Indentured 'white slavery' in Canada - My familial story

Canada is a young country and as such has a number of missteps included in the way many people came to Canada and in the way we treated each other. We are aware of the history of mistreatment of various groups in early Canada but most of us are not aware of the history of how many ‘white’ ancestors arrived here. Today I will tell the story of my paternal grandmother, Alice Pickering.


Alice was an orphan. While her history is not documented, I can relate some of what she told me when I was a child. She shared that she had been told that her father died first and then her mother died about a month later ‘of a broken heart’. She loved that story. Alice was born in England, perhaps in Birmingham,  in the year 1898. She once told me that the people of the orphanage actually named her by an established practice of rotation of letters. When it was her turn, A and P were the letters of the day so she became Alice Pickering. This leads me to believe that the story of the broken heart may have been some sort of fiction because she would have at least have had a name if it were true. I think she may have been the product of a British soldier who had served in India and an Indian mother. She had only a few pictures of her family and I vividly remember seeing women in saris among men dressed in suits and military uniforms. I remember once telling my father that he looked just like a middle-eastern man on the cover of a National Geographic and it upset him terribly. My dad had swarthy skin and deep brown eyes but that is another story. However, it came about, Alice was placed in an orphanage from infancy and until the time when she was told that she was 18 that is where she lived. At that point she was sent to Canada as a bonded servant.

These orphans or ‘Home Children’ as they were called represented a handy solution for the British government of the time. Canada needed labourers and Britain had an excess of people to provide for in workhouses and orphanages. Emigration was seen as a sensible solution. I fear that it also became a business for the unscrupulous. Because of the squalor and lack of support for poor families in urban areas, the local governing boards allowed religious zealots, social reformers, philanthropists and others to train and ship vagrant children and orphans, averaging the age of 10, to Canada where they were placed onto farms as domestic servants or farm workers. Luckier ones were adopted into families. Emigration of children became controversial when it was discovered that many of the children who were being sent overseas were sometimes taken without permission from existing relatives or profited upon. The agencies were not held accountable for the children once the children were placed.

Indentured labour was a form of contract employment usually with a three- to seven-year time frame. A person became an indentured servant by agreeing to work off a debt during a specified term. “Debt slaves” is another phrase to describe the arrangement, especially in the case of prisoners and youth who had no choice and no other opportunity to repay the debt. This is where Alice’s reality got even more complicated. When she was sent to Canada from the orphanage, her papers said that she was 18 and that she had entered into an agreement to be a bonded servant for seven years. It was not until she applied for old age pension in Canada at the age of 65 that she was told that she was actually only 60 years old so she did not qualify. Thus, a child of 13 in 1911 was sold into a form of slavery as a farm and domestic servant.

One estimate claims half of the white settlers of North America were indentured servants. Destitute, they agreed to work for the purchaser of the indenture upon arrival in Canada. Jim Struthers, chairman of the Canadian Studies Department at Trent University, says that employers in Upper Canada used indentured servitude as a means of maintaining a labour force. It was a legal contract that held people to a particular employment, to a place, at least long enough to pay back the initial cost of the passage. Some contracts were similar to apprenticeships while the terms of others were harsh. Some felt indentured servants were treated worse than slaves. They only needed to keep the worker alive for the term of the contract; if they died shortly after, it was not their loss. Contracts varied from situation to situation with no standard form. Permanent employment, a learned skill, the promise of land, tools, any and all of these might be promised for those who stayed for the duration of their contract.

Child migration to Canada peaked from the 1870s until the start of World War I and was triggered by desperate economic conditions over the previous few years. It was during this period that Annie Macpherson, Thomas Barnardo, and William Booth (the founder of the Salvation Army) commenced their work among the poorest and most destitute in the East End of London. To them, and to many other religious workers, emigration, including the forced migration of abandoned children, seemed the one certain way for the desperately poor to better themselves. Some eighty thousand children were sent to Canada during those years. By the time my grandmother came along it was an established and exploited practice.

The first group of these orphans or Home Children, as they were called at the time, came to Belleville in 1870. In the city, the children were accommodated in a temporary home called Marchmont before they were placed in foster care or sent along to be indentured. Alice arrived in Canada and was placed with a farm family in the Trenton area with the obligation to serve that family for seven years. It was not a happy arrangement for Alice and at the end of the time she married a much older man to escape her situation.

Life was hard in early Canada. So while it is true that many injustices happened, we can surely see from this one example that most of the people in Canada were in desperate situations, just trying to survive.