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| McMaster University, Toronto, Canada. The University later moved to Hamilton, Ontario, and the Royal Conservatory of Music now occupies the building. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published
Canada must actively recruit the best and brightest immigrants
Is the federal immigration system a failure? The Harper government seems to think so, but the stats tell a different story
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| Italian-Immigrants-to-Canad (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney sees deep flaws in Canada’s immigration system. For too long, he argues, the system has been drawing ambitious newcomers who arrive here ready to work only to find their qualifications aren’t recognized, their experience isn’t valued, or their skills aren’t in demand. “We’ve got to stop this practice,” he said in a major speech in Toronto last month, “of inviting highly trained people to come to Canada if they don’t have jobs or they’re not likely to succeed in the labour market.”
As one of the most visible federal ministers, Kenney has made sure his critique of the system he runs is widely heard and broadly accepted. In particular, companies echo his complaints about Canada bringing in 250,000 newcomers a year, and still failing to provide the workers they need to fill gaps, particularly in the fast-growing West. But as Kenney continues his withering attack, it’s worth asking: Is the federal program really the unmitigated disaster he suggests? Not by international standards, where Canada is rated highly for its successful integration of immigrants into the economy, or even by some of the yardsticks Kenney has been using to argue Canada’s existing immigration system needs to be completely overhauled.
Some of the clearest evidence showing the program’s success comes from Kenney’s own department. For instance, Kenney points to the so-called provincial nomination program—through which provinces bring in immigrants chosen to fill job vacancies—as the model for reform. But according to figures provided to Maclean’s by Citizenship and Immigration Canada, any edge enjoyed by the provincial programs is small and short-term. The average yearly earnings for provincial nominees range from $35,200 to $45,100. That’s only better at the high end than the $36,400 to $42,700 average range for the earnings of immigrants who entered Canada through the federal skilled workers doorway. And by the fifth year after arrival, according to Citizenship and Immigration Canada data, the federal skilled workers’ incomes outpace provincial nominees by, on average, $2,000 to $7,000 a year.
Still, it’s beyond dispute that new immigrants are taking longer to get established than they did in previous eras. As recently as the 1970s, they earned about the same as Canadian-born workers. But nearly every group of newcomers since has been worse off. By the 1990s, recent male immigrants earned half as much as Canadian-born males the same age. By 2000, more than a third of them were classified as officially “low income.”
So Canadian immigrants haven’t been thriving, at least not in the very short term, and Kenney aims to change that. Under proposals he’s floated in increasing detail in recent months, he’s signalled that he intends to overhaul the programs that make up Canada’s traditional points system for selecting immigrants. The goal is to give employers more of the kinds of workers they need right now and to bring in immigrants who are likely to have their qualifications recognized and be able to work in their own fields right away.
Employers will be given more say in selecting immigrants—possibly through a global “job bank.” Newcomers who speak one of Canada’s two official languages will be given higher priority, and professional qualifications will be assessed before applicants are accepted, rather than after they’ve arrived in Canada.
Still, putting the focus on an applicant’s short-term prospects ignores longer-term considerations. While many immigrants have struggled in their early years as Canadians, their kids have thrived. Even as income levels for first-generation immigrants have fallen over the last 30 years, education levels for their children have remained well above the Canadian average. That’s true even for families in which the parents weren’t university educated.
Dr. Andrew Brown’s father, for instance, immigrated from Jamaica in the late 1970s. His mother followed a few years later. The elder Brown initially struggled in menial jobs. Even after he established himself at Canada Post, both parents had to work to keep the family afloat. After school many days, Brown would microwave hot dogs to have something to eat before his parents got home at 7 p.m. or later.
His parents were never well off. Neither went to university. Statistically speaking you might count them as failures, in an immigration sense. But Brown did go to university, then to medical school. Today he’s a resident in medical imaging at the University of Toronto where he’s studying the next generation of non-invasive cancer research.
That’s not an unusual story. Second-generation Canadians tend to perform better in school, are more likely to earn university degrees and often earn more than children of Canadian-born parents, even if their parents earn low incomes. By moving so fast to overhaul the system, some experts worry the government could put those patterns of next-generation achievement at risk.
Putting more emphasis on English and French proficiency could mean taking in fewer immigrants from areas that tend to show solid multi-generational success. More than 62 per cent of second-generation immigrants with parents born in China have a university degree, for example, compared to just 24 per cent of those with Canadian-born parents. But Chinese immigrants as a whole haven’t typically had the best English or French language skills.
Kenney is aware that second-generation immigrants and what are known as 1.5-generation immigrants—those who came to Canada as children—do well. But he says that isn’t playing a significant role as he retools the system. “We can’t select people on the basis of how their children or grandchildren might succeed,” he says. “Although, and here’s the point, by selecting people who are more likely to succeed quickly in Canada’s economy, I think we’re ensuring that their children and grandchildren will do even better.”
He also says changing the language requirements in a way that might cut the number of immigrants from Asia isn’t a worry. The children of immigrants, no matter where they’re from, are typically going to succeed, he says. “They grow up in aspirational families. They grow up in families that take nothing for granted. They grow up in families that put a huge value on education and quite frankly are pretty forceful and disciplined about making sure their kids do well in school.”
Kenney stresses that employers—not bureaucrats—know best what kinds of workers they need. But giving employers a huge say in the system doesn’t always guarantee success, says Arthur Sweetman, a professor and Ontario Research Chair in health human resources at McMaster University. Companies’ needs, he points out, can change quickly. Before the tech sector busted in the early years of the last decade, there was a huge push to bring immigrants with computer skills into the country. After the crash, many of them ended up unemployed. “Canada wants citizens, employers want employees,” Sweetman says. “Employees are for the short term; citizens are forever.”
Above almost any other factor, Kenney touts the advantage of an immigrant having a Canadian job waiting before landing here. There’s no disputing that is a key factor. More than half of provincially nominated immigrants arrive with a pre-arranged job offer. Since 2005, their average earnings have reached or surpassed Canadian averages within one year of arrival. And since they are chosen specifically to fill the immediate needs of companies, there’s pressure from those employers to expand the program. Across all provinces, it has ballooned from 6,000 immigrants in 2004 to a planned 42,000 this year. And the growing provincial stream has funnelled immigration away from the old dominant cities of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Provincial plans have tripled immigration to the Prairies and doubled Atlantic Canada’s intake of newcomers.
On the other hand, only about 14 per cent of immigrants admitted as federal skilled workers have a job waiting for them in Canada. Even so, they do remarkably well—making on average $72,700 in the year after landing, and seeing their salaries rise to $79,200 within three years. Those who don’t quickly enter the workforce have a harder time getting established—but so do native-born Canadians. Research by David Green of the University of British Columbia and Christopher Worswick of Carleton University has found that about half of the decline in earnings for new immigrants, compared to those who arrived in the 1970s and earlier, stems from the same tougher economic conditions faced by native-born Canadians entering the workforce.
So is the existing federal skilled workers program that Kenney is setting out to reform all that bad? It seems to outperform the provincial alternative after five years. While immigrants overall aren’t succeeding as rapidly as in the past, neither are young native-born workers. And new Canadians fare well by global standards, too. When the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development probed the job markets for immigrants in its member countries in 2007, Canada was found to come the closest to equal employment rates between Canadian-born and foreign-born workers.
None of this is to say Kenney is wrong to bemoan the “regrettable decline in the economic results for newcomers to Canada.” The 21st-century uphill climb facing immigrants is indisputable. But as he lays the groundwork for a policy overhaul, Canada’s highest-profile immigration minister in memory seems fixated on the weaknesses of the system he inherited, and under-emphasizing its continued strengths.
Changes to immigration policy could transform society
ARMINE YALNIZYAN
Globe and Mail Blog
Have you noticed how common it has become to talk about replacing workers with even cheaper workers? If you’re looking over your shoulder, you’re not paranoid; you’re paying attention. There’s probably a cheaper you out there. And in Canada, the feds are helping your boss find them.
This week, the International Labour Organization noted there are 50 million fewer jobs in the global economy than before the financial crisis began in 2008. Some 200 million people are now looking for work.People around the world are on the move, leaving their homes in search of opportunity. Many of them have landed here.
Canada has welcomed newcomers in record numbers throughout the recession, even as unemployment rates spiked. But our policies are shifting, and with it the type of labour market and society we are creating. Today, the preferential nod is being given to a soaring number of temporary foreign workers, or “guest” workers. These are people who are brought here at the pleasure of employers, and stay at the pleasure of employers.
In 2011, 156,000 economic immigrants entered Canada as permanent residents, while 191,000 people entered with a temporary work permit, granted to employers by the federal government. Many of these permits extend beyond a year, so as of Dec. 1, 2011 there were 300,111 temporary foreign workers in Canada, the highest number on record. The number of temporary foreign workers has more than doubled since 2006.
The federal government is promoting the temporary foreign worker program as a solution to skills shortages now faced by employers, particularly in the West. Yet 35 per cent of the nation’s temporary foreign workers are in Ontario, and almost one in five (18 per cent) are in Toronto, which has an unemployment rate of 8.6 per cent. Labour shortage? I don’t think so.
Those numbers will soon rise. Last week, the federal government announced that employers could usher in highly skilled temporary workers such as engineers and electricians in 10 days instead of the current 12- to 14-week approval process, noting red tape will likely be reduced in processing other categories of temporary foreign workers as well. Of note, the fastest growing category of temporary foreign workers is low-skilled workers, whose numbers have grown ten-fold in just five years. These are not the seasonal fruit-and-vegetable pickers on which our nation also relies. These folks toil year-round at Tim Hortons, Canadian Tire, in our abattoirs, nursing homes, and hotels; workplaces where employers say they can’t find Canadian workers willing to work at the offered wages.
Disturbingly, the federal announcement also set out new wage rules that permit employers to pay temporary foreign workers up to 15 per cent below the average paid for that type of work locally, sanctioning the creation of a two-tiered “us and them” labour market.
Even if such a rule were rigorously applied and monitored – and budget cuts may eliminate the staff to do this job – it guarantees a downward trend in wages for everyone. Fifteen per cent below the average is a recipe for continuous decline when labour shortages are filled, as a matter of policy, by those who get paid less and are not allowed to stay long enough to ask for more.
Ottawa’s recently announced reforms did not include a change in the four-year cap on residency for temporary foreign workers, brought into play in 2011. That rule guarantees two things: One, employers can minimize the costs of churn; and two, a permanently temporary class of workers is created, keeping wages and expectations low.
The salute to increased use of temporary foreign workers was also not accompanied by increases in the quotas the federal government sets for the number of people provinces can nominate for fast-track citizenship. In Alberta, by the end of 2011, more than 58,000 people were working under temporary foreign work permits, up from about 37,000 at the end of 2007. The province can only nominate up to 5,000 of these workers to become Canadians. The vast majority of low-skilled temporary foreign workers have no avenue for permanent residency.
Even the Chinese railway workers of the 1800s came with “landed immigrant” status. Emphasizing the benefits of a disposable class of workers is a very recent, and unsavoury, development in our history.
This nation was built by immigrants who had a stake in its future. Together we created an economy which today is the tenth largest in the world. While the economy will continue to grow, the distribution of the gains from that growth threatens to become rapidly even more lopsided.
As an economist, I understand cheaper labour will benefit some employers in the short term, though the longer-term results will slow purchasing power and growth.
As a Canadian, I am appalled that public policy can be boiled down to this. We are all cheapened as a result.
P.E.I. grabs $63M in immigrant deposits
The P.E.I. government has added $63 million to its bottom line through defaults on deposits made by immigrants through the Provincial Nominee Program since 2005.
Allan Roach believes P.E.I.'s record of immigrant retention is improving. (CBC)
More than half that money comes from good faith deposits which every nominee was required to pay, and most of the remainder was from failure to meet language requirements.
The good faith deposit is returned if the immigrant stays on P.E.I. for a year. According to public accounts almost 1,500 immigrants have failed to meet that requirement since 2008.
Allen Roach, the minister responsible for immigration, said that situation is improving.
"We've seen, certainly over the last year, last two years, that more immigrants are in fact staying on Prince Edward Island," said Roach.
"As our immigrant communities continue to grow in P.E.I., those immigrants that come here will feel more comfortable staying here. I think as our job growth continues, we'll see that."
According to Statistics Canada, 95 per cent of the Island's population growth in the last few years has been due to immigration.
The most recent statistics show a drop in population. The Island lost 270 people to other provinces in the last three months of 2011.
Newcomers selected under B.C. Provincial Nomination Program fare the best, study says
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| Mount Robson, Mount Robson Provincial Park, British Columbia, Canada. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
When it comes to earning potential, not all immigrants to British Columbia are equal, according to a new study by author Haimin Zhang.
Zhang, a PhD student of economics at the University of B.C., found a "surprising" wage gap between newcomers who immigrated as federal skilled workers between 2002 and 2008 and those selected under the B.C. Provincial Nomination Program (BCPNP).
Using Statistics Canada data collected from landing information and tax records, the study determined B.C. provincial nominees earned, on average, three times as much as immigrants classified as skilled workers after one year of their arrival. The wage advantage declined with the length of stay in Canada, but remained significant, according to the study, which was published in April on the Metropolis BC website. After four years, B.C. provincial nominees still earned twice as much as skilled workers in the province, the study said.
The federal skilled workers program selects immigrants based on their ability to become economically established in Canada over the long-term. Points are assigned to applicants based on their skills, education, and experience.
The selection process of the B.C. Provincial Nominee Program, meanwhile, requires applicants to have a job offer in hand before they enter the country. The program, launched in 2001, is designed to satisfy province-specific, short-term labour market demands.
Zhang, an immigrant herself who came to Canada from China as a master's student, said the purpose of the study was not to suggest one stream of immigration selection is better than another.
Rather, it's to better understand the wage gaps between immigrant groups and how they will evolve over the long term.
In the study, she poses three possible explanations for the differences in earning levels:
-- Canadian experience: Using data from Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Zhang found that 70 per cent of provincial nominees in B.C. had previously worked or studied in Canada, compared to less than 20 per cent of federal skilled workers.
-- Job-offer requirement: The prearranged job requirement of the provincial nomination program helped immigrants establish in B.C. faster, offered better protection from a bad labour market and, therefore, contributed to their earning advantage.
-- Possible "cream skimming": The significantly shorter processing time of the provincial nomination program may have attracted the most skilled immigrants who would have otherwise qualified under the longer, more arduous federal program.
Zhang also raised the possibility of discrimination at play on the part of employers, noting that B.C. provincial nominees accepts a larger portion of immigrants from English speaking, developed countries, namely the United Kingdom, United States and Australia, compared to other parts of the world.
"It could be a coincidence," Zhang said, adding, "Maybe discrimination is too strong a word, but a preference between different people from the country of origin."
"That is just a personal concern I note. I don't think the data itself can speak directly to this, but I think that it should be pointed out," she said.
Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland questioned the data source used in Zhang's study, calling it old and potentially flawed because many workers earn more money than they declare.
But, he said, the conclusions are sound.
"They got to the right destination, but the wrong way," he said in an email.
Kurland said fast processing times illustrated by the BCPNP will be mirrored under the new federal skilled worker program, "giving more successful outcomes in the labour market, (and) making more earnings for new immigrants."
Zhang acknowledged the findings were compromised by a lack of data that include an occupational breakdown.
"One of the reasons I put this study online is so more people can see the shortage of this paper and that more information would help better address this question," she said.
Zhang said her findings echo those of a 2011 national report by Citizenship and Immigration Canada. According to that study, it took on average five years for federal skilled workers to catch up to the salaries earned by provincial nominees.
dahansen@vancouversun.com Twitter.com/darahhansen
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Immigrant+wages+linked+program+that+worker/6545145/story.html#ixzz1tghhZ7I3
Our City, Our World: Britannia on the Prairies
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| Map of the Prairie provinces in central Canada. The northern reach or the Great Plains of North America are found in these provinces. :*See Image:Canada provinces blank vide.png for additional information. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Before closing with a small postscript -- mail me a revised New Testament, please! -- young Scotsman William Lothian's long letter to his family described the often-lonely immensity of his new home.
"It's a monotonous process, this travelling over the vast Prairies, all so much alike," the 24-year-old wrote in the fall of 1881.
"Jim and I always said we would like, if possible, to go ahead of civilization, to go where settlers would be sure to follow," wrote William to his family southeast of Edinburgh.At the time, Lothian was taking a pioneer version of a long weekend, travelling 180 kilometres from his job at the sawmill at Riding Mountain to the new farm near Pipestone he and his brother James were clearing.
"And we came near enough to having our wish as we were, you may say, the first to settle on the Pipestone, and I was the first white man to sow grain in that part of the country, and Jim was the first to put a scythe in the ripe corn."
On his trek, William encountered only spotty homesteads, some of them slovenly and makeshift, and several other Scottish settlers making their way west. He writes about devouring copies of the Glasgow Herald and makes note of the large English contingent in Rapid City, where a Mr. Whelms managed an English immigration scheme and a Mr. McIntosh ran the sawmill.
"I believe there will be a big immigration from the Old Sod next year, at least I hope so," he concluded. "If the right kind would come out here, they would do well, and they are just what the country needs."
Since the arrival of the Selkirk settlers 200 years ago, immigrants such as William Lothian have represented the province's political and business elite. British stock, even the poor crofters cleared off Scottish farms or the urban working classes from the north of England, came to dominate the province -- its elected posts, its civil service, its banking and business class, its grain trade, its social institutions such as the Manitoba Club.
Federal immigration programs favoured British settlers, who often arrived better-educated, got better jobs, lived in wealthier neighbourhoods and prospered more quickly than other immigrants by virtue of being the most desired. William Lothian may not have imagined it while camped out on the bluffs one cold October night on his way home to his half-cleared farm, but he was typical of the British newcomers who ran the province for generations.
Lothian would go on to have four children, serve on the Royal Commission on grain pricing and shipping, report for the Brandon newspaper and return to England as an immigration emissary.
After the Selkirk settlers, a steady flow of English, Irish, Welsh and Scottish immigrants arrived to take up skilled trades in Winnipeg or farm in rural Manitoba.
But an even larger influx of people of British and Irish heritage migrated west from Ontario. They arrived in Manitoba with a bit of money and education, a generation or two better-established in their new country. That includes businessman James Armstrong Richardson, Winnipeg's first mayor Francis Cornish, police chief (and early advocate for regulated prostitution) John McRae and thousands of others who claim roots in the British Isles.
In spite of their ubiquity, there are only spotty data on the number of British and Irish immigrants who came to Manitoba in the early years and where they settled. Numerous studies exist of Ukrainian, Russian and Polish immigrants and their impact on the North End and on the expansion of the West.
But little has been written about the group that so completely dominated Manitoba's establishment until Stephen Juba became Winnipeg's first Ukrainian mayor in 1957.
The Archives of Manitoba could not provide a breakdown of immigration data for most of the province's history, but historians agree Manitoba was, at its heart in the beginning, a largely British creation.
"The clearly stated preference pre-1900 was still for the British and the Ontario-born," wrote historians in Manitoba 125, A History.
"These made up an ever-growing majority, enough to set a solid cultural base for the province well into the next century -- Protestant, conservative and very British."
Two hundred years after Lord Selkirk arranged for the Sutherlands and Mathesons and McGilvrays and others to settle on the banks of the Red, British immigration has slowed to a trickle.
A little more than 100 Englishmen and women arrive in Winnipeg every year, and even fewer Scots and Irish.
That makes Adrian Trimble a bit of an anomaly, even more so because the young graphic designer's parents chose to settle in Steinbach, arguably a town with limited connection to Manitoba's British heritage.
"When we first heard the name of the town, my dad was thinking 'They'll have great sausages and great beer!' " quipped Trimble, now 21.
Trimble's family had considered leaving their West Wales home for some time before they arrived in Manitoba in 2006. The country had become expensive and crowded, with very steep university tuition and little chance of getting a job upon graduation.
"And the weather's terrible," added Trimble, who is preparing to attend university this fall.
His family was able to bypass the six- or seven-year wait to immigrate because his dad, a truck driver, secured a job with a Steinbach trucking company through the provincial nominee program.
What struck Trimble immediately as a 16-year-old immigrant was the same thing that struck William Lothian -- the endless flat.
"There are very few places in Europe that are this flat for so long," said Trimble. "That's the first thing you notice right off the bat."
That, and real seasons.
"It goes from very white to very grey to very green," he said.
He spent his first summer here biking between his new home and a summer job at the Superstore in Steinbach, where customers would ask him to keep speaking because they loved the sound of his accent.
-- -- --
The first white baby to be born in Manitoba was born to an Orkney woman in 1807, according to the Manitoba Historical Society. In what might be the province's most woeful tale, the woman, whose name is unknown, disguised herself as a man and stowed away on a Hudson's Bay Co. ship to follow her fickle lover to Canada. In his journal, fur trader Alexander Henry recorded the baby's birth on Dec. 29, 1807 at his trading post at the mouth of the Pembina River. Mother and child returned to Scotland the following summer, leaving a mystery in their wake.
Normally, though, the starting point for Manitoba's long history of British and Irish immigration is pegged on the arrival of the first batch of Selkirk settlers in the summer and fall of 1812. Mostly from the Orkney Islands, the Scottish Highlands and Ireland, the group began a series of lurching attempts to create a permanent, self-sufficient river-lot settlement in what's now north Main Street and West Kildonan. Several hard winters, crops that failed and often-violent conflict between the Hudson's Bay and the North West companies, forced many of the early waves of settlers to abandon the project.
"It was 'Try, try again,' " said George Hamilton, whose great-great-great-grandfather is John Sutherland, originally from Caen in the far north of Scotland and sent over with relatives in 1815 at the age of seven.
"Lord Selkirk tried three settlements before he got a successful one."
For many local descendents of the original settlers, the precise reason their ancestors chose to make the risky voyage to Manitoba is murky. As Hamilton said, it's almost as though family lore doesn't begin until the date of arrival in the new world.
The Highland Clearances, where tenant farmers were forced from their homes in favour of more lucrative agricultural practices, left many Scots landless, and big families with several boys exacerbated the problem. Migration into industrial urban centres was an option, but so was emigration.
The promise of good, free land and a degree of autonomy are likely what spurred people to leave, said Hamilton, who still farms part-time and works in agribusiness.
Some, like Catherine McGilvray, spoke only Gaelic, and it was a struggle to get schools and churches established and contend with floods, fires and the enmity of the Métis and the North West Company. Growth was slow, supplemented by former fur traders who took up land in the settlement.
By 1832, the settlement had only 1,200 people, and there was the occasional exodus to Ontario and the United States.
By 1997, though, one estimate held that 15,000 people could trace their lineage back to the roughly 45 original settlers who remained in the colony after 1817, proving farms could thrive on the Prairies, sparking Canada's expansion west and founding Winnipeg.
In many cases, children of the original settlers moved farther into Manitoba as the colony expanded. Bill Matheson, president of the Lord Selkirk Association of Rupert's Land and a descendent of original settler Alexander Matheson, is preparing to plant the 138th crop on land near Stonewall where Alexander Matheson's son and grandson homesteaded in the 1870s.
As the descendents drive through Winnipeg or travel the province, their family history is all around them, in monuments and church cemeteries and most notably, in street names such as Polson, Matheson and Pritchard.
"There's a temptation to think of it as my history," said Hamilton, who has recently started to really study his Selkirk roots.
"But this is Manitoba's history."
The slow success of the Red River settlement didn't open the floodgates of British immigration. Instead, there was a slow and steady flow throughout the 19th century, sped up by economic booms and railway construction and slowed in decades where grain prices were low.
Manitoba sidestepped some of the major waves of immigration that battered the continent. The province didn't get many Irish newcomers during the potato famine in the mid-1800s. They went to the United States, Quebec and Ontario, mostly. And in the last 20 years of the 1800s, just after the Lothian brothers arrived, when wheat prices were low and much of the farmland bought up by speculators, immigration to Manitoba declined precipitously.
-- -- --
Things turned as the century did.
According to University of Winnipeg history professor Ross McCormack, one of the few to make a study of Winnipeg's English immigrants, the period from 1900 to the start of the Great War marked a mini-boom in immigration from the Old Sod.
The period is best-known for the arrival of Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish settlers, who would eventually change the anglophile nature of the province.
But the waning of the British Empire and the economic boom of the Victorian age also prompted thousands of English and Scottish families to take a chance in Winnipeg.
They tended to be working-class people from big cities, but those with skills in demand.
"They came for the opportunity to have good, steady work," said McCormack.
Many Englishmen lived in Transcona and Weston, near the CN and CP rail yards where they worked. Many Ulstermen found work at Eaton's -- Timothy Eaton was from Northern Ireland -- and rose up through the ranks into management, while British women found work in Eaton's garment factories.
Like many immigrant groups, they formed their own ethnic enclaves. Elmwood, for example, across the river from factories where many British immigrants worked, had a very English character, according to McCormack. They supported mutual aid societies, stopped off at English boarding houses while they got on their feet, built a booming Anglican church and married among themselves.
Even Adrian Trimble had some distant relatives in the U.K. who came to Winnipeg in the early 1900s to work on the railroad. The couple had no children, so Trimble can't claim any long-lost cousins in Manitoba, and they retired in the U.K.
According to data from the federal government, Manitoba saw another British immigration boom in the mid-1970s.
In 1974 and 1975, more than 2,700 people arrived from England and Scotland -- not a huge total, but significantly more than in previous years.
That's when Pat and Tony Kennett immigrated to Winnipeg for the second time.
The couple first came over in the late 1960s, thanks entirely to happenstance.
Kennett, then finishing up his teaching certificate, went on a whim with a friend to a recruiting meeting in Bristol where representatives of the Manitoba government were desperate to woo teachers. Kennett had never really thought about leaving the U.K. -- like any 20-something, he'd barely thought beyond graduation. But the friends figured Manitoba made sense because they could get jobs and university credit for their British teaching credentials -- two birds with one stone.
Kennett and his friend arrived in late August just before Winnipeg's final summer long weekend, and, again, it was the bright prairie vastness that struck him.
"The blue sky and no rain," he said. "The blue sky seemed to stay forever. Oh God, it was absolutely beautiful."
A few months later, after doing the long-distance thing for several months, Pat Kennett followed Tony to Winnipeg and, wearing a miniskirt in March, married him, with the couples' seven friends as witnesses.
Pat, who grew up in Devon, quickly got a job as a telemarketer, but only lasted three days, stymied by all the Ukrainian pronunciations that filled Winnipeg's phone book.
"This silly little English girl couldn't get any of the names right," she said with a laugh.
Five years on, with one son and another on the way, the couple did what they had always planned to do -- return home to England.
They bought a house in England and Tony got a new teaching job, but the U.K. was in the grips of economic turmoil, thanks in large part to the oil embargo that drove up the price of everything, including houses.
Besides that, Winnipeg had "just gotten into our blood," said Pat. The couple hated the rain, missed Manitoba's real seasons, its outdoor life, the roots they had already put down and the friends they'd made.
"We just looked at each other and we said 'We think Canada is home,' " said Pat.
"I just became part of what it is to be Canadian," said Tony.
Now though, immigration from the British Isles has slowed to a trickle.
Only about two per cent of the province's immigrants, perhaps 200 or 300 people, come from the U.K. and Ireland every year.
Unlike the British immigrants before him, Adrian Trimble didn't expect Manitoba to be a mini-U.K. even though his people formed the genesis of the province. He said the family kept an open mind and expected an adjustment when they arrived.
"Without a doubt it's better," he said. "The way I perceive it, there's more opportunities in Canada for young people."
Trimble and his sister are planning to stay in Manitoba for the near future, and his parents are pondering doing a typically Canadian thing -- retiring to British Columbia.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 28, 2012 J1
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