Population and Labour Force in British North America

Growth of the Population

Throughout the colonial period, population growth in the North American colonies was seen to be a good thing. Unlike the situation in some developing parts of the world today, it seemed likely that, given the abundance of land resources available in North America , additions to the population would raise rather than lower per capita incomes. The colonial governments in British North America consequently welcomed immigrants, although it was assumed that they would be from the British Isles or the US. As for natural increase, it seemed likely that in what was still a predominantly agrarian society, large families would be "natural". As for the mother countries, the position on emigration was less uniform. In France, at least in the 18^th Century, there had been a perception that labour was in short supply and consequently emigration was in most cases discouraged. In Britain, however, the effects of industrialization were already being felt and emigration was seen as a way of easing the burden of reallocating surplus agricultural labour to other employments.

As for natural increase, the material benefits of having children in the setting of a land rich and labour poor economy were great relative to the costs. Children were a cheap and almost immediate source of additional labour for use in farming, fishing, or other primary pursuits. The marginal cost of supporting additional children was relatively low in the traditional rural household. All this began to change, of course, as British North America also began to experience industrialization, but through most of the 19^th century the old relationships were still dominant: population growth, an expanding agricultural frontier, and economic progress all fit together. Unfortunately, by the 1860s the loss of Imperial Preference and the closing of the agricultural frontier in Canada West brought an end to this pattern of change and the British North American economies began having difficulty supporting their natural increase, let alone attracting immigrants.

How important has immigration been as a factor in Canadian demography? Probably much less than it is held to be in popular belief. It is probably true that all Canadians are immigrants or descended from immigrants. Even the native people are believed to be descended from prehistoric migrants who traveled via a land bridge from Asia across what is now the Bering Straight and south from present day Alaska. The first Europeans began journeying to the North Atlantic coasts of North America as early as the 11^th century, although no permanent settlements were established until the beginning of the 17^th when the French established Quebec. The flow of French immigrants to New France was small and sporadic despite various measures taken by the French government to promote it in the interests of establishing France as a viable commercial and cultural force in the new world. Such immigration as there was dwindled in the late 17^th century and in effect ceased with the British Conquest in the 1760s. There were probably not more than 10,000 original French immigrants to New France. Their descendants, by the time of the Conquest, had grown in numbers, almost entirely as a result of natural increase, to about 75,000.

Immigration to the early British settlements in Newfoundland and the Maritime region was also very slow through the period when the North America economy was dominated by the cod fishery and the early fur trade. The commercial interests involved in these trades were generally opposed to settlement, in the case of the fisheries because local settlement was seen as posing a potentially competitive threat to the companies based in Britain and in the case of the fur trade because settlement was destructive of the resource base. It was not until the timber trade began to develop in the middle of the 17^th century that conditions in British North America became conducive to substantial and sustained inflows of workers from the mother country. Initially, most of those who came were looking for work in the fisheries, forests and shipbuilding yards of the Atlantic region, but, as new land was opened up along the St. Lawrence Valley, many new opportunities for farming were created. Over the one hundred years from 1750 to 1850 there was a substantial influx of farmers, many of whom arrived with the accumulated knowledge and savings needed to establish successful commercial agricultural operations.

Through the remainder of the pre-Confederation period immigration continued to play a significant role in the growth of the English speaking population of the Maritimes and Upper Canada, especially in the 1830s and 1840s. In Lower Canada, most of the population growth through this period was from natural increase. By the middle of the 19^th century, the population of Upper Canada surpassed that of Lower Canada for the first time.

Reasonably accurate population statistics for British North America date from the middle of the 19^th century. The first decennial census was taken in 1851. Before then the data are sporadic, and often difficult to interpret. The best are those relating to Quebec, or Lower Canada, which, until the 1840’s, was by far the most populated part of the area which was to become Canada. Growth of the population there was very rapid due to a high rate of natural increase (over 50 births per thousand of population), a rate rivalling that of the American colonies. The population of Lower Canada grew from 70,000 in 1765 to 553,000 in 1831. By 1851 it had risen to 890,000. Although there was substantial immigration from Britain, particularly after the War of 1812 when British policy sought to promote British immigration and discourage immigration from the US, relatively few British immigrants arriving in Lower Canada remained there. Most continued their migration westward to what is now Ontario or south into the United States. Even so, by 1861 the population of what was by then officially Canada East to over 1 million.

Ontario, or Upper Canada, received its first substantial inflow of settlers as a result of the American Revolution. Loyalists fleeing the US after the Revolution supplemented the meager population already established in the area. By 1785 there were about 10,000 people along the north shore of Lake Ontario and in the Niagara and Windsor regions. At the time of the War of 1812, during which the Americans invaded the area, the population had grown to approximately 95,000. Heavy immigration, mainly of working class people from the British Isles, brought the population of Canada West to 952,000 in 1851 and ten years later the census of 1861 recorded almost 1.4 million living there.

The population in the Maritime colonies to the east totalled 533,000 in 1851 (277,000 in Nova Scotia, 194,000 in New Brunswick and 62,000 in Prince Edward Island). Despite some emigration, mainly to the United States, new immigrant arrivals, mainly from the British Isles combined with natural increase to raise the total population of the Maritimes to 664,000 in 1861. In Newfoundland the population grew between 1851 and 1861 from just over 100,000 to about 125,000.

Out on the west coast, the population of British Columbia was recorded as 55,000 in 1851 and probably exceeded that later in the during the years of the gold rush. By 1861, however, this stimulus had disappeared and the population there declined to about 52,000.

The population of Rupert's Land and the North-West Territory totalled only about 6000 in both censuses.

As would be expected in a newly-settled country, the age and sex composition of the population in the pre-Confederation period reflected the tendency for immigrants to be young and male. The average age of the population in 1851 was 21.7 years.

Growth and Organization of the Labour Force

Labour force estimates are a modern development and there is little systematic data relating to the labour force in colonial British North America. If we assume that the participation rate was fairly stable through the period before 1850, as seems reasonable given that neither the structure of employment opportunities nor cultural determinants of gender roles and the like were subject to major changes during this time, the growth of the labour force probably paralleled that of the population as a whole. Once data do become available as a result of the censuses of 1851 and 1861 the total labour force in British North America was given as 762 thousand in the first and just over 105 thousand in the second which is roughly the same as the growth of the population over the same period. (Indeed, this remained the case throughout the remainder of the 19^th Century.)

As for the structure of employment, while there was certainly some growth in the number of jobs in mainly small-scale manufacturing and various commercial employments during the colonial period, the main source of new employment opportunities was clearly in the primary sector. Even in 1851, when the first hard data become available, about 75 per cent of the labour force in the Canadas was employed in the resource industries (about half of them in agriculture and the other half in lumbering, mining, and fishing) and the evidence suggests a similar pattern in the Maritimes as well.

Again, little reliable evidence is available with respect to any changes in hours of work or other arrangements that would affect the supply of labour provided by a labour force of given size for the period before Confederation. For the large part of the labour force employed in agriculture the amount of work undertaken in a day was probably chiefly determined by seasonal factors such as the hours of daylight available. For wage employees in the cities and towns the situation is less clear. Rudimentary forms of union organization date from at least as early as the 1820s and contemporary accounts of strikes and other forms of labour protest against wages and working conditions indicate that workers were not entirely passive even in the absence of formal organizations.

Legal restrictions inhibiting the formation of labour unions remained in force in British North America for several decades after they were abolished in Britain. Nevertheless, printers in Quebec City became organized in 1827 and craft unions were set up by printers, carpenters, stonemasons, and coopers in Toronto and Hamilton during the 1830s and 1840s. These organizations remained largely isolated from one another, however, and it was not until the 1870s that anything resembling the modern labour movement began to take shape in Canada.

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