Canada: The Country of Choice
for Scots Emigrants Over the Centuries
By HARRY McGRATH
 Andy Cowan, Scottish Parliament photographer
DIRECTORS of Cultural Connect Scotland – Harry McGrath and Graeme Murdoch at the ‘This is Who We Are’ exhibition in the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. |
The term “poop deck” tends to illicit childish giggles from the nautically – challenged, but I managed to stifle all foolishness when I found myself standing at the stern of the HMCS Athabaskan in Leith Harbour, south of Edinburgh, earlier in the month.
The Athabaskan and her sister ship, HMCS Halifax, were in Scotland on manoeuvres. I was fortunate enough to be invited aboard by the Canadian High Commissioner to Britain to quaff Canadian wine and exchange stories with the crew about life in Halifax, Nova Scotia and Victoria, British Columbia, their home ports.
I wasn’t the only one enjoying this privilege. Around me was the cream of the Scottish literary scene.
Crime writer Ian Rankin was there, as was Ron Butlin, the official poet (or makar) of Edinburgh.
These and several other Scottish writers would soon be heading to the Toronto International Festival of Authors where, thanks in part to financial support from the Scottish Government, Scotland’s cultural presence was to be considerably enhanced.
As you would expect, the speeches on the Athabaskan focused on the historical connections between Scotland and Canada and a list of the great Scots-Canadian figures – MacDonald, Simpson, MacKenzie (s), Donald Smith, Simon Fraser, etc. – was duly rolled out and recognized.
There was talk of emigration and the fact that Canada had been the country of choice over the centuries for so many Scottish migrants. Some of the crew members were keen to discuss their own Scottish ancestry and confirm their place in the 4.2 million Canadians who claim Scottish descent – a figure invoked by both the main speakers.
With the Canadian navy in Scotland and Scottish writers heading for Canada, these are heady days for the forging of connections between the two countries but it wasn’t always thus.
Until fairly recently, official efforts to bring the two countries closer together were anaemic. Scotland was mesmerised by the United States despite the fact that Scottish immigration made less of an impact there than it did in Canada.
Thankfully the furthering of relations between Scotland and Canada is now high on the Scottish Government’s agenda.
A few days after the Canadian navy set out across the Atlantic, I had another experience of the burgeoning relationship between Scotland and Canada as a guest on BBC Radio’s Highland Café.
I sat in a glass booth in BBC Scotland’s Edinburgh studio, listened on headphones to disembodied voices from Inverness, and waited to be called on by the host. In the meantime, I discovered some kind of connection to every other piece.
The first guest spoke of the last surviving St. Kildan, Norman John Gillies who was evacuated to the Scottish mainland from the remote archipelago of St. Kilda in 1930.
I wanted to pipe in from my glass prison in Edinburgh and tell the interviewer that Norman John is the nephew of Reverend Donald John Gillies whose memoirs are soon to be published in Scotland. They were written in Vancouver when Donald John was in his eighties.
This feature was followed by a beautiful Gaelic air sung by Julie Fowlis and backed by bodhran player Martin O’Neill.
O’Neill played at the British Columbia Highland Games and at Simon Fraser University a few years ago. And the final feature was an interview with Canon Mel Langille of the Scottish Episcopalian Church. He is a bagpipe-playing native of Pictou, Nova Scotia and now rector of the Black Isle in Scotland.
The format of the show allowed for no cross-talk so I refrained from yelling into the microphone in Edinburgh about the Reverend Gillies’s memoirs, or saying hello to Martin, or telling Canon Langille that I was in Pictou a few months ago to explore its Scottish links.
Instead, I answered the questions that were put to me and then meditated on the great wealth of connection that has suddenly opened up between Scotland and Canada and the number of different forms it is taking.
Canon Langille’s story also got me thinking about a part of the Canada/Scotland story that hasn’t been told yet – the Canadian in Scotland.
A few years ago, Canadians living in Scotland were as rare as hen’s teeth. There are still not enough Canadians living here to register in the statistics, but they are here.
Before I listened to Canon Langille, I met with a young Canadian couple who have moved to Edinburgh – he to work on the fraught city tram project.
The hugely successful Scotster social networking site, based in Edinburgh, is run by a man who splits his time between Fernie, British Columbia and Scotland.
And there are a number of other Canadians residing here as evidenced by the establishment of an on-line site for Canadian ex-pats living in Scotland.
I took this thought with me when I was preparing the text for the “This is Who We Are” Canada and Scotland exhibition in the Scottish Parliament in November.
It needed a modern statistical account and I was able to tell the designers that 147,000 Scots migrated from Scotland to Canada between 1946 and 1960. From the mid-Seventies onwards, however, Scottish immigration to Canada was, in the words of one historian, “reduced to a trickle.”
I also checked the oft-quoted 4.2 million Scots in Canada figure using the latest (2006) Canadian census and found that it had risen to 4.7 million despite few Scots having entered the country.
This seems to be because more Canadians are now recognizing that “Scottish” is one “ethnic or cultural” element in their ancestry in combination with other ethnic or cultural elements.
To me, this is a fine vision of the way a multi-cultural country develops and one to which Scotland would do well to aspire. It might be a while before “Canadian” is listed as an option on a Scottish census, but you never know. There’s a trickle in both directions now.
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