History, Wonder Tales, Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends The Flemish | Page 258

The communities of Tillsonburg, Delhi, Simcoe, and Aylmer relied on tobacco wealth
to build malls, banquet halls, and sports complexes and to send their youth to
university. The harvest attracted about ten thousand transients each year to
southwestern Ontario. Beginning in 1966, students sent out from Belgium to bring in
the harvest also gave language lessons, staged plays, and put on concerts to
reawaken an awareness of Flemish culture. Domestic tobacco consumption began to
decline rapidly in the mid-1980s; many Belgians in the region therefore turned to
growing vegetables and small fruits for local canneries. The youth increasingly looked
to the urban centres for employment.
In 1872 Count Leopold d’Arschot brought out workers for a potato-starch, vinegar, and
glue factory he intended to open in Quebec City. Single men coming to Saint-Boniface
in western Canada often remained there to work in the local brickyards, lumber yards,
abattoirs, meat-packing plants, and flour mills. In Weyburn, Saskatchewan, such
numbers found employment, especially in the brickyards, that a section became
known as Belgium Town. Some immigrants who found seasonal employment as
freighters or lignite miners in the southern prairies worked in the factories of Chicago
or Moline in Illinois during the winter months. In 1905 François Adam, an engineer
who had taken up fur trading, turned his Alberta ranch into the townsite for Camrose,
where he built twelve large business blocks and operated several businesses.
After World War II, Belgians were caught up in the movement from rural to urban
communities. This pattern was particularly evident in the greater Winnipeg area,
where insurance agencies, hardware stores, lumber yards, plumbing, building and
electrical supplies, and bakeries bore recognizably Belgian names. In Ontario,
Belgians became car dealers, innkeepers, insurance agents, salespeople, and
retailers. Some started their own businesses; particularly successful was Michael
DeGroote’s trucking company in Elliot Lake, which developed into the giant Laidlaw
group of enterprises. After 1950, Belgian immigrants to the Montreal area made their
mark as teachers, university professors, researchers, doctors, bankers, brokers,
musicians, and artists.

Family and Kinship
From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Belgians/Cornelius J. Jaenen

During the first decade of immigration to western Canada, Walloons showed a greater
tendency than Flemings to come as family units. Flemings from the agricultural
regions of Belgium usually sent one or two young men, occasionally the head of a
family, to scout out the country, earn some capital, and so pave the way for relatives,
and eventually neighbours, to follow in chain migration. The community of Manor,
Saskatchewan, for example, drew almost exclusively upon the Lommel area of
Limburg province, which was not otherwise a usual source of immigration to Canada.
Both Flemish and Walloon immigrants brought with them strong traditions of a
patriarchal family that functioned as an economic unit. For example, the practice of
unmarried children turning over their earnings to the head of the household until such
time as they married, coupled with the tradition of families of both the bride and the
groom equipping the new household according to their means, was transplanted to
Canada. Such a family structure and the pooling of family resources were an asset in
pioneering days in the prairie west. They were an asset, too, in southwestern Ontario
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