All Things Being Equal: Land Ownership and Ethnicity in Rural Canada, 1901

Abstract

The relationship between ethnicity and land ownership in rural Canada is explored here using the new national sample of the 1901 census developed by the Canadian Families Project. The data offer the first comparison, at a household level, of the factors affecting land ownership throughout the country. Multivariate regressions confirm recent findings that ethnicity was a relatively unimportant determinant of the variation in land ownership at the national level, although it did have an impact on access to farmland in the West. Like the findings of Gordon Darroch and Lee Soltow for Ontario in 1871, the 1901 data indicate that life cycle continued to be the most decisive predictor of farm size.