Literacy and Canadianization

We have surveyed the first of two perspectives on illiteracy developed during the rise of monopoly capitalism in Canada. What demarcated the periods of dominance of the two perspectives was a change in the ethnic composition of the Canadian workforce, particularly as represented in the population of the work camps. Whereas in the period from 1899 to 1907, the majority (or at least a sizeable minority) of workers in the camps were British or Canadian born, in the post-1907 period immigrants from Central and Southern Europe came to predominate. E. W. Bradwin, an employee of the Reading Camp Association, pointed out in 1907 that the "foreign-born are becoming a fast increasing element of Canada's population" .44 By 1912, Alfred Fitzpatrick was able to write that "The Canadian navy, including the French-Canadian, has practically disappeared from our frontier camps". He observed that, "The manual labour is being done almost solely by the European navy".45

Avery notes that:

In the minds of many Anglo-Canadians the arrival of these "hordes" of foreigners stirred deep suspicion. The immigrants posed a serious challenge to Canadian institutions, particularly in the rapidly growing urban centres of Western Canada and northern Ontario where their concentration in ethnic ghettos made them, and their manifold problems, highly visible.46

The "immigrant question" became an explosive one, and Fitzpatrick and other educators of the time singled out education, particularly literacy education, as an effective means of responding to it. Let us now explore this new perspective on illiteracy and the background to its formulation.

The New Immigration

The major reason for the dramatic shift in the ethnic makeup of the workforce after 1907 was a change in the immigration policy of the Canadian government. According to Avery, in the view of the directors of the Immigration Branch:

it didn't matter where immigrants came from as long as they could be made to fit Canada's economic priorities. Racial and cultural factors could not be ignored, but above all immigrants should be selected according to their ability to adjust to the environmental and occupational demands of the Canadian frontier.47

As the need for agriculturalists declined and the demand labourers in railway construction, mining and lumbering grew around 1907, employers increasingly criticized the heretofore favored British immigrants for what were seen as their lack of capacity for hard physical labour and their unwillingness to tolerate low wages and primitive living conditions. 48 They put heavy pressure on federal government to admit a greater number of those immigrants were considered to be more docile and physically hardy, including Italians, Poles, Bulgarians and Slavs. 49 The Immigration Branch obliged and: