AN EXHAUSTING HEMORRHAGE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 18821, 11 July 1923, Page 4

AN EXHAUSTING HEMORRHAGE

This questioning is apparently making itself heard none too soon. Quite recently the United States Secretary of Labour told an immigration conference at Washington that 62,000 Canadians had entered his country in the last nine months, and had every one of theim paid the head tax of eight dollars. This means that they usually were entering to stay. These sixtytwo thousand were entered as “Canadians.” It is quite likely that Brit-ish-born and others who had recently immigrated into Canada but were now leaving it, would be entered as “English,” “Scotch,” “Irish” or otherwise. This might considerably swell even the above startling figures. About the same time the Canadian Minister of Immigration, the Hon. Mr Stewart, announced that in the preceding tnree months there had been an increase of one hundred per cent, in the number of immigrants entering Canada as compared with the corresponding period last year. But his announcement was met with the retort, ’ ’ What is the sense of rejoicing over the increase in Canada’s immigration figures so long as nothing was being done to stop this exhausting hemorrhage in the form of emigration?” As one journal put it, “What Canada needs to-day is a policy which which will keep our boys at home quite as much as a policy which will pump into the country home-seekers who know nothing of our life, our climate or cur local conditions.” New Zealand, iu common with every other part of the Empire, is interested in Canada’s welfare, first by reason of the ties of kinship, and again because of the fact that Canada’s prosperity and indeed her continued existence as a free Dominion are wholly dependent upon the settlement of her empty spaces. It is gratifying to learn that Canadians are taking cognisance of the serious leakage to the States, and are awakening to the fact that settlement cannot be made to grow by bringing even the best of people in unless they are kept in. This is one of the big problems before the Canadian Government, and the measures taken to secure a satisfactory solution will lie watched with keen interest by the other parts of the Empire.