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Industry and the Rural System in Quebec

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

Everett C. Hughes
Everett C. Hughes*
Affiliation:
McGill University
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Extract

This paper will describe the functional relationship of the growth of industry to the traditional system of rural life prevailing in Quebec. The general course of this growth is familiar enough. Quebec has always had industries which exploited the native resources of forest, sea, and lately, of the mines. In the present phase new major industries, which make little use of native materials except water and man-power, have invaded the province. Industries of this type are generally not on the frontiers of settlement, but in the very heart of the province. In the course of the last two decades, Quebec has become more urban than rural. It is now only slightly less industrial than Ontario.

Modern capitalistic industry grew up in a few centres, coincident with an enormous expansion of sources of raw materials and markets. Its spread has taken two forms: the first, still proceeding at a slackening rate, is the extension of its far-flung frontiers; the second is an inner expansion in which industry moves from its most intensely developed older centres to nearby less industrialized regions, where it finds a population accustomed to the main features of Western capitalistic civilization but not sophisticated with respect to its more extreme manifestations. Quebec and the southern United States are among the outstanding regions in which this inner expansion or “mopping up” is taking place.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , August 1938 , pp. 341 - 349
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1938

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References

1 For comparisons of birth-rates of the provinces and of the French and English, see Hurd, W. Burton, “The Decline in the Canadian Birth-rate” (Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, vol. III, 02, 1937, pp. 40–57).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Rural and village population is that of country districts and of incorporated places of less than 1,000 population in 1931. The general effect of this method of compilation would be to increase the rate of growth of rural and village population. The ordinary method would show an even smaller increase of rural and village population, thus accentuating the statements made here. The village population has multiplied by ten since 1871, but as it is only 130,000 now, it is not significant.

3 Enclosed in this block, but not counted because they had higher increases of rural population, are Sherbrooke, Drummond, Chambly, and Champlain. Examination proves that the apparent rural increase in these counties is really a growth of urban centres.

4 Census of Canada, 1931, vol. I, pp. 109 ff.Google Scholar

5 Lemieux, O. A. et al., “Factors in the Growth of Rural Population in Eastern Canada” (Proceedings of the Canadian Political Science Association, vol. VI, 1934, pp. 196–219).Google Scholar Of the twenty-five Quebec counties included in this study, twenty-four are in the block here discussed. The following pertinent points are made: Quebec farms were originally smaller than those in other provinces, and only now are catching up; there has been no decrease in the average size of the Quebec rural family, but the proportion of single persons over fifteen years of age has increased while the proportion under fifteen has declined. This indicates that the decrease in farm population is of persons too young to migrate.

6 Blanchard, Raoul, L'Est du Canada français (Paris, 1935)Google Scholar; also his “Etudes canadiennes” (Revue de géographie alpine, tomes XXV, XXVI, XXVII, 1936, 1937, 1938).Google Scholar

7 Census of Canada, 1931, vol. I, p. 109.Google Scholar

8 Hurd, “The Decline in the Canadian Birth-rate”. Hurd's figures, corrected by him for differences of age distribution of women, show that in 1931 English rural women had only 63 per cent of the number of children under five years of age had by French rural women; French urban women had only 61 per cent.

9 Hurd finds that the net rural-urban movement in Quebec for the decade 1921-31 was 19.2 per cent of the rural population of 1921. This was probably about all of the natural increase of the decade.

10 Census of Canada, 1931, vol. I, p. 83.Google Scholar

11 Haythorne, George V., “Agriculture and the Farm Worker in Eastern Canada” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1938).Google Scholar His compilations are based on the Census of 1931. In Kamouraska County, Quebec, Dr. H. Miner found it said that a childless couple could not succeed at farming.

12 Haythorne (ibid.) reports that 28.9 per cent own threshing machines. In the lower St. Lawrence region the figure is 47 per cent; in the middle St. Lawrence region, 32 per cent; 25 per cent own gas engines.

13 Miner, Horace, “St. Denis, a French-Canadian Parish” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1937).Google Scholar The findings are verified by Gérin, Léon, Le Type économique et social des Canadiens (Montreal, 1938).Google Scholar

14 Miner, Gérin, and the few agronomes with whom I have talked agree that if a farmer succeeds in acquiring a second farm, he nearly always gives it to a second son. He thus in effect establishes a second family. A part of the system has been the assumption by the inheriting son of full and exclusive responsibility for his parents in their declining years. A notary in Drummond County says that the system is endangered in his district by the rising cash cost of providing food, clothing, and medical care for the ageing parents.

15 Haythorne, , “Agriculture and the Farm Worker in Eastern Canada”, p. 446.Google Scholar Dr. Miner found in St. Denis a number of young men whose presence was thought anomalous because they had passed the age of expected emigration. In a sermon the curé urged them to leave the community to find work, as they were a burden upon their families.

16 As late as 1911, 1,165 of the 1,885 industrial workers in Drummond and Arthabaska Counties were in the log products, lumber and furniture industries, and in creameries. The rest were engaged in a wide variety of small industries which produced mainly for local markets ( Census of Canada, 1931, vol. III, table IXGoogle Scholar).

17 Compiled from the Census of Canada, 1911; Census of Manufacturing Industries in the Province of Quebec, 1934; and parish records.

18 Blanchard, Raoul. “Les Cantons de l'est” (Revue de géographie alpine, tome XXV, 1937, fascicule I, p. 174).Google Scholar

19 This information was compiled from parish records kindly made available by the curés. The clergy takes an annual census of all families, both Catholic and Protestant. The birth-place of the male head was recorded for 1,345 of the 3,426 families listed in 1936. Omission of this item ran by streets and blocks, indicating that some census-takers were less punctilious than others. The least complete records were found in an outlying parish whose population is almost completely French and of the working class. A perfect recording would probably show an even larger percentage of people of local origin.

20 A detailed account of the local class structure was read before the American Sociological Society at Atlantic City in December, 1937, and will probably appear shortly in the American Sociological Review.