Scots in Canda

• • Rail Industry: The sheer size of Canada made railway construction a key industry, connecting widely dispersed communities. Scots workmen were used in the main projects, but the key impact was at the planning, design and finance stages

  Example: Donald Smith, fur trader and primary shareholder in the Transatlantic Canadian Pacific Railway
• • Trade: the Hudson Bay Company was the most important and valuable of the early trade businesses set up by Scots settlers

  Example: George Simpson, Governor of the HBC
• • Exploration was a key element in the Scottish influence. Canada was a large territory, all of which needed to be properly mapped. Many Scots undertook this task.

  Examples: John Rae, (from Orkney) mapped the north coast
• • Politics and public life was another key influence, though many of the leading figures in the 19th century are now seen as contentious – in terms of relationship with native people

  Examples: Canada’s first Prime Minister, John MacDonald
• Alexander Isbister was the son of a Scots HBC clerk and a Cree mother. He later became a Dean of a British teachers’ college. From this post he put pressure on both Westminster and the Colonial Office on behalf of the Red River Métis. Eventually, he denounced the HBC’s treatment of native people and ‘mixed-bloods’.
• • So-called ‘country wives’ : The Montreal based North West Company actively encouraged this policy. Eventually, however, all the fur-trade enterprises acknowledged the key role that Native wives played in their operations.

  Example of someone who left their native wife includes: George Simpson, a leading figure in HBC and one of Canada’s most powerful figures, left his country wife to marry his cousin in London in 1830
• Canada’s first Prime Minister John MacDonald is now widely criticised for his school system, which attempted to ‘assimilate’ children of indigenous people without the consent of their families. Over the course of the system's 100+ year existence, around 150,000 children were placed in residential schools nationally. The number of school-related deaths is estimated in the range of 3,200 to over 30,000, mostly from disease.