The Twentieth Century

About 1900 the rate of immigration increased sharply; some 3,000,000 people arrived between 1900 and 1914, and more than half of them stayed. At the same time the flow became less British. In the face of considerable protest – from English Canadians wishing to preserve Britishness and from French Canadians wishing to preserve the proportion of French-speakers – the Liberal government of Wilfrid Laurier, elected in 1896, actively sought Continental immigrants, particularly peasants familiar with semi-arid northern environments. Clifford Sifton, the minister of the interior, discouraged Mediterranean peoples and the British urban poor; his vision was northern and agrarian. Asian immigration, which confronted the racist assumptions that “orientals” were inherently different and inferior, was almost stopped by a head tax of $500 per Chinese immigrant (1904) and a gentleman’s agreement with Japan limiting the number of Japanese men and their wives to a few hundred a year (1908). These measures increased the demand for other sources of cheap labour, which was met by relaxing restrictions on immigrants from Italy and the Balkans.

Yet government policies themselves were not sufficient to attract immigrants. The enormous surge of immigration to Canada between 1900 and 1914 had more to do with changes in relative wage rates (favouring Canada over Europe), rising world prices for wheat, the development of dry farming, the closing of the American frontier, and the rapid expansion of the Canadian economy. Although British immigrants were still the majority, several hundred thousand people came from continental Europe, some of them within the considerable stream that flowed into western Canada from the United States.

Again, this was primarily a migration of the poor. Behind it, for example, lay rural poverty and the weight of class in Britain, fragmented landholdings and virtually landless Ukrainian and Polish peasantries in Austrian Galicia, or similar problems compounded by ethnic-religious tensions and Magyar nationalism in the Hungarian half of the Habsburg Empire. Some of the emigrants from Britain were slum children sent to Canada by pauper emigration schemes, and probably the majority of the others were unskilled workers. At the other extreme, a considerable minority were educated people, accustomed to a servant or two and some social standing but threatened at home by modest incomes and increasingly competitive access to a military commission, the professions, and business, or simply footloose after colonial careers.

Many of the immigrants from the United States were the children of expatriate Canadians, many were Scandinavians or Germans. The regional effects of this massive migration were very uneven. Few immigrants settled in the Maritimes, rural Quebec, or rural Ontario. Montreal, Toronto, the towns of southwestern Ontario, and the mining camps of northern Ontario drew a good many, but most went to western Canada where they transformed each province.

In 1911 only 37 percent of the population of Manitoba and some 20 percent in British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan had been born in the province. These were immigrant societies, although the mix, province by province, was different. There were more British-born in British Columbia (27 percent of the population) than anywhere else in the west, and fewest in Alberta (17 percent). Ontarians had come in largest numbers to Manitoba and Saskatchewan, in smallest numbers to British Columbia. There were few American-born in Manitoba (3 percent) and many in Alberta (21 percent). Continental Europeans had gone principally to the prairies, more to Saskatchewan (where 18 percent of the population in 1911 had been born on the continent) than to any other province. The much smaller Asian migration was concentrated in British Columbia.

In each of the four western provinces English was the predominant and public language, but many other languages, most of them European, were spoken. Much of the prairies, especially, became a patchwork of ethnic territories separated by language, culture, and local institutions. Some groups, such as the Icelanders, sought to conform in public to British-Canadian ways while retaining within the family as much as possible of their language and customs. The Germans, numerous but split into many political and religious groups, also tended to seek a public accommodation with British-Canadian norms. Other groups, the most extreme and successful of which was the Hutterites, sought to remain self-sufficient, autonomous, and remote from the main society. The Ukrainians were less unified than the Hutterites but equally attached to their ways, the most visible landscape symbols of which were their churches and whitewashed, thatched houses. In Europe, time and rootedness underlay regional cultures, while, on the prairie, space and mobility were the dominant characteristics. In British Columbia, most agricultural areas were English-speaking, although the Doukhobors had just settled in the Kootenays and there were Chinese market gardens near the cities. The resource camps were quite different: the canneries along the Skeena or Nass assembled Chinese, Japanese, natives, and whites, and relied on Chinook, a rudimentary lingua franca created out of the fur trade along the Columbia River in the early nineteenth century.

The cities remained primarily British or French, but with significant additions: Jews, principally in Montreal and Toronto, for the most part garment-workers, shopkeepers, and pedlars living on the edge of the central business district; Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews in North Winnipeg, many of them (though rarely the Jews) working in the railway yards, in construction, or as casual labourers; Chinese and Japanese in Vancouver, living in a “Chinatown” or “Japtown” that were as much the product of white racism as the desire of immigrants to be with their own kind. From the perspective of the urban elites, still overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, all of these groups were marginal members of society.

Just over 400,000 immigrants arrived in Canada in 1913, more than any year before or since. With the onset of World War I, immigration plummeted, remaining at about 50,000 a year throughout the war. After 1918 immigration increased slowly, favoured by business and the railways but checked by growing anti-immigrant feeling. In the early 1920s the federal government responded in various ways: by requiring immigrants to be bona fide farmers, by giving special incentives to British immigrants (1922), and by excluding the Chinese (1923). Government and private promotions sought competent British farmers but attracted few; immigration stayed far below pre-war levels. By 1925 the railways, backed now by non-British immigrant organizations, prevailed on the government to admit more eastern and southern Europeans. Under an agreement reached that year the CPR and CNR (Canadian National Railway) could recruit “agriculturalists” (defined at the companies’ discretion) anywhere in Europe. Immigration increased to over 150,000 a year amid cries from unions that labour was being cheapened and from churches that the British character of Canada was threatened. With the onset of the Great Depression and the election of a Conservative government, the railway agreement was cancelled, some 30,000 immigrants were deported, and further immigration was sharply curtailed. Jews fleeing Nazi persecution could not get into Canada, and during World War II immigration almost stopped; in the fifteen years from 1931 to 1945 an average of only 15,000 immigrants a year entered Canada. After the war the government moved cautiously to increase immigration, rescinding the Chinese Immigration Act while resolving to maintain “the fundamental composition of the Canadian population,” and admitting European refugees while screening out those suspected of communist sympathies.

By mid-century the population of Canada was about 14 million of whom those the census classified as British or French still constituted virtually 80 percent. The number of aboriginal peoples had increased to 165,000 but simultaneously had fallen to just over 1 percent of the total population. Asians were 0.5 percent. Almost all the remainder, some 18 percent, were of continental European descent, primarily Germans, Ukrainians, Scandinavians, Dutch, Poles, Jews, and Italians in that order. The continental Europeans were very unevenly distributed, being almost unrepresented east of Montreal, where, apart from Jews and Italians, they were rare. In Ontario, where two-thirds of the population were still classified as British, 22 percent were continental Europeans. In the three prairie provinces, only 47 percent of the population were British, 6 percent French, and most of the rest continental Europeans. They outnumbered the British in Saskatchewan. Almost two-thirds of British Columbians, on the other hand, were British, but a very different British population – recently arrived, in good part from England – from that in the Maritimes or central Canada. Natives were under 2 percent, Chinese and Japanese under 3 percent, and French under 4 percent of the provincial total; the rest were continental Europeans. Overall, at mid-century, the Canadian demographic balance still weighed heavily to the British and French, the political and, for the British, economic balances even more so.

Since 1950 Canadian immigration policy has altered radically, and a rapidly changing Canadian population is the result. The categories within which immigrants are identified and, therefore, the type of discrimination in the selection process have been transformed. The debate about numbers and categories of immigrants continues.

Over the years since 1950 the categories of immigrants have become: (1) sponsored or “family class” immigrants, for which provision was made in the early 1950s, a category that has tended to skew immigration towards the ethnicity of the most recent immigrants – those most likely to have strong kinship ties elsewhere – and the unskilled; (2) independent immigrants, selected as before in relation to the needs of the Canadian economy and from 1967 by a “points system” based on age, education level, skills, and employment prospects; (3) refugees, until 1978 admitted by ministerial permit and thereafter within a special category for people seeking asylum from persecution; and (4) business immigrants, a category intended to attract entrepreneurs and capital and comprising self-employed (1967), entrepreneurs (1978), and investors (1986). The rationales for each category have been different and, to a certain extent, contradictory.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s Canadian immigration policy favoured people from Britain, the predominantly white countries of the commonwealth, France, and the United States; but from 1967 immigrants have been admitted by category and points. Officially Canadian immigration policy became “colour-blind” and turned primarily on economic requirements. Critics argued that the points system discriminated against applicants from the developing world, and that European refugees from left-wing regimes were admitted much more readily than Latin American or African refugees from right-wing regimes. In any case, the long British and European bias of Canadian immigration policy had certainly ended. By and large, governments viewed immigration as an instrument of economic growth, but they had to be sensitive to simmering public debates. Business groups, ethnic organizations, civil libertarians, and demographers concerned about an ageing Canadian population generally favoured high immigration rates; much of the Canadian public, confronted by different, unfamiliar people, favoured far lower rates. The debate was not resolved, and decisions about immigrant numbers tended to be annual and somewhat ad hoc. From 1950 to 1990 between 100,000 and 200,000 immigrants arrived in most years.

Until the late 1960s more than 70 percent of immigrants came from Europe, principally from Britain, Italy, and Germany, and about half of the rest from the United States. This European immigration included two substantial groups of refugees: Hungarians in 1956 and Czechs and Slovaks in 1968. After the “colour-blind” immigration act of 1967, immigration from Europe declined to 36 percent by 1981 and to 20 percent by 1991, while Asian immigration increased sharply. If in 1861 Asians comprised only 4 percent of immigrants, by 1991 this figure had grown to 50 percent. The vast majority came from Vietnam (including 60,000 refugees in 1979– 80), Hong Kong, India, and the Philippines. Jamaica, El Salvador, and Guyana also became sources of substantial numbers of immigrants. Approximately half of these diverse peoples went to Ontario, and most of the rest to Quebec or British Columbia. In spite of government efforts, few went to the Maritimes or, the oil-boom years of the late 1970s and early 1980s apart, to the prairies. In fact, the majority concentrated in three cities: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. In 1991, 80 percent of business immigrants went to these cities, where an even higher proportion of their investments was centred.

In 1991 the population of Canada was almost 27 million. According to the census of that year some 470,000 people claimed simple native descent and 532,000 others some native ancestry. Native numbers were growing rapidly but, however counted, natives were still a small percentage of the Canadian population. As the English language replaced other languages and as English-Canadian culture became more pervasive, ethnicities mixed; only a quarter of the population now claimed straightforward British origins. The interface of French and non-French ancestry had also blurred, although 23 percent of the population still considered that their origin was exclusively French. Some 15 percent claimed other European origins and 5 percent Asian. Although the number of people from the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America had increased many times since 1950, they still represented less than 2 percent of the Canadian population. Overall, the most striking changes since 1950 were these: a greatly increased number who claimed a native connection, the sizeable Asian populations, and, following from the rapid ethnic mixing of the English-speaking and more flexible census questions, the relatively small number who identified themselves as British.

Toronto in 1991 was a city in which those of British background were no longer more numerous than continental Europeans, and Asians comprised 15 percent and Caribbean blacks almost 5 percent of the population (more than half the Canadian total). Vancouver was 20 percent Asian, almost the percentage that claimed British origin. Beyond the predominant French, the population of Montreal was far more European than British and was 4 percent Asian. Immigrants in these cities spanned all income levels and most residential areas.

For all these developments, the ethnicity of Atlantic Canada had changed relatively little in forty years. Newfoundland was still largely composed of English and Irish. New Brunswick remained a population of English and French speakers, whose ancestors had arrived, for the most part, before 1850. In Quebec, the population outside Montreal was overwhelmingly French-speaking and descended from the early French migrations to Canada. Recent immigration had also bypassed most of the prairies. In Saskatchewan and Manitoba total populations were almost static, ethnicities established before World War II were increasingly mixed, native numbers were growing rapidly, and (especially in Saskatchewan) the stream of recent immigrants was scarcely represented. More had gone to Alberta where, in 1991, some 7 percent of the population claimed an Asian background. In British Columbia, a focus of recent immigration, 12 percent claimed such origin, and in Ontario, another focus, 8 percent. Some 2,000,000 Ontarians claimed European backgrounds that were neither British nor French. Such provincial figures are deceptive, however; people were not moving to provinces so much as to a few cities which, more than ever before, became polyglot amalgams of established and incoming ethnicities.