MARINO CULOS and Angelo Branca were the sons of immigrants, but their fathers had chosen to stay in British Columbia rather than return to Italy, as they would have done if they were sojourners. And by the time both boys were school age, their families were permanent residents of Vancouver. When Marino was nine and Angelo was ten, the boys built a raft from logs that had washed in from the Strait of Georgia and littered the shores of False Creek. Then they poled their vessel, “Tom Sawyer style,” under the long bridge at Main and Terminal and up the entire length of the wide inlet.
Their families lived on the north side of the inlet looking south—a waterfront view, albeit an industrial one—in Strathcona. Angelo’s father had started his life in British Columbia working in a Vancouver Island mine and now owned a grocery store on Main Street that sold Italian food and wine. Marino’s father worked for the railway and the family lived on Union Street. Within a year or so of the boys’ Tom Sawyer expedition, two major civic projects altered the landscape of their neighbourhood for good: the first was the building of a viaduct to connect the downtown end of Georgia Street with its continuation east of Main; the second was the draining and filling of the east end of False Creek from Main Street to Clark Drive to provide two railway companies with land for their terminal yards and magnificent passenger stations.
By 1919, the two companies belonged to the CNR. The flu epidemic was raging and Violet Tate, who was about to marry the owner of Benny’s Ice Cream Parlour, Alphonso Benedetti, remembered how the flu seemed to kill the big, healthy men and spare the skinny, weak ones, and how she snuck out of bed to look through the blinds at the hearse taking the dead to the funeral home on Union Street.
Behind the railway stations on Main Street, the tracks and terminal yards shared the False Creek flats with a sewer lagoon and a thousand childhood memories in the decade after the war. Boys hunted rats with a terrier or a .22 rifle and chased ducks with a slingshot on the pond behind the city dump on Prior. In summer the children swam in the “chocolate pool” near the sewer outlet and never got sick; in winter, when the sludge of the waterlogged flats froze over, they skated.
Strathcona School was full of foreigners, but Italians outnumbered the other nationalities. They played a Japanese game called mungo sungo. They had snowball fights with Chinese children and chased them back toward their homes on Pender Street; they ran past houses that smelled of gefilte fish and borscht. They pulled the sacks off the backs of the Chinese vegetable merchants’ horse-drawn carts. They heard the Jews with junk carts calling out, “Any bottles and rags?” and Italian coal vendors crying, “Anybody want coal-l-l-l?” And just before the nine o’clock curfew on summer nights, they heard their parents’ distinctive whistles calling them in. By 9:05 the streets were empty of children.
The night belonged to the adults. They sat on their porches or front stoops, and those who had enough money paraded by in their new automobiles or stepped out to the Avenue Theatre at the foot of the Georgia Viaduct for some live entertainment. Violet Benedetti loved to watch the theatregoing women in their seal coats and their hats with yellow bird-of-paradise feathers hanging down the back. Angelo Branca, who would grow up to be a lawyer, said that there was no crime in Strathcona except for bootleggers and prostitutes and no drugs except for the opium used by the Chinese.
THERE ARE subtler crimes than prostitution and gambling, crimes committed not by Italians but against them, crimes that happened during childhood and were remembered for a lifetime. Up the coast from Vancouver in Powell River, the Piccoli sisters’ childhood memories included a teacher who picked on Italian students. At least once a day she sent eight-year-old Mafalda Piccoli, who sat in the back of the room with her mouth shut, to the principal’s office for talking in class. Falda now admits that it might have been the garlic chains she and her sister, Dora, wore to school that made the teacher treat her so badly. It was a fellow student who persecuted Dora. She locked her in the washroom and shoved her around when she came outside. “[She] knocked me flying, and blood and gravel all over just because I was Italian. We took our knocks.” When six-year-old Lydia Arman started school in Extension, “people called us dagos.”
The 1920s was a decade when racial epithets fell easily from the mouths of even respectable adults, when words like wop, polack, Chink and bohunk were commonly used. But it was also a decade when the Ku Klux Klan of Kanada, which was active in Canada at this time, referred to southern Europeans as “slag and scum” and a Canadian bureaucrat could officially categorize Italians, Greeks and Jews as “less desirable classes of immigrants.” It was a time when bureaucrats labelled eastern and central Europeans “non-preferred” and southern Europeans unsuitable for even that insulting label. It was a time when Italians in particular were suspect “not only for [their] alleged propensity for crime, but also because the Bolshevik menace had spread to their homeland.”
The spread of the “Bolshevik menace” was a symptom of the disease ravaging postwar Italy: a host of grievances ranging from the injustice of the Treaty of Versailles to a fear of Marxism, from the collapse of government to the collapse of the economy, from veterans without jobs to farmers without food. The country cried out for a charismatic leader in the mode of a Garibaldi, that nineteenth-century hero of the Risorgimento, to lead the nation and make Italians proud once more.
Into the breach stepped an unlikely figure. Benito Mussolini was no Garibaldi, but he was the man for the times. Born in a small town in Romagna and named after a Mexican revolutionary, he grew up hating all forms of authority and anyone who was educated, wealthy or religious. He had been a teacher, a journalist, an agitator and an organizer. His newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, sympathized with World War I veterans. They referred to him as Il Duce, they saluted him as the ancient Romans were supposed to have saluted their leaders, with their right hands over their heads, and he returned the compliment by calling them I Fasci, a name that echoed the emblem of the authority of Roman magistrates: a bundle of sticks lashed to an axe.
Not only did he evoke ancient Rome, but he latched onto Garibaldi’s image by adopting distinctively coloured shirts for his followers. Garibaldi’s had worn red shirts; Mussolini’s wore black. And when Mussolini came to power in October 1922 with his so-called March on Rome, it was his blackshirts who marched unopposed into Rome while Mussolini stayed behind in Milan, waiting to make a triumphant entry the following day.
For all his faults, which would eventually become evident even to the people who welcomed him as a saviour—and they were legion—Mussolini was aware of the continued need for temporary emigration. Sojourners would send much-needed money back to a country that still suffered from famine and overpopulation. In the same year Mussolini came to power, the Italian government requested information from Canada regarding fees and regulations pertaining to Italian immigrants. In the following year, the Italian commissioner general of emigration issued a decree fixing maximum rates that shipping companies could charge Italian emigrants.
MUSSOLINI HAD been in power for only a few months when Amabile Ius left her husband, Giuseppe De Anna, and her two sons in Michel, a coal camp in the Crowsnest Pass in the southeastern corner of British Columbia, and went back home to Castions di Zoppola, in Friuli. She had joined her husband in Michel just before the war and had had several babies in the intervening years. Raising those babies and making meals and doing laundry for her boarders had left her exhausted and vulnerable. She contracted rheumatic fever. When it became apparent to her doctor that the fever had damaged her heart, he ordered her to rest. Instead, Amabile took her younger children, including her five-year-old daughter, Ines, back to Italy.
Ines has vivid memories of the five years they lived in Mussolini’s Italy. “The people didn’t call [him] bad, it was just the blackshirts they hated . . . And if they had suspicion that you were a Communist, they’d raid your house to look for papers.” The people learned to avoid wearing red—it being the colour of Communism. If the blackshirts saw someone wearing a red flower they would rip it off. When they found incriminating papers in the houses of suspected Communists, they herded them into a bus and took them to the central piazza, where they humiliated them in front of their fellow citizens.
The blackshirts kept an eye on Amabile and her children, thinking they were traitors because her husband had become a Canadian citizen. She made sure her children gave the Fascist salute to the doctor, the mayor and even the doctor’s wife, “who’d growl if you didn’t.”
There were no stiff-armed salutes required when Amabile and her children returned to Michel after five years in Italy, but Ines had other indignities to suffer. Having had all her schooling in Italy, the ten-year-old was required to start school over again in grade one. Too old for her classmates and “too dumb” for those her own age, she was often alone on the sidelines until she caught up.
Ines and her family returned to a country whose government had not changed its policies toward unsuitable immigrants. Certain immigration bureaucrats and various special interest groups such as veterans and unions were determined to prevent Italians and other southern Europeans from entering Canada, while big businesses, especially the railways, were desperate for the sort of labour best provided by sojourners. Complicating the situation was the fact that the United States had legislated a quota system that used the year 1890 as a baseline: the ideal number of new immigrants, Italians in particular, according to the new law was 2 percent of the number in that year.
In the years between the war and the Great Depression, immigration officials vacillated between policies that would fill the prairies with settler farmers from “preferred” areas such as Britain, America and western Europe and policies that would satisfy the demands of the railway and mining industries for large numbers of temporary workers, even if it meant allowing thousands of “non-preferred” immigrants into the country.
The CPR and the newly formed CNR, in particular, wanted seasonal labourers. The two transcontinental railways were competing with each other for passengers and freight by constructing a network of railways so vast that by the end of the decade Canada would have the largest rails-to-residents ratio in the world and both companies would be operating in the red. From April to December, they needed men to build these lines and men for “extra gangs” to keep track, ties and ballast in first-class condition and improve switches, abutments and bridges. The need was great, according to the railways, as they cited the steady exodus to Europe of Italians in the first postwar years and “the aversion of the native-born and other Canadians towards this class of work.”
Unrelenting in their demands on the government, the railways finally got their way when Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King agreed to remove the barriers to large-scale European immigration by signing the Railway Agreement in 1925. This controversial document allowed the railways control over recruitment of bona fide European immigrants from previously “non-preferred” central and eastern European countries. Italy was not included in the list of acceptable countries until the following year, when an amendment allowed anyone “whose labour and service was required in Canada” to be admitted under a system of permits.
Deputy Secretary F.C. Blair, of the Department of Immigration and Colonization, a long-time opponent of southern European immigration, described the permit system as “this cursed business . . . It seems a terrible thing to have to issue Permits day after day for the admission of Italians, Greeks, Jews and others of the less desirable classes of immigrants, and merely because some Member of Parliament or other influential gentleman demands that it be done.”
FURTHER COMPLICATING the immigration story in the 1920s was the government’s insistence that immigrants be farmers or farm labourers. If Canada couldn’t attract enough “preferred” immigrants, then it would allow “non-preferred” immigrants who knew how to farm. All prospective Italian immigrants had to do to prove they were farmers was fill out a questionnaire written in both English and Italian that included such questions as “How many years have you farmed?” “Can you milk?” “Can you plough?” “How many horses can you handle?”
So desperate was Canada for “agriculturalists” that the government was prepared to accept the answers at face value. Whether or not an Italian could actually plow a field, if he said he could, he was deemed an agriculturalist. And the Italian government was prepared to do everything in its power to help would-be emigrants pass themselves off as such.
The British Passport Control Office in Rome warned Canada in 1924 that the new initiative was “serving as a pretext for Italian farm labourers to emigrate to Canada in search of work without reasonable assurance of employment . . . Emigration to Canada is encouraged in every possible way in [Italy] . . . even to the extent of evading the restrictions laid down.” To secure a certificate from the local mayor that said they were farmers, would-be emigrants had only to produce a witness willing to make a declaration. To obtain the twelve hundred dollars required to buy farm land in Canada, would-be emigrants had only to go to an Italian bank. The bank would issue them a cheque for the correct amount on the understanding that the cheque would be returned to the bank uncashed as soon as possible.
Such subterfuge was not required, however, by a bona fide farmer from the village of Aluli, east of Rome in Abruzzo. She was sixty years old and had been supporting her five children on the family farm ever since her husband had emigrated to the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia fourteen years before. He had never sent any money, but he did keep in touch and had arranged for his oldest son, who had been gassed during the war, to join him in Canada. He could fix shoes and patch his own clothes, but “he wasn’t much good for anything else,” according to his youngest daughter, Lucia, who was born after he left Italy.
His wife had managed quite well without him, growing food for her children and orphaned nephews on two separate pieces of land, raising fifty sheep and making blankets for sale from the wool, feeding calves to sell when they were yearlings. But two of her five children had died and now she had cancer of the uterus, and although she was resigned to the diagnosis, saying, “We all have to die sometime,” she wanted to bring her two surviving daughters to their father before she died.
Lucia didn’t want to leave Italy. She hid from her mother when she heard the news. She liked working on the farm and she didn’t care that she could go to school only when she wasn’t needed at home. But she agreed to go to Canada for her mother’s sake. Their neighbours were sorry to see them go—when the three women left Aluli on a November day, a procession followed them down the road.
They stopped in Rome for their papers and proceeded to Naples, but the ship they were meant to sail on was already full. “See everybody’s trying to make money and they overload so we have to stay there and my mother was so scared because Napoli is a very bad place.” A man in front of them in the line assured them there would be another ship, took them to a movie to pass the time and watched out for them when they were finally able to board a ship.
The ship was old and slow. The three women slept in one big room with all the other people in steerage class. Lucia’s sister was seasick for the entire journey. “As long as she stay up and not eat anything it was not too bad. Well, there was an oven that they used to make the pizzas so I used to buy one big pizza a day for her.” It took nineteen days for the ship to reach “Nova York,” where they cleared American immigration on Ellis Island on the day after Christmas and caught a train for Toronto. From Toronto it took five days and six nights on the CPR main line to reach Sicamous, British Columbia, where Lucia’s father was supposed to be working.
But Lucia’s father wasn’t there. He had gone home to Kelowna to celebrate the New Year, leaving a letter to explain his absence. So Lucia, her sister and her mother boarded a train on the Shuswap and Okanagan line that connected Sicamous to Vernon, eighty-one kilometres away. “God, when I saw how close we were, we could have walked. When we got to Vernon everyone disappear. We were the only one left. I said to Mama, ‘You see any dad around?’ She said, ‘No.’ She was kind of mad too.”
The women didn’t speak English and the station agent didn’t speak Italian. Lucia’s mama repeated “Mia marito ad a mobile,” until someone found an Italian man to translate. The Italian-speaking man knew a woman who could phone and give Lucia’s father a message. Then their translator took them to dinner and a movie, but as soon as it started, her brother walked in drunk.
“But my dear brother, he was ashame of us because we were dressed in Italian. Was so darn cold and we had no coats or anything because we don’t need them at home.” As soon as they left the theatre, her father arrived. Lucia had never seen him before, but she knew who he was immediately. “Here’s my father coming down, a big fatso Italian.” They crammed into a Model T Ford, its side curtains no substitute for winter clothing, and drove through two feet of snow to Rutland, on the flat plain north of Kelowna where her father and his business partner owned a house and grew tomatoes on eight hectares of land.
Lucia didn’t like living with her father. He bossed her around; he told her how to wash dishes and pick tomatoes as if she didn’t already know. When her sister married her father’s partner, her sister had the right as a married woman to tell Lucia what to do. Now Lucia had two bosses. No one thought to send her to school. For the next three years she nursed her mother until the cancer took her. “When she died, the whole world flopped on me. I thought, I got no place no more. My father doesn’t do nothing for me. My sister doesn’t do nothing.”
But Luigi Constantini did something. He was a friend who had been kind to her mother and paid for her funeral. “He saw the situation and he start to tell me, ‘Well, I’m not married. If you want to get married, we get married.’” Lucia didn’t know what to say. She was eighteen; he was thirty-three. “Then I thought, Well hell, I’m kind of a slave here. Even if I got to be a slave at least I’ll be a slave for myself. So I got married with him.”
Luigi bought the house, furniture and land belonging to a Scottish next-door neighbour, who had given up trying to be an orchardist. “[Luigi] was pretty bossy too, but he was a good provider and he was a good worker. I was a good worker so we clicked together and I had six kids and we got along.” They farmed for forty years and Lucia also worked in the fruit packing house just down the road. When Luigi got too old to farm, they moved to Vancouver; by the time he died they had been married for fifty-seven years.
Lucia’s mother had been a real farmer and but for her illness would probably have stayed in Italy. There were many real farmers in Italy, but the ones who had enough land and enough capital had no need to emigrate. It was the farm labourers with no land or capital that the Italian government was helping to bypass Canadian government restrictions. The Railway Agreement made it possible for the CPR and the CNR to bring in so-called agriculturalists by the thousands. Once in the country they became navvies if they were lucky. But the railways charged navvies too much for transportation, paid them less than the wage they were promised and discharged them prematurely, leaving them owing money and without funds to even feed themselves.
Because most of the unemployed navvies were in Winnipeg or Vancouver, the two cities had to shoulder the cost of relief. Canadian labour was not happy with the situation either. The glut of foreign workers lowered everyone’s wages, made jobs scarcer and made strikebreakers more available.
Opposition to the Railway Agreement was wide. “‘Cheap’ men will always drive out ‘dear’ men,” proclaimed the historian A.R.M. Lower. European immigration was unfair to British immigrants, according to the Reverend George Lloyd, Anglican bishop of Saskatchewan and the former leader of the Barr Colony, that group of two thousand British immigrants whom the federal government had assisted twenty-five years before because they were farmers, a designation that applied to only 20 percent of them. The National Association of Canada called the imported navvies “riff-raff from Europe,” and the Ku Klux Klan was opposed to men “who jabber all the tongues that destroyed the Tower of Babel, men who tighten their bellyband for breakfast, eat spaghetti and hot dog and rye bread for lunch . . . men who come to Canada with tags on them telling you their destination.”
And it wasn’t only bigots and cranks who were opposed to the Railway Agreement. By 1928, provincial governments, the federal opposition leader R.B. Bennett and representatives of European governments were voicing their opposition. It had become possible for an unacceptable would-be immigrant to buy a permit for a hundred dollars. Finally, Mackenzie King appointed a select committee to examine immigration policy.
AS OPPOSITION swirled around the prime minister and the unfortunate sojourners whose fate would be decided by the politicians, second- and third-generation Italian immigrants were keeping their heads down and going about their lives. But some of them, the Italian inhabitants of Trail, for instance, were doing so under dangerous conditions.
The founder of Trail’s smelter, Fritz Heinze, had roasted the copper ore in the open air over stacks of cordwood, a process that spewed thick, yellow, foul-smelling smoke laden with vegetation-eating sulphur dioxide directly into the air. When the CPR bought the company, it built closed ovens and two tall stacks to take the poisonous smoke higher into the air, thereby polluting even more of the Columbia River Valley and killing more vegetation in a withering onslaught of fumes, which also prevented regeneration when fires in 1917 and 1918 destroyed the surrounding forest. In the Gulch, the slag heap from the copper smelter encroached on land once used for bachelor shacks and small farms. But smeltermen, most of them Italian, continued to live there, having chosen closeness to their fellow countrymen and their place of work over clean air, and certain employment over comfort and safety.
Even when it threatened their vegetable gardens, Italians in the Gulch took the smoke in stride. In the 1920s, when Buddy DeVito was a little boy, Cominco “released a barrage from the stacks” two or three times a week, sometimes every day. As the smell of gas drifted down over the shacks and houses that crowded into the narrow valley, the children’s job was to cover the vegetables. Lettuce and cabbage would turn brown in a day but tomatoes, zucchini, peppers and parsley could be saved if rescuers got to them quickly enough. A tub filled with water and another with old blankets and sacks sat at the end of each garden; the children plunged the blankets into the water and flung them over the vegetables.
But the people who had planted the gardens and would harvest and eat the vegetables continued to live in the shadow of the smelter. And when it came time in the fall to harvest the abundant tomato crops that grew in every backyard, to eat them fresh or preserve the green ones in thick slices with garlic and olive oil or make the ripe ones into sauce and stuff them into bottles or concentrate them into paste for the winter, Italians felt no resentment toward Cominco. As Buddy DeVito said, “We never blamed the company, because it was part of living.”
To live in the Gulch among fellow Italians and work in the smelter that loomed on the hillside close by, to worship at the church of Saint Anthony of Padua, to hear the rocks rolling down Trail Creek under Byers Lane in the spring freshet, to dodge the horse-drawn wagons delivering coal, wood, hay, vegetables and ice, to see the old Chinese egg man mark each door jamb to keep track of purchases—these familiar things made the treeless hillsides and the menacing smoke tolerable.
But there was another menace that became apparent only as the 1930s approached. Cominco was the world’s largest producer of lead and zinc by then, and 80 percent of the company’s employees worked in areas where they were exposed to lead on the floor, the walls, the ceilings and in the air. By 1928, doctors were seeing men with symptoms of lead absorption: abdominal pain, constipation, anemia and weight loss. They knew the effects of lead were cumulative and they had known since 1924 that a high stipple-cell count was a fairly good indicator of lead in the bloodstream. Men who had been leaded got workmen’s compensation and were encouraged to look for work elsewhere. According to the doctors who read the literature and worked with union and management to provide regular testing of employees, lead absorption could be reversed simply by moving away from the presence of lead. The lead already in the body was excreted in the urine.
But the men called it lead poisoning. According to Mike Landucci, a long-time smelter worker, the stomachs of the leaded men were as hard as cement. “It was terrible the way you’d see them lying on the floor and kicking their legs with stomach pains . . . They went off their rockers, some of them.” As in any industry, the old-timers tried to scare the young employees with horror stories about lead poisoning. Pat Martin saw the effects for himself: he saw men, mostly Italian and mostly in the Gulch, staggering along the street as if they were drunk. So in 1942 when he was eighteen and offered a job in the lead refinery, he refused it. “It was common knowledge,” Martin said, “that the men were not drunk, but had lead poisoning.”
The truth lies somewhere between the two extremes. Cominco took pride in being a good employer. The company had built the hospital and allowed testing in the worst parts of the smelter—the sintering department, the baghouse—to determine the level of leading in employees’ blood, to diagnose lead assimilation before it became lead intoxication. The fact that the Workmen’s Compensation Board had a vested interest in early diagnosis and the prevention of large claims was an added incentive, but Cominco was interested in helping the victims. In the early 1930s the company established a farm to raise vegetables and cattle whose milk the company gave free to smelter workers on the theory, later to be proven wrong, that milk would neutralize the effects of lead.
Beer was the only thing that would cleanse the body of lead, according to the men who sent their children to the pub to bring home a ten-cent bucket after work. And maybe they were right. There are men who worked in the smelter all their lives and suffered no ill effects. Vittorio Bressanutti was a crane man in the lead refinery for forty-five years; three generations of the Baldassi family worked there unscathed. The men who followed the rules, who ate a balanced diet and wore a respirator when told to do so, tended to escape absorbing lead. It is, however, ironic that the men who worked the hardest, who breathed more heavily from their exertions, inhaled more lead.
AS THE 1920s neared their fractious close and the Great Depression loomed in the wake of the stock market crash in October 1929, Prime Minister Mackenzie King and his Railway Agreement were doomed. Thousands were losing their jobs and the populace was quick to cast about for someone to blame. Canadians punished Mackenzie King by voting him out of office in favour of R.B. Bennett, who began his regime by cancelling the Railway Agreement. They punished the immigrant labourers who had gained entry into Canada through the agreement by blaming them for all the things that were going wrong. Even the fact that the railways had abandoned the labourers to starve did not gain them sympathy. That many of them were Roman Catholic and some of them sought refuge in the arms of the Communist Party made them even more despised.
It is unlikely that there were many Italian sojourners left in British Columbia by that time. Since 1927 Mussolini had made it increasingly difficult for Italians to emigrate by tightening the issuance of passports and laying down restrictions on labour contracts. Only husbands, parents, sons and brothers could bring unmarried or widowed women from Italy. The new regulation required a man with an Italian fiancée to go back to Italy to marry her there instead of marrying her by proxy or sending her a steamship and railway ticket so that she could come to Canada for the wedding. All men returning to Italy for a short visit, for whatever purpose, had to obtain permission from the Italian consulate before leaving in order to be able to return to Canada.
BY 1929, Francesco Bafaro had been working for the CPR in Revelstoke for almost twenty-five years, but now he needed to go back to Italy for a short visit. His wife, Rosina, had died the year before at the age of thirty-nine, leaving him with five children; his only daughter had quit school to look after the housekeeping. But Francesco liked having a wife to look after him, and despite the fact that he had made his life in Canada, he wanted his new wife to be Italian and to come from Spezzano Piccolo, his hometown.
That was where Rosina’s widowed sister, Rachel, lived and worked as a seamstress to support herself and her only son. Francesco proposed marriage by mail, but because of Mussolini’s new regulations he had to go back to Italy for the wedding. By the time the newlyweds were on a boat heading back to Canada, she was pregnant. By the time the baby was born, the Great Depression had the world in its grip.
Being Italian and having been a widow, Rachel was frugal and hard-working, character traits that were crucial as she took on the job of looking after a new husband, a newborn baby and five stepchildren with even less money coming into the household than usual. Francesco’s CPR salary was meagre; her adult stepsons were unemployed and living at home, as most Italians do until they are married.
Rachel had never been to school and spoke no English, but her lack of education did not hinder her ability to squeeze the most out of a dollar. The Depression deepened, but Rachel carried on. She hired herself out as a seamstress. The family never went without food. When her son, Robert, was old enough, he became her interpreter when she went shopping. “[My mother] knew money,” he said. “The money part was absolutely no problem.” He was embarrassed when his mother haggled. “You give me more cheap,” was what she always said.
Italians knew how to be frugal; they knew how to work hard. These characteristics equipped them well for surviving the Depression. But the animosity of the non-Italian populace, the bureaucrats and the politicians and the ignorance of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) would make the Depression years especially difficult for British Columbia’s Italian residents and citizens.