Couldn’t one say something similar about any U.S. state in the Mountain time zone?
The Dominion Lands Act, generally in force from 1871 to 1930, allowed any head of household to claim 160 acres for a registration fee of $10, as long as they promised to live on the plot and improve it. One hundred eighteen million acres, mostly in the prairie provinces, were thereby transferred to private ownership. This act was quite closely based on the U.S. Homestead Act.
So? Do you know the difference between a oceanic climate and a continental one? The average daily high temperature remains above freezing year-round in Copenhagen. In northern Ontario it … doesn’t.
Real estate in Canada is expensive because the overwhelming majority of the population wants to live in a relatively restricted area. What Crown Land is within reasonable commuting distance of Toronto or Ottawa?
And why do you think the federal government owns most of the states in the Mountain time zone?
Then you haven’t been reading this thread, or else you missed this post:
You could check out this short summary: The Canadian Homestead Act
And it wasn’t 40 acres that a homesteader got for free: it was 160 acres, with an option to buy another 160 acres for $10, once the homesteader had established himself on the first quarter.
As the article says at the end:
Then there was the Soldier Settlement Act, which was designed to help veterans from the Great War become farmers. That wasn’t so much a land-grant program as a financial support program, to help veterans buy farm land. Why a financial program rather than a land grant programme? because by that time, most of the good farm land was in private hands, not Crown land, because the government had been diligent in getting farmland into private hands through the homestead program.
Yes, but the northern part of Ontario does not get the benefit of either the Gulf Stream or the North Atlantic Current, which is why the UK and the Nordic countries have milder climates than parts of Canada at the same latitude.
Still waiting for you to show examples of metropolitan areas which are hemmed in by Crown land that the government is not selling, even though it would be suitable for residential development. As Muffin has demonstrated, in Ontario, the Crown land is largely located far away from settled areas.
In fact it did, but they smartly did it where there was arable land to give away (or at the least sell for very cheap), in the Prairies. There’s like, Heritage Minutes about it and everything. It’s the reason I exist in Canada, since it’s how my Polish grandparents came over to Canada. Northern Ontario being the same latitude as Copenhagen is irrelevant when there’s no soil there suitable for agriculture. Do you honestly think that we just decided to skip over Ontario when settling the west? If people wanted to farm there, they would have, instead of hiking halfway across the continent. Parts of the Sahara are at the same latitude as North Carolina, but no one’s growing tobacco there. Northern Ontario is wide swaths of forest and impassable muskeg, and turning it into arable land would be not unlike terraforming Mars. I mean, do you see a difference between Copenhagen’s climate and Winnisk, ON’s, located on the north shore of Ontario (I’m not sure if anyone’s ever typed that phrase before)?
You are welcome to move to Kapuskasing or Sudbury or Dryden or… and find a very cheap house - on a quick MLS search I found you can get a nicely furnished 1200 sq ft house in the Kap for $170k - or you could move to any number of small towns on the prairies for even cheaper. I could move back to the town I grew up in in Saskatchewan and buy a house outright for the equity that I have in my house in Calgary – but you couldn’t get me to do that at gunpoint, because there’s not a job for me or my wife there and it’s miles and miles away from anything. Cheap housing exists in absolute spades in Canada, but it is cheap because no one wants to live there. You have to have a reason to live somewhere. You might as well ask why Wyoming, which is about the size of New England + 1/3 of New York, has less than 600k people.
Heck, you don’t even have to move out into the hinterlands (for varying definitions thereof) to find cheap houses in Southern Ontario. You could move to Peterborough. Or Chatham. Or Windsor. Or Brighton. All of those on a quick search had decent looking houses in the 150-250k range. But you don’t want to live there? OK. Turns out Toronto (and Vancouver, and Montreal, and Calgary, and…) house prices are expensive because a lot of people want to live there, and not in these other places.
In your enthusiasm for your tearing down job you don’t seem to be addressing the actual point coremelt was making … not that immigrants from SE Asia are particularly likely to be farmers, but that if at the point when this country was deliberately trying to recruit farmers to work the land (pre-1910? pre-1950?) some of those people had been from tropical regions, they would have been more likely to settle in tropical regions.
Of course the current migrants from SE Asia are educated urban people who want to live in large cities. That’s the sort of people our immigration policy selects for - at the moment. I can’t imagine that we’re putting forward great efforts to recruit farmers of any nationality, given that we’re not currently short on food production.
Where is your evidence for this claim? Those same people from tropical regions who settled in Australia after 1950 have been *less *likely to settle in tropical regions. Where is your evidence that this would have been different ten years earlier?
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Can you support that with any evidence? Are migrants from SE Asia actually more highly educated than migrants from western Europe and, most importantly, are they relatively more educated than the migrants of 1950? Because I don’t believe either is true.
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We aren’t talking primarily about the current migrants from SE Asia. We are talking about all migrants since 1971. Do you really believe that all those Vietnamese and Cambodian boat people were educated urban people? No, of course not. Most had “a low level of education and worked in mainly unskilled jobs prior to their departure” and, I imagine, primarily rural. Yet >80% of them settled in Sydney and Melbourne. Doesn’t that alone refute your idea that it is only education that leads Asians settling almost exclusively in capital cities?
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What difference does this make? Why are educated tropical people disposed to love in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth whereas uneducated ones are not?
Quite simply, show me some evidence for the claim that people from SE Asia are more likely to settle in tropical areas, because I have showed you the evidence that they are, in fact, less likely to do so. And show me evidence that uneducated SE immigrants are more likely to settle in tropical area areas than Italian refugees, because I can easily show you evidence to the contrary.
Australia hasn’t put an effort into recruiting farmers since before the Boer War, which is not the period we are talking about. If you mean farm labourers then, yes, Australia is indeed putting efforts into recruiting them.
Migrants want to go where the jobs are, which is cities mostly in the south of Australia. In the 1860’s Chinese immigrants went to where the gold rushes where, then many of them left due to increasing Anti-chinese feeling in the 1870s and later which then became the white Australia policy.
https://arrow.latrobe.edu.au/store/3/4/5/5/1/public/education/history.htm
When Australia was actively recruiting settlers for rural areas (before 1900) they were looking for white settlers. The Chinese were only tolerated in boom areas as sources of cheap labor and then made to feel unwelcome after.
How does any of that justify your claim that SE Asian migrants would be more likely to live outside the capital cities than European migrants? We know that SE Asian migrants are, and always have been, far more likely to settle in capital cities than European migrants. The reasons for that are irrelevant because the facts are odds with your claim.
Or your claim that Cape York is temperate, when we know that Cape York is tropical.The reasons for that are irrelevant because the facts are odds with your claim.
Or your claim that kangaroo farming would increase food production. We know that kangaroos can’t be practically farmed at all, much less at a level that increases food production. The reasons for that are irrelevant because the facts are odds with your claim.
Or…
Seriously, Coremelt, this is GQ. It’s the place for factual answers. Everything you have posted so far has either been factually wrong, or at best a baseless assertion that is at odds with the facts that we *do *have.
Do you think perhaps your contributions might be better suited to another forum?
Lets keep track of who’s claiming what here. My claim, as you can see from my words above is that you didn’t address the point coremelt was making in that paragraph and my evidence for this is his words
I don’t think that talking about the patterns of Asian migration post-1970 is very relevant to the question of what the pattern of migration would have been if it had been allowed in the White Australia period - 1901 to 1970 (or so). The first half of the twentieth century was vastly different from the second half in Australia and our neighbors. If post-1970 Asian migrants want to go to the big cities then of course they
go mainly to the south - that’s where the big cities are. And they were put there by the people who first set the pattern of urbanisation in Australia - that is, the primarily Anglo/Irish settlers who came here in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Would a largely SE-Asian set of migrants have shown the same bias? Well, China, a country with a similarly wide range of climates, shows no such pattern - its ten largest cities are spread quite evenly through climate zones from cool-temperate (Beijing) to sub-tropical (Shenzhen). So apparently when Chinese people, for one, are able to arrange the pattern of population in a country they don’t particularly cluster round the cool temperate areas (and I’ll get to some other nations later).
Not claiming that - claiming that they’re more likely to be educated and urbanised than the potential migrants of 1901.
Who chose for the Vietnamese refugees to come to Sydney and Melbourne? Them, or the Australian Government?
“Hi, we’re the Navy - we’ve come to take you to Australia”
“Thank God, we’ve been desperate to get out of this place. Where are we going?”
“Melbourne”
“Never heard of it. Sounds great, let’s start.”
Anyway, this is a side issue too. Remember, this part of the discussion started with speculation on what would have happened if there hadn’t been a White Australia policy in 1901 and following
Ok, remembering that we’re looking for evidence of what would have happened in the absence of the White Australia policy. Is there any? Actually, yeah, some. For instance:
http://museumvictoria.com.au/origins/history.aspx?pid=27
So - we’ve got a country of 40 million or so (at the time) 200km or less off our northern border, apparently quite willing to come and make a living here until actively kicked out. At the same time, up until the 70’s Australia is actively trying to recruit population, to the point of paying people to come here from right across the other side of the world. This, yes, seems to me evidence that Indonesians also would have continued to come here if allowed, and that they would have settled in the place they were already going to - the north coast.
Here’s another one from the same site:
(my bolding). So Malaysians were also coming here, not to the SE seaboard cities, and were prevented by White Australia.
Finally, I might as well recap that we are all in agreement that Australia’s population would have been larger without the White Australia policy, aren’t we? It’s the amount, and where they would go that we’re wrangling over.
Ah! Found better data:
This goes to the proposition that more Asian immigration during the White Australia period would have led to more usage of the northern areas than we find today.
Some key figures (male stats, excluding Indigenous Australians):
…Total Population…Asians…Polynesians
NSW … 858k …10k…676
Vic …656k…6k…121
Queensland…330k…8k…1567
SA …207k…1k…23
WA… 162k…6k…57
Tas…98k…0.6k…21
NT…3k…1.3k…11
So in 1911, Asians are more likely than the general population to live in Queensland,WA and especially the NT - that last stat is quite striking. The total non-Aboriginal population of the NT is given as 2,700 of which 1,359 are Asian-born, mostly Chinese - and less than you’d expect in Victoria, SA and Tassie.
(the stats for women are very different BTW, which I presume means the government was willing to tolerate non-Anglo guest workers, but was dead against them bringing their families).
Polynesians (which I included just for the hell of it), although there in pretty tiny numbers, overwhelmingly want to live in Queensland. So there again - in the early part of last century, people from tropical countries settling in tropical areas.
Depends why they were leaving the UK. You can’t assume that it was for political reasons. Irish folks after the famine, sure, I could see them wanting to shake the dust of the UK off their feet.
But a lot of people emigrated from the UK for economic reasons, or wanderlust, but that didn’t mean they wanted to stop being British. The British connexion was an important part of the political scene in Canada and Australia in the 19th century and into the 20th.
In my own family (British immigrants on both sides), I grew up with a strong sense of connexion to Britain. My family came to Canada for economic reasons - free land! less class structure! and, in the case of one of my grandmothers, I’ve always assumed a sense of adventure. But that didn’t mean that they wanted to cut ties to Britain - far from it.
An analogy in the US would be people from the eastern seaboard who moved west in quest of better farmland. They weren’t moving to get away from the US, but to improve their economic position. That didn’t mean that they wanted to cut ties with the US.
I saw the settlement acts, I just meant that Canada never “finished the job” to promote a more balanced population density around the country. And people live all over inhospitable areas worldwide, like Kashmir or Lapland or the Italian Alps
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Look, I’m not expecting Baffin Island to be the next Scarborough. I’m just asking if there has ever been a critical analysis of exactly how, when and why Crown Land got allocated the way it did. Considering that the major areas like GTA/Vancouver are so tapped out and young Canadians are being economically driven out of their communities, why not have a questioning attitude about it? Is it really government benevolence or are there special interests who benefit from this at the expense of Canadian society?
Heck, lots of foreigners find it strange that Canada is so empty (look at this thread). You may be 100% right but I’m not ready to just hand-wave it away as “worthless land”.
Why is it their job to promote more balanced population density? That’s a very different and far more complex job than simply making land available–have you actually though what policies would be required?
And I think you should look a little closer at settlement patterns in Lapland or South Tyrol. In the latter, for example, the main city is in a subtropical climate pattern; other substantial areas are in typically oceanic climates. The areas that are actually in typically alpine regions are much more thinly settled, AND they are close to and derive substantial business from more hospitable climes. Many of the towns that are actually up in the Alps depend mostly on tourism, and that is feasible because they are easy to get to and not far away from major European urban areas. Where’s the corresponding hospitable urban area to go with big settlements in northern Ontario?
Meanwhile, in Lapland the traditional inhabitants lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle centered around reindeer, fish, and fur-bearers. That’s not a lifestyle that holds much appeal to young urban Canadians. Development in Lapland during the past century has mostly focused on natural resource extraction: lumbering, oil and gas, various kinds of mining. As others have noted upthread, those don’t form the basis of economically stable and thriving communities.
Young Canadians are already voting with their feet. There’s plenty of private land and private homes in northern Ontario RIGHT NOW. Do you see lots of young Canadians flocking there? There are already policies in place to transfer Crown Land to local communities when development in the communities warrants; can you point to ANY community in the province where development is restricted by the lack of land?
Take a look at any major real estate site offering properties in more remote areas of the province. For example, see this property–if you’ve got cash, it’s more than an acre for less than twelve thousand dollars. How about this one, a freshly remodeled three bedroom bungalow for $129,900? Are young Canadians eager to buy places like this?
Having a questioning attitude is fine. However, refusing to look at the existing evidence is not so fine.
Is that a personal quirk or is it the way Canadians spell connection?
Not to mention that if we did somehow turn Elliot Lake into the next Toronto, or even a Saskatoon, guess what - house prices would jump in turn. Take a look at Fort MacMurray - one of the more remote large communities in Canada, boosted by the oil boom up to about 60000 people. Until the recent crash in oil prices, they were building as fast as they could but house prices were comparable to Calgary’s. And now, they’ve taken a huge hit since there’s no reason to live in Ft. MacMurray if you don’t have a job there. House prices are expensive the closer you get to Toronto’s center because people want to live close to Toronto’s center, and there’s only so much of it.
It’s a not-infrequent occurrence for little prairie towns to give away undeveloped lots to build on commensurate with a promise to build a house and live there for some specified period of time, usually like 5 years. It usually attracts takers in the single digits, because there’s not much attraction to live there.
And as far as Northern Ontario goes, if you’re trying to turn it into agriculture, I wish you good luck, but knowing farmers as I do (having grown up on a farm), if it can grow a seed, a farmer’s going to plant it there. Northern Ontario is entirely unsuitable for large scale agriculture because there’s no top soil, and you can’t till solid rock.
Canada has vast swaths of cheap land available to purchase right now, unencumbered by any Crown holdings. And in Southern Ontario even, near small-to-mid sized cities. But people, by and large, do not want it.
Ok fine, so with a few scattered exceptions Canada is worthless to any right-thinking human being except for its utility to the mining industry. Maybe you’re right, but I think that vision describes a pretty damn sad country and Canadians shouldn’t complain if they’re not taken seriously on the world stage.
Canada’s not taken seriously because it doesn’t force its people to live on undesirable land? Who knew?
You’ve been asked multiple times now - find one example of a settlement that can’t expand in population because of Crown lands nearby.