur trade, even from enterprising Scotsmen and French Canadians at Quebec and Montreal who were not disposed to recognise the rights which Charles II. lightly gave away when he granted the charter to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1672, conferring on them the lordship of all lands watered by streams running into Hudson’s Bay. Fort Garry, where now is Winnipeg, the capital of the Prairie cornlands, was the western boundary of known Canada, and to get even to Fort Garry before the Canadian Pacific struck across the continent was a most tremendous adventure. When the Canadian Pacific pioneers, however, opened up the country, and the Red River Rebellion, inspired by the unfortunate half-breed Louis Riel, was suppressed by the expedition in which Sir Garnet Wolseley’s name first became known to fame, the Hudson’s Bay Company saw the days of its supremacy at an end. Its rights were bought out, though it received magnificent concessions as the price of surrender, and very soon the incalculable possibilities of the prairie and of British Columbia began to be realised and the stream of immigration set in which is now gathering strength every year. Within the last five years the rate of annual immigration has increased from 300,000 to nearly 400,000. The population of Canada is still under eight millions, but even cautious Canadians predict that in less than twenty years it will be twenty millions, and that by 1930 the immigrant population will exceed the native-born population.

English interest in Canada naturally grows with the growth of English immigration into the Dominion. There are tens of thousands of families now represented in the Dominion where a dozen years ago such families might have been counted by hundreds, and the type of immigrant is changed. Time was, not long since, when Canada was considered the most suitable dumping ground for the social wreckage of Great Britain. Immigrants might have been divided into two classes. First there were the scapegraces of good families—young fellows who had gone the pace at home and had either gone to Canada to keep out of the clutches of creditors or the police, or were sent to Canada by relatives who were none too fond of them, but were glad to be rid of them even though it meant sending remittances to keep them going in the new country until they settled down to something honest, if they developed any disposition to try work for a change. Then there were the out-of-works, the unemployables, the “social problems,” the men of the proletariat who were the despair of the Old Country and whom the Salvation Army and other philanthropic societies got hold of, and sent to Canada with the optimistic belief that men who had failed in the Old Country might possibly succeed in a new. Canada proved a good testing ground for emigrants so sent out. If they were caught young and had received some moral training and some training in industry before they were shipped they did well; but men whose moral backbone had been broken, and whose physical stamina was weakened by self-indulgence at home, too often found that success to a moral and physical weakling was no more possible in Canada than in England. During the last few years the Dominion and Provincial Governments have been setting their faces sternly against the making of Canada a dumping ground for the scapegraces and social wreckage of Great Britain and the world, and they have given strict instructions to societies and institutions receiving grants and commissions from Canadian Government funds that only suitable men must be sent out, while an eye is kept on unsuitables who get in with a view to returning them, after a couple of years or so, as undesirables, to the countries of their origin. It is quite easy to understand the dislike which not only the Dominion and Provincial Governments, but Canadians as a whole, have of immigrants of the types referred to. They give a bad name to the country and prejudice it in the minds of people at home and people in other countries in whose estimation the Canadians desire to stand well. Canada requires and desires immigrants of the best type—physically, intellectually and morally—to contribute towards the making of the Canadian nation that is to be. Only such men can play a worthy and valuable part in developing the amazing resources of the country and making the population of the great cities which are springing up in all the Provinces. During the last few years emigrants have been going out from the best families in the Old Country—young men of education and with a certain amount of capital at their disposal. Canada offers to these a career unequalled in its opportunities, while at the same time such men are a contribution to the future prosperity of Canada even more valuable than the placing in Canada of British capital, which is flowing into the Dominion in ever deepening and widening streams.

A COUNTRY SCENE IN OTTAWA.