“Although Laurie wanted speedy development, he disagreed with the colonization scheme instituted by the Conservative government in 1881 [see Sir David Lewis Macpherson*].… Laurie opposed such schemes in principle. He believed that locating people in blocks tended ‘to prevent the intimate fusion [of] the people of different races into … the homogeneous whole so desirable in a new country.’ In his opinion, immigrants should be obliged to come west at their own expense, without the aid of colonization companies, so that only the most hardy and enterprising would be attracted. No one should be given special treatment.”
Great Britain supplied the majority of immigrants during Macdonald’s tenure, but later Russians, Chinese, and Scandinavians also settled the west. Homesteading offered an opportunity for eastern and central Europeans to escape the restrictive structures of their countries. A group of Russian Jews, including Abraham KLENMAN, settled first in Quebec before pursuing the agrarian lifestyle they were denied in Russia:
“Barred from owning land in Russia because he was a Jew, and believing that a return to the land was necessary for the Jews to become regenerated as a people, Klenman aspired to move to western Canada and settle on one of the quarter-section homesteads being offered by the Canadian government for a registration fee of ten dollars.
“In Montreal, Klenman investigated and promoted the idea of an agricultural colony in western Canada to consist of a number of immigrant Jewish families, and he selected some of the settlers… In the fall of 1888 Klenman and another Jewish immigrant, Jacob Silver, were chosen to seek suitable land. Assisted by Lauchlan Alexander Hamilton, land commissioner of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company in Winnipeg, Klenman and Silver travelled to various localities. Eventually they decided to settle in the aspen parkland belt, in order to utilize the trees for buildings and fuel, and to take advantage of a water-table that was near the surface, not at considerable depth as on the plains. They learned that the John and Rachel Heppner family and some other Russian Jews, supported by Anglo-Jewish philanthropist Hermann Landau, in 1886 had located in the fast-growing area a few miles northeast of Wapella, a village on the CPR main line. The first Jewish farming colony in western Canada, New Jerusalem, which had been founded in 1884, was some 30 miles southeast.”
Macpherson’s efforts to settle the North-West Territories were undone by his own poor planning as well as by economic forces beyond the Canadian government’s control:
“By 1885 Macpherson’s plans for the development of the northwest were in shambles. In part, he simply had the misfortune of being minister during a slump in world grain prices and at a time when advances in farming methods had made land in the western United States far more attractive.”
During the 1880s the population of western Canada doubled. But it would be Macdonald’s opponent in the 1891 election, Wilfrid LAURIER, who would oversee the development of much of Canada’s new land [see Settlement of the West].
For more information on immigration and settlement while Macdonald was prime minister, please consult the following biographies.
![Original title: MIKAN 2896355 MIKAN 2896355: New Westminster, Colombie-Britannique . ca 1887-1909 [83 KB, 600 X 368]](/bioimages/w600.10795.jpg)