Chapter Four
The Regions and First Peoples: Quebec
At the outset of the Confederation decades, Quebec had been in existence as a distinct society for almost two hundred years, as both a French and a British colony. Over this period, it had firmly cemented its own identity, culture, and unique character. For the eight decades preceding 1840, French Quebecers lived a quiet and relatively self-contained life under British rule. French habitants, dwelling for the most part on farms and in small villages, had followed a peaceful rural lifestyle with little change to the rhythms of life from one generation to the next. English Quebecers, on the other hand, lived predominately in the colony’s two major cities, Quebec City and Montreal, and on farms in the Eastern Townships.
This pattern was about to change substantially during the Confederation decades. Like all other societies in North America and Europe, the Industrial Revolution began reshaping Quebec’s economic and social landscape. Over a period of eighty years of British rule in Quebec, a steady stream of British merchants and artisans took up residence in the province’s two major cities. Montreal and Quebec had become predominantly English-speaking. However, by 1840, things began changing again. For francophones, the first precursors of change became evident as Quebec began the transformation from a rugged, pastoral society into an emerging industrial one.
By 1840 French Canada had been cut off entirely from France for more than eighty years. Immediately following the “conquest,” most of the French merchants and administrative officials had voluntarily returned to France. Apart from the clergy, those francophones who remained behind were mostly farmers, whose fortunes and livelihood were tied to the land. The departure of the merchant class was a momentous act that had far-reaching social, political, and economic consequences for the province. With the sudden removal of this vital element of the social hierarchy, francophone commercial life went into a prolonged dormant phase. In the same period as this transformational change, the Quebec Act was passed. It was an unusually generous and far-sighted piece of legislation for its time. It guaranteed French property rights, French civil law, as well as religious and political freedoms. In protecting so many of the existing rights and rules, the Quebec Act also served to help preserve a kind of social status quo. In fact, the combined effect of merchant migration and the Quebec Act was such that the remaining elements of French-Canadian society flourished in a strong, regionally based but essentially rural culture. It was a situation that would remain constant for decades.
A typical Quebec farm scene in the 1870s.
At the time, francophones accounted for 75 percent of Quebec’s white population, with the relatively new English-speaking population accounting for the rest. French-speaking Quebecers were largely self-contained, self-sufficient, and self-reliant. It was a vigorous, tightly knit, intensely Catholic, traditional farming society, with high birth rates and a family-centred culture. By 1851, the colony’s census noted that the ratios remained similar, but the province’s urban areas had begun to grow. There were 100,000 people living in Quebec City, 88,000 in Montreal, while 500,000 people lived on farms and a further 88,000 lived in villages.1
The Confederation era in Quebec was, however, a time of major demographic change. There was an explosion in the population of the province, which almost tripled in size. Substantial growth in both the English and French populations drove major shifts in the provinces demographic and geographic make-up, and with these changes came the beginnings of internal challenges to Quebec’s traditional religious character as well as the first phase in developing a vigorous manufacturing sector. Given that there was virtually no francophone immigration, it was an astonishing increase.
During the Confederation era, Quebec was considerably smaller than the province we know today. Canada East consisted of long strips of farmlands interspersed with small villages running along the shores of the St. Lawrence, the Ottawa, the Saint Maurice, and the Saguenay rivers. The most densely populated rural areas were in and around the Island of Montreal, where almost half of the province’s population was clustered. To the south of the St. Lawrence, there were other, more recently developed and settled farming areas in the Eastern Townships, as well as a handful of scattered villages in the Laurentians. The massive tract of lakes and boreal forest in Quebec’s section of the Canadian Shield, which currently makes up just over 80 percent of the province’s land mass, was not to become a part of the province until the early 1900s.
Economically, Quebec was affected by a major downturn in the fur trade during this period. For two hundred years, this trade had been one of the linchpins of the colony’s economy. As a commodity, fur was in serious decline by 1840. Fashions in Europe were changing. There was less demand for the beaver felt that was used in making the ornate hats of the Georgian period. As a result, the fur trade’s venerable markets, which had been a major source of revenue since the 1600s, began to shrink. At the same time. Canada’s fur trade was also negatively affected by the development of domestic European fur farms and improved manufacturing techniques. Instead of using beaver pelts as the basis for high quality felt, Europe’s hat makers began mixing wool with the fur of locally raised rabbits. The changes in fashion and manufacturing techniques were also accompanied by a precipitous drop in the wild populations of beaver and other animals. Decades of relentless trapping had dangerously reduced beaver populations. With plummeting returns from eastern Canadian trap lines, for a brief time much of the fur trade shifted to the West coast. This major change in the fur trade had a far-reaching effect in Quebec, as many men who could not be employed in farming had been employed in the fur trade. With the changing fur markets, many rural Quebecers turned to the timber industry as a source of both full-time employment and seasonal work for farmers.
Farming in Quebec during this era was a hard life. Farms were generally small, subsistence operations of less than a hundred acres. For the most part, there was little specialization, with each farm producing a variety of crops for their own consumption. The most common crops included barley, wheat, rye, peas, turnips, beets, corn, tomatoes, and potatoes. Livestock was almost entirely restricted to domestic consumption and consisted of small numbers of cattle, pigs, and poultry.
Prior to the Confederation decades, the export wheat market for Quebec had largely been overtaken by the produce of the more specialized Upper Canadian farmers. As a result, by the beginning of the period, Lower Canada was regularly importing wheat from Upper Canada. Wheat farming in Quebec had also been hit hard by the twin calamities of the repeal of the Corn Laws and a succession of poor crop yields due to rust, pests, and soil depletion in the early 1840s.
These developments forced Quebec’s farmers to change. Over the four decades of the period, Quebec farms began to shift into mixed farming and concentrated on the production of horses, cattle, and pigs, all of which found a booming market in the growing cities of Montreal and Quebec City.
One of the most important social changes during the Confederation decades in Quebec was the abolition of the seigneurial system. The seigneurial system was a system of land tenure devised in the early 1600s as a means of encouraging settlement.
The seigneur, or land owner, was usually an influential man who was allocated a large tract of land by the king. Seigneurial farms were usually allocated in long, narrow rectangles along the shores of a major river to make the best use of the waterways as a means of transport. These lots became increasingly narrow as farms were passed down from one generation to the next. A portion of the seigneury would normally be kept by the seigneur and farmed by his family; the rest would be rented out to other habitants. The habitants farmed the land and paid the seigneur a portion of his crops and sometimes a cash tithe. The habitant was also responsible for deforesting the property and erecting houses, barns, and out-buildings.
The seigneur in turn had his own set of responsibilities. He normally served as the local magistrate with authority in matters of civil law and, more often than not, he owned the local mill used by his habitant tenants.
It’s important to note that the seigneurial system was not considered harsh or exploitive. Most seigneurs were fair, middle-class landlords who lived and worked locally, and the Canadian habitant was by no means a peasant in the European sense. He was free to live and work where and as he pleased. Despite this, there were problems with this system of land ownership — seigneurially allocated farms routinely stayed within families for generations, and over time, the operation of seigneuries proved to be an impediment to rural commerce, as it prevented farmers from accumulating capital. The seigneurial system also became a casualty of changing economic times in Quebec. Habitant farmers could and did leave their land for better opportunities. Many left when the farmer’s seigneurial allocation could no longer be sub-divided as an inheritance. And during times of depressed agricultural markets, thousands left their farms to work in the timber trade, or chose to seek work in Montreal, Quebec City, and the factories of New England.
Unlike farming, where both production and the market tended to be more precarious, timber was relatively low risk and consistently provided solid returns on invested capital. It became Canada’s critical foreign export for most of the Confederation decades. This was especially true in Quebec, where timber spurred the growth of Montreal, which in turn initiated and accelerated the demographic shifts from the francophone rural areas to Montreal’s newly constructed factories.
The timber trade was one of the nineteenth century’s principal engines of economic growth. Timber became a vital Canadian export during the Napoleonic Wars as Britain was denied access to Nordic timber. Cut off from her traditional sources for building her naval fleet and domestic construction, Britain turned to Canada. After the wars, healthy markets in Europe and America meant that the timber industry and its supporting services continued to be strong for years after the Confederation decades.
Ships in Quebec City’s harbour load timber destined for Britain in 1869.
Early in the Confederation decades, there were almost as many people living in Quebec’s small rural villages as there were in Montreal — a situation that would change drastically within a century. In the forty years of the Confederation decades, there were just over two hundred villages and hamlets in rural Quebec. Their populations normally ranged from over a hundred to rarely more than two thousand people. Quebec’s villages developed in rural areas where churches or mills had been established by seigneurs, usually every eight to twelve kilometres apart. By the 1840s, most of the larger villages had become the economic, social, and religious hubs for their surrounding areas. Typically, they contained a small school, a general store, a blacksmith’s shop, an ashery for making soap, a small local brewery, and often a tannery.
Almost every village had at its centre a church, frequently made of stone and surrounded by timber houses and buildings. As in many European countries, several Quebec villages had barns and farm buildings located right in the village. With the exception of the parish priest and the seigneur, both of whom held positions of moral and legal authority in society, most of Quebec’s farming villages were egalitarian communities. Some seigneurs lived in the villages, but most were not conspicuously wealthy. There was no real middle class and, given the self-sufficiency of the larger community, there were relatively few full-time merchants, craftsmen, or hired labourers.2
The two most important cities in Quebec during the Confederation decades were Montreal and Quebec City. In the early 1800s, Quebec was the third largest port in North America and the capital of Lower Canada. In the pre-Confederation decades, Quebec City was arguably the most important city in Canada. In addition to its port, its government offices, its timber industry and shipbuilding, Quebec had a military garrison and was the centre of a web of skilled craft workers. By all measures, the “Gibraltar of North America” seemed destined for a grand future.
However, beginning in the 1840s, Quebec City’s growth was stymied by the rise of Montreal as the Canadian economy began its first shift from traditional, low-volume, artisanal production to mass manufacturing. Quebec’s port would suffer a humiliating loss of business to a much more aggressive and entrepreneurial Montreal Port Authority. And as Montreal grew, she rapidly built modern factories, eclipsing much of Quebec’s cottage production. To add injury to insult, by the end of the Confederation decades, Quebec’s wooden shipbuilding industry would shrivel as trans-Atlantic fleets converted from wooden sailing ships to steel, steam-powered vessels.
Montreal’s rise to prominence and the rapid eclipse of Quebec City as a transportation centre was primarily the result of city planners developing the Lachine Canal, and then several years later dredging the St. Lawrence River.
A street scene, Quebec City, 1870s.
It was a clever move. The Lachine Canal was initially built on a small scale as a local bypass for the Lachine Rapids. In the late 1840s, far-sighted members of the Montreal Harbour Commission saw the commercial possibilities of expanding the canal and creating an upstream port closer to the break-bulk point for lumber rafted down the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers. Working around the clock whenever the ice was off the river, the Harbour Commission employed two dredge boats using the earliest models of steam-powered bucket scoops. The slurry was transferred by hand to two sludge boats and ferried to shore. Once the new shipping channel was completed in 1854, it spelled the end of Quebec City’s commercial and industrial supremacy. With the deeper shipping channel, large, ocean-going ships could travel upriver and take on freight at Montreal. With its new-found importance as a transportation hub, Montreal began to expand its industrial base.3
Montreal’s development as a seaport was rapidly followed by the creation of railway links uniting Canada East and Canada West, and shortly thereafter tying Nova Scotia and New Brunswick into its economic circle. With its port and rail links, Montreal quickly became the country’s economic and cultural centre of gravity. Confident, prosperous, dynamic, and forward-looking, it developed its own booming and robust business culture. Canadian entrepreneurs from the island city established a host of forward-looking industries: banking, telegraph services, garment and leatherwork manufacture, steel shipbuilding, locomotive construction, distilleries, and large-scale breweries sprouted on the island. By 1871, in the city’s wood-, iron-, and steel-based industries alone, Montreal was producing two-thirds of Canada’s total manufacturing output.4 The city wasn’t just expanding economically, it was also becoming a centre of learning and culture. In addition to having McGill University, the period also saw the establishment of a second campus of Laval Université* as well as the growth of a vigorous sporting and artistic life. Montreal had clearly become the most energetic and vital city in the country.
In addition to changes to its industrial and business sectors, there were major demographic changes in Montreal. With employment available in the new industries, thousands of people, mostly rural francophones and Irish immigrants, moved to the city to find work in its newly built factories, shops, and mills. By 1865, Montreal had again undergone a demographic shift to become once more a predominantly French-speaking city.
Throughout the period, Montreal was a busy city — and for the most part a safe and peaceful city. But during the Confederation decades, it was a city rigidly divided by ethnicity and class. English and Scottish Protestants firmly shared most of the top tiers of society with a considerably smaller French-speaking professional and merchant class. The working class was largely, but certainly not exclusively, francophone. Large numbers of the recently arrived Irish-Catholic population struggled to find employment in the city’s unskilled labour market, and for many years formed a unique underclass. It would not be until well into the twentieth century that there would be any meaningful social mobility amongst the three groups.
If there was little integration amongst the various European immigrant communities until the twentieth century, there was essentially no opportunity for social mobility for the small aboriginal community living in Quebec City during this period.
Aboriginal peoples in Quebec belong to three traditional language groups. The Inuit live in the Arctic regions surrounding the Hudson Strait and Ungava Bay, and in the woodlands of the more southerly areas are the Algonquin and Iroquoian First Nations.
There have been no serious hostilities between settlers in Quebec and aboriginal peoples for the last 250 years. From the end of the Seven Years War until the end of the Confederation decades, with a few exceptions, most First Nations followed traditional lifestyles, living on unsettled lands to the north of the developed areas of the St. Lawrence Basin and the Eastern Townships. And while the two groups lived separately, large numbers of Quebec’s First Nations were actively involved in the fur trade.
One of the key reasons aboriginal communities and white settlers lived peacefully in central Canada was because indigenous peoples generally tended to migrate north and settled away from the areas developed by European immigrants. The other major reason was that in Canada, European settlers and First Nations developed an accommodation with one another based on the Royal Proclamation of 1763.
The Royal Proclamation became one of the most important documents in Canadian history, as it affirmed that aboriginal title to lands has always existed, and that all land was to be considered aboriginal land until it was ceded to the Crown by treaty. This milestone declaration specifically prohibited settlers from laying claim to aboriginal land, unless it had been first purchased by the Crown, and then resold to the settlers by the Crown. This was particularly important because, for the most part, French and English settlers regarded North America as empty lands that could be settled at will. This was an attitude in sharp contrast to that held by aboriginal cultures, where the notion of private property, and the concept of large landholdings belonging to individuals, was completely alien.
The issuing of the Royal Proclamation was a landmark event in government relations with aboriginal peoples, one that has important legal implications today. France, it should be noted, had a similar, but not identical, concept of aboriginal sovereignty in distant unsettled areas, in what was then referred to as “Pays d’en Haut,” or “upcountry land,” which generally meant those lands beyond the settled French colonies.
If the Royal Proclamation was evidence of an intent by the Crown to respect aboriginal title and aboriginal culture, the overall impact of European settler culture on the aboriginal population was still almost exclusively negative. This impact can be seen in the declining aboriginal population during the period. Providing an exact number of the aboriginal peoples in Quebec during the Confederation era is problematic. Reliably detailed figures were not kept during the four censuses of the period. However, by 1840 it was estimated that there were around twelve thousand aboriginals in both Upper and Lower Canada — which reflected a precipitous decline of over six thousand people since 1791. The drop was almost certainly due to the spread of diseases, particularly smallpox.
Smallpox was the scourge of Canada’s nineteenth-century aboriginal peoples. First introduced to North America in 1630, the disease’s mortality rates had not lessened two hundred years later. In Europe during the 1800s, smallpox was still a horrific disease, killing over 400,000 people. Inoculation with a cow pox vaccination did not become an accepted medical practice in Europe until the early 1820s. By then, the disease had spread in North America and had had a particularly devastating effect on aboriginal populations, who had no resistance. Not just in Quebec, but right across Canada throughout the Confederation era, smallpox would continue to shatter aboriginal communities, killing untold numbers of people.
When the Indian Act was passed in 1876, most First Nations bands in Quebec were living in long-established remote communities. Consequently, for most bands these lands became their official reserves and they were not forced to move. The Indian Act, amongst other things, established the legal basis for “Indian Reserves,” which were defined as land “for the use and benefit of the respective bands for which they were set apart.”5 As an historical aside, Canada’s first reservation, “Sillery,” was established in 1638 in what is now a part of the Ste-Foy area of Quebec City. The settlement had been set aside as the home for forty Algonquin Christian families, who lived there except for the hunting season. The reserve’s status lapsed when it was abandoned due to disease and the subsequent migration of the original inhabitants.
An important aspect to bear in mind concerning the reserves that were established in 1876, one that has current significance, is that reserves should not be confused with land claims areas. Land claims areas do not necessarily relate to any particular reserves, but instead refer to those First Nation lands that were traditionally used for food gathering and were occupied by aboriginal peoples. In this respect, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 imposes an enormous obligation to provide fair compensation and recognition of the possession and tenure of ancient lands. During the Confederation decades, the Royal Proclamation was effectively ignored.
* Montreal’s Laval campus was renamed the Université de Montréal after the First World War.