bout de papier, Vol. 12, No. 3 (1995) — Fall 1995 // Automne 1995, p. 17
Little is known about the early life of William Dixon, who became the first immigration agent for the Dominion of Canada. Dixon was born in Ireland around 1825 and his family emigrated to Canada in 1830. His father opened a business (the British Saddlery Warehouse) in Toronto in 1835 and William was educated at Upper Canada College. In his mid-30s, William Dixon went to England, where he worked and travelled. We know that he married Clara Rowsell “by whom he had several children.” Somehow Dixon came to the attention of the chief commissioner of crown lands in Canada, who recommended him for a job receiving and organizing the exhibits from Canada for the International Exhibition in London in 1862. He unpacked the crates so well that he was made curator of Canada’s display.
Probably as a result of another recommendation from the same quarter, Dixon was appointed in January 1866 as temporary emigration agent in the United Kingdom for the Province of Canada by the province’s Minister of Agriculture, Thomas D’Arcy McGee. The latter was sufficiently impressed by Dixon’s work that the employment was prolonged, though Dixon moved his office from Liverpool to Wolverhampton around the time of Confederation.
By then, responsibility for immigration had been defined, under section 95 of the British North America Act, as one shared between the federal and provincial governments. That prompted the first, but certainly not the last, federal-provincial conference on immigration, in 1868. One consequence of that gathering was a commitment from Ottawa to open an office in London, with others to follow as necessary. Of course, there was nothing to prevent provinces from appointing agents as well.
In December 1868, an Order-in-Council was passed which established a Dominion Agency for Emigration in London, with William Dixon as its first chief. Soon afterward, permanent agents were located in Dublin, Belfast, Glasgow and elsewhere. “It is not an exaggeration,” H. Gordon Skilling has written, “to describe Mr. Dixon, with his two small rooms in Adams Street, with two clerks and a messenger as his staff, and with subordinate agents in other port cities of the British Isles, as Canada’s first resident agent abroad and as the predecessor of the High Commissioner in London.”
In his new role, Dixon was expected to distribute publicity, supervise other Dominion agents in the United Kingdom and later on the continent of Europe, co-operate with the provinces and their own agents, and to report back to Ottawa on conditions affecting emigration from Britain and Europe. “Dixon was a promoter,” according to Nancy Gelber, “who quickly set about inserting advertisements in newspapers and distributing to rural British towns 10,000 posters eulogizing Canada. He was so deluged with responses that he had not time to check on the other agents who continued to go their own way.” Dixon’s efforts were further complicated by unclear instructions and uncertain authority. That situation was eventually remedied in part when his successor was appointed “Agent-General”, though the overall framework for immigration work in Britain was not revised until the appointment of the first High Commissioner in 1880. Dixon had even more difficulty with the representatives of the provinces, whose efforts to promote immigration to their destinations often duplicated and sometimes contradicted the work of federal agents. In part inspired by earlier reports from Dixon, widespread evidence of ’waste and inefficiency’ led a federal-provincial conference in 1874 to call for the discontinuation of provincial agencies.
William Dixon died in late October 1873. As Wesley Turner has commented in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Dixon “deserves some credit” for the dramatic increase in emigration to Canada from Britain and Europe during his tenure of office “because of his vigorous efforts in the promotion of emigration. His honesty, courtesy, and competence helped ensure the permanence of the Canadian agency in London and set a high standard for future agents.”
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 12, No. 3 (1995) — Fall 1995 // Automne 1995, p. 17. Read the rest of this issue →
