Chapter Eleven

The Immigrant Peoples: The English

Canadians of English ancestry form the largest ethnic community in the country but, curiously, they are also the least visible of all the traditional groups.

Unlike the French, Irish, Scots, and Canada’s many other immigrant groups, the English don’t celebrate a particular holiday of their own — they have no day like St. Jean Baptiste Day, St. Patrick’s Day, or Robbie Burns Night. They have almost no festivals or reunions; they rarely celebrate historical dates or anniversaries; yet their presence is everywhere. It is not that English Canadians have been taken for granted or ignored; instead, like familiar wallpaper, they have become so ordinary that they are virtually unnoticed.

The most likely reason for this is that Canadians of English descent have never had to fit in. They have always been, if not the dominant culture, one of the most influential. English laws, institutions, language, and culture permeate almost every aspect of Canadian society. Canadians of all backgrounds have knowingly or unconsciously adopted and internalized English symbols and traditions and made them their own. Nobody thinks it strange that Canadian parliamentary democracy and all its rituals reflect an English custom, that the army’s most famous French-Canadian regiment mounts the guard on Quebec’s citadel dressed in bearskins and scarlet tunics, that Canadian laws date back to the Magna Carta, or that hundreds of other traditions we see as being a part of Canada are copied from England. English influence has been accepted in Canada for the same reason it has been accepted in places like India. English culture is amenable to local mutation. English customs in Canada are a hybrid relation of those of the parent country. The cultural DNA has similarities, but it has traced its own unique evolutionary path. In Canada, adopting English culture has never been the nation’s default mode; but those English traditions that we do have are widely accepted and now exhibit their own uniquely Canadian characteristics.

The people who brought those traditions to Canada migrated here in a number of distinct waves. Paradoxically, the first large-scale “English” migration to Canada was not from England, but from the United States. Following the American Revolution, the United Empire Loyalists moved north and settled in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Ontario, and Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Americans have never been given their due credit for this because, over the course of several early censuses, American immigrants tended to be lumped in with the English. Although no official reason has ever been forwarded for this bizarre accounting inaccuracy, it was probably a result of two things: deliberate misrepresentation, reflecting the unfortunate but trad­itional tendency to downgrade American influence in Canada; and, in the early days of settlement, a tendency by American loyalists and follow-on settlers, anxious to display their loyalty to the Crown, to claim English heritage rather than their more recent American lineage.

With the offer of free land, American settlers also moved up into southern Ontario in significant numbers prior to the War of 1812. This ceased abruptly once hostilities started and, for the next three decades thereafter, “English” immigration came largely from Britain, in what has been called the “Great Migration” — large numbers of immigrants from across England came to Canada, settling predominantly in the Maritimes. But by 1830, this pattern had changed. For several years, settlers came almost entirely from Yorkshire and moved to Canada West.

During those early years, the Canada Company, a commercial enterprise that saw the possibility of profit in the immigration and early land development business, brought in English immigrants to what is now western Ontario. These early settlers enjoyed mixed results. Many of the immigrants the Canada Company tried to settle in the first years of the Great Migration were poor farm hands who had experienced crop failures back home. A large percentage were unemployable, and many had been languishing in parish workhouses. As a result, many of the company’s clients did not have the farming skills or the inclination to make a go of it, and did not stay in Canada, but instead moved on to settle in the United States. However, in the years just prior to Confederation, this exodus was offset by increased American immigration to Canada. Throughout the mid-and late nineteenth century, this would become a fairly consistent pattern, with Canadians and Americans migrating north and south. Canadians were invariably looking for jobs in the newly industrializing northern states, and Americans were searching for free land on which to carve out a homestead and farm.

By 1851 there were around 93,000 people in Ontario who had actually been born in England. These recent immigrants were by no means the majority. There were almost an equal number of Scots; and the Irish, who had begun emigrating to Canada in ever larger numbers, registered almost two and a half times as many new arrivals as the English. During the later Confederation decades, Irish immigration began to tail off and English immigration once again picked up, so that by 1871, 22 percent of Canada’s entire population had been born in England.

The English who moved to Canada from the late 1850s onward came from varied backgrounds. Some were poor, but unlike many in the Irish and the early Scottish migrations, most English settlers could afford the price of a ticket. They were less desperate and more assured of finding employment or a successful niche in Canada. English arrivals often had skilled trades and had little difficulty becoming established. There were, however, other groups of English settlers who did not fit this mold.

Perhaps the most singular group in this category were “remittance men.” From the late 1870s through the First World War, when this practice ceased, a surprising number of sons of the wealthy English upper classes, who for one reason or another were deemed troublesome or an embarrassment to their families, were packed off to Canada with an allowance — often not an overly generous one. They were expected never to return.

A few lived a life of indolence and leisure, joining some of the exclusive men’s clubs in Montreal or Toronto, but most others ended up trying their hands at more demanding undertakings, such as commercial logging, homesteading, and ranching. As the Canadian West was settled, these men became the butt of popular jokes and music hall sketches.

In all likelihood, many of these young men ex­peri­enced great difficulties adapting. Shunned at home and ridiculed in the new country, life was undoubtedly difficult. Many, by virtue of their background and disposition, were temperamentally unsuited for the rigors of a harsh, outdoor frontier life, while others quietly made a success of themselves.

Another large group of immigrants were the “home children.” They were orphaned and abandoned children who had been given free passage to Canada and placed into homes for adoption. The practice started in the late 1860s and continued in different forms right up until the 1930s. At the time, it was believed that compulsory emigration would give these disadvantaged children a better life and a more solid moral upbringing than being raised on the city streets of England.

Most of these children were not, however, orphans. In fact, it is believed that of the thousands of children that came to Canada under this plan in the late Confederation era, only 2 percent were actually orphans. This was an era that had limited or non-existent social services, and the remainder were children put out for care by families who through poverty, illness, or some other affliction, could no longer support them.

The most famous of the organizations that sponsored such children was the Bernardo Home. Since then, the term “Bernardo Children” has come to be used as a generic name for all such children. However, more than fifty charities sent these children to Canada. The vast majority came from England, although there were some homes in Ireland and Scotland as well. Often, within a week of being placed in a charity, children would find themselves on board a steamer headed for Canada. The children would get off the ship in groups in Halifax or Montreal, usually with cardboard signs hanging about their necks identifying which charity they belonged to. They would then be collected at the pier by an administrative official and sent to a “distribution centre” where they would be sent by train to their new families to begin life anew in Canada.

One of the home children at work on an Ontario farm.

For every boy or girl sent to Canada, there were seven applicants who wanted to adopt a child. Although in theory the practice sounded reasonable, many of the children found themselves placed not in loving homes but with families where they were put to work in harsh circumstances as unpaid farm hands or domestic servants. There are no statistics on how many children actually found a better situation, but anecdotal evidence indicates that the numbers who found themselves in abusive situations were far from insignificant. It was a system open to abuse, and there were no checks in place to make sure that the system worked as it was intended.