PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE
Reference :-
TITIC.O. 885
ALLY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE BE REPRODUCED PHOTOGRAPHIC- COPYRIGHT PHOTOGRAPH-NOT TO
20 PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON
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that offered, and eventually became caretaker of the Board of Trade Buildings and lift-man. He told me that he was now making $80 a month and living rent free; and that he had saved about $3,600. I judged him to be about 45 or 50 years of age. He said emphatically that a man should not emigrate to Canada after 40 years of age, because of the great difficulty of fitting himself into the new condi- tions of life and work, and that every man should, if possible, go out unencumbered by a family in the first instance.
On the morning of Tuesday, the 31st of August, I went with Dr. Milne to look over the new and very well-arranged Immigration Building which the Govern- ment are putting up near the outer wharf. In the afternoon I returned to Vancouver, after an unsuccessful attempt to get hold of the Secretary of the Vancouver Island Development Association)
VANCOUVER.
On Wednesday, the 1st of September, I called on Mr. C. F. Jackson, one of the local correspondents of the Emigrants' Information Office in Vancouver. He is an Englishman who has been in Canada some eight or nine years. His firm is engaged in metal manufacture, and he is also interested otherwise in engineering affairs. He described to me the troubles and fights which he had had with the Labour Unions as chairman of the largest engineering company in the West of Canada, over the question of the open shop. The company won in the end, after eighteen months of strikes and law suits and every other form of annoyance. He said that of course there was a demand for farm help in the Province. He also thought that there was an appreciable demand for artisans, especially carpenters or others connected with building. He gave me an instance to show that any man who wanted work could get it, if he was only willing to take anything that offered. He spoke of men who had come out from England and almost immediately got good wages as painters and paperhangers, although they had done no work of the kind in England. He gave me a description of the way in which men in the lumber camps make good money in a few weeks or months, and come into Vancouver and spend it at once in riotous living, being then maintained by certain of the hotel keepers (in consideration of a charge on future wages) until there is again work to be got in the lumber camps.
He described the lack of domestic servants as deplorable. Not only could they not get female domestic servants, but the wages of Chinese and Japanese boys had now risen to an almost prohibitive figure. He and Mrs. Jackson had been doing their own housework for some months. Casual labour was also very difficult to get. He had on three separate occasions offered work in the garden to English immigrants who represented themselves as being in want of work, and had offered high wages. In no case was the work persevered in for more than a few days.
He introduced me to Mr. Lockman, one the principal lumber merchants of the city. Mr. Lockman felt pretty strongly about the unsatisfactoriness of British manual labour in the lumber camps as compared with that of other nations. He thought that the Britisher was, generally speaking, less handy and less conscious of the value of time than other nations. For manual labour and for adaptability to new conditions, he preferred Swedes, Hindoos, and Japs; but for a position of trust he preferred the Britisher. He had timed a gang of three British workmen against a gang of three IIindoos without either gang knowing. The British gang was engaged on moving cedar planks, which are very light, and the Hindoos in moving much heavier timber. The Hindoos got between three and four times as much timber moved in the time as the British. He thought it possible that the
British workman earned such low wages at home that he genuinely failed to realise what a serious loss it meant to his employer if he were slow and dilatory, or inefficient in other ways. He also thought (and Mr. Jackson agreed) that there was something in my suggestion that the British immigrant, coming to a country which he had at any rate heard a good deal about, and which he was accustomed to look upon as a remote part of his own country, and finding the same language and, to a certain extent, the same habits of thought, did not realise the actual change of his environment and the necessity for adapting himself to it to the same degree as a German or Swede, who would from the first realise that he came as a stranger to a strange land. They also thought that the habits of discipline engendered by national military service might make men of other nationalities more disposed than the British immigrant to submit to the requirements of his new country. Mr.
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Lockman said he had no difficulty in getting all the men he wanted for his lumber camps, except perhaps at harvest time.
I also had a talk with Mr. C. F. Leighton, the representative of a large engineer- ing firm in Vancouver They had no difficulty in getting all the men they wanted, skilled and unskilled. Their skilled men had, generally speaking, been with them a long time, and when a vacancy occurred it was generally possible to promote an apprentice. The "Roust-about and unloading, driving, &c., was recruited without any difficulty. He spoke of gang, employed in the rough labour of loading the domestic servant difficulty. He and his wife had brought out from England a servant whom they had had there for a considerable time. But after about a year of Canada she became so conscious of the value of her services that they had to get rid of her, and they had not been able to get one since.
I next called on Mr. Skene, the Secretary of the Board of Trade. He said that the functions of the Board were such that he could not deal with questions of employment or the demand for labour, but that he would be glad at any time to look through the Emigrants' Information Office "Circular" and "Handbook," copies of which he would be glad to have. He talked to me for some time about the development of British Columbia. He thought that sooner or later there was bound to be a north to south railway connecting Vancouver with Prince Rupert, and touching the heads of the inlets with which the coast of British Columbia is indented. When that time came he thought that large areas of agricultural land now lying unavailable in these remote valleys would be opened up, and that grain-growing and other forms of farming would have a great development.
THE ARROW LAKES.
In the afternoon of Wednesday, the 1st of September, I started to go east and took the route through the Arrow and Kootenay Lakes and the Crow's Nest Pass. It was very interesting to see the beginning of development along the shores of the lakes. Every few miles there would be a clearing among the trees which clothe the banks to the water's edge, a few log houses would be seen, and the steamer would put in to land stores, or a circular saw, or to take up chickens for consumption on the boat, or embark a settler or two going a few miles down the lake. plain, south of Kootenay Landing, great things are expected of fruit farming. 1 slept one night at Nelson, a beautiful and thriving town, which is certain to have a great future as a distributing centre for the fruit-growing country in the imme- diate neighbourhood and for the mining districts near the boundary line.
MEDICINE HAT.
F
In the level
On Saturday, the 4th of September, I broke my journey for twelve hours at Medicine Hat. I called on Mr. J. T. Hall, the Secretary of the Board of Trade, who introduced me to some of the most prominent residents of the town. The opinion held by them generally is that Medicine Hat is bound to have a considerable development in the not distant future. It is situated in the middle of the dry lands which have hitherto been used only for ranching and have been deemed useless for ordinary farming. But already, thanks partly to irrigation and partly to the results obtained by experiments in place to ordinary farms, and a demand for farm help, as well as for farmers to dry farming," the ranches are giving take up holdings, is, therefore, bound to arise. Mr. Hall thought that the district would probably go straight from the ranching stage to that of mixed farming, without going through the stage of grain-raising pure and simple. The great feature of the place is, however, the supply of natural gas. The gas serves all purposes in the town, supplying light, heat, and power at an extremely low cost. I saw it in actual operation in the divisional shops of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, who save $60,000 a year at this one point by having this natural source of power at their command. The gas is offered for manufacturing purposes at 5 cents per 1,000 cubic feet, which equals $2.40 per annum for one-horse power through a ten hours' working day. The ambition of Medicine Hat is, therefore, to he, not only the distributing, but also the manufacturing centre of the agricul tural district which is developing around it. But the process can hardly be said
to have begun yet. Mr. Hall promised to act as a local correspondent of the Emigrants Information Office, and showed the utmost readiness to answer any enquiries that we might wish to address to him. He ought to prove a most useful correspondent, as, in addition to being the Secretary of the Medicine Hat Board of