Soon, Prescott and Russell counties had francophone majorities. Arriving with little capital, the migrants could only afford small farms at first, 20 hectares on average, and the land became poorer each year under the effects of intensive exploitation. Moreover, the French-Canadian farmers in eastern Ontario did not see any advantage in owning a large plot or mechanizing their operation, since, as they had done in Quebec, they spent part of each year off their land, working in forestry to earn essential extra income. With some variations, their compatriots in southwestern Ontario and Georgian Bay were doing the same. In all three regions, the turn of the century saw a transition to the dairy industry. Still, farming for subsistence and to supply workers in the forestry industry persisted.

French Canadians were also found in the province’s industrial centres, including Toronto, where Sacré-Cœur parish had 130 families when it was founded in 1887, and Cornwall, where the migrants worked in the textile and pulp and paper industries. As for Ottawa, which became Canada’s capital in 1867 and was a small industrial centre, it attracted civil servants, professionals, craftsmen, tradesmen and labourers from the regions of Quebec City, Montreal and Trois-Rivières. By 1910, Ottawa was home to 23,000 French Canadians, representing nearly a quarter of its population.

It was in the northern part of the province, though, that the early 20th-century emergence of a French-Canadian proletariat was most pronounced – as railways were built, mines and pulp mills were established and hydro-electric power was developed. As in the province next door, the Church advocated settlement of the North, a veritable promised land. The migrants came mainly from eastern Ontario, the Montreal area and western Quebec, but there were also contingents from the lower St. Lawrence. The clay-based soils were poor, the summer short and the markets far away, and the settlers quickly reproduced a way of life based on a combination of subsistence agriculture and work in the mines and forests, or on commercial agriculture to supply the resource industry worksites. Others moved into company towns where they provided an unskilled workforce. Railways were also important employers of French Canadians. Nearly all 8,000 workers on the Canadian Pacific in the Sudbury region belonged to this group.

Thanks to these migrations and to a high birth rate, the French-Canadian population in Ontario grew from 13,969 in 1842 to 248,275 by 1921. Although they made up only 8.5 per cent of the province’s population that year, their geographic concentration made them extremely visible in certain areas. This was enough to lead some segments of the anglophone majority to raise alarms about a French Catholic invasion, which, in turn, played a large role in generating the great language conflict that shook Ontario in the first two decades of the 20th century.