“Seventeen special trains from Halifax and Saint John are due in Montreal” Saturday and Sunday, carrying 6,000 immigrants,” the Halifax Herald reported April 2, 1910. More than 12,000 arrived during the week. It has been “the biggest week in the immigration line that Canada has had for a good many years,” says the Herald. Most […]
Category: Economic history
The stink of dirty money
Dirty money was once more than a metaphor. It had a horrible stench, according to this letter published in the London, Ontario Advertiser, April 4, 1902. An open letter to the Hon. W.S. Fielding, minister of finance, and to all the general managers of the Canadian banks: Gentlemen — Are you willing, by a single […]
Business against 8-hour work day
British Columbia would be crippled by a mandatory eight-hour work day, proposed by an independent member of the Legislature, a delegation of 20 businessmen warns in a meeting with Premier John Oliver and his cabinet, the Victoria Times reports, November 11, 1921. A resolution passed by the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association and endorsed by the business […]
Sad decline of little towns follows shift to big cities
The railways and industrialization began to shift Canada’s population from rural farm areas to the big cities in the late 1800s. The Weekly Sun, a leading Ontario farm newspaper published in Toronto, lamented the decline of little towns in its issue of January 21, 1897. A rather melancholy part of our present situation is […]
Free trade kills marriage hopes
Free trade is a bit like religion: economists agree it would be a good thing, if it were practiced as much as it’s preached. In the nineteenth century, there was as much preaching against free trade as for it. One of the anti-free trade preachers was Toronto’s Mail and Empire, as seen in this satire, […]
1857 Great Financial Panic unheeded lesson for 2008 Great Recession
The Great Recession of 2008 began with the collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank and the bursting of an eight trillion dollar real estate bubble. The Great Financial Panic of 1857. might have been a lesson. It began with the collapse of a bank in Ohio, railway failures and the burst of an […]
Tipped lamp kills 50 in theatre fire
Camphene, an explosive mixture of alcohol and redistilled turpentine, was a popular but dangerous lamp fuel in mid-nineteenth century. Whale oil had been the universal lamp fuel for decades, but it had become expensive as whales were hunted almost to extinction. Camphene was not only cheaper but burned brighter and cleaner. It also tended to […]
Tough times blamed on National Policy
Winnipeg’s main street in 1894. Tough times were blamed on the high costs of John A. Macdonald’s National Policy, but with a plethora of bachelors, men were said to be excited about the prospect of boatloads of buxom young English women. Glenbow Archives NA-118-24. Free trade 1840-1894 A correspondent for the Regina Standard, December 7, […]
History of fierce Can-Am free trade and protection issue backgrounds high-stake NAFTA renegotiation
No Canadian political and economic issue is as contentious, persistent, and long-running as the struggle between free trade and protection. A concise account of that issue from 1840 to the 1988 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement provides essential historical background to the impending high-stakes renegotiation of NAFTA with the erratic Trump administration. The record clearly confirms […]