Saudis and Russians Push Oil Higher; Big Cities; Copper in Renewables; World Cigarette Prices and Italian Immigrants in Cold Canada
September 11 2023 Volume 4 # 17
“Crude Oil is a Geopolitical Wrecking Ball” Hubert Marleau
Crude oil is up more than 20% since June, points out Hubert Marleau, the Montreal economist and investment advisor. The West Texas price is $87; Brent Crude is $90 plus. Marleau points out higher oil prices cause inflation, but if energy prices take up too much of people’s income it causes a recession and becomes deflationary. At least that’s the way I read his commentary.
Oil in a Cold Climate
Both Russia and Saudi Arabia are pushing oil prices higher: Russia because it needs to finance its war in Ukraine, the Saudis to finance the grand modernization plans of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Shipping Rates Dropping: The Christmas Rush is Over
Rates from Asia to the US west coast dropped 5% this week alone, according to Freightos.
Cheap To Ship Goods From China
Amazing to think how cheap it is to ship a 40 foot container across the Pacific. You can stuff a lot into one of them. The CBM is short for a cubic metre of goods not weighing more than 520 kilograms or 1,146 pounds; the price is door-to-door.
How Container Ships Have Grown
Panamax means the largest ship that can squeeze into the locks of the Panama Canal. The Panamax got more max when the Canal expanded. ULCS is not a school in California but an Ultra Large Container Ship. They only cross the oceans, though they can squeeze through the Suez Canal which has no locks.
TEU stands for twenty-foot equivalent unit, so a forty foot container is two TEUs.
How Cities Have Grown
London was the largest city in the world for the 19th century and the first part of the 20th. Today it squeaks in at number 15 and only in the third column.
There are only two American cities, New York— once number one— and Los Angeles.
Jakarta, with almost 34-million people, is sinking 6.7 inches (17 cm) a year under all the weight. Indonesia plans to build a totally new capital city.
Windmills Use Tons of Copper.
Canada’s Liberal government loves this:
Windmills framed against the mountains in oil-rich Alberta.
Eco-conscious politicos in Ottawa do NOT like the looks of this: a copper mine in British Columbia. The Trudeau government cancelled one copper project by naming the land surrounding it as a national park.
A copper mining firm points out that there is no green energy without copper.
Disclosure: I own some Teck shares in my retirement account.
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A Cheap Place to Smoke
Compared To:
A pack of Marlboros in Turkey is the equivalent of $1.42; in Spain $5.53; Hungary is $5.69, Serbia $3.68 and $2.07 in Russia. Prices for September 2023 from Numbeo.
Top Countries for Lung Cancer
The Emperor And The President
Came across this historian-built likeness of the Roman Emperor Vespasian.
And thought he looked a lot like LBJ, even the ears.
Vespasian came to power at the end of a civil war in the `year of of four Emperors’. Johnson was crushed by civil unrest caused by his expansion of the War in Vietnam.
Who is Rich Where in the USA
It costs a lot to be classed as Rich (I don’t like the euphemism wealthy) in San Francisco. Given the mess that city is in the rich might soon abandon it.
Essay of the Week
This is the first chapter of book I wrote about four families who moved to Sudbury from Italy in the early 20th century. They adopted to a different climate and prospered in the New World.
Fare Fortuna
Fare Fortuna. A two-word Italian phrase meaning to make a fortune: it was the reason almost every Italian crossed the Atlantic Ocean to Canada, the United States or Argentina. They were leaving behind a world of poverty and near feudalism to come to a place where they could work hard, save to own property, and build a better life for themselves and their children—something it was almost impossible to do in Italy 100 years ago.
The extended family that makes up the Dellelce clan is an example of Fare Fortuna. The work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit now spreads into the fifth generation, the great grandchildren of the poor Italians who made their way to Sudbury just before and during the First World War.
Italians are the second largest group in Sudbury, after Canadians of English and French descent, and they are among the most successful people in the area.
The Dellelce and Scagnetti families arrived in the first wave of Italian immigration. There were some Italians working in the area in the late 1800s but the first big wave came in the years before the First World War. You might ask, how did a poor Italian living in a remote part of Italy, who may not even have known what was going on in the next village, discover there was work 7,000 kilometres away?
Diane Dellelce’s father Beniamino (Ben) Scagnetti arrived in Canada from northern Italy in May of 1913, the first member of the Dellelce family tree to settle in Canada. He sailed on a rather small passenger ship, the Verona, leaving from Genoa and stopping in Naples to pick up other passengers before sailing to their final destination in the New World: New York City. From there he made his way to Buffalo, New York, and then on to Sudbury. At the time it was common for immigrants from Italy to enter Canada through New York City.
There were three waves of Italian immigrants to Canada in the 20th century, and the Scagnettis and the Dellelces were part of the first group to come here. Being one of the first Italian immigrants to Sudbury gave Ben Scagnetti an advantage, as he started his fledgling businesses and waited for his future wife, Cristina, to arrive.
Cristina Della Vedova was from the same region in northern Italy as her husband. She sailed from Genoa to New York aboard the Duca Degli Abruzzi, odd in that her daughter, Diane would marry into the Dellelce family who were from Abruzzi. She arrived in New York City on October 4, 1915, one of the 1,740 third class passengers on the ship. Records from thee time described her as having blue eyes and black hair.
Italy had joined the Allied side in June of 1915 and there was some danger in the Atlantic from German U-boats (submarines), and, the Milazzo, a ship owned by the same shipping company as the Duca Degli Abruzzi, was sunk by a U-boat in 1917.
Thomas Dellelce, born Tommaso Dell’Elce, sailed from Naples to Halifax, Nova Scotia, one of the thousand or so passengers on the Palermo, arriving in Halifax, Nova Scotia on July 25, 1913. In December of 1916 a German U-boat off the coast of Spain sank the Palermo. Immigration papers record that he was five feet eight inches tall with bark complexion, dark brown hair and brown eyes. Not every ship manifest and immigration record went into such detail.
Tommaso’s future wife, Rachelina Masciangelo was only three when she arrived from Naples aboard the America, docking in New York City on March 9, 1916. There were a number of different ships of that name at the time, including one built by the same company that built the Titanic. However, Rachelina travelled on an Italian vessel of that name, used mainly for the transatlantic run to New York.
Rachelina arrived with her 67-year-old grandfather, Pasquale, a shoemaker, and her mother Ginerva who was 25 at the time and on her way to meet her husband, Enrico, who arrived in Halifax a few years earlier. It was common for single Italian men to arrive on their own, and then when they had made enough money send for their wives or fiancés. Some even returned to Italy, and Tommaso Dellelce was an example of that as he criss-crossed the Atlantic three or four times.
Word of the booming mining towns in Northern Ontario reached the villages and towns of Italy in the years before and during the First World War. At the time immigrants made up just a small part of the local population of Sudbury and the Finns and Ukrainians outnumbered the Italians.
The British Canadians who made up the bulk of the population were in many cases xenophobic and anti foreigner, and Italians were Catholics, anathema to the Protestant members of the Masonic Order who dominated management at Inco. This prejudice was strong even during the First World War when Italy was on the British side. The Scagnettis spoke only English to their children at home; the Dell’Elce family changed the pronunciation of their name to a more Anglo sounding Dell-eece, though the spelling remained Dellelce. This was not the tolerant age of multi-culturalism. There was no tolerance for ‘foreign’ languages.
Inco was desperate for workers in the early 20th century, and it couldn’t get enough from the rest of Canada or Britain. The company used labour agents in Italy to find people who wanted to move to Canada. The labour agent would go to a town or village and post notices in the town square or other prominent public places. The agents would then arrange the voyage, from Genoa for people in the north, the Scagnettis, or Naples in the south for the Dellelces and Masciangelos.
Some of the labour agents lied to the potential immigrants about what they could expect. The Canadian Encyclopedia reports a newspaper in Milan reported on the scandal of Italian peasants becoming indentured labour in northern work camps. In 1904 there was a Royal Commission in Canada to investigate these charges and they were cleaned up before the Dellelce, Scagnetti or Masciangelo families left Italy.
This form of immigration, with labour agents working specific geographic areas, meant there were larger groups of people from the same village who emigrated en masse. For example 5,000 immigrants from the Italians region of Marche moved to Copper Cliff to work in the mine and smelter there. Marche is just north of Abruzzi, home to both the Dellelce and Masciangelo (Rachelina Dellelce’s maiden name) families. There were in fact few families from Abruzzi in the Sudbury area.
It was easy for people from the same region to live together. Many of them would know each other and they spoke the same dialect. Italy has 20 different regions and as many as 1,600 separate dialects, as villages isolated from each other for centuries developed a different way of speaking. It was certainly true of the Dellelce and Scagnetti families who came from regions 600 kilometres apart. Theresa Dellelce commented that her mother and father’s dialect were very different. Diana Iuele-Colilli, a professor of Italian at Laurentian University in Sudbury, said the Scagnetti dialect from northern Italy near the border with Slovenia would have been Incomprehensible for a person from Abruzzi.
“They wouldn’t have understood each other at all,” said Ms. Iuele-Colilli. “Friulan (the language of the Udine region) is a separate language.”
Ron Scagnetti said his mother used to make Italian pastry with a neighbour across the street in Garson. The woman was from Calabria, the region in southern Italy that sent the largest number of Italian immigrants to the Sudbury region. He recalled that when the two of them spoke Italian, Cristina Scagnetti found her Calabrian neighbour almost impossible to understand. The Scagnetti family first lived in Creighton Mine, which was shut down by the mine owners and turned into a ghost town; they moved on to Garson, another town built around a mine.
Many Italians worked for mines, either above ground or below, but working underground was more dangerous and because of that the hours were shorter and the pay was higher. Tom Dellelce was the only member of the Dellelce or Scagnetti families to work directly for the mines; he was a locomotive engineer for Inco. But he branched out later working for Inco and running a business with his wife on the side. Starting small, both families created much more wealth as entrepreneurs than they ever would as employees.
Tom Dellelce’s paycheques from Inco.
The January 1939 cheque is for two weeks work (117 hours) at .80 cents an hour. The July 1943 cheque is a $24 bonus for the period of the Second World War. By then his pay was .90 cents an hour.
Many of the people who left Italy planned to return, promising those at home that they would be back in five years after they had made their fortune. The posters in the town square promised riches, immense sums compared to what a poor Italians could make at home. Reality was often something else. The weather was harsher and the work was harder than expected and the wages not what they dreamed of. Some Italian immigrants found Canada too tough and went to the United States; others went home, disillusioned with life in the New World.
Though most stayed there were those who managed a kind of trans-Atlantic shuttle, including Tom Dellelce who returned to Italy at least three times prior to his marriage to Rachelina, according to immigration records. Once he married Rachelina he stayed put in Sudbury
Other Italians worked in the mines in Sudbury in the summer and then would take the train to other places for the winter. Trail, British Columbia, was a favourite spot since it too was a frontier-mining town. Italians were relatively frugal; there weren’t many heavy drinkers, as they were used to wine and could handle it. The idea was to save money, not spend it.
Tom and Lina Dellelce’s Savings Book from January to July 1940
As you can see the Dellelce family were diligent savers. The amounts may not look like much, but that $700 withdrawal would be worth about $12,000 today, according to the Bank of Canada’s Inflation calculator. In 1940 you could buy a brand new Ford V8 sedan for $732.
When Italians made money it didn’t stay in the savings account for long. They put it in property. Ninety per cent of Italian Canadians today own their own homes, compared to a national average of sixty-nine per cent. They also tend to want solid houses of brick construction, something that announces to the world that they have made it. Certainly the Dellelce and Scagnetti families made a lot of their money in property: boarding houses to hotels, building single family homes to turning large tracts of land into new neighbourhoods.
Professor Iuele-Colilli, who has written two books on Italians in Sudbury, says these immigrants almost all succeeded in one way or the other. “Italians are hard workers. They don’t get involved in things such as heavy drinking and especially not in Sudbury. The goal was to make money and nothing else. Their vices are cards or bocce, but that’s all.”
Italians came to Canada because of economic opportunity. Almost all of the Italians who left were poor. Italy in the late 19th century was one of the poorest countries in Europe, especially in the south and northeast, and its social structure had a land owning aristocracy at the top of it all who made it difficult to buy land. Farmers leased their holdings from large landowners. Starting a business in Italy 100 years ago would be all but impossible for the likes of the Dell’Elces and Scagnettis. In Canada they worked hard and prospered, and because of their Italian roots and the class system there, when they did make money they invested in land and buildings, something solid and unheard of back home.
At the turn of the 20th century there were only about 11,000 Italians in Canada. Three quarters of the immigrants came from the poor southern regions such as Sicily, Calabria, Molise and Abruzzi. Few immigrants came from the north of Italy, the exception being those from the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, a largely rural area to the northeast of Venice, where the Scagnettis came from. Part of the reason for the dissatisfaction of rural Italians from the south was the dominance of the northern Italians who controlled the political and business life after the final unification of Italy in 1871.
There was a huge surge in Italian immigrants from 1900 until the First World War when 119,700 Italian immigrants entered Canada, according to the Canadian Encyclopaedia, the biggest year being 1913, when the patriarchs of the Dellelce and Scagnetti families arrived, young single males, who would later send for their brides to join them. The war slowed down immigration, though Rachelina Masciangelo and her mother arrived in 1916 as the war raged in Europe and shipping tonnage was devoted to troop and materiel, not passengers.
There was little immigration in the 1920s and economic opportunity in Canada dried up in the Great Depression of the 1930s. During the Second World War many Italians were interned as so-called enemy aliens. This did not happen to any of the Dellelce, Scagnetti and Masciangelo clans who were all loyal Canadian citizens by that time.
America was discovered by an Italian, Christopher Columbus, and named after an Italian, Amerigo Vespucci. The first Italian to land in what is now Canada was Giovanni Caboto, from Venice but in the pay of the English King when as John Cabot he laid claim to Newfoundland for the British crown. In spite of this early history there were prejudices against Italian Canadians, even those who were citizens. As can be seen in this book the families we are looking at ignored the limits placed on foreigners by the Protestant establishment by going around the system as self-employed entrepreneurs.