Alistair MacLeod, in No Great Mischief, presents a tapestry of migrant life in Canada's past and present. The primary focus of the novel is the narrator - a Scottish Canadian from Nova Scotia - and his and his family's experiences as both immigrants to Canada in the past, and as internal migrant workers in the present. Reinforcing this focus is a parallel narrative occurring throughout the text, in which the narrator discusses the lives and experiences of migrant fruit pickers in Ontario. Some of these fruit pickers are non-Canadian migrants, while others are French-Canadian migrants. However, as this essay will argue, this national distinction is secondary to the significance of their shared status as working class peoples bonded to the soil and to their common distance - physical, cultural and economic - from mainstream Canadian society.
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