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Chapter
2 (continued)
Clifford Sifton's second new field of recruitment was eastern and central Europe. In his urgent search for suitable farmers and farm labourers, the new Minister was prepared to admit agriculturalists from places other than Great Britain, the United States, and northern Europe, long the preferred suppliers of immigrants for Canada. Describing what he looked for in the ideal settler, Sifton said:
Clifford Sifton was quite correct when he noted that his view of the ideal settler to pioneer the West differed substantially from that held by most others who concerned themselves with the issue. The vast majority of English-speaking Canadians deplored the idea of Canada's admitting "illiterate Slavs in overwhelming numbers." Nevertheless, by dint of his forceful personality, status, and determination, Sifton managed to proceed with his controversial plan. Unusual measures had to be put in place to attract "stalwart peasants" who would push back the western frontier and furnish seasonal or casual labour when required. One of these saw Sifton's department enter into a secret arrangement with a clandestine organization of booking agents and steamship company officials based in Amsterdam. According to the terms of the arrangement, known as the North Atlantic Trading Company contract, the North Atlantic Trading Company agreed to direct, whenever possible, agriculturalists to Canada; for its part, the Immigration Branch would give the company a bonus for every genuine agricultural settler steered to this country. The syndicate's operations and its members' names were kept secret because most European countries had restrictive emigration laws; in some, agents involved in immigration propaganda were liable to prosecution. The government did everything it could to establish bloc settlements of the different ethnic groups and in this way attract immigration of the right kind. Such settlements, it was believed, would exert a powerful magnetic effect, and often they did. The Ukrainians (the collective name applied to Slavs from regions of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires in eastern and southern Europe) were by far the largest group to immigrate to Canada from eastern and central Europe in these years. Between 1891, when the first wave of Ukrainian immigrants came to Canada, and the outbreak of the First World War, approximately 170,000 Ukrainians settled in this country, attracted by the offer of free land, a sense of space, and an opportunity to make a living in a free and open society. For the most part, these Ukrainian newcomers were small farmers and labourers from Galicia and Bukovina (both provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) who were fleeing oppressive social and economic conditions in their homeland. Commonly called Galicians, because Galicia had furnished the first Ukrainians to immigrate to Canada, they headed for those parts of the West that provided meadow, water, wood, and, if possible, contact with pioneers who spoke their language. As a result, large numbers of Ukrainians settled in the aspen parkland of the Prairie provinces, a wide band of country that runs in an arc from southeastern Manitoba through central Saskatchewan to the Rocky Mountain foothills west of Edmonton. Today the route that these newcomers took is known as the Yellowhead Highway or Highway 16, also referred to as the Ukrainian Settlement Road. When they first settled on the Canadian prairie, the Ukrainians continued to practise their traditional mixed farming, and their early settlements were distinguished by whitewashed huts with thatched roofs similar to those they had left behind. As they became better educated and more prosperous, they adopted frame houses, modern machinery, and advanced agricultural techniques. While pioneering huge tracts of land, the Ukrainians struggled to maintain and develop their language and culture. To this end, they founded the Prosvita (Enlightenment) Society. The Manitoba government aided their cause by establishing a training school in 1905 for Ukrainian teachers in Winnipeg. Further progress would be made after the Second World War, when several Canadian universities, along with a number of other Canadian institutions of higher learning, established Ukrainian language and literature programs and the provinces of Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba introduced optional credit courses in Ukrainian at the high school level.
The Ukrainian community, through its dedication to its traditions, has made many cultural contributions to Canadian life, some of them dating from the first decades of this century. These have included a Ukrainian travelling theatre, which appeared in the West as early as 1915, and a school of Ukrainian folk dancing, which was established in 1926.
Among the thousands of immigrants who homesteaded on the Prairies in these years were settlers of German origin. Most came not from the German Empire, but from the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian empires and the Balkan countries, where German colonies had been established in the eighteenth century. By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, several factors affecting these settlements encouraged emigration. One was a shortage of land, the result of the colonies' rapid growth and the large size of many German-speaking families. The growing class of landless workers and a dearth of factory jobs also spurred the exodus. A further factor was nationalist sentiment that in some areas led to the repeal of the Germans' original rights and privileges. From the 1890s until the outbreak of the First World War, approximately 35,000 Germans settled in Manitoba, representing 7.5 percent of that province's total population. Alberta (where Germans concentrated in the Medicine Hat area and along the Calgary and Edmonton Railway) and Saskatchewan also witnessed a dramatic growth in German immigration, in Saskatchewan's case from less than 5,000 in 1901 to over 100,000 in 1911. Most settlements in Saskatchewan broke down along denominational lines: Mennonites, the first to pioneer on the Prairies, settled in Swift Current and Rosthern; Lutherans, in central Saskatchewan; and Roman Catholics, after 1903, in St. Peter's Colony, near Humboldt, and in St. Joseph's Colony, near Trampling Lake. The Canadian government welcomed French-speaking immigrants from France, but this country had a dismal record as a source of immigrants. France felt strongly that it needed its population, in particular a strong army to protect itself against German expansionism. As a result, the French government was generally opposed to emigration. When French citizens expressed an interest in leaving, they were encouraged to emigrate to French colonies. Accordingly, Ottawa concentrated on repatriating French Canadians who had been lured to New England by the prospect of good-paying factory jobs and the spell of American prosperity. To entice these Franco-Americans back to Quebec, the government employed French-Canadian priests and lay agents. Priests based in Quebec parishes received a small stipend to spend time in the United States promoting the idea of repatriation among Franco-Americans. To further the cause, the government also gave grants to colonization societies located in Montréal and Québec City.
Canada did not actively seek Italian immigrants in this period because Clifford Sifton considered Italians ill-fitted for pioneering, placing them in the same category as artisans, clerks, common labourers, and other city dwellers. Thousands of Italians nevertheless came to Canada from Italy and from the "Little Italys" of the American east coast in these years. Most were peasants or sharecroppers, small landowners, and rural day labourers from the impoverished southern regions of Italy, where they had wrested a living from a harsh environment and struggled against an exploitative socio-economic order. Confronting a bleak future in their homeland, these southern Italians emigrated overseas in search of work and entrepreneurial opportunity.
From among those who arrived in Canada, thousands went to work for this country's railways. Others found employment in the mining and resource industries, where there was a demand for intensive labour. Some 3,000 Italians arrived in Montréal in 1904, and two years later, when construction of the trunk lines of the Grand Trunk Pacific, the Canadian Northern, and the National Transcontinental railways began in earnest, there was a further dramatic increase in the numbers of Italians coming to Canada. Most of the Italians who came to this country between the turn of the century and the First World War, either from Italy or from the American east coast, were migrant workers, often bachelors. After working for the summer, many returned home to contribute their savings towards the upkeep of their southern Italian villages and the purchase of dowries for sisters and daughters. Those who did not make it back to Italy wintered in the railhead cities, notably Montréal. When railway work was succeeded by labouring jobs for interurban and street railways, more Italians decided to stay in the cities. Instead of returning to Italy, young men chose to become immigrants and they sent for their wives or other relatives, thereby initiating a process of "chain-migration." In major Canadian cities, Italian business districts grew up and the ambience of Little Italy emerged; the padrone who had recruited unskilled labour for the railway companies was now joined by middle-class shopkeepers, importers, caterers, priests, and undertakers. By the time the First World War broke out, half of the fruit merchants in Toronto were of Italian descent.
The first great wave of European immigration to Canada included the first Russians to settle in the country. They were Doukhobors, members of a peasant sect whose pacifism and communal lifestyle had invited czarist authorities to mount a campaign of brutal persecution and harassment against them. Fortunately for the Doukhobors, their plight aroused the sympathy of Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist, who used his fame, literary skills, and international connections to help them to emigrate. A prominent Russian anarchist, Peter Kropotkin, and James Mavor of the University of Toronto also aided their cause, the latter persuading the Canadian authorities to admit sect members to Canada. In late January 1899, the first of five parties of Doukhobors, numbering over 7,500 people, settled in the Prince Albert and Yorkton areas in what is now the province of Saskatchewan.
Although the Doukhobors were permitted to establish community settlements, each settler was required to make his own entry for a homestead and to take an oath of allegiance within three years in order to obtain title to his property. The Doukhobors, however, refused to have any dealings with the state. They refused to take the oath, and they would not register births, marriages, and deaths; neither would they allow their children to be educated in the public system. As the three-year probationary period drew to a close, splits appeared in the community. These were widened by the actions of an extremist group, the Sons of Freedom, who liberated cattle, burnt property, and refused to till the land. At the other end of the scale were a number of Doukhobors who broke away from the community, took the oath of allegiance, and began to farm their land and to live and work like other settlers. In between were the rest of the Doukhobors, who attempted to maintain the traditional community pattern while being harassed by the Sons of Freedom. Order was finally restored by the Doukhobors' spiritual leader Peter Veregin. After arriving in the Northwest Territories in 1903, he quickly set about reorganizing the sect members into a prosperous farming community and keeping the Sons of Freedom under control. In 1908, Veregin purchased a large tract of land in British Columbia (the oath of allegiance was not a requirement in that province), organized the Doukhobors as the Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood, and established community villages in the province. Here, too, independent-minded members broke away to take their place in the outside society. Apart from the Doukhobors, very few Russians entered Canada before the First World War. Canada was not a popular destination for emigrating Russians; for them, western Europe, the United States, and South America were the favoured destinations. Nevertheless, small Russian communities developed in Sydney, Montréal, Toronto, Windsor, Timmins, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Victoria. Most of the Russians in these communities had been peasant farmers who had left their homeland because of their intense opposition to the czarist regime. After arriving in this country, many found jobs in Canada's growing industrial sector.
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