Rather than radically addressing poverty, pollution, and social inequality, Britain slumped into colonial expediency. Indigent boys and girls were promised fresh air and a new start in the Dominion of Canada. This offloading of impoverished children coincided with Muskoka’s free-land colonization era from 1870 to 1930, which explains why our District, and especially North Muskoka, received more Home Children than any other part of Canada.
Some found good homes, but not many. There were adoptions of some younger children. Spare time was for schooling, but with all their chores there was no spare time. Home children got extra work when the family’s own children went to school. A modest payment was to be made, but held back until the indentured youth reached age of majority, by which time the “employer” had typically offset the entire amount for disbursements. On one Huntsville farm, a boy attempted to poison his employer. Elsewhere in Ontario, several boys took their own lives.
Home children coped with terror, intense confusion, child courage, and optimist. Most boys on farms and in forestry operations, and girls in domestic servitude, survived and contributed “bone and sinew” to Muskoka. After completing their term of service, they generally married, raised families, began their own farms, worked as skilled employees as printers, or started small businesses as florists in Muskoka’s towns. Some, such as Johnny Moon in Bracebridge, remained self-directed loners all their lives.
Hundreds of Muskokans are descendants of British Home Children. Last May, when Brenda Stanbury of the Windermere Women’s Institute introduced Orillia’s Lori Oschefski, an overflow crowd had gathered in the village’s community centre to learn more from the CEO of the British Home Children Advocacy and Research Association. Oschefaski said some 129,000 children were brought to Canada during the child export program, adding that Canadians believed them orphans, although just two percent really were.
Organized labour strongly opposed the program because unpaid child laborers took work from Canadians needing jobs. Onset of the Great Depression in 1930 effectively ended Britain’s offloading of marginalized children. They lived a grinding pioneer life we can now barely comprehend. As adults, these world-wise and stoic individuals contributed a lively democratic character to Muskoka and Canada generally, a robust quality that invariably grows from the bottom up, not the top down.
