Cornelius J. Jaenen - Promoters, Planters, and Pioneers: The Course and Context of Belgian Settlement in Western Canada

Cornelius J. Jaenen

Promoters, Planters, and Pioneers: The Course and Context of Belgian Settlement in Western Canada

Calgary, University of Calgary Press, 2011

ix + 348 pp. Paper. $34.95. ISBN 978-1-55238-258-5

One of Canada's most senior scholars has successfully discharged a long-planned obligation to chronicle the Belgian community on the prairies. The Canadian son of a Flemish father and a Walloon mother, Cornelius J. Jaenen insists that the Belgian settler experience must be traced back to the homeland. Perhaps the only omission from this comprehensive study is the absence of a page of basic Belgian facts about an intriguing country of which outsiders know little, stressing its linguistic division, intense Catholicism, population density and early industrialisation. In the 1961 census, 61,000 Canadians traced paternal ancestry to Belgium, with 28,000 born there. They came in three waves, 16,000 in 1900-14, 15,000 in the interwar years and 19,000 in 1946-60. Jaenen confirms the general impression of a concentration in Winnipeg's francophone enclave, St Boniface, although a surprisingly high proportion of the few thousand Belgians there were Flemings. Belgian institutions were few: Scheppers College, a rural Manitoba boarding school for Flemings, opened in 1920 and lasted just twelve years. The most enduring organisation, Le Club Belge, took shape in St Boniface between 1905 and 1914, just survived the War and later spawned communal projects such as a credit union. Language lay at the heart of assimilation challenges: the Church sought francophone Walloons when Quebecers would not move west, while Flemings (like Dutch immigrants) easily made the transition to English. Belgian groups generally evaded internal language issues, although problems arose when francophone priests were sometimes sent to areas of Flemish settlement. Le Club Belge maintained a library, and there was obvious pressure to favour purchase of Flemish titles, since books in French and English were widely available. Jaenen argues that multicultural Saskatchewan was the most likely province for the maintenance of minority identities, but the Belgian label does not seem to have stuck anywhere. As cultural traits, enthusiasm for pigeon racing and cycling hardly offer colourful ingredients for folkloric commemoration. Indeed, the significance of the Belgian experience in Canada may lie largely in its negatives. Unlike the Finns and the Irish, they do not seem to have imported homeland issues. Jaenen gives no indication of controversy over the role of Leopold III in the second world war, although by then specifically Belgian publications were few. This stands in obvious contrast with the wartime story of the Dutch monarchy, and its exile in Canada. Conversely, the apparent lack of sympathetic Quebec interest in a small, part-francophone and often-threatened country seems striking. Perhaps this was because the Catholic Church in Belgium seems to have directed its outreach towards the Congo. This publication surely makes Cornelius J. Jaenen the country's most eminent Belgian-Canadian.