History, Wonder Tales, Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends The Flemish | Page 257

they had acquired. In this way, Belgian communities were built up around Chatham,
Windsor, and Sarnia. The Depression of the 1930s affected the industry, and
dissatisfied workers began leaving for the more-lucrative tobacco culture. Others,
especially the youth, sought employment in glass, plastics, and auto-accessories
manufacturing. By the end of World War II, Belgians were no longer closely
associated with beet-sugar production in the region.
Beet growing had been introduced in Alberta, with a hefty provincial subsidy to a Utah
company, in 1903. The Knight Sugar Company hired Flemish migratory workers for
the back-breaking labour in fields around Raymond, promising them passage money,
housing, and even a cow. However, the twenty-seven families who arrived in 1912
were bitterly disappointed because none of the promises were kept. The company
closed down when the subsidy ran out in 1914, and the immigrant workers were left
stranded. In 1925 another Utah company opened a plant in Raymond. The families
recruited in Belgium were dissatisfied with housing provisions – sometimes only
remodelled chicken coops or granaries – and wages, and they formed a Beet
Workers’ Industrial Union. The British Columbia Sugar Company acquired ownership
of the Alberta refinery in 1931 and set about dividing the growers and their hired
workers in order to break down any common front against management. Work
stoppages resulted in the recruiting of scab workers, as had been the case in the
collieries. In 1941 the growers were able to use displaced Japanese Canadians as
cheap labour, and so the remaining Belgians left.
In 1939 Baron Kronacher and a New York investor had opened a sugar refinery in Fort
Garry, Manitoba. Dairy farmers living near the plant, mostly Flemings, began growing
sugar beets on a crop-sharing basis. In 1955 the British Columbia Sugar Company
also acquired the Manitoba refinery and eventually closed it down. By this time,
prospective workers in Belgium had good reason to heed the warnings of their
consular officials and emigration societies against the industry. The conditions that the
workers now demanded were not acceptable to employers, and recruitment of Belgian
fieldworkers came to an end.
It was primarily tobacco that drew Belgians away from market gardening and beet
growing in southwestern Ontario. The first immigrants had not been active in the
production of air-cured tobacco in Essex and Kent counties, but when flue-cured
tobacco was introduced as a commercial crop around Tillsonburg and Delhi in the
1920s, Belgians were among the first to become involved. By this time 63 percent of
Belgians in Ontario had migrated to Kent, Essex, and Lambton counties. The tobacco
buyers exploited the small farmers through a system of barn buying, and the growers’
plight was aggravated by the onset of the Depression and a decline in prices.
Although the large, cohesive family functioned well as a unit of production, many
growers became hopelessly indebted. Flemings in 1932 helped to form the Southern
Ontario Flue-Cured Tobacco Growers’ Association, which filed a complaint with the
combines investigation bureau that the tobacco companies were price fixing. When it
was unsuccessful, the growers organized their own marketing association with
representatives from both growers and buyers, an arrangement that remained in effect
until they adopted the European system of selling by auction in 1957. They also
organized a Tobacco Growers Cooperative in Kingsville to buy, redry, and pack the
crop. In the 1950s about twenty Flemish growers left Ontario to establish tobacco
culture around Joliette in Quebec. Others introduced the crop to Nova Scotia in 1958,
Prince Edward Island the following year, and New Brunswick in