1867-1914: Background / Fitful Growth / Changing Conditions / First Wave / Laurier Boom

Background

Most of those who arrived in these years were "pushed" rather than "pulled" to the still rural, very rugged Canadian frontier. The British government began making migration to its North American outposts a strategic priority after the War of 1812. It encouraged demobilized Highland regiments to stay in the garrison towns of the colonies, mostly to strengthen colonial defence. In the years after 1815, too, the government for the first time began encouraging growing numbers of poor to migrate. It established a chief emigrant agent in

Quebec by 1828. Britain's 1828 Passenger Act, and similar acts that followed, attempted to make the immigrant's harrowing voyage to America, on what became known as "floating coffins," healthier and safer. In 1834, and again after the Irish Potato Famine in 1846-1847, the government supplemented local aid to Britain's poor (as laid out in the Poor Laws) with financial incentives to encourage them to move to British North America.

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