History, Wonder Tales, Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends The Flemish | Page 254

urban boom in Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Calgary. In 1929 Léon Dupuis organized the
Canadian-Belgian Chamber of Commerce in Vancouver. By using the Hudson Bay
railway route, his enterprises had no real competitors in rails, structural steel, wire,
cement, and glass until the outbreak of World War II. Belgians became active again in
1945, especially in mining and the petroleum industry. Genestar, Canadian Petrofina,
Canadian Hydrocarbons, and Great Northern Gas Utilities are a few of the Belgianbacked companies that have contributed significantly to the economy of the west. By
1960 Belgium ranked just after the United States and Britain in investments in
Canada.
A few Belgians had been employed in collieries in Cape Breton as early as the
seventeenth century, but it was not until the 1880s that miners from Hainaut were
actively recruited. The Dominion Coal Company employed several hundred at the
Glace Bay, Dominion, and Reserve Mines. In 1906 the company also began to recruit
in the province of Liège. A contract provided for assisted passage to Sydney, a
stipulated salary, and a schedule for repayment of the travel advance. What recruiting
agents failed to clarify were the working conditions and the company’s monopoly of
housing and the local store. Dissatisfied with conditions in Cape Breton, many of the
men migrated to the mining centres of Inverness, Pictou, and Stellarton and eventually
to Pennsylvania. The pattern of migration continued as miners moved on from the
United States to Vancouver Island, Crowsnest Pass, Lethbridge, and Drumheller. In
the company-built housing near the mines, various ethnocultural groups tended to
form enclaves. At Reserve Mines the concentration of shacks known locally as
Belgium Town was renowned for its house parties and the “Friday night friction” with
local Scots. Near every mine the Belgians had their own boarding-houses operated by
miners’ wives, who also attended to elementary medical needs.
Walloon miners had a reputation for being radical and anticlerical, and they were well
acquainted with the tradition of working men’s political associations when they came
to Nova Scotia. In 1909 they were caught up in a bitter struggle between the Dominion
Coal Company and the United Mine Workers of America, which was seeking
certification. There were strikes at other Nova Scotia mines in the pre-war years. At
Springhill, Jules Lavenne emerged as a militant leader and member of the Socialist
Party of Canada. As a result of the labour unrest that characterized mining in the
province up to 1914, most of the Belgians, like those in Cape Breton earlier, moved on
to mining communities elsewhere on the continent.
In 1888 James Dunsmuir had hired for his Vancouver Island collieries a number of
Belgian miners anxious to flee the aftermath of strikes and riots in Liège and Charleroi.
They were given exaggerated accounts of working conditions in the mines, and
complaints soon began appearing in Be