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7. Making a Western Home, 1896-1900
From Canadian History Portal - HCO
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Canada Turns West
Contents |
Western expansion was never far from the thoughts of many Canadians by the mid-eighteenth century.
Canadians in the east wanted more land, as there was a growing feeling that the best available land, especially in Canada West (present-day Ontario), had already been claimed. George Brown, a father of Confederation, founded his Clear Grit Party on that very notion. On the other hand, the people of British North America wanted to establish a presence on the prairies in order to keep the Americans out.
The two major planks of Brown's Clear Grit Reformers were "rep by pop" (representation by population), that would give the growing English-population more political control, and also the expansion of Canada westward. George-Étienne Cartier also promoted the West as a homeland for French Canadians, particularly in the bilingual province of Manitoba.
Both Brown and Cartier had pushed Canada to start mapping the West, and in 1858, the government commissioned the Hind expedition. Its mandate was to map and survey the major agricultural areas on the prairies as well as to locate the best routes for future roads and railway lines. Once those things were done, settlers could come streaming into the largely empty western lands.
Canadians also felt continuing concern about US interests in the area. For a long time, Canadians felt that unless they established a physical presence in the prairies, the Americans would claim it in the name of "Manifest Destiny".
The Cariboo gold rush of 1858 in British Columbia had brought in thousands of Americans. When the gold rush ended, some Americans returned home, but many remained behind. The conclusion of the Civil War, 1861-1865, increased the fear that Americans would march into the western lands in retribution for British support of the Confederates during the conflict. The 1867 US purchase of Alaska from Russia , for $7.2 million, only heightened Canadian fears of encirclement. And during the first Métis Rebellion in the Red River, the United States had sent an envoy in the hopes of taking the area over. Clearly, Canadians had to start populating the West, or else the Americans would take it over.
Rupert's Land Real Estate
The government of the Canadas moved to address these concerns and in so doing, transformed the Canadian prairies. The first of two major milestones was the Rupert's Land Act of 1869, negotiated on behalf of Canada by Britain. For almost two hundred years, the Hudson's Bay Company had conducted a very lucrative trade in furs in the huge area known as Rupert's Land, which it had been granted in 1670. By the 1860s the HBC was looking to diversify out of the fur trade. At the same time, The BNA Act had provided for adding the western lands to the Dominion.
The Rupert's Land Act cemented the biggest real estate deal in history. In return for the immense tract of land, the Canadian government paid the HBC 300 000 pounds, allowed the Company to retain large areas of land around its trading posts as well as granting it one-twentieth of land from the entire holding. With the stroke of a pen, the size of Canada increased six times.
The other milestone that transformed the Canadian west was the signing of a new contract to build the Canadian Pacific Railway. There were, given the potentially lucrative nature of the contract, debates and squabbles concerning who should be awarded the contract. There was also the complication of Americans getting involved in the project, or building lines into the Canadian West from south of the border that would tap into CPR business.
Initially, Macdonald's Conservative government had awarded the contract to Hugh Allan of Montreal and his American partners in 1873. However, because of the Pacific Scandal, the change of government, the onset of worldwide depression, internal squabbling, and lack of capital, the plan languished.
The new CPR syndicate was given about $30 million of existing rail lines, a land grant of 10 million hectares, a $25 million subsidy, a tax exemption, and a 20-year railway monopoly in the Prairies. Of all these terms, the monopoly of rail traffic irked westerners the most. They felt they were captives of the exorbitant freight rates over the lines where the CPR held a monopoly.
With Donald Smith's driving of the last spike in November 1885, the face of the West would never be the same. The CPR was the very lifeblood that would convert Macdonald's National Policy into the economic orthodoxy for the next century.
The Canadian Pacific Railway transported the manufactured products of Ontario and Quebec, protected by high tariffs, to the growing domestic market on the prairies. It shipped prairie wheat to Canadian ports to be transshipped to foreign destinations. The increasing number of immigrants brought out by the transcontinental railway helped transform the prairies into the great Canadian breadbasket.
Racism & Discrimination
At the same time, there was a mean-spirited side to the changing landscape. Discrimination and prejudice were rampant by today's standards. Many of the existing population saw non-British newcomers as undesirable. Some were singled out based on country of origin. In 1886, after having one Chinese worker die for every kilometer of track laid - nearly seven hundred in total - the first head tax of $50 (doubled in 1901 and raised to $500 in 1904) was put on immigrants to Canada from China.
Chinese immigration to Canada, mostly to British Columbia, in fact kept growing, reaching a high of 7 500 in 1913. After that, however, the head tax had the desired result. Chinese immigration almost ceased after World War One.
In the case of immigration from Japan, Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier agreed in 1908 to allow Japanese people to come to Canada, but limited the number to only four hundred a year.
Many incidents of racial discrimination took place in these years, none as infamous as the "Komagata Maru" affair. A Japanese freighter, the Komagata Maru, rented by an Indian businessman, arrived in Vancouver carrying 376 men from the Punjab, mostly Sikhs who wanted to immigrate to Canada. The people did not have the $200 per person required for all East Indian immigrants, and Canadian authorities ordered the vessel to return to India.
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Canada's Aboriginal people did not fare much better. The numbered treaties forced most of them onto inferior reserves with marginal land that at the time was only fit for grazing. Any Métis man who chose not to "take treaty" was offered scrip. This entitled him to buy $20 worth of Dominion land for a farm. Many Métis did not understand the concept of land title, and some fell prey to unscrupulous land agents.
Laurier's Interior Minister, Clifford Sifton, began a policy of trying to take away reserve lands from the Aboriginal peoples without their approval, until the Justice Department told him that the practice was illegal. Sifton, however, was not deterred. He then attempted to convince many tribes that they would never make it as farmers and that they would be better off selling part of their reserve land to the government in order to pay off their debts. Most refused to sell.
Sifton's successor, Frank Oliver, was more blatant - and successful. He simply passed laws allowing the government to seize sections of reserve land. Government agents appropriated Aboriginal land for the immigrant settlers through badgering, legal exploitation, false promises, and even outright fraud (as in the case of the Moose Mountain reserve).
Manitoba Schools Question
[Whether the aim was to reduce costs or whether it was to assimilate the minority population, did not really matter to the seven percent French Catholic population of the province. They appealed to Ottawa to disallow the legislation. It became a political dilemma of great complexity. Five Conservative prime ministers were either unable or unwilling to resolve it. Wilfrid Laurier was elected as the first French-Canadian prime minister, in large part because of the conciliatory position he promised on the issue. And he delivered.
Once in office, he and Premier Greenway negotiated a compromise, the 1896 Manitoba School Agreement. Manitoba was not compelled to fund a dual educational system. However, it did have to provide thirty minutes of religious instruction daily as well as having to provide time, resources, and teachers for French language instruction "where numbers warranted.
Lands for the Millions
Laurier was fortunate in assuming power in the closing years of a worldwide depression, which had continued, with varying intensity, since the 1870s. The new prosperity proved to be crucial in boosting immigration and settlement of the west. So the third pillar of the National Policy was set in place.
Along with the end of the depression, a number of other factors greatly stimulated immigration. Many Europeans sought a better life, free of religious persecution, conscription for military service and the threat of war. They wanted to flee overcrowded cities, unemployment, high taxes and land prices.
In the United States, by the turn of the century, there was a strong belief that the frontier was now closed. All the available arable land was gone. (A noted American historian of the time, Frederick Jackson Turner, published an influential paper to that effect.) Canada offered a great deal - free land, freedom from religious and political persecution, and opportunity.
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The man chiefly responsible for promoting immigration to Canada was Laurier's Minister of the Interior Clifford Sifton. He worked tirelessly advertising the virtues of Canada to prospective immigrants. He sent hundreds of his recruiting agents, armed with millions of posters advertising "the Last Best West", to European, British, and American audiences.
Sifton's campaign cost over one million dollars. Perhaps his most persuasive argument was the promise of a virtually free (only a small registration fee was required) quarter section, or 160 acres, of land. The campaign was so successful that over one million immigrants came to the Canadian prairies (mostly Saskatchewan) during the Laurier years.
In total, between 1896 and the outbreak of World War One in 1914, more than 2.5 million people immigrated to Canada. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Canada's population almost doubled, from 5.4 million to 10.4 million.
The growth was most remarkable in the west. Saskatchewan saw its population grow from 91 000 in 1901 to 492 432 by 1911 to make it the third most populated province of Canada. Manitoba increased its population from 152 000 in 1891 to 554 000 in 1916. B.C.'s population skyrocketed from 98 000 to 456 000. In 1891 there were fewer than 100 000 people living between Manitoba and British Columbia; a quarter of century later, there were more than one million.
As the global depression disappeared, the demand for Canadian wheat soared. The Western Canadian breadbasket was created when a government scientist, Charles Saunders, developed Marquis wheat, which had a shorter growing season. Now thousands more acres of land could be brought under cultivation. Also aiding the wheat boom was the introduction of mechanical tractors and threshers. Canadian wheat production soared. In 1900, the value of Canadian wheat exports was $6 million. By 1915, it was $45 million.
It was not, however, an open door immigration policy. Sifton wanted those types of immigrants that he thought would fare the best on the unforgiving prairies. He also wanted immigrants that he felt could be integrated into mainstream Canadian society most easily. They should be hardworking, reliable, and experienced. They should be accustomed to the climate and topography of the West. That largely meant northern Europeans. Sifton sent his agents to Europe and they signed up thousands of Ukrainians, (the single largest group with close to 200 000 Galicians, Poles, Germans, and Scandinavians.
Following are photos of immigrant groups taken in the Quebec immigration shed in 1911 by W.J. Topley
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Sifton liked experienced British farmers because they brought with them British customs and traditions. American farmers were also desirable because of their ability to speak the language. But mostly Sifton's ideal immigrant, as expressed in his famous quote, was "a stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations, with a stout wife and a half dozen children."
Life on the Prairie
Still they had not fully arrived. They still had to trek their way to their own piece of land. Normally, the newly arrived settler had to buy a wagon and teams of horses or oxen, put all his worldly possessions on it, and make his way to their final destination.
What they saw was more of a nightmare than a dream. Rather than the flat, rich, bountiful scenes depicted in the posters, they saw vast open land, often very rough and rock-strewn or covered in thick brush. Then the hard work began. They had to clear that land, build a homestead (the first usually of sod called a soddie), then plough, plant, tend, and harvest their first crop. The obstacles were many and varied - early frost, drought, summer heat, hail, grasshoppers, locust, and fires.
There was always financial insecurity, even with a bumper crop. Equipment was expensive. The National Policy forced them into a "double bind" whereby they had to "buy expensive and sell cheap. (The manufactured products they needed were protected with tariffs. That resulted in reduced competition from foreign made products, which in turn raised the price. What they sold, mostly wheat, had no tariff protection, therefore lots of competition, which in turn reduced the price.) They also paid for excessive freight rates. These rates were reduced in 1897 with the Crows Nest Pass Agreement, but they still remained high.
Settlers often felt lonely and homesick. Finally, being new arrivals and perceived as different, they faced serious resentment and discrimination from much of the Canadian population. At the turn of the century, over 85% of the population was still of French or Anglo-Saxon stock.
As the nineteenth century came to a close and the twentieth century dawned, a sense of optimism grew in Canada - and not without good reason. The worldwide depression had come to an end and prosperity had returned. Sifton's immigration campaign had swung into high gear. The belief that the American frontier had closed up simply added to the great influx of immigrants to Canada.
With the settlement of the Canadian prairies, the western breadbasket was born. That process would be augmented four years into the new century with Saunders' Marquis wheat strain. This one innovation made wheat cultivation possible in the more northerly reaches of the Canadian Prairie.
Canadian urban centers were growing rapidly as well. Recent inventions such as the telephone and the automobile changed the way of life for most Canadians. The CPR was being fully utilized, and a new transcontinental line was built from Winnipeg to Edmonton. Tariffs helped support new industries. In short, there was much evidence to support Laurier's optimistic pronouncement that "The nineteenth century was the century of the United States. I think that we can claim that it is Canada that shall fill the twentieth century".
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