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The New Fur Trade
This edition is our annual visit to Brandon, Manitoba located, if you dont know, on Highway One, 2.5 hours straight west of Winnipeg as the crow flys.
One new fact is that Manitobas second largest city continues to grow and change. One phenomena is the coming of hundreds of offshore workers, handpicked by Maple Leaf Pork, to work in the large pork processing plant employing about 1,600 people.
Since 1998 about 3,200 workers, about 25 per cent from offshore, have come to live in this long established community.
Their settlement has been highly organized, but their sheer numbers has created a housing crunch that will be a challenge. It sounds much like Brandons beginnings. As one new comer found in 1882. Hundreds of immigrants cannot even get shelter. Whole cars of stock have been starved and frozen to death. The reckless destruction of baggage and freight is something appalling. The snow blockade has prevented things from being sent down from Winnipeg and one cannot get the smallest trifles. Over five million feet of lumber is being sent here now from the States and in a few months this place will be three times the size it is now.
The most recent influx of settlers Columbian and Chinese workers will find life far more tolerable. These new workers are reminiscent of an influx of Filipino seamstresses brought to Winnipeg for the garment factories in the 1970s.
Though many could not speak English, they braved the cold new world, kept their language, built their close community. The garment trade has faded, but they always found other work and their children have attended university and Winnipeggers.
Maple Leaf Pork found itself in the same position as the garment trade in that Canadian workers were not available.
Concerns about how large blocks of immigration would affect Brandon have been allayed as Maple Leaf has been exemplary in its pursuit and handling of employees. The company has sent its own people offshore to do the interviewing, adding a personal touch to pre-employment.
Employment immigration created Manitoba and we are all immigrants whose ancestors came from other countries.
In 1892, the City of Brandon took the name of a 1793 Hudson Bay trading post, Brandon House, named after the 4th Duke of Brandon, a member of the British House of Lords.
The trade in furs eventually waned and the mid-1800s farming started with the Scottish Selkirk Settlers. By the turn of the 19th century, farming was well entrenched. Grain has been the core of its commercial soul ever since. The pork market has now created its own commodity sector. One might call it the new fur trade.
And with it come immigrant workers following opportunities. Employment economics change demographics for the better as they bring change. Those and other stories are in this edition, which focuses on Brandon the home of the Royal Winter Fair, hockeys Brandon Wheat Kings and now Maple Leaf Pork.
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