Lori Jones - Not Here by Choice: Canada‘s Importation of Child Labourers (original) (raw)

Who Cares? Welfare and Consent to Child Emigration from England to Canada, 1870–1918

Liverpool Law Review, 2019

From the 1870's, children in the care of charities or state provided institutions, including workhouses and industrial schools, were subject to the practice of emigration to Canada, separating them from their parents and wider family. This was achieved ostensibly to secure the child's welfare, and provide opportunities in Canada beyond the poverty of the industrialising cities of the north of England. Using original archive material, this article examines the legal rights of parents of children identified for emigration, and how charities and state institutions obtained the authority to emigrate children. The lack of a clear basis for assessing child welfare led organisations to consider a broad range of moralistic considerations regarding the characterisation of parents and the child's circumstances in deciding whether a child should be emigrated. Despite these negative perceptions, it will be demonstrated that some parents exercised considerable agency in seeking to resist emigration of a child, and in attempting to maintain the familial relationship.

Cossar’s Colonists: Juvenile Migration to New Brunswick in the 1920s

Acadiensis, 1998

CONTROVERSY HAS ALWAYS been a concomitant of migration, and perhaps no aspect of the phenomenon has been so persistently controversial as the transfer of more than 100,000 children and adolescents from Britain to Canada between 1870 and 1930. Unlike the farmers, tradesmen, domestic servants and entrepreneurs who were lured across the Atlantic by promises of abundant land, high wages, congenial employment and lucrative investment opportunities, these unaccompanied, often destitute, juveniles came to Canada by compulsion rather than choice. They were, perhaps more than any other category of migrant, passive pawns in the hands of agents who aimed to relieve overpopulation, pauperism and unemployment in Britain, and also to satisfy incessant Canadian demands for cheap labour, while simultaneously strengthening the imperial bond. Despatched by an army of British philanthropists as an integral part of their high-profile moral and economic crusade for "God and Empire", 1 the young migrants not only introduced the new-and pejorative-term of "home child" to the Canadian vocabulary. Their successes and failures also sharpened the emigration debate on both sides of the Atlantic, as the objectives and achievements of the "child savers" were increasingly criticized by employers, politicians, psychologists and social workers. While most home children were sent to southern Ontario, significant numbers were also settled further east. This paper evaluates institutionalized juvenile migration to Maritime Canada. It does so primarily by considering the activities of one particular agency, the Cossar Farms, of Paisley, Scotland and Gagetown, New Brunswick. The chronic poverty, overcrowding, destitution and vice that characterized late Victorian Britain's city slums spawned numerous charitable relief programmes, both national and provincial. In the absence of state welfare provision, churches and charities strove to rescue and rehabilitate needy men, women and children, sometimes through domestic assistance alone, often by linking home-based relief to assisted emigration schemes, and occasionally by concentrating exclusively on training and sending emigrants. While the main catalyst for overseas relocation was the practical argument that selective assisted emigration could address labour-supply problems in both Britain and Canada, there were also philosophical considerations. Many of the emigrationists of the 1870s and 1880s were inspired by an evangelical Christian

Exploiting the Future: The Evolution of Child Labour Laws in Ontario from the Pre-Industrial Period to the 1930s

Waterloo Historical Review

Child labour was not uncommon in the pre-industrial period, yet with industrialization demand for child labour in workplaces other than family farms and contractual apprenticeships rose. In the context of factories, shops and mines, employers had no legal liability for the health and wellness of the children they employed. Legislation emerged to fill this void as early as the 1880s, yet it was poorly enforced. It would only be with the modernization of industry, the rise of wages for skilled labourers, and increasing public consciousness about the value of education that child labour would decrease across the province in the early 20<sup>th</sup> century.

Deporting Mad Girls: A Colliding of the Century of the Child and the Century of Canada

Friends of the CAMH Archives Newsletter, 2022

T hrough my current dissertation research, I examine the experiences of children in psychiatric facilities between 1880 and 1930. In the course of this research, I came across three patients' archival files that bring together 20th-century discourses on the future of Canada, immigration, eugenics, and youth. The experiences of Dorothy, Margaret, and Eileen-pseudonyms to protect their identities-at Toronto's provincial Asylum for the Insane (opened 1850, now CAMH Queen Street site) shed light on people who found themselves at the intersections of these discourses. In particular, their files illustrate the consequences of discourses and policies for youth by bringing together the growth of mental hygiene beliefs, immigration policies, and Toronto Asylum, 1910-postcard, courtesy of Toronto Public Library, Baldwin Collection https://digitalarchive.tpl.ca/ the growing anxieties around Canadian youth. These beliefs tied into the eugenic idealism that sought to forge a healthy

Barber, Marilyn and Murray Watson–Invisible Immigrants: The English in Canada since 1945. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2015. Pp. 288. (review)

Histoire Sociale/Social History, 2017

With their life-story approach, Barber and Watson build on, and offer comparisons with, Jim Hammerton and Al Thomson's Ten Pound Poms (a study [End Page 450] of the English in Australia) and Murray Watson's Being English in Scotland. The authors challenge the invisibility of English immigrants in Canadian historiography and suggest rather that "in many respects the English are invisible, though audible" (p. 153). Their analysis sheds light on the range of factors motivating English emigrants and on the ways in which they experienced Canada's newly adopted role as a civic nation. The writers ground these narratives in a wealth of secondary literature, select periodicals, and archival documents, and consider them in relation to "contextual issues related to family and gender, social class, welfare, race and ethnicity, sensory perception, technology, and popular culture" (p. 28). However, one should read their conclusions with caution, since about one-third of English immigrants returned to England or moved elsewhere, and the authors interviewed none of these people.

Settler Colonial Structures of Domestication: British Home Children in Canada

Genealogy, 2021

There has been a surge of research on Home Children in the past several decades, as the phenomenon previously unknown to many came into the spotlight. However, much of the historical research has focused on either the psychological and physical impacts on the children at the hands of their new “families” (there were many reports of child abuse and neglect) or the ways they were saved from their poverty in Britain by being sent to the colonies. This article will put this existing historical research into conversation with theories of settler colonialism, considering Home Children as a tool of domestication for the social reproduction of Canadian white settler society, which was paired with the forced removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands. This analysis stems from and is intertwined with personal reflections on my own family history as a white settler woman descending from a Home Child to explore the gendered labour of social reproduction as a crucial pillar in creating and m...

Elimi(Nation): Canada’s “Post-Settler” Embrace of Disposable Migrant Labour

Studies in Social Justice

This article utilizes the lens of disposability to explore recent conditions of low-wage temporary migrant labour, whose numbers and economic sectors have expanded in the 21stcentury. A central argument is that disposability is a discursive and material relation of power that creates and reproduces invidious distinctions between the value of “legitimate” Canadian settler-citizens (and candidates for citizenship) and the lack of worth of undesirable migrant populations working in Canada, often for protracted periods of time. The analytical lens of migrant disposability draws upon theorizing within Marxian, critical modernity studies, and decolonizing settler colonial frameworks. This article explores the technologies of disposability that lay waste to low wage workers in sites such as immigration law and provincial/territorial employment legislation, the workplace, transport, living conditions, access to health care and the practice of medical repatriation of injured and ill migrant ...

Growing up Canadian: A study of new immigrant children

1998

Direction générale de la recherche appliquée Politique stratégique Développement des ressources humaines Canada The views expressed in this document are the authors' and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Human Resources Development Canada or of the federal government. Les opinions exprimées dans le présent document sont celles des auteurs et ne reflètent pas nécessairement le point de vue de Développement des ressources humaines Canada ou du gouvernement fédéral. # The Working Paper Series includes analytical studies and research conducted under the auspices of the Applied Research Branch of Strategic Policy. Papers published in this series incorporate primary research with an empirical or original conceptual orientation, generally forming part of a broader or longer-term program of research in progress. Readers of the series are encouraged to contact the authors with comments and suggestions. La série des documents de travail comprend des études analytiques et des travaux de recherche réalisés sous l'égide de la Direction générale de la recherche appliquée, Politique stratégique. Il s'agit notamment de recherches primaires, soit empiriques ou originales et parfois conceptuelles, généralement menées dans le cadre d'un programme de recherche plus vaste ou de plus longue durée. Les lecteurs de cette série sont encouragés à faire part de leurs observations et de leurs suggestions aux auteurs.

Child Welfare and the Imperial Management of Childhood in Settler Colonial Canada, 1880s-2000s

The Canadian child welfare system perpetuates deeply colonial relations. Indigenous children are being removed en masse, die at exceptionally high rates in the system, and the child welfare personnel is primarily drawn from the white settler society. This dissertation seeks to find answers to the question of how this present-day reality came to be and how Indigenous child removal can continue so vigorously. This dissertation is a genealogical inquiry into the beginnings and development of the Canadian child welfare system. Through extensive archival research, it traces how this institutional framework re-articulates relations of coloniality – relations through which Indigenous peoples are rendered subjects to be managed and white settlers are re-inscribed as dominant, superior, and – despite the enormous violence that underpins their subject positions – as ‘caring’. I advance the argument that the management of childhood is of central concern to the colonial/racial state. Child welfare emerged as an imperial project, for the purpose of white settler colonial nation-building. Animated by a colonial concern that the white race be preserved, early child-rescue initiatives focused on ‘saving’/managing the damaged but salvageable white settler child. These children were to be prevented from ‘sinking’ to the level of the Indian or racial Other, and molded into useful citizens for the white settler colony. At the turn of twentieth century, Indigenous children were rendered extraneous to the emerging field of child welfare. State interest in the Indigenous child was an annihilative and carceral interest, animated by the idea that Indigenous children had to be removed and contained in institutions (i.e. Indian Residential Schools). While Indian Residential Schools were eventually phased out, the colonizers’ focus on Indigenous child removal remained. Indigenous child removal emerged as a central modality of colonial power, the intent of which was to effect Indigenous erasure and dispossession for the proliferation of the settler colony. This modality of power continues through the child welfare system today, sustaining the settler society’s annihilative and accumulative impulse, continuing to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands and sovereignty.