Recently I have been watching a lot of crash course on YouTube to study for a history test so when Ms. Willemse asked us to do a blog post on the Laurier era I decided to do it in that format. The topic I chose was how immigration to Canada contributed to regional disparity and was quite hard to research so I had to infer most of the information from charts of jobs and income per city. 

Actually making the video was the easiest part and I was surprised by how professional it looked because I thought the lighting was going to make it look bad but I’m very impressed by what I did. If I was to do this again I would add an animation like the “thought bubble” segment in crash but as most of my time was research i didn’t have time.  

In the overview there will be links to what I talked about.

The reason I’m holding up the iPad is just a style choose to contrast what most people do.

https://youtu.be/luTQkUrchec

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Here is an overview of what I said in the video.

How did immigration to Canada help spread out the wealth to certain provinces but not others?
Canada has an unbelievable amount of natural resources like oil, metals and of course lumber all untouched when it first became a country. During this time the Canadians decided they wanted to super boost their economy. Their solution to this? An open door immigration policy and advertising campaign across Europe encouraging people to move to “the last best west” which referred to the prairies and some of the north west territories. They wanted to encourage farming and agriculture there because of all the empty farm land.

Soon the population skyrocketed and thus began the golden years of Canadian history known as the Laurier era. To illustrate how effective this policy and advertising was the population of non aboriginals in the last best west went from 1000 in the 1870s to over 56,000 in 1881. And this nearly doubled by 1891. 

And that’s just one example if you look at British Columbia at this time period they were taking a massive amount of Chinese immigrants to work on the pacific railway and today in Alberta with the need of workers for the oil sands. 

Now those natural resources were being used and labour was no longer hard to come by. However immigration lead to a problem: regional disparity.

Regional disparity can best be described by this graph of different industries in the prairies and maritimes. 

This demonstrates the effects people can have on a country when they move there and how an increase of people in one place can mean a drop in business for another.