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Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 129, 27 November 1929, Page 11

BACK TO CANADA

TREND FROM THE STATES

DOMINION'S PROSPERITY

(From "The Post's" Representative.) VANCOUVER, 16th October. Bising Canadian prosperity has resulted in a very drastic- reduction of the exodus of man-power to the United States. In the past five years, 221,638 Canadians have returned to make their permanent homes in the Dominion. Of this number 191,089 were Canadianborn, the balance British-born who resided in Canada.

Quebec has been tho heaviest loser. There are now 2,250,000 FrenchCanadians in the New England States. Colonisation authorities have been unremitting in their efforts to induce these sons and daughters of old Quebec to return, and are now meeting with a fair degree of success.

A significant feature of the new movement is that these FrenchCanadians are not all going back to the parent province; many are seeking a now home in the Peace Elver country, north of British Columbia and Alberta—Canada's Last West, the only sector of the Dominion where free homesteading is going on. It was difficult to get them back. They had become industrialised. But they had two loves they could not shako off—that of their homeland, and, somewhat unique in this age, o£ their traditional occupation, agriculture.

The eyes of tho land-hungry from the whole of North America and from Great Britain are on tho Peace River. It is tho focal point of Western Canadian settlement to-day. 14 The best wheat in North America is grown there. It is, besides, ideally suited to mixed farming. Here • the French-Canadians are returning. To make it easy for their children they board them out at consolidated Bchools for fivo days a week, bringing them home for the week-end. The Government appropriation for motor transport to and from school is utilised, for the maintenance of dormitories, with the approval of the education authorities. The .movement is a happy augury in tho repatriation of French-Canadians.