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Quebec's Last Frontier
by Louise Bryce, Val-d'Or Historical and Genealogical Society
A majority of the workers in the mines of northwestern Quebec were immigrants who, until the middle of the 1930s, held jobs under extremely rough and dangerous conditions. According to the mining companies, foreign workers were very productive, and more importantly, they were submissive. Any form of complaint was risky, since few of these workers had obtained Canadian citizenship, and therefore were easily expelled from the country. The local population denounced the favouritism towards immigrant workers that was evident in the mining companies' hiring practices. They believed that positions should be filled by people from the region of Abitibi-Témiscamingue and the province of Quebec.
For their part, over half of the French Canadians who emigrated to Abitibi through the settlement plans abandoned their properties. Incompetence and discouragement, illness or death of a spouse, and remoteness from inhabited areas and modern comforts explain, to a large extent, this phenomenon. Agriculture was a precarious activity and was therefore replaced by more profitable endeavours, such as mining, forestry and, later on, in the war industry. As the Depression continued, the local population made it loud and clear that they wanted jobs for French Canadians. Under such pressure, most mining companies were obliged to "Canadianize" their workforce, while others resisted and continued with their original hiring policies.
After a strike by the "fros" (the common abbreviation for "foreigners") in the Noranda mine during the summer of 1934, French Canadians started to fill the many vacant jobs in Rouyn-Noranda, after the departure of European workers to join the army or to find work in the war industries. Val-d'Or was still home to a very varied population, as Gabrielle Roy attests in a 1945 report: "There is no doubt that there is no other town in the province that is as cosmopolitan as Val-d'Or, proportionately speaking. You can hear the harsh speech of Yugoslavians, Yiddish, and the precise accent of a few French people. You can encounter Russians and Ukrainians with their high cheekbones, and many French Canadians." [unofficial translation] (Roy, p. 8)
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