Post-War Agricultural Settlement in Manitoba

T SHE Canadian province of Manitoba shares with her sister provinces, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia, a zone of active agricultural settlement that extends in a great arc from the Lake of the Woods westward to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. This fringe is located within the southern margin of the Boreal Forest, which forms a broad belt across the North American continent from Alaska to Labrador. Since World War II, a considerable amount of virgin land has been settled under provincial supervision and with both provincial and Dominion assistance in various forms. A particularly striking feature of the post-war period has been the placement of Canadian war veterans on Crown lands within the frontier zone under the terms of the Veterans Land Act of 1942. In addition to the demand for land on the part of veterans, there has been a need to provide low-priced land for the sons of Canadian farmers faced with increasingly high land values in the settled portions of the country. Recent agricultural settlement in Manitoba must be investigated within the framework of provincial land policy, for nearly all of the virgin land available to prospective farmers is Crown land: that is, publicly-owned land whose title rests in the provincial government. Only a scattering of private holdings remained unsettled by the time of the Second World War, mainly Hudson's Bay Company lands with little agricultural potential. Most of the latter have been sold since 1945 to timber operators rather than to pioneer farmers. The present study, therefore, is concerned with post-war settlement of Crown lands in Manitoba and with the policy of the provincial government with respect to such settlement

Agriculture · Archaeology · Business · Geography · Settlement (finance) · Agriculture and Rural Development Research · Canadian Identity and History