Irish labour key to carving out a young Canada’s future

They scraped away at an unforgiving wilderness with picks and shovels. The fruits of their labours — the Rideau, Lachine and Welland canals, to name a few — transformed pre-Confederation Canada from colonial backwater to a land ripe with industry.

Yet it took nearly 200 years for the thousands of Irish immigrants who laboured on Canada’s earliest infrastructure projects to achieve formal recognition for a job well done.

During the early and mid-1800s, workers who had emigrated from Ireland formed the largest pool of labour in the British colonies of Upper and Lower Canada (today Ontario and Quebec). They came from all parts of Ireland, Protestant and Catholic alike, drawn by the promise of work and a fresh start in a young country.

Little is known about Canada’s earliest blue-collar workers. Few records remain because the labourer’s role in construction was not considered as important as the roles of engineers, architects or project managers. Irish labourers in particular were often discriminated against by the colony’s ruling class and merchant-employers.

"They are a turbulent and discontented people," complained Norman Bethune in 1843. Bethune was keeper of the company store that supplied and paid workers during the building of the Lachine Canal.

These labourers began appearing in the early 1800s — well before the flood of immigrants escaping the mid-century Irish potato famines. Some historians suggest the earlier immigrants were purposely recruited to form a labouring class by people such as Peter Robinson, a politician who settled 2,500 Irish families, mostly from County Cork, in the eastern regions of Upper Canada.

Many of these early labourers travelled in large work gangs that drew their identities from regions of origin — Corkmen, Munstermen or Cannaughtmen, for example. The gangs crossed borders to obtain work, tackling the Erie Canal in New York State one year and the Welland Canal (in present-day Niagara Region) the next.

The remote areas where construction unfolded held many surprises. Ireland didn’t have black flies or mosquitoes. Rural areas there had been farmed for centuries so would have offered little opportunity to build the skills needed to navigate and clear Canada’s dense wilderness.

Work days were long — 10 hours spread over 12 to allow time for meals during expansion of the Lachine Canal in the winter of 1843; 14 hours a day, six days a week during the 1826 to 1832 summer construction seasons along the 202-kilometre Rideau Canal.

Most of the sites were too remote and rugged to allow for the use of steam equipment, so labourers employed horses and oxen where they could. Mostly though, the men relied on picks, shovels, axes, and, to excavate, wheelbarrows. Wheelbarrows had to be pushed up steep hills and banks along "barrow runs," notes Ken Watson in the essay, "Those Who Laboured." Risk abounded. People fell off rocks, suffocated in mudslides or were maimed by the unstable explosives used to blast through rock. Accidents triggered inquiries. Alcoholic "overindulgence" was a factor often cited, notes an article on the Rideau Canal World Heritage Site website.

For these early Irish labourers, however, malaria presented the greatest danger. Of the estimated 1,000 workers who died building the Rideau, at least half succumbed to "the ague" as malaria was called at the time. Quinine was known to cure the disease, but the medicine was hard to get and far out of the price range of a labourer who was paid even less than a farm worker. (Malaria outbreaks were common in the Canadas during the first half of the nineteenth century but ceased as marshes were filled in to accommodate settlement.)

So at night, crowded into the small wooden shanties they either rented from their employers or built on their own farther away from the worksite, Irish workers shivered and perspired as they resorted to folk remedies or simply waited for the ague to take its course. Yet challenges were not only physical.

Relations smouldered between management and workers and often flamed into strikes. Contractors frequently operated the "company" stores that served these workers in remote areas. Often they paid workers in the form of credit issued at these stores. Workers resented being forced to buy only from their employers. They took issue with pay, too.

The 1843 strike at the Lachine Canal flared after workers learned they would get a full shilling a day less for the work they were doing in the winter than they were used to getting in summers for the same work. (It was the first time that canal work had been attempted in winter.)

Workers threw down their picks and shovels on January 25. By February, they had begun to fight among each other and residents in the area called in the troops. Finally, Montreal citizens of Irish heritage intervened and brokered an agreement between the workers and the contractor.

Right from the beginning Irish labourers were a force to be reckoned with, forming a majority of the 4,000 to 10,000 men who worked on the Rideau, a likely majority on the construction of the Welland Canal from 1824 to 1829 and certainly a majority on the first round of construction of the Lachine in 1825 as well as on its expansions in the 1840s and in 1875.

Their strong presence wasn’t a coincidence. When the Lachine contractor attempted to replace Irish workers with French Canadians, the Irish labourers drove their competitors away and "all (French Canadian workers) were so intimidated as to render it unlikely they will return," noted the Montreal Transcript in 1843.

In the 1850s Irish labourers figured prominently in another transformative build: the Victoria Bridge in Montreal.

Grand Trunk Railway commissioned the tubular structure, and when finished in 1859, it linked the island city by rail to other communities throughout North America.

Spanning the St. Lawrence, this bridge was every inch as much of an engineering feat as the Rideau Canal had been nearly 30 years before. Its presence would allow Montreal to serve as the fledgling Canada’s centre of business and manufacturing after Confederation in 1867.

Yet it would be the Rideau Canal that finally provided the catalyst for delivering Irish workers’ long overdue recognition for the role they played in building our country.

In the early 2000s, local groups and the Irish government erected Celtic crosses in Kingston and Ottawa to commemorate the Irish labourers who lost their lives in the building of the Rideau. Since that time, several other markers have joined these two along the canal’s route. The markers celebrate and acknowledge these workers’ remarkable achievements. Their toil and sacrifice ensured Canada was prepared to meet the demands of a new industrial age.