AN ETHNOCULTURAL WORKFORCE
Canada's working class has become much more ethnically diverse over the last two hundred years. Up to 1800, it was made up mainly of people of French and British (English and Scottish) descent, along with other small minorities such as Germans and African Canadians. After 1800, it expanded into one of the most ethnically complex in the world, thanks to three main waves of immigration - in the early 19th century, late 19th and early 20th centuries, and since 1945. The effect of these changes has been to make the working class a much richer and more varied grouping, but also to create problems in organizing it and achieving unity.
The first major change came with the arrival of large numbers of Irish immigrants between 1820 and 1850. Fleeing a deteriorating economic situation in their homeland, many
Chinese worker at Victoria Rice Mills, Victoria, BC c. 1889
© Library and Archives Canada [LAC] , PA-118156 |
of these people sought work as unskilled labourers working on the docks and on public works projects. Their arrival enabled the construction of the canals, the first major public works projects of the 19th century. The Irish introduced a volatile element into the ranks of wage earners: while unorganized, they were not afraid to speak out loudly against authority. Their presence also underlined an emerging ranking of workers based on skill and ethnicity, with skilled British workers at the top in terms of income and prestige, and the unskilled Irish near the bottom.
Immigration continued more slowly after 1850 until the beginning of a second great wave of migration near the end of the century. In the 1880s, Chinese labourers came to Canada to work on the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Then, between 1896 and 1913, more than two million people fled economic and social distress in Europe for the promise of Canada's western and urban areas.
Japanese men soldering cans a second time after first cooking at Imperial Cannery in Steveston, BC, 1913
© Vancouver Public Library, Special Collections, VPL 2088 |
These people, who made further industrial development possible, were a richly heterogenous group including not only the British, but also newcomers from across continental Europe such as Poles, Italians, Ukrainians, Slavs, Hungarians, Finns and many others. In the newly settled Canadian west, they made up the bulk of the working class. The result was a wide variety of cultural traditions represented both in major cities such as Toronto and Montréal and in working-class towns and neighbourhoods across the country, and particularly on the prairies. The variety of backgrounds made labour unity more difficult to achieve. Groups were divided by language and social traditions. They were separated by types of jobs and wages, with the British tending to get the higher paying positions. Some groups had no experience of organized resistance. Others, for example the Finns, brought strong traditions of working-class
socialism to bear on Canadian problems. In spite of these divisions, coal miners and other workers in single-industry towns found much in common and developed a strong sense of labour solidarity and militancy.
Since 1945, a third wave of immigration has been set in motion. At first, the new arrivals came mainly from Europe, with Italians and other people from southern Europe much better represented than before. After 1967, however, with the removal of immigration restrictions
Japanese women, with babies on their backs, filling cans with salmon at Imperial Cannery in Steveston, BC, 1913
© Vancouver Public Library, Special Collections, VPL 2071 |
based on ethnicity and nationality, immigrants began arriving from many other parts of the world - including the West Indies, India, Pakistan, China, and other areas in Asia and Africa. Many of these people sought working-class jobs. As early as 1961, one in five Canadian workers was born outside the country. Today, the Canadian working class has grown to become one of the most ethnically complex in the world. While newcomers have brought a wide range of talents to their work, the earlier problems of ethnic hierarchies based on income and status have grown, as has the challenge of encouraging unity among the diverse group.