Immigration on the Prairies

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the population diffusion that Canada saw with its third wave of immigration. It deals with the changes in migration policy and land tenure that allowed this diffusion during Canada's third wave of immigration and specifically focuses on immigration on the prairies. The paper then discusses the prairie township system and how they worked in Canada.

From the Paper:

"With respect to the results of this process for the settlement landscape of the prairies, the most striking consequence was that townships were often organized into small micro-cultures, in order to encourage and facilitate immigration and homesteading. As I discussed in my previous paper, the government was inclined to promote immigration by a variety of cultural groups, such as "Mennonite settlers from Ukraine" (Lehr, 279) and therefore allowed them to gather together in townships, or clusters of townships, such as the "Mennonite West Reserve" (Lehr, 280), created in 1875, which consisted of twenty-two townships. Sifton took this process further, by encouraging immigration and land cultivation "under the colony or hamlet system" (Hall, 65), a move which he believed would encourage single men to consider homesteading. From this perspective, the township system may have encouraged the development of towns and communities, and may well have served as the impetus to immigration it was intended to be, however it also had drawbacks."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Hall, D.J. "Clifford Sifton: Immigration and Settlement Policy, 1896-1905" The Settlement of the West H. Palmer (Ed.) Calgary: U. of Calgary Press, 1977. (60-85).
• Lehr, John. "Western Interior: Transformation of a Hinterland Region" Heartland and

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