1 INTERNAL MIGRANTS TO 20TH-CENTURY NORTH AMERICAN metropolitan centres have frequently been stereotyped as being unprepared for big-city life. This article explores the problematization of the “Maritimer” in Toronto in the 1960s, a decade of substantial immigration and urban growth. Maritimers, who in the Ontario understanding also included Newfoundlanders, were both scapegoated and viewed as victims of rural-urban migration. In media and expert reports they were portrayed as a distinct subculture. The narratives about newcomers to Toronto, which viewed Atlantic Canadian newcomers as a burden, contrasted with those of the Atlantic region, where social scientists, politicians, and the media feared that out-migration was contributing to regional underdevelopment. Although both perspectives were essentially negative in terms of the movement of Atlantic Canadians to Ontario, the latter was based on the loss of human resources available to Atlantic Canada while the former was largely based on stereotypes of “Maritimers” as vulnerable or undesirable migrants from a backward region. Indeed, Atlantic Canadians in 1960s Toronto, like Appalachian migrants to the industrial cities of the American Midwest, were framed culturally as “yesterday’s people.”1

2 Metropolitan Toronto experienced significant growth in the 1960s and 1970s. Following a brief recession in 1959-60, the metro area benefitted from a construction boom in transportation infrastructure, industrial parks, office complexes, apartment buildings, and suburban malls and housing.2 Between 1961 and 1966, the population of the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) grew by 18 per cent. The population in the city of Toronto itself had reached a saturation point in the early 1960s and began to recede. Torontonians migrated to the suburbs, and housing stock that was not lost to urban renewal was utilized by immigrants and in-migrants from other parts of Ontario and the rest of Canada. The Toronto CMA, which drew an average 30,400 immigrants a year during the same period, was losing its dominant Anglo-Celtic character. In fact, the 1950s was the last decade that the city of Toronto had a “British” Canadian ethnic majority. The metropolitan region was also the destination for the majority of all immigrants arriving in Canada; in 1969, 53.6 per cent of all immigrants to Canada ended up there. In the 1960s the Italian community, which had begun to grow in the previous decade, received the most media attention in terms of new immigration. But by the mid-1960s, Toronto also contained an estimated 15,000 West Indian immigrants. During the following decade Caribbean immigration would gain more prominence and attention.3

3 In the post-1940 era, American cities were also changing their demographic makeup. The economic boom of the American Midwest was fuelled by the outflow of people from Appalachia, 3.2 million of whom had arrived by 1970. Many of them headed to large cities such as Cincinnati and Chicago.4 Canada’s experience was similar as its post-war boom also needed workers, and the Toronto CMA was a major destination for internal migration – with an estimated 1,000 a month arriving between 1956 to 1961. The Canadian-born population consisted of three roughly equal-sized segments: those born in Toronto, those who had migrated from elsewhere in Ontario, and those from other provinces.5 Between 1965 and 1971, the Toronto CMA gained 185, 530 Canadian migrants and lost 205, 655. And among these Canadian migrants – even in the early 1950s – there was a sizeable number of Atlantic Canadians. The 1951 census revealed, for instance, that nearly 4 per cent of the city’s population had been born in the Atlantic Provinces. An additional 12,000 lived in the remaining areas of York County. Thousands of former Newfoundlanders lived in greater Toronto by the mid-1950s. By 1961, 4.7 per cent of Toronto’s population had been born in the Atlantic region and they represented 49 per cent of all interprovincial migrants. Although identified with Parkdale (see below), Atlantic Canadians lived in other Toronto neighbourhoods such as Riverdale, and in adjacent municipalities such as New Toronto, Etobicoke, and Scarborough.6 The same economic conditions that made many people of the Atlantic Provinces “Canada’s stepchildren” (in the words of columnist Richard Needham) drew them to distant cities such as Toronto.7

4 During the 1960s, fertility and birthrates in the Atlantic region were above the Canadian average. Within the region they were highest in more isolated, rural areas such as northeastern Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, Guysborough and Antigonish counties, most of Newfoundland, and Prince and Kings counties in PEI.8 Between 1961 and 1966, the Atlantic Provinces lost approximately 106,000 people to out-migration (two-fifths from Nova Scotia, just over a third from New Brunswick, and one quarter from Newfoundland). About two-thirds of this outflow consisted of persons less than 30 years of age, and in PEI this figure was 97 per cent. Between 1951 and 1966, in fact, PEI lost 16.3 per cent of its population. From 1951 to 1971, the outflow of people from New Brunswick was 17 per cent of the population. But not all who left their home province moved to another region as many migrated to other centres within Atlantic Canada. This was particularly the case with Newfoundlanders and Prince Edward Islanders, while between 1959 to 1969 more people (80,000) departed from New Brunswick than from any other province in the region. Those from the 20-to-24-age cohort were the most likely to leave the region.9

5 Kari Levitt’s 1960 study on migration in general for the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council noted that the region had lost roughly 500,000 people since the 1860s. During the 1950s, the economy of PEI had been unable to absorb many of the workers displaced by agricultural consolidation and fisheries modernization – unlike in Newfoundland, where the forestry and mining sectors created a demand for new employment (and contributed to net in-migration between 1951 and 1956). Out-migration was greatest in Newfoundland from the South Shore, Trinity Bay, and Bonavista Bay. In PEI, almost two-thirds of persons leaving the rural areas moved away from the province between 1951 and 1956 while, in Nova Scotia, migrants included not only rural workers but also displaced Cape Breton, Pictou County, and Cumberland County miners and iron and steel workers as well as their families. This parallelled Appalachia, where the most impoverished communities, and those most likely to experience out-migration to the cities of the Midwest, were located in the coalfields of Kentucky and West Virginia. New Brunswick out-migration, which was mainly rural in origin, was affected by high birthrates. Between 1951 and 1956 more than 4,000 farms and 14.1 per cent of the total farmland were abandoned. Migration from rural non-farm areas was also high.10

6 Although many out-migrants from Atlantic Canada headed for the United States between 1956 and 1961, Ontario was their favourite Canadian destination, followed by Quebec.11 Of Newfoundland and Nova Scotian interprovincial migrants, 46.7 per cent went to Ontario; the figures were slightly lower for the other two provinces; between 1966 and 1971, Ontario was the destination of 61.6 per cent of out-migrants from Newfoundland and 41.7 per cent of those from New Brunswick. For French-speaking Acadians, Quebec was the preferred destination, followed by Ontario. In 1969 the Atlantic Development Board stated that the reasons for Ontario’s attraction were self-evident, and included job opportunities and superior income levels.12 A 1971 study by Leroy Stone and Susan Fletcher concluded that from 1956 to 1971 Ontario acted as a “buffer zone” for migrants from Quebec and the eastern provinces. The four western provinces were supplied by migrants from Ontario, and the levels of out-migration were directly related to increased levels of education. Of the four eastern provinces, Newfoundland and PEI had the lowest rates of out-migration, possibly because the likelihood of migration increased with urbanization.13

7 Prior to the 1960s there appears to be little negative stereotyping in the Toronto media of Atlantic Canadian migrants as a group despite their significant influx into the area. Evidence of their presence included church, athletic, and social organizations and activities, and at least one weekly newspaper, The Newfoundlander, established in the late 1960s. By 1968 greater Toronto, in the words of one journalist, contained a large “assimilated” community of former Atlantic Canadians that included thousands of Newfoundlanders and five thousand Acadians.14 Despite the generally neutral stance of the press and public figures, though, paternalistic attitudes were sometimes evident. In 1958, for example, a vice-president of the University of Toronto declared that “Maritimers” were hard-working owing to the fact that life in the region was “frugal and hard.” They also took “the time to enjoy the important things in life.”15 Many prominent and successful Torontonians hailed from the Atlantic Provinces. One was leading poet and University of Toronto professor E.J. Pratt (1883-1964), who often entertained after-dinner audiences with childhood tales told in Newfoundland dialect.16 Some “positive” commentary on regional culture was also problematic, such as a Globe and Mail column in 1965 that attributed Newfoundland’s high birthrate to a combination of poverty and a joie de vivre: “They sing, dance, drink, go fishing, make love and generally get the most they can out of existence.”17 This was the period, according to Larry J. Orton, that the “Newfie” joke, which parodied Newfoundlanders’ lack of intelligence in a manner similar to “Polack” and other ethnic jokes, first became popular in Ontario.18

8 Discussion of migrants to urban Ontario was shaped by the evolving debate on poverty. During the 1960s, liberals in Canada, led by the media, academics, and nongovernmental organizations, “discovered” urban and rural poverty in the midst of technological advance and affluence.19 For example, social issues in Metro Toronto, which contained two million residents by 1970, were central to English Canada’s “Just Society” debate of the late 1960s. Albert Rose, an expert on housing, reported that 20 per cent of families in the city centre were unable to afford decent accommodations. They included transients, the elderly, immigrants, and “low-income newcomers from other parts of Canada.” This was hardly a new problem for Toronto. Poverty, according to government agencies, churches, academics, voluntary organizations, and the media, was not confined to specific ethnic groups or cultures and was even appearing in the suburbs. By the mid-1960s, experts and activists spoke of a housing crisis, and planners and politicians debated the best methods for solving the problem.20

9 Because municipalities and not the province were responsible for general welfare assistance, local politicians were more likely to speak out on the issue of poverty-stricken migrants. By 1965 more than 25,000 people were on daily municipal welfare rolls, and municipal officials reported that 18,000 people were being added to welfare for the first time each year. Many of them were internal migrants. Prosperous Toronto had 45,000 unemployed in the winter of 1965 and 3,000 families waiting for public housing.21 In 1966 a controversy erupted concerning Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, an area of migrant and immigrant transition. Once a largely stable area dominated by detached, three-story homes, Parkdale, affected by the Gardiner Expressway project of the late 1950s and early 1960s, was transformed into a disadvantaged community containing many rooming houses. It also had developed a reputation for juvenile delinquency, drugs, and prostitution. Most of the housing stock dated from before the First World War. By the late 1960s the area included European immigrants and West Indians, but it was predominantly associated with poor, Canadian-born whites. According to the Atlantic Centre, a counseling centre for newcomers on Queen Street West, Atlantic Canadians constituted a small but vulnerable minority of Parkdale’s population.22

10 Atlantic Canadians also were associated with other Toronto neighborhoods. Near Parkdale, the Chinatown/Southwest Spadina area included Atlantic Canadians who had arrived in the 1930s and 1940s. Another area associated with “Maritimers” by the early 1960s was the new public housing project at Warden Woods in southwestern Scarborough. Many residents there were white Anglo-Celtic Canadians; some had been displaced from Cabbagetown and St. James Town (Toronto neighbourhoods affected by urban renewal) while others were migrants from the east coast.23 Robert Crysdale’s 1968 sociology thesis on Riverdale, a working-class neighbourhood dominated by “British” Canadians, noted the presence of “East coasters.” Another academic work, Daniel Hill’s 1960 dissertation “Negroes in Toronto,” identified the lower section of Ward Four as a “zone of emergence” – a filtering area for newcomers – as by the late 1950s most African Canadian migrants from Nova Scotia lived in “the District.” According to Hill’s field work, Toronto-born blacks were embarrassed by the backward and unsophisticated ways of their rural Nova Scotian counterparts, and the latter felt shunned and excluded by the established black community.24

11 One of the first media stories to stigmatize “ex-Maritimers” as a social problem in metropolitan Toronto was an interview in 1963 with a Metro Travellers’ Aid Society official. This agency, supported by the local United Appeal, provided counseling to travelers and persons new to the city. “People from the Maritimes are often uneducated, unprepared for big city life and have little to offer,” Mildred Dimms explained. These comments were contested by members of the Maritime Club, who stressed that most former residents of the region were employed and educated and that Ontario had its own indigenous problems with poverty.25 Dimms later attempted to clarify her remarks, agreeing that Toronto had many examples of educated and successful former “Maritimers.” Dimms also explained that only 2 per cent of all clients aided by her organization were Maritimers. But the issue of dependent Atlantic Canadian migrants had been defined and entered into public discourse. It also provoked negative press coverage in the Maritimes, as did other media reports that portrayed Atlantic Canadian newcomers in Toronto as “poor peasants with large families, no jobs and a burden on Central Canada’s economy.”26

12 In the expanding urban society of 1960s’ metropolitan Toronto, “Maritimers” were increasingly problematized. In 1965, Alderman Michael Grayson stirred controversy by denouncing Atlantic Canadians who moved to Toronto in order to exploit welfare benefits. In doing so he helped create a lasting stereotypical image: “You have a fellow drive up here in a broken-down car, climb into the St. James Town area, get on welfare and he’s having the time of his life.”27 This controversy was framed against the backdrop of a perceived social crisis surrounding affordable housing in Toronto’s older neighbourhoods. Mayor Philip Givens clarified for the media that most residents of the St. James Town slums had been born in Ontario, not the Maritimes.28 But that same year a magistrate in the city of Burlington, near Hamilton, Ontario, stated that young male migrants from Quebec, Newfoundland, and the Maritime provinces were especially prone to stolen property charges.29 Although serious crimes involving “Maritimers” were limited, regional identities were included when such crimes were reported. Such was the case of a drinking party on Dundas Street East in 1965, which ended in a fatal stabbing. Six “New Brunswick expatriates” had left a nearby beverage room to attend a party in an apartment rented by a Maritime couple. The men played guitar and sang “western songs” prior to a fight breaking out. The birthplace and ethnicity of people involved in two other Toronto murders reported on the same page of the newspaper were not mentioned. Another example of this tendency is a 1968 press account, which noted a magistrate’s expectations that problem tenants were likely Maritimers.30

13 In 1965 the Toronto Daily Star published “Hard Luck Maritimers” by Harold Morrison, a story which drew comparisons with Toronto’s “have-not, ill educated” Maritimers and “their spiritual cousins in the Appalachian Mountains areas of the United States.”31 The piece supposedly had been inspired by recent crimes in the metro area involving “Down East” migrants. Morrison explained that most “Maritimers” – who in his analysis included Newfoundlanders – found employment and settled into a normal lifestyle; but Morrison also opined that even the successful expatriates from that region, excluding professionals and skilled workers, endured loneliness and cultural shock in the transition to living in “big, cold Toronto.” Manifestations were heavy drinking, the squandering of wages and savings, and male breadwinners suffering the humiliation of being supported by their spouses. The author, who had consulted the police, clergy, social workers, and private charity officials, described vulnerable Atlantic Canadians as “social casualties,” and stated that most did not apply for assistance either out of fear or ignorance. Pockets of these “invisible immigrants” were located in Regent Park, Cabbagetown, the West End, and on the borders of York Township. A United Church minister who worked with the poor in Regent Park described the most vulnerable as males who were displaced from the agricultural, fishing, forestry, and mining sectors and who were unable easily to adjust to the urban, service economy. Recent American immigration restrictions, Morrison noted, as well as the fact that Quebec was regarded as “foreign” and chain migration practices attracted these blue-collar individuals to urban Ontario.32 A provincial deputy minister of welfare described British and Italian immigrants to Toronto as “better prepared for the transition period” than many Maritimers. Even an official of the Salvation Army, which assisted more than 4,000 Atlantic Canadians newcomers each year, described the adults as “honest, hard-working people” who were nonetheless ill-suited to retraining programs. Morrison attempted to compare the lower-class “Maritimers” of Toronto to the hillbillies in the cities of the American Midwest, stressing that “both have a rich folk culture that can be traced back to Elizabethan days” and that both were known to produce and abuse “home-distilled alcohol.” Evidence of “folk culture” included the ubiquitous love of “country and western music” as well as alcohol. Morrison also claimed that at most of the homes he visited in preparing the article he heard “the family collections of guitar twanging records – or often their own guitars and singing.” Morrison’s exposé suggested practical reforms: federal legislation, youth hostels, and emergency housing. Yet it ended on a pessimistic note, implying that allowing an individual with “a third-rate education in a have-not province” to migrate to a modern city was a recipe for failure.33 As at least one critic of the article pointed out, Morrison based some of his conclusions on less than 400 migrant families (“most of them living in Toronto”) seeking relief from the provincial Department of Welfare. At the time, the population of metro Toronto was as great as that of the Atlantic Provinces.34

14 The following year Alderman Kenneth Dear, whose ward included Parkdale, created an “inter regional” incident when he declared that too many “Maritimers” were locating in the community, competing with locals for scarce housing and “clogging welfare rolls.” Dear may have been influenced by press accounts, such as Morrison’s, that suggested that Atlantic Canadians were drawn to Toronto by its generous welfare benefits. He also stated that he opposed the use of municipal funds, especially a suggestion made to the Toronto city council to subsidize public housing tenants, as it would draw even more Maritime migrants who would compete with deserving Toronto residents. ”We don’t owe these people a living,” he explained to a reporter. “They are causing us nothing but grief.” The angry responses from Atlantic Canadians included death threats and Toronto police had to take measures to protect the alderman and his family. The premier of PEI pointed out that Ontario gained when educated Maritimers, whose schooling had been paid for by taxpayers in their home provinces, relocated to the city. The New Brunswick government reminded the media that Maritimers had made important contributions to Toronto’s cultural, educational, and business life. The mayor of Boston, John F. Collins, whose grandfather was from New Brunswick, announced that Maritimers were still welcomed in his city, where a large minority of the population had family connections with Canada. Dear embarked on a three-week goodwill tour of the Maritimes, where he attended a convention of municipal officials in New Brunswick. There he explained to local media that his remarks were not directed against all “Maritime” migrants, but rather the several thousand who annually arrived in the metropolis with few skills and little savings. In addition to the large influx from “east of Quebec City,” the Ontario capital was also burdened with vulnerable migrants from Manitoba. The immediate issue, he repeated, was a shortage of private housing for low-income families.35 Although the head of Toronto’s public housing authority agreed, neither Toronto’s mayor nor its Board of Control accepted Dear’s suggestion of a publicity campaign to encourage Atlantic Canadians “to stay home if they had no job.”36 Prior to his visit, Dear had even participated on an open-line radio program in Halifax, where he attempted to explain why Toronto welcomed immigrants from overseas but not fellow Canadians. He returned to Toronto convinced that the federal government should provide counselling for potential migrants and encourage them to upgrade education and job skills.37

15 The influx of young Maritimers, “incapable of coping, financially and emotionally, with the frustrations of high-geared urban life,” was cited by journalist Michael Valpy as one of the main reasons behind the expansion of Toronto’s skid row in the 1960s.38 The classic urban sociology anthology The Underside of Toronto contained a chapter on the city’s “skid row” subculture, which involved up to 10,000 males living in a zone east of Yonge Street, south of Carlton Street, west of River Street and north of King Street; the chapter noted that many were alcoholics who valued the area for its soup kitchens, cheap rooming houses, bars, and pawnshops. According to Reverend Keith Whitney of the Metropolitan United Church (located on the edge of the district): “Most of the men on Toronto’s skid row come from the Maritimes or Newfoundland, from high unemployment and low-income areas of Ontario and Quebec, or from Indian reservations.”39 And a study of skid row “chronic drunkenness offenders” carried out by the Alcoholism and Drug Addiction Research Foundation identified a large minority of “winos” who were originally from the “Maritimes.” The researchers wrote that, based on the interviews they conducted, heavy drinking constituted “the informal expectation for validation of the male role” for Maritimers.40

16 York University sociologist Thelma McCormack, in a study for the Canadian Centre for Community Studies, concluded in 1968 that Atlantic Canadians were not always equipped to deal with the big city, and consequently suffered discrimination from employers and landlords. McCormack, who had worked with Robert Lynd, Paul Felix Lazarfield, and Robert K. Merton at Columbia University in the 1940s, was influenced by an American sociological tradition that stressed the trauma of immigrant and rural migrant adjustment to cities. Her study was sponsored by the Atlantic Development Board and the federal departments of Manpower and Immigration and Forestry and Rural Development – agencies that were interested in uncovering “barriers to mobility” and the role of migration in regional development. Owing to negative media reports, the employment barriers facing “Maritimers” had already emerged as a public issue. McCormack interviewed thirteen “Maritimers” (five Nova Scotians and eight Newfoundlanders) who had moved to Toronto in the 1950s or 1960s from rural areas or small towns. The larger study was also interested in the “backflow” of Atlantic Canadians who returned to the region after encountering difficulties in the metropolis and in the trade-off between economic security and personal happiness in the big city.41

17 Although many of the observations in the study seem subjective and based on stereotypes of regional migrants as ill-suited to urban living, McCormack noted that the interviewees, all of whom had established themselves in Toronto, did not match the media image of the young impulsive “Maritime” drifter. The view from Manpower officers and social workers was that Atlantic Canadians were vulnerable and “expected to be helped” by charity or the government. Bureaucrats and social workers, who concentrated on young, unskilled, and poorly educated males who appeared in the courts and Manpower and social agency offices, noted their unpredictability, high turnover, and alienation from work. McCormack’s migrants in contrast were more mature and self-reliant, but she did characterize them as “submissive” to employers and other authority figures. Rural Atlantic Canadians accustomed to houses, according to the interviews, also found it difficult to adjust to living in rented apartments.42 McCormack’s study, although limited in scope, was echoed by the later judgment of American scholars Obermiller, Wagner, and Tucker, who concluded that although Appalachian migrants between 1940 and 1960 had “done well economically, the social cost has been great. Their labor was welcome, but their ‘peculiar ways’ were not. Appalachian migrants encountered discrimination: sometimes in housing, sometimes in hiring, and often in the school system.”43

18 Vulnerable and dependent internal migrants sometimes were referred to as “Old Canadians” – individuals and families of Anglo-Celtic or French stock who were not prospering in the modern city.44 According to the Metro Toronto Social Planning Council, which organized a Social Opportunities Project (SOP) for migrants in 1967, their rural origins, low education levels, and lack of employment skills and personal savings constituted a burden on social welfare and public housing.45 The SOP study was funded by the federal Department of Manpower and Immigration and chaired by a local Church of England cleric. It aimed not at examining Atlantic Canadian migrants, but the general migrant population of census tracts 27 through 32 – the Dufferin-Parkdale area – which by 1966 housed more than 39,000 people. The area was below Dundas Street West, north of the Canadian National Railway lands and Exhibition Park, and bounded on the west by Sorauren Avenue and the east by Dovercourt Road. Its main commercial thoroughfare was Queen Street West. Although ethnically mixed, with Italian, Polish, and Ukrainian populations, the study area was more “British” in nature than Toronto as a whole. The upper part contained many single-family residences; the southern section was dominated by rooming houses, houses converted into flats, and inexpensive apartments.46 It was described as an area with a large transient population, a high cost of living, and overcrowded rental housing (including many rooming houses).47 As Whitzman’s recent study of the community and how it has been understood by planners, politicians, and the media explains, Parkdale’s actual socio-economic conditions in the 1950s and most of the 1960s were actually more stable than many other Toronto neighbourhoods as until the late 1960s it was a “mixed-income, mixed-use neighbourhood.”48

19 Interviews with Manpower Canada officials, police, social workers, landlords, school principals, and clergy familiar with the census tracts studies by the SOP, revealed certain common characteristics being identified with eastern Canadian migrants to the area. They included youthfulness, unrealistic economic expectations, low levels of education, clannishness, loneliness and alienation, timidity, family problems, hedonistic binge drinking by young males, frequent residential moves, and “pride and group feeling.” A Manpower Canada survey of a larger area of Toronto at the time had noted that half of the applicants at job centres were under 25 years of age and that more than half were single. And Atlantic Canadian and other newcomers of working age were often seen as the result of “unplanned migration,” which originated out of rumour or word-of-mouth information from friends, relatives, neighbours, and former co-workers. Eastern Canadians tended to relocate to Ontario through a process of informal chain migration.49 This echoes the findings of research on migration from the American South to the cities of the American north. According to Chad Berry’s interviews with former Southern migrants to Northern cities, kinship networks “often determined where a migrant went as well as where he or she lived, worked and even retired.”50

20 The Social Opportunities document justified its emphasis on Atlantic Canadians as a “problem” on two grounds. The first was the challenge of their “occupational and structural integration”; the second was their identity as members of regional subcultures. Also problematic was the study’s lumping together of anglophone and francophone migrants from four provinces into virtually a single ethnic type, with a distinctive speech, dress, and lifestyle: “Those in-migrants who draw attention to themselves do so in part because they are often representative of regional folk or subcultures, those from the outports of Newfoundland, farmer-fishermen-pulp cutters of New Brunswick, those from the steel and coal communities of Nova Scotia, Gaspesians and generally those who have been isolated physically from the more prosperous industrial and industrialized dynamic areas of the county.”51 Alderman Ken Dear, interviewed in response to the SOP report, stated that conditions in Parkdale had not changed over the previous two years. The Toronto Daily Star interviewed a young Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, gas station attendant who had moved to Toronto, exhausted his meager savings, and ended up in a variety of shelters and rooming houses. The reporter’s article was a cautionary tale that warned “green” rural and small town dwellers in other parts of Canada to resist the urge to engage in “impulse” migration.52

21 The SOP researchers also suggested that Atlantic Canadians who were educated and middle-class, those who had professional jobs, and others who had moved to the suburbs were embarrassed by the lifestyle and image of the dependant groups, who enjoyed a “clannish social life” centred on quaint regional lingo, drinking, loud parties, “Maritime nights,” and two west end hotel taverns.53 The most problematic migrants were young single males – “the wind-breaker” group in the words of one social worker – who suffered from a poor work ethic, emotional immaturity, lack of career goals, and a tendency to drink, fight, and get into trouble with the police. One press account of the report stated “drunkenness down east is more tolerated.” The Salvation Army men’s hostel on Sherbourne Street reported that Atlantic Canadians were the single largest group of clients; they also constituted 75 per cent of new monthly applicants to the Salvation Army welfare office.54

22 Unlike most accounts that stressed the masculine nature of migration, the SOP report also discussed women. They had been a minor part of Morrison’s 1965 exposé, which suggested that small numbers of “Maritime” young women ended up as “prey to the seamy side of life.”55 SOP project informants associated with the YWCA, Canada Manpower, and other organizations told researchers that many young Atlantic Canadian women were “ill prepared to work and support themselves in the city.” Rural and small town “girls,” although hard-working, religiously devout, and willing to send money back to their families, lacked the discipline and maturity to become domestic servants and were vulnerable to “curbside johnnies” at the train station and bus terminal when they arrived in the city. Originating from traditional communities, they supposedly lacked an identity in the metropolis. Some were arrested for vagrancy (“no visible means of support”) and others drifted into Yorkville’s coffee house and drug scene.56

23 Other trends concerning “Maritimers” were discernable. Although economic migrants tended to be young and single, they included families and children and some of the single male migrants married while they were in Toronto. Many mothers worked, which was a potential problem for child supervision. Families held on to traditional foodways, and a number of accounts mention Newfoundland grocery stores. A number of the fathers allegedly started drinking heavily, drifting into petty crime to support the family or relying on welfare. Housing was a problem and lower-class Atlantic Canadians were constantly shifting residence. Interviews with the principals of the seven schools in the study area described the children of these families as “culturally deprived,” with lower-than-average literacy skills and a lack of parental support. School authorities noted a high degree of transferring out, implying that many families ultimately moved back to Atlantic Canada.57 Although McCormack had realized the diversity and complexity of migration, and the importance of the life cycle effect, many commentators equated “leaving” with failure. Migration history, including that of Appalachia, provides many examples of temporary migration or sojourning, particularly by males, to help sustain the family economy back in the home region or country.58

24 Several initiatives were undertaken to address these problems. One of the recommendations of the 1968 SOP report was the establishment of a “friendly” or drop-in centre for Parkdale. The Catholic diocese of Toronto, in cooperation with the diocese of Antigonish, Nova Scotia, began an informal counseling service for Atlantic Canadian migrants at St. Mary’s Church on Adelaide Street in 1967.59 Earlier in the decade, St. Mary’s, located at the corner of Bathurst and Adelaide streets, had run out-reach programs for neighbourhood Maritime families, which included a large representation from Cape Breton. By the late 1960s the Atlantic Centre, which employed two social workers, offered assistance to eastern Canadian migrants who tended to congregate in Toronto’s west end. Migrants sought information on boarding houses, employment, social events, and psychological counseling. By the early 1970s the centre, which operated in a vacant store in Parkdale, was supported by the United Community Fund as part of a growing coalition of community agencies. It was also seeking funds from Atlantic Canada’s provincial governments in order to help provide counseling for some of the several thousand migrants from these provinces who arrived each year in metro Toronto. In 1971 the two social workers, Jesuit brother Jim McSheffrey and Beth Sellars, issued a press release warning Newfoundlanders and Maritimers that “the streets of Toronto are not paved with gold.” They advised potential migrants that employers demanded evidence of education and job references and that unskilled workers faced an uncertain future. McSheffrey and Sellars counseled prospective newcomers to arrange in advance to stay with friends, to bring sufficient funds on which to survive for several weeks, and to move back to Atlantic Canada if things did not work out.60 In 1970 Metro Toronto’s welfare commissioner revived the arguments of Alderman Dear, pointing out that 20 per cent of welfare applicants originated from outside of the province, mainly from Atlantic Canada. They were also often less self-sufficient and connected to support networks than newcomers to Canada. A year later, municipal officials were suggesting special federal government aid for vulnerable Atlantic Canadian migrants (similar to assistance afforded refugees).61

25 Occasional controversies surrounding migrants and stereotypical views of “Maritimers” and their culture notwithstanding, the number of Atlantic Canadian expatriates in Toronto region was limited. 1971 census data indicates that less than 50,000 Atlantic Canadian-born people lived in all of Ontario and that 9.9 per cent of the residents of the City of Toronto had been born in provinces outside of Ontario. Moreover, most Canadian-born newcomers blended into the general population through residential dispersion. Similarly, despite the warning issued by McSheffrey and Sellars, the Atlantic Centre was not flooded with newcomers. In 1971 new clients, who tended to be young males with limited education, amounted to roughly a dozen a week. The “flood” of Atlantic Canadian welfare applicants reported in 1970 in the City of Toronto amounted to several hundred families. The Western-area Young Women’s Christian Association reported in 1971 that few of children and youth of the Dundas St. West area, who included many Newfoundlanders, were “poor.”62 Parkdale’s image was similar to that of Chicago’s “hillbilly ghetto,” Uptown, six miles north of the city’s downtown and close to Lake Michigan. A sympathetic American activist account published in 1970 quoted a municipal official who spoke of the need to “urbanize” the rural migrants of the Chicago neighbourhood.63

26 Another important qualification to the general stereotype about “Maritimers” is that in addition to being differentiated by age, social class, education, skill, and family status, Atlantic Canadians came from four provinces – each with their own distinct cultures and history and comprised of various religious and ethnic groups. Acadians, for example, were a distinct culture, and Hill’s 1960 study revealed that Nova Scotian “negroes” were considered a less desirable subgroup of the African Canadian community in Toronto. Furthermore, as a study by Orton indicated, Newfoundland migrants brought their historic differences, based on community and religion, with them to the city. Many Newfoundland associations, for example, could be traced back to two Orange lodges formed earlier in the century. Orton also concluded that migrants who joined Newfoundland organizations lived in “working class and lower middle class areas.” Their clubs, bowling leagues, hockey teams, and dances were shunned by better educated and more prosperous Newfoundland migrants, who also regarded country music as the music of “hicks.”64 The label “Maritimer” favoured in Ontario may have implied a common background, culture, or even ethnicity, much like the adjective Appalachian, but this was far from the case. According to business executive J.E. “Ned” Belliveau, writing in 1970, Maritimers had successfully infiltrated Toronto’s legal, financial, and higher education establishment. The only things that migrants from Atlantic Canada had in common were geography and the stereotypes they faced in Ontario.65 And by 1983 the American scholars Martin Marger and Phillip Obermiller were arguing that working-class migrants from the Atlantic region, who were mostly English-speaking and Protestant, were so similar to the dominant Canadian-born group in Toronto that they should not be considered ethnically distinct.66

27 In addition to Torontonian depictions of migrants, two other factors contributed to regional stereotypes: media portrayals of Atlantic Canadian traditionalism and underdevelopment as well as national and provincial government programs of regional development (best symbolized by the creation in 1969 of the Department of Regional Economic Expansion or DREE). A Toronto Daily Star reporter, for example, described the Maritimes in 1956 as “Canada’s ‘Deep South’” – a region that seemed to be stuck in the 1930s. 67 Other accounts tended to blame the people of the region, not the economic structure of Confederation, for the misery of the region’s inhabitants. A financial editor in 1958 reported on a slower pace of life, a dislike of work, and a suspicion of “Upper Canadians.” A year earlier, in 1957, an editorial in the Globe and Mail criticized the supposedly “defeatist” attitude of the people of the region and its expectation of federal government subsidies. Yet that year the Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects recognized the existence of regional disparity and suggested that out-migration from the Maritimes be subsidized in order to fill labour needs in Central Canada. Although John G. Diefenbaker campaigned in 1958 with assurances that Maritimers would not be forced to leave their region in order to improve their standard of living, an important idea had been planted in policy-making and media circles.68

28 The federal government’s commitment to regional equalization and the increased reliance of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick on transfer payments – notably the more generous seasonal unemployment program of the 1970s – strengthened outsiders’ perceptions of the region’s backwardness and lack of initiative.69 Contributing to these perceptions were journalistic and academic critiques of the traditional, conservative, and patronage-ridden political culture and political systems of the four Atlantic provinces as well as accounts that stressed the “backward nature” of the region and the deficiencies of its people.70 The headline for a Globe and Mail story summarizing a Cornell University mental health study of a rural Nova Scotia county in 1962 was “A Third of Rural Maritime Folk Mentally Sick.”71 During the late 1960s, as the issue of regional development gained more prominence, the national media contained many accounts of the declining industries that, in tandem with a continued emphasis on the region’s backward political culture and social systems, fostered further negative stereotyping. Not surprisingly, such reports often created resentment in Atlantic Canada.72

29 Even sympathetic depictions of regional socio-economic conditions, as in the case of Appalachia, reinforced the negative image of Atlantic Canada. Appalachian backwardness was publicized to a new generation in 1962 with Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberland, a history that stressed grinding poverty, resource depletion, environmental degradation, and political exploitation. Similar messages were associated with Canada’s “forgotten” provinces.73 Sympathetic activist exposés of Atlantic Canadian society, such as Silver Donald Cameron’s book on the 1970-71 Nova Scotian fishermen’s strike, exploited “folk” images of the region (but for progressive, not conservative reasons).74 Cameron, a journalist raised in British Columbia who moved to the Canso Strait area, likened the strike to “a peasants’ revolt” in a feudalized industry that was protected by the political elite and legal system. In a letter to fisher Everett Richardson, the book’s protagonist, the author celebrated Nova Scotians’ anarchistic “country cunning,” which included driving while impaired, bootlegging, exhibiting frank attitudes towards sex, shoplifting from chain stores, “borrowing” tools from employers, and cheerfully engaging in absenteeism and unemployment insurance fraud. Cameron advised his fisher friend that life was about more than “a steady round of eight-hour shifts in the mills of Port Hawkesbury”; occupational pluralism was a more humanized existence than the demands of industrial wage labour.75

30 Socio-economic statistics were less subjective than romanticized journalism. In the mid-1960s the average education level in New Brunswick was grade eight or less. In 1961 nearly two-fifths of all dwellings in Newfoundland had no running water, two-thirds had no baths or showers, and half had no toilets.76 Atlantic Canada was the least urbanized part of the country, and a relatively larger share of its workforce was involved in seasonal occupations such as agriculture, fishing, and primary forestry as compared to other parts of Canada.77 Poverty rates for unmarried adults and families also were higher in Atlantic Canada than in many other parts of the nation. Aging, inefficient industries such as coal and steel were being propped up by federal and provincial government subsidies. High rates of unemployment were another ongoing reality, and unemployment insurance and regional development spending could be interpreted as a form of “foreign aid” to keep undereducated and unemployable Atlantic Canadians from flooding into Ontario.78

31 As with mainstream American views towards Appalachians, the attitudes of Toronto elites toward “Maritimers” appear to have become entrenched by the 1960s.79 One culturally selective account of East coasters in urban Ontario was penned in 1969 by journalist Kenneth Bagnell for the Toronto Globe Magazine. “With Guitar and Dreams: Maritime Migrants: White Socks in the Big City” focuses on young, undereducated Maritimers who were unprepared for the realities of urban living. It features the story of 20-year-old “Bernard Cormier” (a fictionalized name), a “drifter” originally from Miscouche, PEI. One of a family of 13 children whose father had died, Bernard had grown up in poverty at Miscouche and Charlottetown, obtained a Grade 10 education, and had worked illegally in Charlottetown while receiving unemployment insurance benefits. After unwisely taking out a car loan through a finance company, he had journeyed to Ontario to find work. Bernard had played his guitar with other Maritimers on the long train trip to Toronto; significantly, the article mentioned not PEI or Maritime folk songs, but Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home,” a sentimental Nashville county ballad about a condemned prisoner. Cormier was depicted drinking draft beer at the Horseshoe Tavern on Queen Street West, a favourite haunt of Maritimers when country music was performed. At the Horseshoe, Cormier heard his idol, Stompin’ Tom Connors, play his favourite type of music. Bagnell establishes Cormier’s conservatism by noting that he did not like “long hair” on men and the latter’s deviancy is compounded by his love of working-class country music (with its defeatist overtones), rather than modern rock and roll (the music of middle-class youth). The story also discusses a dancehall and tavern near Chinatown frequented by young East coasters.80

32 In didactic fashion, the author, a Cape Breton native and graduate of Mount Allison University, stresses that Cormier’s new friends were not “outsiders” such as Yorkville hippies, suburban teenagers, Prairie migrants, or small-town Ontarians at the YMCA; instead, they were fellow working-class Maritimers, who wore “white socks” (a visible symbol of their lack of sophistication). Aside from their interest in county and western music, the young Maritimers were examples of 1950s-type working-class “greasers.” Cormier’s attempts to find work at Toronto factories were unsuccessful, and he spent most of his time at his sister’s apartment on a street south of Dundas Street. After receiving an unemployment cheque from home, he hosted a party where several Maritimers played guitars. When the beer ran out, a fight erupted and the police were called. With the aid of his brother, a truck driver, Cormier subsequently found a job making deliveries to garages and, like his brother, selling pilfered auto parts. According to Cormier, this was not stealing as the company had plenty of money and paid low wages. Another brother earned illegal money by stealing aluminum windows from a factory. In the end, Cormier quit the job, borrowed funds from his brothers, and flew back to PEI. Bagnell attempted to use the story to illustrate the sociological theory that migration for unskilled workers often was an “irrational process.”81

33 Even more vivid and influential images of the “Maritimer adrift” were found in Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road (long considered a classic of Canadian independent film making). Shebib, born in Toronto, studied film at the University of California in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. In 1966 he received some attention for his National Film Board documentary Satan’s Choice, about an outlaw motorcycle club. He filmed a documentary on San Francisco’s hippie scene for CBC in 1967, and in 1969 he released Good Times, Bad Times – a non-romanticized documentary about Canada’s war veterans. Goin’ Down the Road, a story of two Maritimers trying to make it in Toronto, cost $80, 000 to produce and was released in 1970 to critical acclaim. The writer, who shared screenplay duties with the director, was Alberta-born Bill Fruet, who also had studied film at UCLA. The movie was shot in Toronto in 1969, the same year that Bagnell’s article appeared.82 Goin’ Down the Road was described as the first “real” Canadian movie because it was based on the experience of “so many tens of thousands of Maritimers.”83

34 Shebib had attended the University of Toronto to study sociology before heading to California. His parents had come from Atlantic Canada; his father was the son of a Lebanese immigrant who had settled in Cape Breton and his mother’s family was from Newfoundland. By 1969 he had made more than a dozen documentaries, several of which dealt with people on the fringes of society. In an interview with journalist Pierre Berton, he stated that his biggest influences were television and movies, including the “social” films of Fritz Lang and Frank Capra. In his director’s commentary recorded for the re-release of the film Goin’ Down the Road on DVD three decades later, Shebib also mentioned other influences: John Ford’s film of Steinbeck’s Great Depression migration saga The Grapes of Wrath, and Italian films such as I Vitelloni (1953) and Il Posto (1961).84 According to a press report, the idea for his first dramatic feature, which featured a fluid filming style, had originated as a two-part special for the CBC television program The Way It Is.85

35 The working title for the film was The Maritimers. The plot, which resembled a fictionalized blend of the narratives in the SOP report, McCormick’s study, and Bagnell’s journalism, centred on two young working-class Cape Bretoners, Joey Male and Pete McGraw, who drive to Toronto in search of jobs and good times.86 Aside from stock footage of Nova Scotia, the “Maritime” travel scenes were filmed in Scarborough. Pete explains in a job interview that in the Maritimes you do not need higher education to work in a mine or on the docks. The two men find work in a bottling plant, experience the bright lights of Yonge Street and meet two working-class waitresses. At one point Pete is spurned by a “classy” French Canadian secretary. He is more of an idealist in search of unattainable goals, such as a middle-class job or middle-class women (interestingly depicted as “hippies”). Joey’s new girlfriend, played by Jayne Eastwood, becomes pregnant and they decide to wed, moving into an alienating high-rise apartment and extravagantly buying furniture and a colour television on credit. After the protagonists are laid off at the plant, money becomes scarce and employment sporadic and this is degrading to their masculinity. The men write to “the unemployment” to see if they are eligible for unemployment insurance, but they have not worked enough weeks to qualify. Living amid the consumer delights of the modern metropolis at Christmas time, they eventually take to crime (stealing groceries, committing an assault) in order to survive. In the end, they flee from the city in their second-hand car and Joey’s pregnant bride is abandoned.87

36 Goin’ Down the Road was a Canadian hit and its gritty realism became a model to emulate in English and French Canada filmmaking. It was judged to be one of the first successes of the fledgling Canadian Film Development Corporation, which had awarded Shebib a $19,000 grant, and Margaret Atwood discussed it in her 1972 nationalist cultural treatise Survival.88 The movie won the best film award at the Toronto Film Festival and the Canadian Film Awards, and it was screened at New York’s prestigious Carnegie Hall Cinema. Influential critic Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker, described it as “the most uncorrupt movie in town.” Doug McGrath and Paul Bradley shared a best lead actor award. Interestingly, both had working-class backgrounds that paralleled their characters, although McGrath, born in Cape Breton, had grown up in Timmons, Ontario, and Bradley had been born in Cabbagetown. Eastwood, whose background was more middle class, described the movie as “an accurate portrayal of the prejudice faced by people from the East Coast.” Even 30 years after the initial release of the film, media coverage of it was still positive.89

37 The characters, according to Shebib’s director’s commentary on the 2002 DVD re-release of the film, were not intended to represent all “Maritimers” – only young working-class men who aspired to better times. They are essentially immature hedonists, whose solution to most problems is “a couple of more beer.” They do not know the latest dances and their favourite music is country and western. The film included mandatory depictions of drinking, male horseplay, and guitars. Similar to the “problem migrants” identified by social agencies and the media, they had little education, few skills, and unrealistic expectations about employment and budgeting. Yet, like the rural Nova Scotians celebrated in The Education of Everett Richardson, they were “authentic.” Shebib later explained that the characters epitomized a type of Canadian working-class culture that he associated with 1950s and 1960s Canada, which functioned as a type of opposition to American “middle class” culture. Yet in 1971 he stated that audiences in West Virginia would probably closely identify with the film. Shebib also admitted, however, that the characters of Joey and Pete were partly inspired by stories about his Cape Breton cousins, who had experienced tough times in Ontario.90 And 30 years before those comments about the inspiration for the film’s protagonists, Shebib, in a 1970 interview, explained that he had seen the future, which was California; the Maritimes, in his opinion, were at “the other end of tunnel” – stuck in the 1950s. He explicitly drew a parallel between the Canadian and American situations in that Maritimers who arrived in Toronto and ended up on welfare were regarded “like poor white trash in Alabama.” And Shebib also thought that his film reflected part of the Toronto “scene” that involved “kids in Riverdale and Parkdale who have ducktail haircuts, white socks and pointed shoes. The characters in Cabbagetown,” he explained, “are forgotten people.”91

38 The director recalled that audiences in Atlantic Canada “loved” the film, but the evidence suggests a more complex response.92 According to an editorial in the Saint John Evening Times Globe, Maritimers in Toronto who had been approached to be “extras” during filming in 1969 were reluctant and “resentful.” The editor noted, bitterly, that a number of documentaries on Maritimers in the big city had depicted them “drinking, wrangling, brawling, weeping, cadging dimes and toothlessly gumming food handouts.” Shebib did film a brief sequence at Toronto’s Maritime Social Club (and which appeared in the movie) that, according to the Canadian Press (CP) news service, featured “ducktail haircuts and pegged pants, girls in party dresses and sweaty couples jiving to songs popular in the 1950s.” More questionably, a scene filmed in Allan Gardens, a Toronto park, did not use extras but actual “winos,” which drew on another archetypal image of the Maritime drifter. Like Bagnell’s depiction of Atlantic Canadian “greasers” in the streets and beer parlours of Toronto, the CP story implied that “Maritimers” were behind the times and sources of pathology.93 It is not clear whether Fruet and Shebib had been influenced by the SOP report, McCormack’s study, or Bagnell’s article, but the similarities among the four narratives are striking. Interviews done by Shebib suggest that the filmmaker was familiar with media coverage of Atlantic Canadians.94 Although he was clearly sympathetic to the characters, and stressed their working-class as much as their regional nature, the film reinforced pre-existing perceptions that Atlantic Canadians, like Appalachians in cities of the Midwest and “Okies” in California, were “maladjusted migrants” who experienced considerable hardship and caused problems. Similar to these groups, “Maritime” migrants were associated with “strong images of uprooting and the psychological burdens of urban adjustment.”95

39 In contrast to central Canadian stereotypes of unskilled, undereducated, and problematized “Maritime” migrants, politicians, the media, and experts in Atlantic Canada regularly expressed concerns over the impact of out-migration on the sending society. Their message was simple: the region was losing its young, educated, skilled, and productive people to Ontario and the West.96 The Atlantic region also attracted few immigrants, which was one reason why its population growth rate in 1968-69 was one-fifth of the national average.97 The Atlantic Provinces Economic Council (APEC) noted that 103,000 individuals left the region between 1961 to 1965. In 1965 APEC officials, supporting regional modernization, stressed the need to create opportunities through “manpower policies” so as to keep young, “able,” educated, and “enterprising” people in the region. Out-migration was an “adjustment mechanism” that had “facilitated national economic growth and expansion” since Confederation. By 1967 council members were warning that out-migration had reached “alarming” levels. They cited a 1962 study that predicted a negative impact on labour force quality and productivity.98

40 Academics, sensitive to the emerging issue of regional disparity, weighed in on the issue. Out-migration within the region became an important focus of historical research, with much of it subsequently published in the regional journal Acadiensis.99 Historical awareness of the scale of out-migration was part of a revived regional/provincial rights consciousness during the 1970s that stressed the negative outcomes of Confederation. Some of the commentary, worried about cultural loss, was nostalgic. One of the more wistful depictions of population loss was in the 1979 National Film Board documentary Empty Harbours, Empty Dreams, directed by Kent Martin, which adopted a strict Maritime Rights interpretation of Confederation and its aftermath: the loss of people, as well as political influence and economic control, was part of the tragedy of union with Canada. Out-migration also informed activist and academic discussions of Atlantic Canadian “capitalist underdevelopment,” the region’s supposed role in subsidizing the national labour market, and the sense of regional “inferiority” as an outcome of a type of colonialism.100

41 After the 1960s, Atlantic Canada continued to provide surplus labour for Central Canada and Western Canada, particularly Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. During the 1970s and 1980s, out-migration levels remained relatively low in Newfoundland – a situation that changed in the early 1990s with the collapse of the ground-fish industry. From 1991 to 1996, Newfoundlanders were more likely than residents of any other province to leave their province: 37,000 people, or 7 per cent of the population, emigrated. For the three Maritime provinces, the figure was 5 per cent (the same level as Manitoba and Saskatchewan).101 According to anthropologist Gerald Sider, Newfoundlanders were “the Mexicans of Canada,” willing to migrate seasonally or permanently to labour in unskilled and semiskilled jobs in regions far from home.102 Nova Scotia’s population grew an average of 7 per cent a year in the 1970s and 1980s, but the rate slowed significantly in the late 1990s. Immigration to Atlantic Canada remains negligible, out-migration continues, and the birthrate, which traditionally countered the former, is falling. Population studies continue to predict negative – even apocalyptic – social and economic outcomes for the region in light of these factors.103

42 In the 1960s and 1970s (and possibly beyond), Newfoundland migrants in greater Toronto were still described as Maritimers and Maritimers as “Newfies.”104 As Toronto’s multicultural society developed beyond the 1960s, it problematized other subcultures, such as the city’s “second nation” – its 300,000-strong Italian community – as well as the growing visible minority presence.105 Other social threats surfaced, such as Yorkville and Rochdale College hippies and youthful summer transients hitchhiking across Canada.106 Yet regional stereotyping continued past the 1960s. Cultural explanations of Atlantic Canada’s economic situation, ranging from “timid” entrepreneurship to a rural culture of dependency or poverty, did not disappear.107 In recent years, negative comments about Atlantic Canada’s work ethic and employment insurance and transfer payment dependency have been linked to political leaders in Central Canada and Western Canada and have prompted resentment in the Atlantic Provinces.108

43 In hindsight, it seems strange that a metropolitan area that contained 600,000 immigrants by 1970 would portray a portion of a small native-born minority – “Maritimers” – as a social problem.109 The media and expert response to Atlantic Canadians in 1960s Toronto as a source of urban pathology closely resembled reactions in cities of the American Midwest to the influx of Appalachian “mountaineers” in the 1950s and 1960s, where, according to Chad Berry, the deviancy and poverty of the minority, not the prosperity and adjustment of the majority, was emphasized.110 East coast migrants, and the societies that they had left behind, were symbols of a vanishing way of life. Despite the director’s attempts at capturing a universal experience based on class and not region, Goin’ Down the Road was a “realistic” fictional embodiment of a set of characteristics already created by sociologists, employment counselors, clergy, social workers, police, teachers, journalists, and politicians. To varying degrees, these sources of knowledge offered a simplistic and culturally biased view of rural, unskilled, unmotivated, undereducated, and unreliable migrants adrift in the city. In contrast to the process described by McKay in The Quest of the Folk, these stereotypes appears to have been created in urban Ontario, not in the sending society, and they were far from romanticized.111 In the eyes of urban Ontarians, Maritimers had several characteristics. They were fatalistic young drifters who lived off welfare, drank heavily, engaged in violence, listened to country and western music, and broke the law in order to survive. Although they were Canadian-born and largely white and Protestant, their economic expectations were unrealistic and their work ethic supposedly weak. They also held on to backward and unique folkways in their clannishness, speech, and even dress. Those who did not migrate back to the region as “failures” become “hard core” welfare cases or ended up on skid row. “Maritime” migrants – like stereotyped Appalachians who had migrated to cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Columbus or Cincinnati – were lumped into a “deviant subculture” in need of modernization.112 Seen as products of subsistence farming, fishing, or primary forestry economies, declining coal mining or steel mill towns, substandard education systems, and conservative and corrupt political systems, “Maritimers” were regarded, not always sympathetically, as the casualties of Confederation.