THE OPEN DOOR IN CANADA
Wherever I go in Canada I find the people on tiptoe with eagerness
for the growth of their country. I do not mean that they are hungry
for territory; they already have more than they can use for a century
or two. The increases they are praying for are in population, in the
size of their towns, in the area of land under cultivation, and in the
number of families settling new farms.
For seventy-five years Canada has given a cordial welcome to immigrants
and during the last quarter of a century she has been conducting
recruiting campaigns to get settlers. But where formerly immigration
was only something to be desired, the situation to-day makes the coming
of new people an imperative necessity. They are needed not merely to
open up rich virgin lands, but to share the burden of carrying the
national overhead.
A single fact will make clear this situation. The interest on the
Canadian national debt is five times what the total revenues of the
government were before the World War. The people are faced with the
alternative of having less to live on after their increased taxes are
paid, or of dividing their heavier expenses among a larger number of
producers. Naturally they prefer the latter.
Canada’s per capita debt mounted from seventy-two dollars in 1914
to three hundred and twenty-two dollars three years after the war,
and the total stands to-day at just under three billion dollars. The
war has not only multiplied the public debt, but it has also greatly
reduced immigration. The population of Canada is now nearly nine
million, and if the high rate of increase that prevailed for the five
years preceding 1914 is regained it will soon be ten million and
more. The national production and revenues in that case will grow
proportionately, and the individual share of the burden of taxes and
debt will be considerably less.
The prediction of James J. Hill, many years ago, that Canada would have
fifty million people by 1950 seems unlikely to be fulfilled, but every
Canadian expects the population of his country eventually to reach
that figure. The Dominion has four hundred and forty million acres of
land suitable for cultivation. Only one fourth of this area is even
occupied, and but thirteen per cent. is being tilled. To get men and
women on the unoccupied lands is a national policy of the government
that enjoys the support of all the people.
Canada’s banner year was 1913, when more than four hundred thousand
immigrants settled in the Dominion. During the war not one eighth of
this number came in. The annual inflow is now only one fourth what it
was the year before the World War, and about as many more are added by
natural increase. If there is no radical change in conditions Canada
should gain at least a million about every five years. On the other
hand, she has lost population by emigration, especially to the United
States.
Two racial stocks--British and French--make up eighty-three per cent.
of the population. With our “melting pot” example next door, Canada
is determined to preserve her race character, and she controls
immigration accordingly. She tries to get settlers chiefly from the
British Isles, the northern countries of Europe, and the United States.
Labourers from Japan and China are no longer admitted, though for many
years the head taxes of five hundred dollars on each Chinese who came
in paid most of the expenses of promoting general immigration.
We might profit by the way Canada regulates her immigration. In the
first place, the government has wide discretion as to what kinds of
people shall come in. It can partially close the gates during dull
times, and open them wide when times are good. Immigrants are admitted
only as the authorities are satisfied that they are fitted to work on
the land and that they can become self-supporting. Government agents
in foreign countries start immigrants on their way, and others meet
them on their arrival. Canada does not allow hordes of foreigners to be
thrown into her cities. She guides them out to the land, and helps them
to establish themselves there. She has no fixed quota law such as ours,
but she is vastly more particular as to whom she admits.
Besides the government, both the Canadian National and the Canadian
Pacific railways maintain immigration offices abroad. The C. P. R. at
one time had practically all Europe covered with agents engaged in
drumming for immigrants, whom it brought across the Atlantic in its
own steamers, carried through Canada on its own trains, and located
on farms along its own lines. When that road was built the company
received a grant of twenty-five million acres of government land. Four
fifths of these have been sold, but the company still has five million
acres for settlers. At the present time, it is selling land for a
cash payment of only one seventh of the purchase price, the balance to
be paid within thirty-five years.
[Illustration: Canada feels acutely the need of more population. She
not only welcomes settlers from the British Isles, northern Europe,
and the United States, but gives them every assistance in establishing
themselves on the land.]
[Illustration: It is still possible for the immigrant to take up good
land in Canada with the reasonable hope of making it into such a ranch
as this. Many of the richest farmers of to-day came from the United
States.]
The government and the railroads spend large sums in advertising Canada
as the Land of Great Opportunity. Ottawa and each of the provincial
capitals produce literature by the ton. Information bureaus are
maintained that answer every conceivable question about the resources
and farming conditions in all parts of the Dominion. The government
regularly exhibits at fairs in the United States and also in the United
Kingdom. It distributes photographs and “movie” films, and sends out
lecturers to tell of the glories of Canadian life. It advertises in our
American farm journals and plasters the countries of northern Europe
with posters. The Canadian Pacific conducts publicity campaigns for the
purpose of attracting both tourists and settlers, and for forty years
it has been a great force for the settlement and upbuilding of the
Dominion.
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.
[Illustration: 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.]
[Illustration: The part played by Canada’s railroads in colonizing
her prairie provinces can hardly be overestimated. They maintain
immigration agents abroad, and spend large sums in advertising the
Dominion’s attractions.]
[Illustration: In helping a settler get started, the Canadian Pacific
Railway may provide him with a house and barn built on some of the land
still available out of its grant of twenty-five million acres.]
All went well for a time, but the Canadians soon discovered that the
Doukhobors were subject to periodic outbreaks of religious fanaticism
that had many intolerable features. At times, they were seized with the
notion that it was a sin to utilize the labour of animals, and so they
turned off all their live stock. At other times, they had the idea that
it was wrong to use machinery, and they scrapped their farm tools. But
what brought them into most serious conflict with the authorities
were the pilgrimages they made to meet Christ on the prairie. It
was their notion that they must not appear before Him on his second
coming except in their natural condition of complete nakedness. At one
time seventeen hundred men, women, and children marched into Yorkton
stark naked. At another, six hundred Doukhobors wandered off naked in
midwinter. On each occasion of this sort, the police had to round them
up and confine them until they became sane enough to put on clothes and
conduct themselves normally. Later they moved some of their colonies
into British Columbia and many of them returned to Russia.
There are now more than thirty thousand Mennonites in Canada. They were
originally Lutherans from Poland and Prussia, who about 1787 accepted
refuge in Russia from religious persecution at home. They were favoured
for a time by the Russian government, and became prosperous farmers and
stock raisers, and also manufacturers. Just before the Canadian Pacific
Railway was built, a number of them emigrated to Canada, settling along
the Red River Valley in Manitoba. Their migration was financed to
the extent of a million dollars by the Canadian government. This the
Mennonites later repaid, and their communities thrived and prospered.
After the World War, the Mennonites in Russia suffered severely at
the hands of the Soviet government. Their lands, factories, and other
possessions were confiscated. Thereupon, with the aid of wealthy
Mennonites in Pennsylvania, a fresh emigration to Canada was financed.
These Mennonites were taken to southern Manitoba and Saskatchewan,
where they were located on desirable lands. Among them were some who
before the revolution in Russia owned farms of from ten to fifteen
thousand acres. One man had been worth a half million dollars, and was
one of the largest horse breeders in Russia. Of the Mennonites who
first came to Canada, some have since gone to Mexico, where they have
formed colonies similar to those established in the Dominion.
The immigration offices of Canada are filled with stories of settlers
who have made good. Many of these stories are in the form of letters
written by the men and the women who have fought and won their battles
with the land, some of whom are now wealthy and nationally prominent.
Canada is perhaps a generation nearer the pioneer stage than we are,
and on her farms of the frontier thousands are to-day laying the
foundations of fortunes, as our farmers did when they settled the
West. From the human documents I have examined I quote the advice to
prospective settlers given by a man who, twelve years after landing
from England with one dollar in his pocket, sold out his farm for
thirty-five thousand dollars. These, says he, are the secrets of
success in Canada:
1. Get a farm if it takes your last ten dollars.
2. If you are not married, get married, for successful bachelor
farmers are not plentiful.
3. Give your hired help, and the members of your own family, an
interest in the farm; whether it be a quarter section of land or
a setting of eggs. Get them interested.
4. Work with and for your neighbours. Coöperation is the A B C
of success. Always lend a hand to those in need, especially
newcomers, and you will be repaid a hundredfold. Above all,
value the good-will of your neighbours.
5. Lastly, be a true Canadian all the time, for no other country on
earth will appreciate it so much or give so much in return.