History, Wonder Tales, Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends The Flemish | Page 252

The Quebec government’s efforts to attract francophone Catholic immigrants caught
the imagination of a Belgian attorney in Montreal, J.V. Herreboudt, who urged the
Baron de Haulleville, editor of the ultraconservative Journal de Bruxelles, to undertake
a colonization project on the Gaspé peninsula. In 1891 Father H.J. Mussely pursued
the idea of a colony at the Baie des Chaleurs. Only twenty-five Belgian families were
among the seventy or more who settled at Musselyville, and it therefore was never a
Belgian enclave.
Colonization schemes in western Canada were less numerous, but more successful.
In 1887 the Société d’Immigration Française sent its secretary, accompanied by the
Belgian engineer Georges Kaiser, who later recorded his impressions in Au Canada
(1897), in advance of settlers destined for Manitoba. Three years later Quebec’s
legendary colonizer Antoine Labelle convinced Louis Hacault, editor of the
conservative Courrier de Bruxelles, to visit Manitoba. Hacault’s Notes de voyage au
Canada en 1890 became a successful piece of propaganda in attracting settlers to
southern Manitoba. His efforts were seconded by the parish priest for Flemish
settlements, Gustaaf Willems, who published Les Belges au Manitoba: lettres
authentiques (1894), a collection of carefully selected letters from successful pioneers
that the Manitoba and dominion governments circulated throughout Belgium. Some
immigrants acted as recruiting agents for governments or railway and steamship
companies in the communities they had come from. Sebastien Deleau was one such
agent; he succeeded in bringing out compatriots from his native province of
Luxembourg to a community named after him in western Manitoba. In 1900 Louis
Barceel travelled as far west as Edmonton on a tour in the interests of the Société
Agricole et Industrielle du Manitoba, which had its headquarters in Antwerp. The
following year the Belgian vice-consul in Ottawa, E.R. De Vos, explored British
Columbia on behalf of mining and investment concerns as well as to study its
agricultural potential.
In his efforts to create a chain of francophone parishes across the prairies, Abbé Jean
Gaire turned to Belgium for recruits. He attracted a number of immigrants from that
country for his settlements at Grande-Clairière in Manitoba (1888) and at Bellegarde
(1891), Cantal (1892), and Wauchope (1904) in what is now Saskatchewan. In 1904
he founded the Société Générale de l’Œuvre de la Colonisation Catholique Française
au Canada, with the support of the church hierarchy, to buy up farm lands and hold
them for resale to approved immigrants. His colonization plan for the Red Deer region
was less successful, and the Société de la Ferme Assiniboia-Alberta was liquidated in
1909 after having brought out only a handful of Belgians. Other colonizing priests were
able to attract Walloons and sometimes Flemings to francophone parishes. Such was
the experience of Dom Paul Benoît at Notre Dame de Lourdes in Manitoba, Abbé Paul
LeFloch at Saint-Brieux in Saskatchewan, and Abbé Jean-Baptiste Morin at Morinville
in Alberta.
More spectacular but not much more successful were several utopian colonies. In
1889 eleven aristocrats, including Baron van Brabant, established the elitist
community of Saint-Hubert, south of Whitewood in present-day Saskatchewan. They
recruited a number of Belgians with agricultural training and skills, built several
imposing stone châteaux, opened a chicory-processing plant and a Gruyère cheese
factory, and began horse ranching. The aristocrats left when blizzards and prairie fires
destroyed their dreams, but their labourers remained, and their numbers were
augmented by compatriots, including some agronomists. A second Franco-Belgian

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