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1867-1914: Background / Fitful Growth / Changing Conditions / First Wave / Laurier Boom
Laurier Boom
Clifford Sifton
Economic Takeoff
Demography
Frank Oliver
Ian Radforth's study of Ontario bushworkers found that some immigrants were preferred over others, with, for instance, Scandinavians with forest experience ranking after English and French. Some companies hired specific ethnic groups for certain bushcamps. Finnish contractors tended to hire their countrymen for their own camps. But on the whole, a "mixture of tongues" could be heard in these
forest settings. A researcher in 1908 visited one lumber camp near Fort Frances in Ontario and recorded that the workforce was 10 per cent Swedish, 20 per cent English and French Canadian, and 70 per cent "Russian, Austrian, Polish and Central European." 11 The same immigrants might join annual threshing crews on Ontario farmland or hire out as hands for struggling Saskatchewan farms.
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