History, Wonder Tales, Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends The Flemish | Page 255

At the turn of the century, miners from Wallonia had begun arriving in Alberta to work
for West Canadian Collieries, founded in 1903 by French and Belgian entrepreneurs,
and Canadian Coal Consolidated, a Paris-based firm. Léon Cabeaux, a well-known
union leader who had organized a particularly violent strike in Hainaut in 1886, settled
in Lethbridge and soon attracted disgruntled compatriots from collieries in
Pennsylvania. As elsewhere, the Walloon miners became involved in labour
radicalism. Mine disasters in Alberta were among the worst anywhere, and there were
no provisions for the welfare of families of miners maimed or killed at the workplace.
Among the local leaders were Frank Soulet, Joseph Lothier, and Gustave Henry.
Henry, who had come to Lethbridge by way of Cape Breton and British Columbia, was
ordered deported in 1925 on the grounds that he had been convicted of theft. His
appeal to the Supreme Court of Alberta was successful, however, and he was
permitted to remain in Canada.
In another celebrated case in 1925, a police constable in Drumheller seriously injured
a Belgian youth named Lambert Renners. In the courts the case turned on the legality
of picketing, but the lower courts concentrated on an allegation that Renners was a
member of the Young Communist League. Although the Labour Defence League
supported his appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, he lost the case and never
received compensation. Such incidents embittered the Belgian community and turned
it against the Communist Party, which was perceived as having divided the
community. In Blairmore, bitterness was also directed against the Catholic Church as
part of the “establishment.”
As early as 1896 Belgians from overseas and migrants from North Dakota had come
in search of employment in the lignite mines around Estevan and Bienfait in what is
now Saskatchewan. Conditions were no better than elsewhere, but it was not until
1931 that the miners went on strike. Police and firemen broke up a rally at the Estevan
town hall, injuring scores of people and killing three workers. Louis Revay was among
those immigrants arrested, charged with unlawful assembly, and ordered deported.
In agriculture, Belgians have excelled in five specialties: market gardening, dairying,
and the cultivation of sugar beets, tobacco, and fruit. In Quebec a couple of Flemings
in the 1870s experimented with flax growing and market gardening near SaintHyacinthe, and later in the century, Belgian experience in intensive farming worked
wonders when applied to the province’s previously haphazard approach to farming. In
1903 Johann Beetz introduced silver-fox farming, which became a lucrative business.
In Ontario, market gardening was undertaken by newcomers to the Windsor and Lake
St Clair regions. After World War II, Leamington became the canning and foodprocessing centre for the southwestern part of the province. At the Klondyke Gardens,
Gerhard Vanden Bussche produced quality vegetables on what had been an
unproductive marsh. He also pioneered overhead irrigation for tomatoes and
strawberries and new greenhouse watering systems. In Manitoba, market gardening
boomed throughout the inter-war years around Winnipeg, but after World War II
Belgians moved out of this activity into urban occupations. Belgians also took up
market gardening in the Fraser valley of British Columbia, but they never dominated
the enterprise there as they had in Manitoba.
The success of fruit growing in the Okanagan valley began in 1890 with the Okanagan
Land and Development Company, in which eight Belgians held shares. Seven years

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