Post Confederation Canadian History - Essay Example

Post Confederation Canadian History The Cnadian welfare like welfare s elsewhere, has undergone significant reform and restructuring. Reformers were concerned first and foremost with promoting healthy and efficient living to ensure national affluence. Peter Bryce, the chief dominion health officer, defined public health as 'the maintenance of the largest possible number of effective citizens, viewed from the standpoint of their economic value to the state.' It was evident that unhealthy, disease-ridden dwellings had an injurious impact on physical health by directly limiting the productivity of the labor force. W. Struthers, a prominent public health official, expressed reformers' concerns succinctly: 'Poor housing conditions, lack of light and ventilation, uncleanliness, ignorance of proper care of the body and of the laws of health, unwholesome and improper food and drink, the prevalence of venereal and other diseases are rapidly producing a degenerate race.' The threat of 'race suicide' loomed large in the outlook of housing reformers as it did in all the social improvement campaigns of the era. It was widely believed that the deplorable health of the working class, most visibly demonstrated in the high failure rates in military medical inspections, and the large-scale 'infiltration' of non-British immigrants would jeopardize the future of the Anglo-Saxon 'race.' One worrying development noted by reformers was the hesitancy of landlords to rent dwellings to families with children. This reluctance was commonly noted by observers of the urban scene and became particularly serious after the war with the housing shortage. It represented a concrete manifestation of the potential conflict of interest between different sections of capital -- industrialists and landlords -- over questions such as the reproduction of the workforce. As one conservative union bureaucrat in Toronto, J.T. Gunn, put it blatantly in 1920, 'Landlords object to children, with the result that we are drifting into race suicide.' 'Race' was a loosely defined term used extensively by social commentators to designate the peculiar social attributes that allegedly derived from the biology or culture of a particular people. In the English-Canadian case, this attitude was largely rooted in a sense of the inherent superiority of British 'stock' and constituted a fundamental element of the social hierarchy. It reflected the ideological legacy of the conquest of French Canada and the Native peoples, the Anglo-chauvinism associated with the international hegemony of the British Empire, and the Eurocentric racism linked to colonialism and slavery. Whether one was an environmentalist who believed that active intervention could uplift the social and moral conditions of the indigent and socially 'misfit' or a hereditarian who envisioned that social problems originated in immutable biological traits, there was a common opinion that the Canadian 'race' could be bettered. Neither was there disagreement that the physical, mental, and moral state of the race faced grave danger unless prompt action was taken. Early reformers isolated infectious diseases as the main peril because they threatened to overtake the city as a whole. A 1906 editorial in the Toronto Daily News outlined this threat to the 'respectable' classes: 'The Ward constitutes a constant menace to the physical and moral health of the city. It is an open sore from which flow fetid currents which cannot but be corrupting to the whole community.' The metaphor of disease was widely used to depict the slum housing conditions of immigrants and the poor. Dr Charles Hodgetts, head of the Public Health and Housing section of the COC, argued that temporary shack towns on the outskirts of cities were quickly becoming the 'overcrowded permanent homes of a foreign population -- hot beds of parasitic and communicable diseases and breeders of vice and inequity.' Such bigotry was extended to working-class British and American immigrants as well, revealing the new-found view that race degeneration stemmed partly from urban-industrial life. The distinguished psychiatrist C.K. Clarke regarded them as 'failures at home, and are often so because of congenital defects. Their progeny may rise above their own level, but they never cease to suffer from their misfortunes of birth.' It was not the wretched housing conditions that immigrant workers had to endure that was isolated as the problem, but rather the immigrants themselves. In the face of intense market competition and the threat of decreasing labor productivity, manufacturers soon added their voice to the chorus of concern expressed by state officials and reform-minded individuals over the working-class housing problem. They discerned a direct link between the factories and the homes of workers, a relationship that needed to be reinforced. As one industrialist put it when discussing the necessity of employers involving themselves in housing reform: 'It is the best class of philanthropy which results in raising the condition of our citizens and thereby increasing their efficiency.' Bettering the housing conditions of the working class also promised to offset the specter of fierce confrontation between labor and capital. Industrial Canada warned that 'out of the slums stalk the Socialist with his red flag, the Union agitator with the auctioneer's voice and the Anarchist with his torch.' If many Canadian-born workers did not qualify as deserving citizens, then immigrants could hardly expect better treatment from social policy thinkers and makers. Immigration controls aspired to stop the flow of physically, mentally, and morally 'unfit' immigrants at the border, while restraints in social policy effectively limited or barred social services to those 'second-class' citizens -- immigrants and aliens --already residing in the country. J.A. Ellis, commissioner of the Ontario Railway and Municipal Board and overseer of the Ontario Housing Committee, established to implement the 1919 Federal Housing program in the province, wrote to Premier Hearst arguing that the scheme should be confined to British subjects only. 'Persons, who are not British subjects,' he noted crudely, 'are often undesirable occupants of any home.' The federal government's 1919 housing program was almost exclusively limited to veterans: a highly regarded group of citizens at the time, given the government's fear of disaffected returned soldiers. Restrictive covenants prohibiting certain ethnic and racial minorities in federal housing programs and in suburban housing developments were the logical conclusion of the attitude that non-British immigrants posed a threat to the racial norms of Canadian society. Although their origins were corporate, these covenants were a particular reflection of a generalized opinion in the reform movement on the 'foreign problem.' There is clear evidence that municipal officials routinely overlooked such practices until the 1950s. For the environmentally minded, who believed in the efficacy of social improvement measures, the question remained of how to manage the growing numbers of unhealthy and immoral persons in the country, immigrant or otherwise. J.S. Woodsworth, a Winnipeg mission worker, Methodist minister, and prominent spokesperson of the social gospel movement, summarized the dilemma: 'English and Russian, French and Germans, Austrians and Italians, Japanese and Hindus -- a mixed multitude, they are being dumped into Canada by a kind of endless chain. They sort themselves out after a fashion, and each seeks to find a corner somewhere. But how shall we weld this heterogeneous mass into one people' Forcing immigrants and native-born workers to conform to suitable conventions of 'Canadian' living was the response given by the champions of better public health and housing. 'Ticketing and raiding' a house -- identifying and labeling a residence in preparation for condemnation -- was the preferred method of supervising the behavior expected to occur within and beyond the domestic environment. From 1911 to 1918, Dr Charles Hastings reported that 1682 homes had been destroyed by such means in Toronto. Hamilton's public health officer proposed that the city hire a battalion of inspectors to 'systematically go looking for trouble.' Winnipeg authorities gloated that they dealt with the 'overcrowding evil by dint of stern repression and frequent prosecutions.' They even held house inspections at night, claiming that such raids would only trouble those with a 'guilty conscience.' Asian shanty towns in Vancouver and New Westminster were frequently inspected and destroyed with no concern for the inhabitants. Drastic action such as slum clearances temporarily eliminated bad environments and ensured racial purity by preventing foreign slum conditions from spreading to other areas. But house inspection and condemnation also constituted a significant form of coercive state intervention, serving as a means of pre-emptive repression and a way of enforcing suitable standards of conduct. In the classification of the growing problems of working-class housing, identity and place were firmly intertwined. Local boards of health targeted the most visible and disreputable slum areas. As David Ward contends, slums expressed 'the presumed causal links between social isolation, and adverse environment and deviant behavior.' In Toronto, the infamous Ward became synonymous with physical and moral degeneracy. Around the turn of the century, the Ward referred to the St John area of downtown, populated mostly by the city's Italian and Jewish population. It was a convenient area for civic attention because it was next door to City Hall and the wealthy neighborhood around the provincial legislative buildings. In his comprehensive study of housing in 1911, Hastings stressed the dense overcrowding and shabby conditions of the lodging houses and tenements of Eastern European immigrants in the Ward. Blame was placed squarely on the 'foreign element': Jews, Italians, and Poles, with their 'dirty habits.' Although landlords were blamed for renting 'most any condition,' the problem was also attributed to the foreigners who had acquired property. By 1919, as the immigrant population moved westward, the Ward was developing new meaning. The persistence of the area and its fixation in reform thought provoked the Bureau of Municipal Research, a civic research organization, to call the Ward 'a condition, an attitude of mind toward life, a standard of living -- not merely a geographic locality.' Indeed, in 1934, a government study placed it to the west of its 1900 boundaries. In her fascinating study of 'racial discourse' in Vancouver's Chinatown, Kay Anderson analyses a similar conflation of identity and place. In the mid-1890s City Council officially classified 'Chinatown' as a formal entity in health department records and activities: 'Along with water, sewerage, scavenging, infectious disease, slaughter houses, and pig ranches, Chinatown was listed as a separate category and assigned a special officer to supervise it under the by-laws.' Throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, city officials persistently harassed and persecuted Chinese businesses and residences under the cloak of 'sanitary concerns.' In 1910 a clique of prominent local officials, including the mayor, the chief of police, and the medical officer of health, set out to achieve 'full control of conditions in Chinatown.' Anderson insightfully concludes that the geographical and ideological construction of Chinatown served as a helpful means for the state at the local level to frame 'a divisive system of racial classification.' The construction of race was developed in relation to external economic and political pressures as well as internal conflicts. In an era of competing imperialisms, the menace posed by detrimental living conditions on economic, military, and reproductive capacity caused great apprehension among social commentators and policy makers. The sweeping respect accorded to the idea of empire, British or German, speaks clearly to the imperialist assumptions underlying the housing reform campaign. The Contract Record and Engineering Review, a building industry magazine, argued in June 1918 that 'proper housing not only means better health and more comfort, but also a greater fitness for the day's work, which in its turn, means a more vigorous and optimistic prosecution of the war.' In an article entitled 'Defective Children,' Dr Helen MacMurchy, a noted Ontario pediatrician and leading eugenicist, favorably cited British prime minister Lloyd George's admonition, 'You cannot have an A1 army on a C3 population.' George Ross, the architect responsible for designing the homes for the post-First World War Halifax Reconstruction Committee's Hydrostone scheme stood in 'awe' of Germany's town planning advances. Detailing the impressive housing schemes in the city of Ulm, Germany, Noulan Cauchon, future president of the Town Planning Institute of Canada, argued that Canada needed to meet the challenge of the enemy: 'Such is the efficiency of the enemy whom we will have to fight industrially after the war and reveals one of the reasons why he can compete so successfully -- wherein he has learned to live efficiently and cheaply.' The influence of 'social imperialism,' in which social reform ideas were thoroughly permeated with imperialist assumptions, was striking. Works Cited Francis, R Douglas, Richard Jones nd Donald B Smith,, (2004). Destinies: Canadian History since Confederation, 5th ed., Scarborough: Thomson Nelson Francis, R. Douglas nd Donald B Smith., (2002). Readings in Canadian History: post Confederation, 6th ed., Toronto: Thomson Learning Read More