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

Between the 1830s and the 1940s, more than 100,000 poor British children were imported to Canada as indentured apprentices. While support for the socalled -juvenile immigration movement‖ was initially strong, it did not take long for the public and media to turn against the children. This episode in Canadian history, wherein children became the target of hostility, is one that until recently has been largely ignored in Canadian historiography. Although the juvenile immigration movement is mentioned in passing in most scholarly works about the history of British immigration to Canada, academic attention to the practice of importing child labourers began only in the late 1970s. To understand Canada's practice of importing young child labourers requires examining Britain's attempts to deal with its poor, the inter-relationship between Canada's labour needs and its immigration policies, and changing public perceptions of child labour that ultimately led to the demise of child importation.