Industrialization and Urbanization in Québec (1896–1945): Industry, Immigration, Unions, War and Depression
1896–1945 is the second industrial revolution and its social bill: hydroelectricity, pulp and paper, mining, textiles, foreign capital, and cities growing faster than their sewers. The exam also tests immigration, unionization, the First World War and the Depression.
Industry and urban growth
Cheap hydro power (Shawinigan, 1899; later Beauharnois), the Lachine Canal, asbestos and copper mining, and pulp mills attract British and, increasingly, American capital - a branch-plant economy exporting raw and semi-finished goods. Montreal dominates finance and manufacturing; rural exodus swells working-class wards with overcrowded, unsanitary housing, typhoid outbreaks and high infant mortality.
Immigration
Laurier's and Sifton's campaigns fill the West with British, American and eastern European settlers; Québec receives a smaller share, and few immigrants are French-speaking because of language and religion. Immigrant workers supply cheap labour in mines and factories. Wartime and postwar xenophobia appear in the 1914 War Measures Act and the internment of "enemy aliens".
Labour
Craft unions and, from 1921, the Catholic CTCC organize; strikes are often broken. The 1937 Padlock Law lets the Duplessis government padlock premises of alleged communist and union groups. Workers win little before 1944, when the Rand formula and provincial labour codes entrench union security and compulsory arbitration.
War and Depression
The First World War brings boom and the 1917 conscription crisis: Borden's Military Service Act, opposed by Bourassa and most francophones, splits the country. The 1929 crash collapses wheat and pulp prices; relief is inadequate, and Ottawa's 1940 constitutional amendment creates unemployment insurance. Québec's women win the provincial vote in 1940, after decades of campaigning by Thérèse Casgrain and Idola Saint-Jean.
Worked example
Two tables: Montreal ward mortality in 1901 and 1931. Reasoning: compare like with like (rates per 1,000), note the fall, then explain it - water filtration, sewerage, housing bylaws and rising incomes. Do not claim industrialization caused the decline simply because both happened; identify the mechanism.
Traps
- Saying Québec women voted provincially in 1918.
- Confusing the 1917 conscription crisis with the 1942 plebiscite.
- Dating the Padlock Law to 1937 and the Rand formula to 1944.
- Treating foreign investment as automatically harmful or beneficial.