STEERAGE TO CABINET.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20536, 11 October 1928, Page 18

STEERAGE TO CABINET.

SOME SPECTACULAR CANADIAN CAREERS. Three immigrants from the British Isles now occupy seats in the Canadian Cabinet. They are the Ministers of Railways, Labour, and Immigration. They have all made their own way in Canada without any adventitious aid. They arrived in a new country without capital and without friends, and their experience (Reuter’s Ottawa correspondent writes; shows what young men going to Canada can accomplish on their own. Charles Dunning, now Minister or Railways, went from England at the age ot 17 years; Peter Heenan, Minister ot Labour, horn in Ireland,, arrived in Canada at the age of 28 years, in the same year, 1902, as Dunning; while Robert Forke, now Minister of Immigration, left Scotland for Canada in 18d2, at the age of 22 years. All three tried their hand first at farming. Dunning s rise was meteoric. At the age of 26 years he was vice-president of the Saskatchewan Graingrowers, general manager of the Saskatchewan Co-operative Elevator Company, and member of the Canadian Council of Agriculture. At 34 he was Provincial Treasurer of Saskatchewan, a few rears later Premier of the province, and at 41 Minister of Railways in the Dominion Cabinet. . Heenan’s career was also spectacular. \fter being a professional football player in the Old Country he tried engineering for a construction company in Costa Rica. An attack of yellow fever necessitated a colder climate. He chose Canada, and went on an Alberta ranch. _ He left that to become a locomotive engineer, got into the Labour councils of Ontario, and 17 vears after coming to Canada became a member of the Ontario Legislature, cix vears later ha was representing m the Federal House a constituency larger in area than the whole of Great Britain, in 1926 he became Minister of Labour. Forke’s career held more the moral ot the fable of the hare and the tortoise. Forke began farming, and kept at it- 1 16 soon got interested in municipal politics, and became in 1921 member of the Dominion House of Commons.