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1867-1914: Background / Fitful Growth / Changing Conditions / First Wave / Laurier Boom
Changing Conditions
An estimated 50 per cent of immigrants settled in the cities, working in expanding industrial businesses; 30 per cent of immigrants homesteaded in the West; most of the others worked in mines, bush camps, railway gangs, lumber and logging operations, and the many hydro-electric projects across the country.
One Italian immigrant, Johnny Strappazzon, found work at the Exshaw cement works in Alberta in 1911. When R.B. Bennett's Calgary Power Company announced it was building the Horseshoe Dam on the Bow River in the Canadian Rockies, Strappazzon walked ten miles along the railway, shivering in light clothing, to apply for work. He eventually manned a drill at the dam's foundation, received 25 cents per hour, and bunked with the rough crews in the barracks constructed near the dam site. He stayed on as a Calgary Power employee for the rest of his working life. 6
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A.R.M. Lower, Settlement and the Forest Frontier in Eastern Canada (Toronto: Macmillan, 1936). |
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Loading Logs, White River, ON, n.d. Few industries failed to employ newcomers to Canada during the first great wave of immigration. Primary industries, especially logging and mining, were particularly important employers of immigrants. |
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