Persuasive Posters

“Immigration work has to be carried on in the same manner as the sale of any commodity; just as soon as you stop advertising … the movement is going to stop.”

Or so declared Canada’s bullish minister of the interior Clifford Sifton in 1899. According to Daniel Francis, in his most recent book, Selling Canada: Three Propaganda Campaigns That Shaped the Nation, the advertising by, for and about Canada never did stop, not once, although his book examines specifically the period between 1880 and the 1930s, as exemplified in three campaigns: the population of Canada’s Northwest, meaning everything west of Ontario (“The Last Best West … Homes for Millions”), the Great War (“There’s a Man You Know Who Ought to Go, GIVE US HIS NAME”) and tourism (“See Canada … Apply Within.”)

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