Clifford Sifton 1861-1929
Opening Canada 's Breadbasket to the World

A Federal Minister of the Interior from 1896 to 1905, Clifford Sifton was in charge of immigration during an era that basically saw Canada vast western plains occupied and settled. Times were booming: western farms were in high demand and immigrants were pouring in. If any individual deserves credit for settling the prairies, it is Clifford Sifton whose energy, initiative, and leadership made this possible.

1. Sir Clifford Sifton introduced the world's first commercial film while Minister of the Interior in 1903. Financially back by the CPR, the film's purpose was to attract European immigrants to settle as farmers in western Canada. [PAC-PA 27943] 2. Sir Clifford Sifton, Minister of the Interior, 1896-1905, was responsible for the settlement of the Canadian prairies. He is viewed here in this comic poster leading a gathering of multicultural settlers standing in a Canadian prairie wheatfield enthusiastically singing "The Maple Leaf Forever," Canada's patriotic anthem at the turn of the century.

Born in 1861 in London, Ontario, he went with his parents in 1875 to the underpopulated province of Manitoba. There in 1882 he was admitted to the Manitoba bar, eventually entering politics for Brandon in 1888. By 1891 he had become Attorney General and Minister of Education in the provincial government of Thomas Greenway. In 1896 his stand on public education not only played a decisive part in the Laurier Greenway schools compromise, which maintained some French and Catholic separate school rights in Manitoba, but also led Sifton on to Ottawa and into Laurier's Liberal Federal cabinet as Minister of the Interior.

The new minister took hold of a promising situation dynamically. Swelling industrialism in Britain and Europe required more food resources from overseas. The American West was all but full; attention therefore swung to Canada's "Last Best West" - an area masterfully promoted by Sifton. He sent agents and organized immigration campaigns not just to Britain and the United States but throughout central and eastern Europe too. Canadians and British newcomers flowed west to prairie grainlands; Americans were also attracted to the west, especially to the area that would become Alberta.